A CounterPunch Special Investigation: High-Fivers and Art Student Spies What Did Israel Know in Adva

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High-Fivers and Art Student Spies

What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

03/07/07 "Counterpunch" -- -- On the afternoon of September 11, 2001,

an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO - "be on lookout" -- was issued with

regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the

New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade

Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area

were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a "vehicle possibly

related to New York terrorist attack":

White, 2000 Chevrolet van with 'Urban Moving Systems' sign on back

seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first

impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van

were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion.

FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for

prints and detain individuals.

At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO,

officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the

commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the

police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli

approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the

vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and "was

asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black

leather fanny pouch type of bag". With guns drawn, the police then

"physically removed" Kurzberg, while four other men - two more men had

apparently joined the group since the morning - were also removed from

the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda

rights.

They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to

DeCarlo's report, "this officer was told without question by the

driver [sivan Kurzberg],'We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your

problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'" Another

of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo -

falsely - that "we were on the West Side Highway in New York City

during the incident". From inside the vehicle the officers, who were

quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports

and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey's Bergen

Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five

Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement

hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle

"maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like

they're hooked in with this", the source told the Record, referring to

the 9/11 attacks. "It looked like they knew what was going to happen

when they were at Liberty State Park."

The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the

country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which

maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were

held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York,

during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA

counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the "high-fivers"

for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were

placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were

given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul

Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for

ten weeks. Then he failed it.

Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban

Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national,

abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter's

departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell

phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars

of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect

list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and

suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt

Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as

the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving

Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what

they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.

It was New York's venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this

story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward

reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the

men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence

agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the

five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers

confirmed this to me, noting that movers' vans are a common

intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government

itself admitted that the men were spies. A "former high-ranking

American intelligence official", who said he was "regularly briefed on

the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials", told

reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted

Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government "acknowledged the

operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington".

Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in

the Mossad denied the story. "Nobody stopped talking to me", he said.

In June 2002, ABC News' 20/20 followed up with its own investigation

into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent

Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the

CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as

hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro

told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks

and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site

of their "celebration" with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From

the beginning, "the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the

Israelis had foreknowledge", according to Cannistraro. A second former

CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who

spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were

pursuing two theories. "One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at

Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other

was that they were at the park location already". Either way,

investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when

they got there.

Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation

was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were "high-level

negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials", a

settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems

suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to

bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that by the last

week of October 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained,

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified

"prominent New York congressmen" were lobbying heavily for their

release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report,

high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a

negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the

U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.)

And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they

had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of

their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered.

There is sufficient reason - from news reports, statements by former

intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the

reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government -to believe that in

the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network

inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given

Israel's concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history

of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What's

incendiary is the idea -supported, though not proven, by several

pieces of evidence - that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11

in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American

officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a

Congressional investigation.

Yet none of this information found its way into Congress's joint

committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially

referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission's final

report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of

The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. "There weren't even

stories saying it was bullshit", says The Forward's Perelman.

"Honestly, I was surprised". Instead, the story disappeared into the

welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.

It's no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of 9/11-

related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story doesn't

fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the attacks. It

brings up concerns not only about Israel's obligation not to spy

inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor, but

about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate warning

of an impending devastating attack on American soil. Furthermore, the

available evidence undermines the carefully cultivated image of

sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel relationship. These are all

factors that help explain the story's disappearance, and they are

compelling reasons to revisit it now.

Torpedoing the FBI Probe

All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed

the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile

radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving

Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were

allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for

the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives.

Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in

northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the

suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who

backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with

or without knowledge of the terrorists' plans, have been tracking the

men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?

In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have

denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an

intelligence operation in the United States. "No evidence recovered

suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11

attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad",

FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not

respond to questions for this article.) According to the source at ABC

News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups.

"There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case", the

source told me. "They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the

investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully

investigated". Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter,

whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact.

Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar

frustration within the CIA: "People I've talked to at the CIA were

outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that

there hadn't been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging

out there without any conclusion."

However, what was "absolutely certain", according to Vincent

Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance

network in the New York- New Jersey area. The network's purpose was to

track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant

Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA

counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI

investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as

Arabic-speaking linguists "running technical operations" in northern

New Jersey's extensive Muslim communities. The former CIA officer said

the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones

in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: "Our

conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring

operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with

this". The ABC News source added, "What we heard was that the Israelis

may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the

morning of 9/11".

The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: "There was no

question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came

from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters

that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis

would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was

a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If

somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this - we know

that they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they

possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be

a political nightmare to deal with."

The Israeli "Art Student" Spies

There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives

were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the

peculiar tale of the Israeli "art students", detailed by this reporter

for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo

circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Security

Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11

attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as

art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly - and

seemingly inexplicably -attempting to penetrate DEA offices and other

law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the country. The

DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged in "an

organized intelligence gathering activity", but to what end, U.S.

investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo briefly

floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in trafficking

the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, "the most activity [was]

reported in the state of Florida" during the first half of 2001, where

the town of Hollywood appeared to be "a central point for these

individuals with several having addresses in this area".

In retrospect, the fact that a large number of "art students" operated

out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the

city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and

served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the

World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to

fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in

the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as

art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in

Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men

and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept

officers in the Israeli military -training and experience far beyond

the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their "traveling in

the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background", according

to the DEA report.

One "art student" was a former Israeli military intelligence officer

named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the

mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers.

Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips

showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the

first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about

$80,000 during the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash

pads for at least two other "art students", were located at 4220

Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed

Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street--approximately 2,700 feet

from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan al-

Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which smashed

into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818 Jackson

Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue apartment.

In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close

reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements

and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker

timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and

federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers,

suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaedaconnected

suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than

half a mile apart, for various periods during 200001 in the run-up to

the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood,

Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg,

Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.

Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and

around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael

Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in

April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less

than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of

Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs,

especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with "art student"

activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land

Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the

European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002

told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the "art

students", that "Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the

Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of

funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson,

Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]". It's

plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the Holy

Land Foundation came from "art student" spies in the Richardson area.

Others among the "art students" had specific backgrounds in electronic

surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli

wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns

among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for

example, as "a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for

the Israeli military". Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in

January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence

"working with classified information". Hanan Serfaty, who maintained

the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the

Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to

disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his

activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le

Monde meanwhile reported that six "art students" were apparently using

cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in

the U.S.A.

Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth

Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic

eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems' American

subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey,

not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli "movers"

were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in

his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to "DEA

Groups". How he acquired information about so-called "DEA Groups" -

via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping

company -was never determined, according to DEA documents.

"Art student" Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving,

Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond

posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications

software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology

to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the

United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose

executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current

members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated

at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of

espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure.

(The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)

According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of

investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law

enforcement officials examined the "art students" phenomenon, they

came to the tentative conclusion that "the Israelis likely had a huge

spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a

number of the hijackers". The German daily Die Zeit reached the same

conclusion in 2002, reporting that "Mossad agents in the U.S. were in

all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers". The

Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that

Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. "There

is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks,

but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered

intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it", Fox

correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was

the first major expos

In article <1177729143.046867.150500@c35g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>,

Erroneous420@gmail.com wrote:

Well, he said...

--

NeoLibertarian

"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for."

---Will Rogers