http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/576/in00.htm
Israeli spy-ring uncovered in US
Revelations of a secret US government report lead investigators to
question whether Israeli intelligence had prior
knowledge of the 11 September events. Iason Athanasiadis reports
The US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) announced on Tuesday
5 March that it has yet to level charges
against any of the Israeli suspects it has detained in what is
being described as the greatest revelation of an Israeli
spying operation since the 1986 John Pollard case.
Le Monde and Intelligence Online, a French online magazine, claim
they have obtained a draft version of a secret
US government report issued by the Justice Department which proves
that an active Israeli intelligence network
has been detected within America. It adds that there is proof that
members of the network may have trailed
suspected Al-Qa'eda operatives in the United States without
informing federal authorities, leading to speculation
over whether the Israeli government might have had prior knowledge
of the events of 11 September.
Intelligence Online was first to report that the investigation,
which has been ongoing since April 2001, has led to
120 Israelis being detained or deported on immigration charges.
According to the report it has obtained, which is
dated June 2001, the ring was active in the states of Arkansas,
California, Florida and Texas, and consisted of
around 20 cells of between four and eight members, aged between 22
and 30 who had recently completed Israeli
military service in an army intelligence division.
According to the Justice Department report, the students
represented themselves as art students and made efforts
to gain access to sensitive federal office buildings and the homes
of government employees, U.S. officials said. A
draft report from the Drug Enforcement Administration q which first
characterized the activities as suspicious q
said the youths' actions "may well be an organized
intelligence-gathering activity."
Immigration officials deported them for visa violations; no
criminal
espionage charges were filed. The arrests, made in an unspecified
number of major US cities from California to
Florida, came amid public warnings from US intelligence agencies
about suspicious behavior by people posing as
Israeli art students and "attempting to bypass facility security
and enter federal buildings."
In Washington, however, U.S. law enforcement officials discounted
the report, with one calling the assertion of a
spy ring "a bogus story."
In Washington on Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Susan
Dryden said of the Le Monde report,
"At this time, we have no information to support this." US
officials said that some Israeli students had been sent
out of the country for immigration violations, not for spying. In
Israel, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Yaffa
Ben-Ari said it was "nonsense" that the students were spying on the
United States. Another Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman, Irit Stopper, confirmed that a few Israelis posing as
art students were expelled from the United
States for working without permits. However they were not accused
of espionage, she said. She did not say how
many Israelis were expelled and did not give any additional
details.
According to the editor of Intelligence Online, Guillaume Dasquieh,
the US government report issued by the
Justice Department on March last year, reveals that the
investigation has been ongoing since April 2001 and that
the ring was active in the states of Arkansas, California, Florida
and Texas, and consisted of around 20 cells of
between four and eight members who were aged between 22 and 30 and
had recently completed Israeli military
service in an army intelligence division.
Le Monde said more than one third of the suspected Israeli spies
had lived in Florida, from January up until June
last year, when the report was published, where at least 10 of the
19 Arabs involved in the September 11 airplane
attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon were also
based.
The newspaper also said that it had learned that six suspected
spies had used portable telephones bought by a
former Israeli vice consul in the United States.
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) report said a majority of the
young people questioned by US investigators
acknowledged having served in military intelligence, electronic
signals interception or explosive ordnance units in
the Israeli military. The DEA said one person questioned was the
son of a two-star Israeli general, one had served
as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army and another served
in a Patriot missile unit.
At least five of the Israelis had resided in Hollywood, Florida,
the same town in which alleged hijacker
Mohammad Atta and four of his accomplices in the attacks also
lived, the paper said.
Two Israelis lived in Fort Lauderdale, near Delray Beach, where
hijackers in the planes that crashed into the
Pentagon and in Pennsylvania resided temporarily, the report added.
The U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, a
federal agency, circulated a public warning in
March 2001 urging employees to report contact with people
describing themselves as Israeli art students.
"These individuals have been described as aggressive," the warning
said. "They attempt to engage employees in
conversation rather than giving a sales pitch."
The thesis that Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service,
might have known in advance of the 11 September
operations is strengthened by an article in the 16 September 2001
issue of the London-based Daily Telegraph
which alleges that senior Mossad officials had visited Washington
in August to warn the CIA and the FBI that a
cell of up to 200 terrorists was planning a major operation in
America. Israeli intelligence officials say that they
warned their counterparts in the United States last month that
large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets
on the American mainland were imminent.
Despite the strong alliance between Israel and the US, high-profile
episodes of spying have been uncovered in the
past, the most prominent of which was the 1986 life sentence given
to Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who
passed U.S. military secrets to Israel.
