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Israeli art students { May 7 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://salon.com/news/feature/2002/05/07/students/index_np.htmlFwd: The Israeli "art student" mystery - Salon.com (fwd)
http://salon.com/news/feature/2002/05/07/students/index_np.html
The Israeli "art student" mystery
For almost two years, hundreds of young Israelis falsely claiming to be art students haunted federal offices -- in particular, the DEA. No one knows why -- and no one seems to want to find out.
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By Christopher Ketcham
>May 7, 2002 | In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug
>Enforcement Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from DEA
>field offices across the country. According to the reports, young Israelis
>claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale had been
>attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a year. The Israelis had also
>attempted to penetrate the offices of other law enforcement and Department
>of Defense agencies. Strangest of all, the "students" had visited the
>homes of numerous DEA officers and other senior federal officials.
>
>As a pattern slowly emerged, the DEA appeared to have been targeted in
>what it called an "organized intelligence gathering activity." But to what
>end, and for whom, no one knew.
>
>Reports of the mysterious Israelis with an inexplicable interest in
>peddling art to G-men came in from more than 40 U.S. cities and continued
>throughout the first six months of 2001. Agents of the DEA, ATF, Air
>Force, Secret Service, FBI, and U.S. Marshals Service documented some 130
>separate incidents of "art student" encounters. Some of the Israelis were
>observed diagramming the inside of federal buildings. Some were found
>carrying photographs they had taken of federal agents. One was discovered
>with a computer printout in his luggage that referred to "DEA groups."
>
>In some cases, the Israelis visited locations not known to the public --
>areas without street addresses, for example, or DEA offices not identified
>as such -- leading authorities to suspect that information had been
>gathered from prior surveillance or perhaps electronically, from credit
>cards and other sources. One Israeli was discovered holding banking
>receipts for substantial sums of money, close to $180,000 in withdrawals
>and deposits over a two-month period. A number of the Israelis resided for
>a period of time in Hollywood, Fla. -- the small city where Mohammed Atta
>and three terrorist comrades lived for a time before Sept. 11.
>
>In March 2001, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive
>(NCIX), a branch of the CIA, issued a heads-up to federal employees about
>"suspicious visitors to federal facilities." The warning noted that
>"employees have observed both males and females attempting to bypass
>facility security and enter federal buildings." Federal agents, the
>warning stated, had "arrested two of these individuals for trespassing and
>discovered that the suspects possessed counterfeit work visas and green cards."
>
>In the wake of the NCIX bulletin, federal officials raised several other
>red flags, including an Air Force alert, a Federal Protective Services
>alert, an Office of National Drug Control Policy security alert and a
>request that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) investigate
>a specific case. Officials began dealing more aggressively with the "art
>students." According to one account, some 140 Israeli nationals were
>detained or arrested between March 2001 and Sept. 11, 2001. Many of them
>were deported. According to the INS, the deportations resulted from
>violations of student visas that forbade the Israelis from working in the
>United States. (In fact, Salon has established that none of the Israelis
>were enrolled in the art school most of them claimed to be attending; the
>other college they claimed to be enrolled in does not exist.) After the
>Sept. 11 attacks, many more young Israelis -- 60, according to one AP
>dispatch and other reports -- were detained and deported.
>
>The "art students" followed a predictable modus operandi. They generally
>worked in teams, typically consisting of a driver, who was the team
>leader, and three or four subordinates. The driver would drop the
>"salespeople" off at a given location and return to pick them up some
>hours later. The "salespeople" entered offices or approached agents in
>their offices or homes. Sometimes they pitched their artwork --
>landscapes, abstract works, homemade pins and other items they carried
>about in portfolios. At other times, they simply attempted to engage
>agents in conversation. If asked about their studies, they generally said
>they were from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem or the
>University of Jerusalem (which does not exist). They were described as
>"aggressive" in their sales pitch and "evasive" when questioned by wary
>agents. The females among them were invariably described as "very
>attractive" -- "blondes in tight shorts or jeans, real lookers," as one
>DEA agent put it to Salon. "They were flirty, flipping the hair, looking
>at you, smiling. 'Hey, how are you? Let me show you this.' Everything a
>woman would do if she wanted to get something out of you." Some agents
>noted that the "students" made repeated attempts to avoid facility
>security personnel by trying to enter federal buildings through back doors
>and side entrances. On several occasions, suspicious agents who had been
>visited at home observed the Israelis after the "students" departed and
>noted that they did not approach any of the neighbors.
>
>The document detailing most of this information was an internal DEA memo:
>a 60-page report drawn up in June 2001 by the DEA's Office of Security
>Programs. The document was meant only for the eyes of senior officials at
>the Justice Department (of which the DEA is adjunct), but it was leaked to
>the press as early as December 2001 and by mid-March had been made widely
>available to the public.
>
>On the face of it, this was a blockbuster tale, albeit a bizarre and
>cryptic one, full of indeterminate leads and fascinating implications and
>ambiguous answers: "Like a good Clancy novel," as one observer put it. Was
>it espionage? Drug dealing? An intelligence game? The world’s wackiest
>door-to-door hustle? Yet the mainstream media has almost entirely ignored
>the allegations or accepted official "explanations" that explain nothing.
>Even before the DEA memo was leaked, however, some reporters had begun
>sniffing around the remarkable story.
>
>On Oct. 1 of last year, Texas newswoman Anna Werner, of KHOU-TV in
>Houston, told viewers about a "curious pattern of behavior" by people with
>"Middle Eastern looks" claiming to be Israeli art students. "Government
>guards have found those so-called students," reported Werner, "trying to
>get into [secure federal facilities in Houston] in ways they're not
>supposed to -- through back doors and parking garages." Federal agents,
>she said, were extremely "concerned." The "students" had showed up at the
>DEA's Houston headquarters, at the Leland Federal Building in Houston, and
>even the federal prosecutor's office; they had also appeared to be
>monitoring the buildings. Guards at the Earle Cabell Federal Building in
>Dallas found one "student" wandering the halls with a floor plan of the
>site. Sources told Werner that similar incidents had occurred at sites in
>New York, Florida, and six other states, "and even more worrisome, at 36
>sensitive Department of Defense sites."
>
>"One defense site you can explain," a former Defense Department analyst
>told Werner. "Thirty-six? That's a pattern." Ominously, the analyst
>concluded that such activity suggested a terrorist organization "scouting
>out potential targets and ... looking for targets that would be vulnerable."
>
>Post-9/11, this should have been the opening thrust in an orgy of
>coverage, and the scoop of a lifetime for Werner: Here she’d gotten a
>glimpse into a possible espionage ring of massive proportions, possibly of
>terrorists scouting new targets for jihad -- and those terrorists were
>possibly posing as Israelis. KHOU’s conclusions were wrong -- these
>weren’t Arab terrorists -- but at the time no one knew better. And yet the
>story died on the vine. No one followed up.
>
>Just about the same time that KHOU was stabbing in the dark, reporter Carl
>Cameron of the Fox News Channel was beginning an investigation into the
>mystery of the art students that would ultimately light the way into
>altogether different terrain. In a four-part series on Fox’s "Special
>Report With Brit Hume" that aired in mid-December, Cameron reported that
>federal agents were investigating the "art student" phenomenon as a
>possible arm of Israeli espionage operations tracking al-Qaida operatives
>in the United States. Yes, you read that right: a spy ring that may have
>been trailing al-Qaida members in the weeks and months before Sept. 11 --
>a spy ring that according to Cameron’s sources may have known about the
>preparations for the Sept. 11 attacks but failed to share this knowledge
>with U.S. intelligence. One investigator told Cameron that "evidence
>linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about
>evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information."
>
>According to Cameron, some 60 Israeli nationals had been detained in the
>anti-terrorism/immigrant sweeps in the weeks after Sept. 11, and at least
>140 Israelis identified as "art students" had been detained or arrested in
>the prior months. Most of the 60 detained after Sept. 11 had been
>deported, Cameron said. "Some of the detainees," reported Cameron, "failed
>polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities
>against and in the United States." Some of them were on active military
>duty. (Military service is compulsory for all young Israelis.) Cameron was
>careful to note that there was "no indication that the Israelis were
>involved in the 9/11 attacks" and that while his reporting had dug up
>"explosive information," none of it was necessarily conclusive. Cameron
>was simply airing the wide-ranging speculations in an ongoing investigation.
>
>Incendiary as it was, that story died on the vine, too, and the
>scuttlebutt in major newsrooms was that Cameron’s sources -- all anonymous
>-- were promulgating a fantasy. Reporters at the New York Times and the
>Washington Post hit up their go-to people inside Justice and FBI and CIA,
>but no one could seem to confirm the story, and indeed numerous officials
>laughed it off. Fox got it wrong, the newspapers of record concluded. And
>nothing more was heard on the topic in mainstream quarters.
>
>But inside the DEA, the Fox piece reverberated. An internal DEA communiqué
>obtained by Salon indicates that the DEA made careful note of Cameron’s
>reports; the communiqué even mentions Fox News by name. Dated Dec. 18,
>four days after the final installment in the Fox series, the document
>warns of security breaches in DEA telecommunications by unauthorized
>"foreign nationals" -- and cites an Israeli-owned firm with which the DEA
>contracted for wiretap equipment -- breaches that could have accounted for
>the access that the "art students" apparently had to the home addresses of
>agents.
>
>It wasn’t until nearly three months after the Fox reports that the "art
>student" enigma resurfaced in newsrooms, this time in Europe. On Feb. 28,
>the respected Paris-based espionage newsletter Intelligence Online
>reported in detail on what turned out to have been one of Cameron's key
>source documents: the 60-page DEA memo. The memo itself, which Salon
>obtained in mid-March, went no further than to speculate in the most
>general terms that the "nature of the individuals’ conduct" suggested some
>sort of "organized intelligence gathering activity." The memo also pointed
>out that there was some evidence connecting the art students to a drug
>ring. "DEA Orlando has developed the first drug nexus to this group," the
>memo read. "Telephone numbers obtained from an Israeli Art Student
>encountered at the Orlando D.O. [District Office] have been linked to
>several ongoing DEA MDMA (Ecstasy) investigations in Florida, California,
>Texas and New York."
>
>However, Intelligence Online and then France's newspaper of record, Le
>Monde, came to a much more definite -- and explosive -- conclusion. This
>was the jackpot, they concluded, a proven spy ring run by the Mossad or
>the Israeli government. Thus you had Intelligence Online leading its Feb.
>28 piece with the statement that "a huge Israeli spy ring operating in the
>United States was rolled up," and you had Le Monde trumpeting on March 5
>that a "vast Israeli spy network" had been dismantled in the "largest case
>of Israeli spying" since 1985, when mole Jonathan Pollard was busted
>selling Pentagon secrets to the Mossad. Reuters that same day went with
>the headline "U.S. Busts Big Israeli Spy Ring," sourcing Le Monde’s story.
>
>The two French journals came to conclusions that the memo itself clearly
>did not. And yet they had unearthed some intriguing material. Six of the
>"students" were apparently carrying cell phones purchased by a former
>Israeli vice consul to the United States. According to Le Monde, two of
>the "students" had traveled from Hamburg to Miami to visit an FBI agent in
>his home, then boarded a flight to Chicago and visited the home of a
>Justice Dept. agent, then hopped a direct flight to Toronto -- all in one
>day. According to Intelligence Online, more than one-third of the
>students, who were spread out in 42 cities, lived in Florida, several in
>Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. -- one-time home to at least 10 of the
>19 Sept. 11 hijackers. In at least one case, the students lived just a
>stone's throw from homes and apartments where the Sept. 11 terrorists
>resided: In Hollywood, several students lived at 4220 Sheridan St., just
>down the block from the 3389 Sheridan St. apartment where terrorist
>mastermind Mohammed Atta holed up with three other Sept. 11 plotters. Many
>of the students, the DEA report noted, had backgrounds in Israeli military
>intelligence and/or electronics surveillance; one was the son of a
>two-star Israeli general, and another had served as a bodyguard to the
>head of the Israeli army.
>
>The DEA report on which the French journals based their investigations
>contained a wealth of remarkable tales. To take just a few samples:
>
>
>
>On March 1, 2001, a DEA special agent in the Tampa division offices
>"responded to a knock at one of the fifth floor offices. At the door was a
>young female who immediately identified herself as an Israeli art student
>who had beautiful art to sell. She was carrying a crudely made portfolio
>of unframed pictures." Aware of the "art student" alert, the agent invited
>the girl to an interview room, where he was joined by a colleague to
>listen to the girl's presentation. "She had approximately 15 paintings of
>different styles, some copies of famous works, and others similar in style
>to famous artists. When asked her name, she identified herself as Bella
>Pollcson, and pointed out one of the paintings was signed by that name."
>Then things got interesting: In the middle of her presentation, she
>changed her story and claimed that the paintings were not for sale, but
>"that she was there to promote an art show in Sarasota, Fla., and asked
>for the agents' business cards so that information regarding the show
>could be mailed to them." Well, where's the show? asked the agents. When's
>it going up? Pollcson couldn't say: didn't know when or where -- or even
>who was running it. Later it was determined that she had lied about her
>name as well.
>
>
>On Oct. 20, 2000, in the Houston offices of the DEA, a "male Israeli art
>student was observed by the Security Officers [entering] an elevator from
>a secure area. [The officers] were able to apprehend the art student
>before he could enter a secure area on the second floor." Three months
>later, in January 2001, a "male Israeli" was apprehended attempting to
>enter the same building from a back door in a "secured parking lot area."
>He claimed "he wanted to gain access to the building to sell artwork."
>
>
>On April 30, 2001, an Air Force alert was issued from Tinker Air Force
>Base in Oklahoma City concerning "possible intelligence collection being
>conducted by Israeli Art Students." Tinker AFB houses AWACS surveillance
>craft and Stealth bombers. The report does not elaborate on what kind of
>intelligence was being sought.
>
>
>On May 19, 2001, two Israeli nationals "requested permission to visit a
>museum" at Volk Field Air National Guard Base in Camp Douglas, Wis.
>"Approximately ten minutes after being allowed on the base, the two were
>seen on an active runway, taking photographs." The men, charged with
>misdemeanor trespass, were identified as 26-year-old Gal Kantor and
>22-year-old Tsvi Watermann, and were released after paying a $210 fine.
>According to the Air Force security officer on duty, "Both were asked if
>they were involved in the selling of art while in the U.S. Kantor became
>very upset over this, and questioned why they were being asked about that
>... Kantor's whole demeanor changed, and he then became uncooperative."
>
>So it went week after week, month after month, for more than a year and a
>half. In addition to the locations mentioned above, there were "art
>student" encounters in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, El Paso, Los
>Angeles, Miami, Orlando, New Orleans, Phoenix, San Diego, Little Rock,
>Seattle, Washington, D.C., Arlington, Texas, Albuquerque, and dozens of
>other small cities and towns.
>
>"Their stories," the DEA report states, "were remarkable only in their
>consistency. At first, they will state that they are art students, either
>from the University of Jerusalem or the Bezalel Academy of Arts in
>Jerusalem. Other times they will purport to be promoting a new art studio
>in the area. When pressed for details as to the location of the art studio
>or why they are selling the paintings, they become evasive."
>
>Indeed, they had reason to be nervous, because they were lying. Salon
>contacted Bezalel Academy's Varda Harel, head of the Academic Students'
>Administration, with a list of every "student" named in the DEA report,
>including their dates of birth, passport numbers, and in some cases
>military registration numbers. Not a single name was identified in the
>Bezalel database, either as a current student or as a graduate of the past
>10 years (nor had any of the "students" tried to apply to Bezalel in the
>last ten years). As for the University of Jerusalem, there is no such
>entity. There is the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but Heidi Gleit, the
>school's foreign press liaison, told me that Israelis commonly refer to
>the school as Hebrew University, not the University of Jerusalem. (Hebrew
>University, she said, does not release student records to the public.)
>
>Still, the U.S. press was uninterested. Just one day after the Le Monde
>report, the Washington Post ran a story on March 6 that seemed to put the
>whole thing to rest. Headlined "Reports of Israeli Spy Ring Dismissed,"
>the piece, by John Mintz and Dan Eggen, opened with official denials from
>a "wide array of U.S. officials" and quoted Justice Department spokeswoman
>Susan Dryden as saying, "This seems to be an urban myth that has been
>circulating for months. The department has no information at this time to
>substantiate these widespread reports about Israeli art students involved
>in espionage."
>
>The Post quoted anonymous officials who said they thought the allegations
>had been "circulated by a single employee of the Drug Enforcement
>Administration who is angry that his theories have not gained currency ...
>[T]wo law enforcement officials said the disgruntled DEA agent, who
>disagreed with the conclusion of FBI and CIA intelligence experts that no
>spying was taking place, appears to be leaking a memo that he himself wrote."
>
>An INS spokesman acknowledged to the Post that several dozen Israelis had
>been deported, but said it was the result of "routine visa violations." At
>the same time, DEA spokesman Thomas Hinojosa told the Post that "multiple
>reports of suspicious activity on the part of young Israelis had come into
>the agency's Washington headquarters from agents in the field. The reports
>were summarized in a draft memo last year, but Hinojosa said he did not
>have a copy and could not vouch for the accuracy of media reports
>describing its contents."
>
>The Post's apparent debunking was far from convincing, even to the casual
>reader. Of course there was no proof that the art students were part of a
>spy ring: Intelligence Online and Le Monde had jumped the gun. However,
>the real possibility that they were part of a spy ring could not be
>dismissed -- any more than could any other theory one might advance to
>explain their unusual behavior. With that in mind, Justice spokeswoman
>Dryden's assertion that reports of an Israeli spy ring were an "urban
>myth" was an oddly overplayed denial. A response that fit the facts would
>have been something like "There have been numerous reports of suspicious
>behavior by Israelis claiming to be art students. We are looking into the
>allegations." Instead, Dryden appeared to be trying to forestall any
>discussion of just what the facts of the case were. Given the political
>sensitivities and the potentially embarrassing nature of the case, that
>was not surprising,
>
>If the whole thing was an "urban myth," like the sewer reptiles of
>Manhattan, and if it all led back to one deskbound nut job in the DEA,
>then what were those "reports of suspicious activity" that had come in
>from agents in the field? Hinojosa's statement about the DEA memo was
>suspiciously evasive: If the "media reports describing its content" (that
>is, the articles in Le Monde and Intelligence Online) were in fact based
>on the DEA memo whose existence Hinojosa acknowledged, then the "lone nut"
>explanation offered by anonymous U.S. officials was at best irrelevant and
>at worst a rather obvious piece of disinformation, an attempt to shove the
>story under the rug. (In fact, the French articles were based on the
>actual DEA memo -- a fact any news organization could have quickly
>verified, since the leaked DEA document had been floating around on
>various Web venues, such as Cryptome.org, as early as March 21).
>
>To someone not familiar with the 60-page DEA memo, or to reporters who
>didn't bother to obtain it, the fact that a disgruntled employee leaked a
>memo he wrote himself might seem like decisive proof that the whole "art
>student" tale was a canard. In reality, the nature of the memo makes its
>authorship irrelevant. The memo is a compilation of field reports by
>dozens of named agents and officials from DEA offices across America. It
>contains the names, passport numbers, addresses, and in some cases the
>military ID numbers of the Israelis who were questioned by federal
>authorities. Pointing a finger at the author is like blaming a bank
>robbery on the desk sergeant who took down the names of the robbers.
>
>Of course, the agent (or agents) who wrote the memo could also have
>fabricated or embellished the field reports. That does not seem to have
>been the case. Salon contacted more than a half-dozen agents identified in
>the memo. One agent said she had been visited six times at her home by
>"art students." None of the agents wished to be named, and very few were
>willing to speak at length, but all confirmed the veracity of the information.
>
>Despite such obvious holes in the official story, neither the Post nor any
>other mainstream media organization ran follow-up articles. The New York
>Times has not yet deemed it worth covering -- in fact, the paper of record
>has not written about the art student mystery even once, not even to
>pooh-pooh it. One or two minor media players did some braying -- Israel
>had been caught spying, etc. and the bonko conspiracy fringe had a field
>day, but the rest of the media, taking a cue from the big boys, decided it
>was a nonstarter: the Post's "debunking" and the Times' silence had
>effectively killed the story.
>
>So complete was the silence that by mid-March, Jane's Information Group,
>the respected British intelligence and military analysis service, noted:
>"It is rather strange that the U.S. media seems to be ignoring what may
>well be the most explosive story since the 11 September attacks -- the
>alleged break-up of a major Israeli espionage operation in the USA."
>
>The only major American media outlet aside from Fox to seriously present
>the "art student" allegations was Insight on the News, the investigative
>magazine published weekly by the conservative Washington Times. In a March
>11 article, Insight quoted a senior Justice Department official as saying,
>"We think there is something quite sinister here but are unable at this
>time to put our finger on it" -- essentially echoing what the DEA report
>concluded.
>
>Managing editor Paul M. Rodriguez, who wrote the Insight story and had
>quietly tracked the art student phenomenon for weeks before Intelligence
>Online scooped him, took an agnostic stance toward the mystery. "There is
>zero information at this time to suggest that these students were being
>run by the Mossad," he told me. "Nothing we've come across would suggest
>this. We have seen nothing that says this is a spy ring run by the Israeli
>government directly or with a wink and a nod or some other form of sub
>rosa control. Based on what we've been told, seen and obtained I just
>don't see the so-called spy ring as a certain fact. Does that make it not
>so? I don't know."
>
>Rodriguez added, "I think the investigators' take is this: What were these
>'students' doing going around accessing buildings without authorization,
>tracking undercover cops to their homes -- if not for some sort of intel
>mission? It's sort of a mind-fuck scenario, if one were to believe this
>was a conspiracy by a foreign intel source and/or a bunch of nutty 'kids'
>fucking around just to see how far they could push the envelope -- which
>they seem to have pushed pretty damn far, given the page after page after
>page of intrusions and snooping alleged."
>
>The Israeli embassy denies the charges of a spy ring. "We are saying what
>we've been saying for months," spokesman Mark Reguev told Salon, referring
>to the Fox series in December. "No American official or intelligence
>agency has complained to us about this. The story is nonsense. Israel does
>not spy on the United States."
>
>Whether or not the "art students" are Israeli spies, Reguev's blanket
>disavowal is untrue: Israel does spy on the United States. This should
>come as no surprise: Allies frequently spy on each other, and Israeli
>intelligence is renowned as among the best and most aggressive in the
>world. Israel has been at war off and on since its birth as a nation in
>1948 and is hungry for information it deems essential to its survival. And
>America's relationship to Israel and support for it is essential to the
>survival of the Jewish state. Add these things up, and espionage against
>the United States becomes understandable, if not justifiable.
>
>The U.S. government officially denies this, of course, but it knows that
>such spying goes on. In 1996, the U.S. General Accounting Office issued a
>report indicating that "Country A," later identified as Israel, "conducts
>the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any
>U.S. ally." A year earlier, the Defense Investigative Service circulated a
>memo warning U.S. military contractors that "Israel aggressively collects
>[U.S.] military and industrial technology" and "possesses the resources
>and technical capability to successfully achieve its collection
>objectives." The memo explained that "the Israelis are motivated by strong
>survival instincts which dictate every facet of their political and
>economic policies."
>
>In the history of Israeli espionage in and against the United States, the
>case of Jonathan Pollard was certainly the most heinous. Pollard, a
>civilian U.S. naval intelligence analyst, provided Israeli intelligence
>with an estimated 800,000 pages of classified U.S. intelligence
>information. The Israelis in turn passed the information to the Soviets,
>compromising American agents in the field -- several of whom were
>allegedly captured and killed as a result. Israel at first denied, and
>then admitted, Pollard's connections to the Mossad after he was arrested
>in 1985 and imprisoned for life. The case severely strained
>American-Israeli relations, and continues to rankle many American Jews,
>who believe that since Pollard was spying for Israel, his sentence was
>unduly harsh. (Other American Jews feel equally strongly that Pollard and
>the Israelis betrayed them.)
>
>Any attempt to understand the official U.S. response to the Israeli art
>student mystery -- and to some degree, the media response -- must take
>into account both the smoke screen that states blow over incidents that
>could jeopardize their strategic alliances, and America's unique and
>complex relationship with Israel. The Jewish state is a close if
>problematic ally with whom the United States enjoys a "special
>relationship" unlike that maintained with any other nation in the world.
>But U.S. and Israeli interests do not always coincide, and spying has
>always been deemed to cross a line, to represent a fundamental violation
>of trust. According to intelligence sources, the United States might
>perhaps secretly tolerate some Israeli spying on U.S. soil if the
>government decided that it was in our interest (although it could never be
>acknowledged), but certain types of spying will simply not be accepted by
>the United States, whether the spying is carried out by Israel or anyone else.
>
>If England or France spied on the United States, American officials would
>likely conceal it. In the case of Israel, there are far stronger reasons
>to hide any unseemly cracks in the special relationship. The powerful
>pro-Israel political constituencies in Congress; pro-Israel lobbies; the
>Bush administration's strong support for Israel, and its strategic and
>political interest in maintaining close ties with the Jewish state as a
>partner in the "war against terror"; the devastating consequences for
>U.S.-Israeli relations if it was suspected that Israeli agents might have
>known about the Sept. 11 attack -- all these factors explain why the U.S.
>government might publicly downplay the art student story and conceal any
>investigation that produces unpalatable results.
>
>The pro-Israel lobby is a vast and powerful force in American politics;
>the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is the No. 1
>foreign-policy lobby and the fourth most powerful lobby in Washington,
>according to Fortune Magazine. Michael Lind, a senior fellow of the New
>America Foundation and a former executive editor of the National Interest,
>calls the Israel lobby "an ethnic donor machine" that "distorts U.S.
>foreign policy" in the Middle East. Among foreign service officers, law
>enforcement and the military, there is an impression, says Lind, that you
>can't mess with Israel without suffering direct and indirect smears, such
>as being labeled an Arabist. Lind, who himself has been virulently
>attacked as an anti-Semite for his forthrightness on the subject,
>acknowledges that the Israel lobby is no different from any other -- just
>more effective. "This is what all lobbies do," Lind observes. "If you
>criticize the AARP, you hate old people and you want them to starve to
>death. The Israel lobby is just one part of the lobby problem."
>
>Considering the volatility of the issue, it is not surprising that almost
>no one in officialdom wants to go on the record for a story like the art
>students. "In government circles," as Insight's Rodriguez put it,
>"anything that has to do with Israel is always a hot topic, a third rail
>-- deadly. No one wants to touch it." Fox News' Cameron quoted
>intelligence officers saying that to publicly air suspicions of Israeli
>wrongdoing was tantamount to "career suicide." And the Israeli-Palestinian
>conflict, in one of its bloodiest and most polarizing phases, has only
>exacerbated sensitivities.
>
>Some of the same pressures that keep government officials from criticizing
>Israel may also explain why the media has failed to pursue the art student
>enigma. Media outlets that run stories even mildly critical of Israel
>often find themselves targeted by organized campaigns, including
>form-letter e-mails, the cancellation of subscriptions, and denunciations
>of the organization and its reporters and editors as anti-Semites.
>Cameron, for example, was excoriated by various pro-Israel lobbying groups
>for his exposé. Representatives of the Jewish Institute for National
>Security Affairs (JINSA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the
>Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) argued
>that the Fox report cited only unnamed sources, provided no direct
>evidence, and moreover had been publicly denied by spokesmen for the FBI
>and others (the last, of course, is not really an argument).
>
>In a December interview with Salon, CAMERA's associate director, Alex
>Safian, said that several "Jewish/Israeli groups" were having
>"conversations" with representatives of Fox News regarding Cameron's
>piece. Safian said he questioned Cameron's motives in running the story.
>"I think Fox has always been fair to Israel in its reporting," said
>Safian. "I think it's just Cameron who has something, personally, about
>Israel. He was brought up in the Middle East. Maybe that has something to
>do with it. Maybe he's very sympathetic to the Arab side. One could ask."
>The implicit suggestion was that Cameron is a bigot; in conversation,
>Safian would later make the same allegation about the entire editorial
>helm at Le Monde, which he called an anti-Semitic newspaper.
>
>Told of Safian's comments, Cameron said, "I'm speechless. I spent several
>years in Iran growing up because my father was an archaeologist there.
>That makes me anti-Israel?" The chief Washington correspondent for Fox
>News, Cameron had never before been attacked for biased coverage of Israel
>or Israeli-related affairs -- or for biased coverage of Arabs, for that
>matter. Cameron defends his December reporting, saying he had never
>received any heat whatsoever from his superiors, nor had he ever been
>contacted by any dissenting voices in government.
>
>Oddly, four days after the Cameron investigation ran, all traces of his
>report -- transcripts, Web links, headlines -- disappeared from the
>Foxnews.com archives. (Normally, Fox leaves a story up for two to three
>weeks before consigning it to the pay archive.) When Le Monde contacted
>Fox in March for a copy of the original tapes, Fox News spokesmen said the
>request posed a problem but would not elaborate. (Fox News now says Le
>Monde never called.) Asked why the Cameron piece disappeared, spokesman
>Robert Zimmerman said it was "up there on our Web site for about two or
>three weeks and then it was taken down because we had to replace it with
>more breaking news. As you know, in a Web site you've got x amount of
>bandwidth -- you know, x amount of stuff you can put stuff up on [sic]. So
>it was replaced. Normal course of business, my friend." (In fact, a
>text-based story on a Web site takes up a negligible amount of bandwidth.)
>
>When informed that Cameron's story was gone from the archives, not simply
>from the headline pages (when you entered the old URL, a Fox screen
>appeared with the message "This story no longer exists"), Zimmerman
>replied, "I don't know where it is."
>
>The extreme sensitivity of the Israeli art student story in government
>circles was made clear to this reporter when, in the midst of my inquiries
>at DEA and elsewhere, I was told by a source that some unknown party had
>checked my records and background. He proved it by mentioning a job I had
>briefly held many years ago that virtually no one outside my family knew
>about. Shortly after this, I received a call from an individual who
>identified himself only by the code name Stability. Stability said he was
>referred to me from "someone in Washington." That someone turned out to be
>a veteran D.C. correspondent who has close sources in the CIA and the FBI
>and who verified that Stability was a high-level intelligence agent who
>had been following the art student matter from the inside.
>
>Stability was guarded in his initial conversation with me. He said that
>people in the intelligence committee were suspicious about my bona fides
>and raised the possibility that someone was "using" me. "Your name is
>known and has been known for quite a while," Stability said. "The problem
>is that you're going into a hornet's nest with this. It's a very difficult
>time in this particular area. This is a scenario where a lot of people are
>living a bunker mentality." He added, "There are a lot of people under a
>lot of pressure right now because there's a great effort to discredit the
>story, discredit the connections, prevent people from going any further
>[in investigating the matter]. There are some very, very smart people who
>have taken a lot of heat on this -- have gone to what I would consider
>extraordinary risks to reach out. Quite frankly, there are a lot of
>patriots out there who'd like to remain alive. Typically, patriots are dead."
>
>In a subsequent conversation, Stability said that the DEA's Office of
>Professional Responsibility is currently undertaking an aggressive
>investigation targeting agents suspected of leaking the June 2001 memo.
>The OPR inquiry was initiated as a result of Intelligence Online's exposé
>of the DEA document in late February. According to Stability, at least 14
>agents -- including some in agencies other than DEA -- are now under
>intense scrutiny and interrogation. Half a dozen agents have been
>polygraphed several times over, computers have been seized, desks have
>been searched.
>
>A DEA spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the allegation. "Anything
>that has to do with internal security, which would include OPR, is not
>anything we're able to discuss," the spokesman said.
>
>As for the DEA document itself, Stability said that all information
>gathering for it ceased around June 2001. He also noted that "there are
>multiple variations of that document" floating around DEA and elsewhere.
>
>"It was a living, breathing document," Stability said, "that grew on a
>week-by-week basis, that was being added to as people forwarded
>information. To say this was a coordinated effort would be a stretch; it
>was ad hoc. But that document [the DEA memo] didn't just happen. That
>document was the result of literally dozens of people providing input,
>working together. These events were going on, people were looking at them,
>but could not understand them.
>
>"It wasn't until the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001 that field
>agents ran across a series of visits that occurred within a very close
>period of time," Stability said. Agents from across the country began
>talking to each other, comparing notes. "There was an embryonic
>understanding that there was something here, something was happening.
>People kept running across it. And agents being who they are, gut feelings
>being what they are, they would catch a thread. They'd start to pull a
>thread, and next thing, they'd end up with the arm of the jacket and the
>back was coming off, and then you'd end up with reports like you saw. The
>information, in its scattered form, is one thing. The information
>compiled, documented, timelined, indexed, is a horrific event for some of
>these people. Because it is indisputable."
>
>"Agents started to realize that people were coming to their homes," he
>continued. "If you are part of an organization like this, you tend to be
>careful about your security. When something disturbs that sense of
>security, it's unnerving. One thing that was understood fairly early on
>was that the students would go to some areas that didn't have street
>signs, and in fact they would already have directions to these areas. That
>indicated that someone had been there prior to them or had electronically
>figured where the agents were located -- using credit card records, things
>of that nature. This sat in the back of people's minds as to the resources
>necessary to do that."
>
>"I will tell you that there is still great debate over what [the art
>students’] specific purposes were and are," Stability went on. "When you
>take an individual who picks up a group of individuals from an airport,
>individuals who supposedly have no idea what they're doing in-country, who
>fly on over from a foreign land, whose airline tickets could in some
>instances total a value greater than $15,000 -- and who get picked up at
>the airport and drive specifically to one individual's home, which they
>know the exact directions to: Yeah, you could say there's a problem here.
>You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that. The
>overarching item is that a lot of work went into going to people's houses
>to sell them junk from China in plastic frames."
>
>But to what end? What was the value? What was to be gained? "Unknown,
>unknown," Stability said. "You could be anywhere from D.C. to daylight on
>that one. Even on our side, you have to take all the stuff and draw it all
>out and clean out all the chaff. I will tell you that from those who are
>working ground zero [of this case], it is a difficult puzzle to put
>together, and it is not complete by any means." Even the spooks are
>baffled; they have no answers.
>
>So let’s draw out the chaff ourselves and see if we can at least
>speculate. In intel circles, there are a number of working theories,
>according to Stability. "Profiling of federal agents is one," said
>Stability. "Keeping tabs on other people, other foreign nationals, is
>another. A third is that they were working for organized crime -- that's
>an easy one, and it almost sounds more like a cover than a reality. The
>predominant thought is that it was a profiling endeavour, and from a
>profiling aspect, also one of intimidation."
>
>You mean this whole vast scheme was a mind fuck, to use Paul Rodriguez’s
>elegant phrasing? A psy-ops endeavor to spook the spooks? Perhaps. As
>Stability put it, "Almost nothing is wrong in this particular instance,
>Mr. Ketcham. In this particular situation, right is wrong, left is right,
>up is down, day is night."
>
>Yet for the most part the targeted agents weren’t spooks in the strictest
>sense: They were DEA -- cops who bust drug dealers. And that leads us into
>Theory No. 1, also known as the Art Student/Drug Dealer Conspiracy. This
>theory has a piece of evidence to support it: the link, mentioned in the
>leaked DEA memo, between an Ecstasy investigation and the telephone
>numbers provided by an Israeli detained in Orlando. There are "problems"
>with Israeli nationals involved in the Ecstasy business, according to
>Israeli Embassy spokesman Reguev. "Israeli authorities and the DEA are
>working together on that issue," he said. In a statement before Congress
>in 2000, officials with the U.S. Customs Service, which intercepted some 7
>million Ecstasy tablets last year, noted that "Israeli organized-crime
>elements appear to be in control" of the multibillion-dollar U.S. Ecstasy
>trade, "from production through the international smuggling phase.
>Couriers associated with Israeli organized crime have been arrested around
>the world, including ... locations in the U.S. such as Florida, New
>Jersey, New York and California."
>
>Miami was cited as one of the main entry points of Ecstasy into the United
>States and was specified as one of the central "headquarters for the
>criminal organizations that smuggle Ecstasy"; Houston was also cited for
>large Ecstasy seizures -- an interesting nexus, given the large number of
>"art students" who congregated both in the Miami and Ft. Lauderdale area
>and in Houston. "Israeli nationals in the Ecstasy trade have been very
>sophisticated in their operations," says a U.S. Customs officer who has
>investigated the groups. "Some of these individuals have been skilled at
>counterintelligence and in concealing their communications and movements
>from law enforcement."
>
>It would thus seem that Israeli organized crime has at least the capacity
>to pull off a widespread surveillance and intelligence operation. The drug
>connection would also explain the sizable reserves of cash one Tampa
>student was handling.
>
>One DEA agent named in the "art student" report told Salon that the best
>possible explanation for the affair - and he admitted to being utterly
>baffled by it -- was that drug dealers were involved.
>
>"Why us if not because of the DEA's mission?" the agent asked. "I mean,
>what would Israeli intel want with us? Here's another avenue of inquiry to
>take: Israeli organized crime is the now the biggest dealer of Ecstasy in
>the United States. These students? It was Israeli organized crime judging
>our strength, getting a survey of our operations. What if I wanted to
>burglarize your building and go through your files? I'd do a reconnoiter.
>Get a sense of the floor plan and security, where the guards are
>stationed, how many doors, what kind of locks, alarm systems, backup alarm
>systems."
>
>The trouble with this theory is the obvious one: In the annals of crime
>chutzpah, for drug dealers to brazenly approach drug agents in their homes
>and offices may represent the all-time world record. And what conceivable
>useful intelligence could they gather that would be worth the risk? Were
>the tee-heeing tight-sweatered Israeli babes pulling some kind of Mata
>Hari stunt, seducing paunchy middle-aged DEA boys and beguiling them into
>loose-lipped info sharing?
>
>Theory No. 2 is that they were all engaged in espionage. This scenario has
>the virtue of simplicity -- if it smells like a spy, walks like a spy, and
>talks like a spy, it probably is a spy -- but doesn't make much sense,
>either. Why would the Mossad -- or any spy outfit with a lick of good
>sense -- use kids without papers as spies? And, just as our incredulous
>DEA agent noted, what intelligence useful to Israel could be gathered from
>DEA offices, anyway?
>
>I suggested to Stability that the operation, if it was that, was purposely
>conspicuous -- almost oafish. "Yes, it was," he replied. "It was a noisy
>operation. Did you ever see 'Victor/Victoria'? It was about a woman
>playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this from
>that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that was in
>your face, that didn't make sense, that couldn't possibly be them." He
>added, "Think of it this way: How could the experts think this could
>actually be something of any value? Wouldn't they dismiss what they were
>seeing?"
>
>That’s where you enter truly dark territory: Theory No. 3, the Art Student
>as Agent as Art Student Smoke Screen. It has major problems, but let’s
>roll with it for a moment. This theory contends that the art student ring
>was a smoke screen intended to create confusion and allow actual spies --
>who were also posing as art students -- to be lumped together with the
>rest and escape detection. In other words, the operation is an elaborate
>double fake-out, a hiding-in-plain-sight scam. Whoever dreamed it up
>thought ahead to the endgame and knew that the DEA-stakeout aspect was so
>bizarre that it would throw off American intelligence. According to this
>theory -- Stability's "Victor/Victoria" scenario -- Israeli agents wanted,
>let's say, to monitor al-Qaida members in Florida and other states. But
>they feared detection. So to provide cover, and also to create a
>dizzyingly Byzantine story that would confuse the situation, Israeli intel
>flooded areas of real operations with these bumbling "art students" -- who
>were told to deliberately stake out DEA agents.
>
>Perhaps. Why not? Up is down, left is right. I nudged Stability on the
>obvious implication of the "Victor/Victoria" scenario: If this was a ruse,
>a decoy to conceal another operation, what was that other operation?
>"Unknown," Stability said.
>
>Then of course there’s Theory No. 4: that they really were art students.
>Either they were recruited in Israel as part of an art-selling racket or
>they simply hit upon the idea themselves. This theory is basically the de
>facto position held by the U.S. and Israeli governments, which insist that
>the only wrong committed by the "students" was to sell art without the
>proper papers. There are almost too many problems with this to list, but
>it's worth mentioning a few: Why in the world would people try to sell
>cheap art market to DEA officials? Why would they almost all use the same
>bogus Bezalel Academy of Arts cover story? Why would anyone running such a
>racket to make money use foreign nationals without green cards, knowing
>that they would quickly be snagged for visa violations? And why did so
>many of these itinerant peddlers, wandering the United States on their
>strange mission of hawking cheap Chinese knockoff paintings, have "black
>information" about federal facilities?
>
>There are other theories. One is that these were spies in training, newly
>minted Mossad graduates on test runs to see how they would operate in
>field conditions. I asked Stability how hotly the matter was now being
>pursued in intel and law enforcement. "Depends on who you speak to," he
>told me. "Some people say that it's a dead issue, a fantasy. Most of the
>investigations are happening at an ad hoc level. There are people out
>there that you couldn't sway off some of the cases, because that's how
>dedicated they are."
>
>Apparently, at least some agents in FBI remain quite concerned about the
>art student problem. According to several intelligence sources, including
>Stability, on Dec. 3, 2001, six separate FBI field offices simultaneously
>forwarded communiqués to FBI headquarters inquiring into the status of the
>investigation. The FBI agents wanted to have a "clarification" as to what
>was going on.
>
>The subject may not be officially dead yet. The art student matter may be
>taken up by the congressional committees investigating intelligence
>failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, according to another source.
>
>What about the crucial Washington Post article, in which anonymous federal
>agents alleged the DEA memo was the work of a disgruntled employee?
>
>"The Washington Post article was a plant -- that's obvious. The story was
>killed," Stability told me. Who planted the story? Stability claimed the
>FBI was behind it. "Every organization is running scared," Stability
>added, "because they're afraid of the next shoe to drop. There are many
>smoking guns out there, many. So consequently every one is at a level of
>heightened anxiety, and when they're anxious they make mistakes."
>
>Yes, but what are they afraid of? What will the smoking guns prove?
>Questions, questions, labyrinthine questions, and the more you ask in this
>matter, the fewer get answered. When I called the CIA to inquire about the
>agency's March 2001 alert -- an alert that evinced deep disquiet over the
>affair -- an official who was aware of the inquiry told me, "I'll make a
>recommendation to you: Don't write a story. This whole thing has been
>blown way out of proportion. As far as we're concerned, we reported it,
>yes, but subsequently it's nothing of interest to us. And we've just
>closed the book on it. And I really recommend you do the same. Let it go.
>There's nothing here."
>
>Not everyone else in law enforcement is so sure. "There's a lot of concern
>among the agents," said the DEA source. "We're investigators. We're not
>satisfied when we don't have answers. This is a mystery that has an answer
>and it has to be resolved."
>
>
>- - - - - - - - - - - -
>
>About the writer
>Christopher Ketcham is a freelance writer in New York City.
>
>
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