Story no "American" Media Organization will Follow - Part 1 of 3

[lup...@bellsouth.net]

"Fritz Wuehler" <fr...@expires-200309.rodent.frell.eu.org> wrote in message
news:a2192215fb59aa22...@remailer.frell.eu.org...
>
> This article deserves another posting.
>
>
> Copyright 2002 Salon.com, Inc.
>
> 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.
>
> May 7, 2002 Tuesday
>
> The Israeli "art student" mystery
> By Christopher Ketcham
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> (continued in Part 2)
Just to add to the mystery, four or five of these Israeli "students" lived
in a motel, stone's rhrow away from another motel where Mohammed Atta and
his "pilots" lived. Mohammed Atta's girlfriend who lived with him in
Venice Fl. for several months, says that she went partying with Atta and
several german visitors in Key West, during which time lots of booze and
drugs were consumed. I just wonder If Atta's "German friends' might have
been some of the "Art students"!
Apparently, FBI never bothered to finde that out or talk to the
"girlfriend"!
>