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by Marc Perelman
SF911Truth Art
Contest -- First Prize - Youth Category
Frances Yun
Artist Comments:
"I tried to portray how much the truth was blacked out
and the repetition of the same minimal facts and images. "
FORWARD STAFF
MARCH 15, 2002
Despite angry denials by Israel and its American
supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the
United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned.
However, far from pointing to Israeli spying against
U.S. government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week,
the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the
United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected
of links to Middle East terrorism.
In particular, a group of five Israelis arrested in New
Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two
months was subjected to an unusual number of polygraph tests and
interrogated by a series of government agencies including the FBI's
counterintelligence division, which by some reports remains convinced that
Israel was conducting an intelligence operation. The five Israelis worked
for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop
immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel.
Other allegations involved Israelis claiming to be art
students who had backgrounds in signal interception and ordnance. (See
related story, Page 8.)
Sources emphasized that the release of all the Israelis
under investigation indicates that they were cleared of any suspicion that
they had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks, as some anti-Israel
media outlets have suggested.
The resulting tensions between Washington and Jerusalem,
sources told the Forward, arose not because of the operations' targets but
because Israel reportedly violated a secret gentlemen's agreement between
the two countries under which espionage on each other's soil is to be
coordinated in advance.
Most experts and former officials interviewed for this
article said that such so-called unilateral or uncoordinated Israeli
monitoring of radical Muslims in America would not be surprising.
In fact, they said, 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.
"I have no doubt Israel has an interest in spying on
those groups," said Peter Unsinger, an intelligence expert who teaches
justice administration at San Jose University. "The Israelis give us good
stuff, like on the Hamas charities."
According to one former high-ranking American
intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the
conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested
in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission
and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served
as a front.
After their arrest, the men were held in detention for
two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially
for visa violations.
However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI
concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives,
according to the former American official, who said he was regularly
briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.
"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a
front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The
conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that
they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11."
However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated
because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they
didn't know about it."
Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the
Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case.
Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue.
However, the former American official said that after
American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last
year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for
not coordinating it with Washington.
The five men — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner,
Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel — were arrested eight hours after the
attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban
Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men
allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the
roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van.
In addition to their strange behavior and their Middle
Eastern looks, the suspicions were compounded when a box cutter and $4,000
in cash were found in the van. Moreover, one man carried two passports and
another had fresh pictures of the men standing with the smoldering
wreckage of the World Trade Center in the background.
The Bergen County police immediately handed the suspects
to the INS, which turned them over to a joint police-FBI terrorism task
force set up after September 11 to deal with all possible links with the
attacks.
The five Israelis were detained in the high-security
Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn in solitary confinement until
mid-October. On September 25, they all signed papers acknowledging
violations of US immigration law. At the end of October, the INS issued a
deportation order which was enforced a month later after a review by the
Justice Department and prodding by Jewish and Israeli officials.
However, the former official said, this is just the
official story.
In fact, he said, the nature of the investigation
changed after the names of two of the five Israelis showed up on a CIA-FBI
database of foreign intelligence operatives, he said. At that point, he
said, the bureau took control of the investigation and launched a Foreign
Counterintelligence Investigation, or FCI.
FBI investigations into possible links to the September
11 attacks are usually carried by the bureau's counterterrorism division,
not its counterintelligence division.
"An FCI means not only that it was serious but also that
it was handled at a very high level and very tightly," the former official
said. That view was echoed by several former FBI officials interviewed.
Steven Gordon, an American lawyer hired by the families
to help secure their release, said he could not confirm which FBI division
was in charge of the investigation. However, he acknowledged that "there
were a lot of people involved, including counterintelligence officials
from the FBI."
The men all underwent at least two polygraph tests each,
the lawyer added. He said one of the Israelis took the test seven times, a
very unusual total according to several polygraph experts interviewed by
the Forward.
After the men were arrested, FBI agents searched the
warehouse of Urban Moving Systems in Weehawken, N.J., seizing computer
hard drives and documents. The warehouse was closed on September 14, said
Ron George, a spokesman for the New Jersey State Division of Consumer
Affairs.
On December 7, a New Jersey judge ruled that the state
could seize the goods remaining inside the warehouse. The state also has a
lawsuit pending against Urban Moving Systems and its owner, Dominik Otto
Suter, an Israeli citizen.
The FBI questioned Mr. Suter once. However, he left the
country afterward and went back to Israel before further questioning. Mr.
Suter declined through his lawyer to be interviewed for this article.
Earlier this year, the New York State Department of
Transportation revoked Urban Moving System's license after discovering
that the company's midtown Manhattan base was only a mailing address.
After they returned to Israel at the end of November,
the five men told local media that they were kept in solitary confinement,
beaten, deprived of food and questioned while blindfolded and in their
underwear.
Mr. Ellner, one of the five Israelis, said on two
occasions in recent weeks that the five men had decided not to grant any
interviews right now "because we went through a very difficult period and
we are not ready for this."
Their Israeli lawyer, Ram Horwitz, told the Forward he
was still waiting for the results of the medical tests undertaken by the
men in Israel to make a decision on an eventual lawsuit in the United
States for mistreatment.
Mr. Horwitz insisted the men were not intelligence
officers.
Irit Stoffer, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokeswoman,
said the allegations were "completely untrue" and that there were "only
visa violations."
"The FBI investigated those cases because of 9/11," Ms.
Stoffer said.
Charlene Eban, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Washington,
and Don Nelson, a Justice Department spokesman, said they had no knowledge
of an Israeli spying operation.
"If we found evidence of unauthorized intelligence
operations, that would be classified material," added Jim Margolin, a
spokesman for the FBI in New York.
One leading expert in American intelligence operations,
Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at the Boston-based Political Research
Associates, explained that there "is a backdoor agreement between allies
that says that if one of your spies gets caught and didn't do too much
harm, he goes home. It goes on all the time. The official reason is always
a visa violation."
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