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120 Spies Deported The French publication, which broke the
story that U.S. law enforcement had cracked an Israeli spy network, is
sticking to its guns amidst an international backlash. But the FBI wants to
cover up the story. Exclusive to
American Free Press http://www.americanfreepress.net/03_17_02/120_Spies_Deported/120_spies_deported.html September
17, 2002 By
Christopher Bollyn French reports of 120 Israelis arrested or deported in the
top-secret operation, part of a huge Israeli spy network operating in the
United States connected with the events of Sept. 11, have aroused a great
deal of “comment and controversy,” according to Guillaume Dasquie, editor of
Intelligence On line, who first broke the story in the beginning of March. The French newspaper Le Monde, citing a secret U.S. government report
outlining spying activities by Israelis, said: [U.S. documents] support the theory that Israel did
not give the U.S. all the information it had about the planning for the Sept.
11 attacks. A vast Israeli espionage network operating on American territory
has been broken up,” it wrote. “One of their tasks was to track the al Qaeda
terrorists on American territory—without informing the federal authorities. This convergence is, interalia, the origin of the
American conviction that one of the tasks of the Israeli “students” would
have been to track the al Qaeda terrorists on their territory, without
informing the federal authorities of the existence of the plot. The French newspaper described it as the biggest
Israeli spy case in the United States to be made public since 1986, when
Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew, was found funneling U.S. military secrets
to Israel. Le Monde added that in June 1999 Insight
magazine reported on a “secret” investigation by Division 5 of the FBI
regarding Israeli phone tapping targeting the White House, the State
Department and the National Security Council. The report by Intelligence Online was based on a secret
document issued by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and confirmed on Feb. 25
by the DEA’s public affairs bureau as authentic. Following the Intelligence
Online report’s publication, the FBI responded with statements “aimed at
minimizing the impact of the DEA document, or even denying it existed,” said
Dasquie, who spoke with American Free Press on March 13. The French web site has threatened to publish the DEA
report if U.S. and Israeli officials continue to deny its existence or
contents. The DEA played a central part in the counter-espionage operation because
it was the agency’s in-house security service, Office of Security Programs,
which first detected the unusual behavior of young Israeli nationals trying
to gain access to DEA circles. The Israelis involved in the case are reported to be
between 22 and 30, who had recently served in Israeli army intelligence
units. The network had some 20 units composed of between four and eight
members apiece. Each was under the orders of a local chief who planned and
dovetailed operations. Dasquie said: “The document we have in our possession
details not only the identities of the members of this network, but also
their activities in the Israeli army, and even their serial numbers in the
intelligence services, their passport numbers, their visas and their
validity. “The report shows the clandestine network was engaged in
several intelligence operations. It was a long-term project,” he said. The
report summarizes the results of interrogation of the Israeli suspects
between January and May of last year and describes inquiries that have
already been completed, primarily in Florida, Texas and California. “It seems irresponsible for us to publish it, but if the
denials go on, we could put the report on our Internet site and in so doing
possibly blacken the names of the people most exposed,” Dasquie said. The
61-page document was a technical counter-espionage report “notably with the
names of agents, details about them and their families, and the identities of
the U.S. agents who worked on the case,” he warned. DOCUMENTING ISRAELI SPYING The DEA’s security office began compiling a dossier on
125 suspicious Israeli agents in January 2001, after they began showing up at
DEA field offices and the homes of federal agents peddling paintings. The DEA
draft report documented the Israelis’ visits to agents’ offices or homes in
Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami and other cities,
which it said “may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity.” The Israeli network seemed to hold lists of names, Le
Monde said. “Its members knew at which office or which private residence to
go. The objective was apparently to make contact, even for a short time.” Last spring, the FBI sent a warning to other federal
agencies to watch for visitors calling themselves “Israeli art students” and
attempting to bypass security at federal buildings. The Israelis told
investigators they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. But
Pnina Calpen, spokeswoman for the Israeli school, told AP that no one named
in the report has been a student there in the last 10 years. The DEA report said many of the “art students” had served
in intelligence or electronic signal intercept units in the Israeli army. “That these people are now traveling in the U.S. selling
art seems not to fit their background,” it noted. The “art students”
cultivated contacts with Israeli information technology companies based in
the United States, which served as regular suppliers to various U.S. federal
agencies, such as Amdocs, Nice or Retalix. The FBI has been heavily involved in trying to suppress
the reports and even said the authors of the reports were “mad or crazy,”
according to Dasquie. “The most unexpected reaction came from ‘anonymous
sources’ that didn’t comment on the substance of the report but called the
person who drafted it virtually unhinged,” Intelligence Online said.
“However, from the outset the document is known to have been the result of
teamwork and to have been drafted by a task force specially set up for the
purpose.” The task force was reportedly comprised of agents from the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, DEA, the FBI and Air Force
intelligence. The Israeli network targeted some of the most sensitive
sites in the United States, such as Tanker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City.
The U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigation sent a letter to the
Justice Department on May 16 of last year to ask for assistance in a case
against four Israelis, Yaron Ohana, Ronen Kalfon, Zeev Cohen and Naor To paz,
suspected of spying. In March 2001, the National Counterintelligence Center
(NCIC) warned, “in the past six weeks, employees in federal office buildings
have reported suspicious activities concerning individuals representing
themselves as foreign students selling artwork.” “There is a political context,” Dasquie said, which
involves the current hostilities between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
“That explains why the FBI is carrying out a global cover-up of this story.” The addresses of Israeli agents mentioned in the report
are very close to former, known residences of the terrorists involved in the
Sept. 11 attacks. Le Monde said more than one-third of the suspected Israeli
spies had lived in Florida, where at least 10 of the 19 Arabs alleged to have
been involved in the Sept. 11 airplane attacks on New York’s World Trade
Center and the Pentagon also lived. At least five of the spies resided in
Hollywood, Fla., where alleged hijacker Mohammad Atta and four accomplices in
the attacks also lived, the paper said. The DEA draft report established that 12 Israelis had
been based in the Florida town of Hollywood, where U.S. authorities
reportedly arrested another 12 people “suspected of being tasked with the
logistics of preparing the Sept. 11 attacks.” 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. “This concordance could be the source of the American
view that one of the missions of the Israeli ‘students’ could have been to
track al Qaeda terrorists on [U.S.] territory without informing federal
authorities,” Le Monde said. When AFP asked Dasquie if he thought the Israelis were
engaged in intelligence gathering or monitoring the activities of the
“working level” Arab “terrorists,” he said, it is “too early to speculate”
and that “a lot of material is undercover.” The newspaper said it had seen a copy of the secret
report, and that it had learned that six suspected spies had used portable
telephones bought by a former Israeli vice consul in the United States. “We know there has been an extensive Israeli spy ring
operating in the United States during the year before last July, but we don’t
know its global activities,” Dasquie said. “A lot of the story is unknown.” When asked if Intelligence Online would publish the
entire document, Dasquie said: “That is the great question.” The document
contains the names of 120 Israelis, some of whom, he says, may be innocent.
Government agents’ names and addresses are also included. Dasquie said Intelligence Online has acquired a great
deal of solid evidence, which it intends to publish soon. +++ |