Israeli art students - part 1
paranoia
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.
paranoia
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.
paranoia
"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.
paranoia
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 information eventually ended up in Soviet hands,
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.
paranoia
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?
paranoia
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."