By Way of Deception - Connecting the Dots - Mossad and 9/11

[mason-free party]

There's much more evidence implicating Mossad in 9/11 than there is implicating Al Qaeda. Naturally the Government tried to suppress all evidence that implicates Israel. Fake evidence was planted to frame Muslims.


By Way of Deception - Connecting the Dots - Mossad and 9/11

Article by Douglas Herman

Wealthy Zionist Larry Silverstein built World Trade Center Building 7 in 1985. The building was part of the WTC complex, owned by the New York Port Authority. WTC-7, ostensibly a US government building, housed offices of the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) Secret Service, CIA and Security & Exchange Commission (SEC). Late in the afternoon of September 11, 2001 Larry Silverstein, for all intents and purposes, had WTC-7 demolished.

Only months before, well-connected Zionist Lewis Eisenberg, Chairman of the New York Port Authority, which owned the WTC, leased the complex for 99 years to fellow Zionist Silverstein. How or why that transaction took place was never discussed. At the time, the WTC was considered, by many, as an architectural white elephant and less than desirable piece of real estate.

Meanwhile, well-connected Zionists had attained top positions of power throughout the Bush administration, and within the three branches of the US government. Many had signed a sort of Globalist Declaration of Independence. The document mirrored an earlier Israeli manifesto. The signers slowly consolidated power in America, unbeknownst to most Americans.

The PNAC-Project for The New American Century---was first written by Zionists in Israel as an Israeli policy papers, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," before becoming an important blueprint for foreign policy here. Many of the same authors contributed to both papers. On the surface both papers seem pragmatic, almost admirable, filled with diplomatic language. Yet if we understand the motives and comprehend the methods-By Way of Deception---we may discern the Big Picture.

Douglas Feith ascended to power at the Pentagon, as did fellow Zionists Paul Wolfowitz, Dov Zakheim and Richard Perle. Most, if not all, of these top military strategists curiously possessed dual passports: Israeli and US passports.

"He served Likud interests," said Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski of her superior, Douglas Feith, head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP). "I don't think those are the same as Israel's interests, but instead those of a faction within Israel. He engineered Likud (Right wing Israeli party) outlined and desired actions by the US and, in Feith's mind, I think he did it for Israel. I just don't have any countervailing information that would suggest he has ever done anything for America."

Likewise what role did Wolfowitz play? And Perle? And Zakheim? All Pentagon top officials. How does one hold a foreign passport---Israeli---while holding Top Secret US security clearances? Does anyone see a conflict of interests here? One could argue these men were great patriots---but for which country? Philosophically they all shared the same goal: Strengthen Israel; weaken the tyrannical Islamic states; hasten US hegemony of scarce resources for key global players and multinationals.

And they all worked at the Pentagon. If America was ever to be attacked---perhaps by a team of Islamic fanatics---what better symbolic target than the Pentagon? Curiously, only a year before, the Pentagon had war-gamed just such an attack. You would have thought someone would have been prepared.

The Underlings

The alleged Israeli art students in Hollywood, Florida (They sold cheap Chinese art) lived on the EXACT same street, only blocks from the alleged Islamic hijackers (who flunked flight school). What were the odds of that happening? Was there a shared connection, a common link, a series of dots perhaps (strip clubs)? Or was it simply a massive coincidence that a team of possible Mossad double agents posing as art students, lived blocks away from alleged Islamic fanatics who just happened to train next to US military bases?

What about those dancing Israeli furniture movers in Liberty State Park? They filmed the event from atop their white van, while celebrating the successful attack. Later, two other vans were stopped in key access points to Manhattan. The FBI kept these Israelis for weeks before eventually releasing them. In the horrific days following 9-11, other vans were stopped. Other Israelis were arrested. Dogs detected traces of explosives in the vans. If not for the vigilance of local law enforcement officers in several states (unlike the FBI), how many other targets in America would have been destroyed?

The US media actually performed quite well for 24 hours following the attack. Unbelievably, even Fox News.

"What is striking about Fox News Reporter Carl Cameron's portrait of Israel's spy network in the U.S. is the sheer vastness of his subject," wrote Justin Raimondo, in The Terror Enigma: Israel and the September 11 Connection, "In the months leading up to 9/11, Cameron claimed Israel was waging a covert war against its principal ally and benefactor, the United States."

But aside from smaller newspaper, like the Bergen Record, few reports of these obvious false flag-black operations by Israeli double agents appeared anywhere on cable news giants CNN, MSNBC or Fox in subsequent weeks. Nor did the appear in the mainstream newspapers. Why didn't they?

A quick glance at the masthead of any daily New York newspaper reveals a preponderance of Jewish editors and publishers. What was most revealing, after 9-11, was not so much editorial reluctance but an overwhelming self-censorship, a stony silence, by all the New York City newspapers. They refused to mention---EVER---the probable connection of Israel to the 9-11 attack.

Even though seven prominent NYC steel scrapers were demolished under exceedingly suspicious circumstances, not ONE Judeo-centric newspaper launched even a semblance of an investigation. Given the fact that Israel possessed the greater motive, means and opportunity to carry out the 9-11 attack, one had to wonder about the criminal complicity of the big New York dailies.

Other NYC periodicals went out of their way to debunk any attempt to get at the truth. Periodicals like Popular Mechanics, edited by a cousin of US Homeland Security head, Michael Chertoff, mouthed the official (Zionist) version of events. According to every New York periodical, Islamic terrorists hijacked the planes. How they attained the means, not to mention the opportunity to attack, was rarely broached.

Compromise security and you can conquer a city, state or nation. The Trojan Horse being a good example; America being another.

If indeed hijackers somehow got past airport security cameras and avoided normal flight check in procedures, wouldn't the suspicion fall on the Israeli-owned security company at Logan airport in Boston? How would hijackers have access to gates and terminals otherwise? No Mainstream news reports indicated hijackers got past airline employees working flight check-in counters. Somehow this remains a minor detail to the US media.

Even more suspicious, regarding security, how exactly did Islamic terrorists manage to gain access to the interior structure of WTC-7, in order to place obvious demolition charges? Wealthy real estate mogul and Zionist Larry Silverstein, the new lessee of the entire WTC complex, would have had final say in any security, wouldn't he? Additionally, the WTC-7 was, for all intents and purposes, a US government building. How could an enormous building, housing offices of the CIA, Secret Service and the SEC be left unsecured---unless the new landlord chose the "security" outfit.

Even more strange, flaming debris somehow scattered across a city block from the collapsing Twin Towers and set afire the 11th floor of WTC-7, where the SEC was located. Why this floor? What was located there?

"Odds are the SEC records in WTC 7 that were fortuitously destroyed when that building was 'pulled' included this.bogus Brady Bond deal," wrote Karl Schwarz. "Our sources have informed us that there was a group of ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] working in this part of the Pentagon (that was destroyed) that were investigating the $120 billion Brady Bond scam I have reported on recently." A masterful crime or a diabolical yet masterful spy operation? Probably both. Instead of a terrorist attack, the crime begins to look like a huge scam with billions in profits and thousands dead.

If one were to examine this enormous evil iceberg further, and not just the tip, one might discover a monumental mass of icy Intelligence-connected players below the surface. Very likely, the entire WTC operation was a combination insurance scam (Benefiting one wealthy Zionist), false flag "terrorist" op (benefiting one Zionist nation), and billion dollar gold heist (Benefiting various operatives from many branches of intelligence possibly). Difficult to believe the CIA and Secret Service---not to mention Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management--- had NO prior knowledge of the impending destruction of their offices.

According to the London Times: "The Comex metals trading division of the New York Mercantile Exchange kept 3,800 gold bars - weighing 12 tonnes and worth more than $100 million (£70 million) - in vaults in the building's basement. Comex also held almost 800,000 ounces of gold there on behalf of others, with a value of about $220 million (worth more than $560,000,000 today). It also held more than 102 million ounces of silver, worth $430 million (Worth $1.5 billion today). The Bank of Nova Scotia, which kept gold in the Comex vault, reported $200 million of gold lost in the wreckage (Lost-!). Comex also held precious metals for Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bank of New York and Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking."

Not surprisingly, one massive gold-filled truck was discovered, crushed, in the tunnels below the WTC complex. Perhaps, in the eight hours, between 9 AM and 5 PM, when WTC-7 was demolished and Americans were glued to televisions, horrified, masterful planners heisted hundreds of millions in gold bullion. Before Silverstein finally "pulled" the US government building, that is.

Which leaves us only THREE final questions: Who leased the building only months before? Who hired security at Logan and the WTC? Who covered up the subsequent crime in the US media, not only in New York City but the nation?

Still not convinced that key, dual-citizenship "Zionists" played a pivotal part? Perhaps THE pivotal part? The final footnote, indicating overwhelming involvement in the 9-11 attack, and the subsequent power to cover up any involvement, occurred 18 months later. That signature event was the War with Iraq, launched with whole-hearted White House, US Media and Congressional support on March 18, 2003.

On Purim, a significant Jewish holiday, a day signifying destruction of Israel's enemies.
Masterful.

USAF veteran, Amateur historian and student of Spinoza and Thoreau, Douglas Herman questions authority. Shouldn't you?


9/11 - WHAT DID THE GOVERNMENT KNOW AND WHEN DID IT KNOW IT?

The task was simple, deny the evidence, cover-up the embarrassing arrest of two Israelis with an explosives-tainted truck, and give the media a reason to return to the mantra of "all terror is caused by Muslims". But what started as a simply attempt to spin the news away from the Israelis arrested in Washington State has backfired on the Bush administration in a big way. In conducting the classic "limited hangout" of admitting to foreknowledge of the attacks of 9-11 in order to reassert the link to Osama bin Laden, Bush has handed opponents of his administration and opponents of World War the most damning proof yet that the reality of 9-11 is not what the US Government and media have been telling the American people it is.

The arrested Israelis posed a problem. History records in the Lavon Affair that Israelis willingly use bombs and lay false trails to Arabs for political gain. And it wasn't too long ago that JDL Chairman Irv Rubin was arrested for plotting to blow up a US Congressman who refused to toe the Israel party line. Then there were the two Mossad agents arrested inside the Mexican Congress with guns and explosives shortly after 9-11. As the battered World Trade Towers collapsed, the very first suspects arrested, caught cheering as the towers fell, were Israelis, later identified as Mossad agents. The arrested spies worked for Urban Moving Systems, whose Israeli owner promptly fled the nation.

Still other espionage suspects posed as art students trying to get into federal buildings, while others held cover jobs in mall kiosks selling "Zoom Copters", kiosks that sat empty when their entire staffs were thrown into jail on suspicion of espionage. All told, the Israeli spy ring, which had been partly uncovered prior to 9-11, was the largest spy ring ever uncovered in the United States.

In California, the ADL was also convicted of running a massive spy operation on American citizens. Coupled with the spies themselves was the discovery of a massive phone tapping operation carried out by Comverse Infosys (yet another Israeli company) contracted to place phone tapping equipment on the US phone system to aid US law enforcement authorities. However, those same authorities began to suspect that Israelis were using that very same system to listen in on the phone calls of Americans when high profile drug investigations into Ecstasy rings (run by the Israeli organized crime) were derailed using information only obtainable from police phone calls.

In the Kenneth Starr report, it is reported that Bill Clinton was aware that an unnamed foreign power had made recordings of his phone sex sessions with Monica Lewinsky. In the end, three Israeli companies with deep penetration of the American communications infrastructure were implicated in the phone and internet tapping scandal. One of these companies, Odigo, had an office near the World Trade Towers, and received a two hour advance warning of the impending attack.

Two hours means the warning was sent before the planes that eventually crashed into the World Trade Towers had even left the ground on their final flights! Someone knew of the plan, someone who decided they needed to warn Israelis working for a company linked to Israel's spying operation.

Taken together, there is probable cause to investigate just what connection the Israeli spying operation had with 9-11. Such an investigation should have happened, but instead, something very odd took place in the investigation! According to a government official quoted in Carl Cameron's story on the spy ring, the US Government classified the evidence that links the arrested Israeli spies to 9-11.

Rather than treat the arrested spies as Jonathan Pollard had been treated, the US Government hurried to get the arrested Israelis out of the country as quickly as possible, in one case releasing and deporting one Israeli even though he failed his polygraph examination! Pollard had been just one spy. Here was the largest spy ring ever uncovered in the United States and the United States itself was trying to cover it all up! The media went along by downplaying the Rubin story, ignoring the Mexican incident and actually spiking Carl Cameron's four part story on the spy ring.

As quiet as the media was about the evidence pointing towards Israeli involvement in 9-11, the media was quite the opposite when it came to claims of proof linking ex CIA agent Osama bin Laden with the crimes. The reason was obvious. Long before the attacks on the World Trade Towers the United States had been planning for a war in Afghanistan to create a climate more favorable for American oil companies. John Marcesca, as part of a UNOCAL working group on the Afghanistan pipeline project, had gone before Congress and stressed the necessity of replacing the Afghanistan government before a pipeline from the Caspian sea to the gulf of India could be built.

The Bush White House admits that a plan to attack Afghanistan existed BEFORE 9-11. Following 9-11, the US did replace the government of Afghanistan, and the pipeline is under construction. One member of the UNOCAL working group, Hamid Karzai, is the President of the new government in Afghanistan. Another UNOCAL group member, Zalmay Khalilzad, is the US special envoy to Afghanistan. A cozy relationship to be sure!

But there was a problem with the "Osama did it" story. As much evidence as existed suggesting Israeli involvement in 9-11 (certainly enough to justify being classified by the US Government), there was none at all to support the official story.

The 19 names of suspected hijackers released by the FBI don't point to Afghanistan. They come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates; all across the middle east without a focus in any one region. Indeed, even as the FBI was admitting that its list of 19 names was based solely on identifications thought to have been forged, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saudi Al-Faisal insisted that an investigation in Saudi Arabia showed that the 5 Saudi men were not aboard the four jet liners that crashed in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania on September 11.

"It was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened," Al-Faisal told the Arabic Press in Washington after meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House. A sixth identified hijacker is also reported to still be alive in Tunisia, while a 7th named man died two years ago!

The 19 names of suspected hijackers released by the FBI don't even appear on the passenger lists of the hijacked planes.

CNN reported that the men who hijacked those aircraft were using phony IDs, using the names of Arabs. A total of 7 of the men named by the FBI as suspected 9-11 hijackers are still alive! And the FBI Admits it has no actual evidence linking the 19 Arab suspects to 9-11

In another development, the BBC reported that the transcript of a phone call made by Flight Attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney to Boston air traffic controls shows that the flight attendant gave the seat numbers occupied by the hijackers, seat numbers which were NOT the seats of the men the FBI claimed were responsible for the hijacking!

FBI Chief Robert Mueller admitted on September 20 and on September 27 that the FBI has no way to prove the true identities of the hijackers. Yet in the haste to move forward on the already planned war in Afghanistan, our government and the FBI (which does not have the best record for honesty in investigations to begin with, having been caught rigging lab tests, manufacturing testimony in the Vincent Foster affair, and illegally withholding/destroying evidence in the Oklahoma Bombing case) are not taking too close a look at evidence that points away from the designated suspect, the people living over the oil fields.

Yet another problem lies with the described actions of the hijackers themselves. We are being told on the one hand that these men were such fanatical devotees of their faith that they willingly crashed the jets they were flying into buildings. Yet on the other hand, we are being told that these same men spent the night before their planned visit to Allah drinking in strip bars, committing not just one, but two mortal sins which would keep them out of Paradise no matter what else they did.

Truly devout Muslims would spend the day before a suicide attack fasting and praying. Not only does the drinking in strip bars not fit the profile of a fanatically religious Muslim willing to die for his cause, but the witness reports of the men in the bars are of men going out of their way to be noticed and remembered, while waving around phony identifications.

Because of the facts of the phony identifications, we don't really know who was on those planes. What we do know is that the men on those planes went to a great deal of trouble to steal the identities of Muslims, and to make sure those identities were seen and remembered, then to leave a plethora of planted clues around, such as crop dusting manuals, and letters in checked baggage (why does a terrorist about to die need to check baggage?) that "somehow" didn't get on the final, fatal, flight. This abundance of dubious evidence pointing to Arabs is the pattern previously established in the Lavon Affair.

More than an absence of proof linking 9-11 to Osama, the proof exists of a deliberate attempt to frame Arabs for terror attacks in the United States. The claimed proofs have all been dismissed as deliberate mistranslations bordering on frauds and in one case a (poorly) faked video tape. The Anthrax letters, written to look like they were from Arab Muslims are actually from a non-Arab source. This proves the existence of a deliberate plot to frame Arabs.

And yet the US Government is not interested in looking at any evidence that does not support the desired outcome.

The public is well aware of the facts that suggest deception on the part of the US Government. Documents declassified in 1994 prove beyond a doubt that Roosevelt not only knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked but that he encouraged and allowed it to happen to get the United States into a war they did not want. The public is well aware that the present government is as eager to get the US into a major war for the oil wealth of central Asia and the Middle East as Roosevelt was to get the nation he ruled into the war against the Axis.

The public is well aware of "Operation NORTHWOODS", a previous plan by the US (spiked by JFK) to stage fake terror attacks to ignite a war against Cuba. The public is well aware that government throughout history have used fake terror against their own people as a tool of domestic policy.

In such a climate the arrests of two Israelis in a truck that tested positive for explosives was sure to attract notice. The FBI moved quickly to quash the story, as protective of these Israelis as of the spy ring itself. Despite the fact that the story had taken almost a week to make the news, it was only after the story broke that the FBI rushed in to conduct their own tests and claim that the bomb dog, and the test sued by the local authorities were all wrong, there were no explosive traces, everyone had been fooled by residue from a cigarette lighter.

Given the FBI's documented frauds in the Vince Foster, OK City, and TWA 800 cases (not to mention the despicable history of COINTELPRO, including the Black Panther Coloring Book, the smearing of actress Jean Seberg, the spying on celebrities, etc. ), it should come as no surprise that the companies that make the tests used to detect TNT and RDX report that neither tobacco nor butane will false-positive the tests they manufacture. So again the US Government was lying to protect Israelis, the public was aware of this lie, and this set the stage for the current debacle.

No sooner had the FBI given the official "pooh pooh" to the arrested Israelis and explosives-tainted truck than a distraction appeared. In order to remind the public that it is Arabs they are supposed to suspect for 9-11 and nobody else, the White House, knowing that another simple declaration of Osama's guilt would gain no more traction, decided to create a "confession" of knowing in advance that the correct villain was behind 9-11 ahead of time, hoping that the public would find this "confession" more believable.

There certainly was cause to suspect government foreknowledge. Setting aside Odigo's warning, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown had received a warning not to fly on 9-11, and Ashcroft had changed from commercial to much more expensive charter planes in July 2001.

But Bush's attempt to steer public suspicion away from Israel and back onto the designated fall guys has backfired. The admission that there had been advance warning flies in the face of Ari Fleischer's statement that there had been no warning at all just after the attacks In addition, the claim that there was advance warning contradicts Bush's claim, repeated twice, to have initially thought the first plane hitting the tower was an accident caused by a bad pilot, a statement that in hindsight appears to have been a (poorly acted) attempt to sell the idea that 9-11 was a Pearl Harbor style surprise attack, even though it clearly was not.

The public, already aware it is being lied-to, is angry at the idea that government knew the 9-11 attacks were coming and like Roosevelt, may have allowed them to happen to further a pro-war agenda. Bush and his cronies, realizing they have hung themselves, are back peddling furiously, claiming now that while the warnings were sufficient to finger Osama bin Laden as the 9-11 villain, that the warnings were simply far too general in all other aspects to prevent the attacks.

Yet Ari Fleischer's briefing after the attack claimed to have detailed and specific information regarding the targets. Dick Morris, in a Fox TV Interview, revealed that Bush had detailed records of financial transactions by all Muslims groups in the US dating back to 1993, used to justify seizure of their funds. Again, someone is lying!

Even worse, in trying to use this "limited hangout" to shift suspicion away from Israel and back to Osama, Bush has, probably without realizing it, sent a message round the world that the United States is weak, and that even with advance warning the US Government was totally outclassed by a small group of terrorists.

Bush and company are struggling to reaffirm the official story, that the US was caught by surprise, just as it was at Pearl Harbor, and the same Air Force that was able to intercept Payne Stewert's plane just couldn't seem to get off the ground while four hijacked planes wandered out to Ohio before heading back to hit their targets on the East Coast, and all the work if a tiny group of Arab fanatics.

And if you believe that, I have a watch to sell you.

And if you want to read even more there's this excellent article,

http://sac911truth.com/stf.htm

[TonyGosling]

Good Video Summary of Israeli Role in 9-11
http://therebel.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64803 0
Category: Christopher Bollyn
http://www.bollyn.com/good-video-summary-of-israeli-role-in-9-11/
Created on 30 May 2013
Written by Christopher Bollyn

Jewish commentator reports that Jewish Neocons were behind Iraq War
Published on 9 May 2013
Sometimes the truth can even be heard on MSM TV! Commentary by Mark Dankof from "Mark Dankof's America" weekly podcast.
For the absolute best Podcast on the internet make sure to tune in to all the Ugly Truth podcasts - http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi-scJwrnMk

The following 14-minute video is an excellent summary of the evidence of Israeli involvement in 9-11. It touches on many of the key points that I explain in greater detail in the Solving 9-11 set of books. Although I am not mentioned in the video, I am the person who uncovered several of the links that it presents.

[TonyGosling]

TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2002 08:12 PM +0100
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.
CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
http://www.salon.com/2002/05/07/students/

The Israeli "art student" mystery
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 worlds 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 shed 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. KHOUs conclusions were wrong — these werent 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 Foxs “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 Camerons 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 Camerons 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 Camerons 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 wasnt 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 Mondes 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-* scenario, if one were to believe this was a conspiracy by a foreign intel source and/or a bunch of nutty ‘kids’ * 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 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.

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 lets 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 *, to use Paul Rodriguezs 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 werent 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?”

Thats where you enter truly dark territory: Theory No. 3, the Art Student as Agent as Art Student Smoke Screen. It has major problems, but lets 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 theres 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.”

Editor’s Note: This story has been corrected since its original publication.

[outsider]

'Zim Shipping: New Evidence suggests Six Months Foreknowledge of the September 11th Attack Date and Potential Involvement in the Israeli Deep Cover Operation':
https://alethonews.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/zim-shipping-new-evidence- suggests-six-months-foreknowledge-of-the-september-11th-attack-date-an d-potential-involvement-in-the-israeli-deep-cover-operation/

'Zim American-Israeli Shipping (“Zim”) was the predecessor company of the present Zim Integrated Shipping Services and was 49 percent owned by the Israeli government on 9/11. In 2004, the Israeli government sold their interest to the Israeli Ofer Brothers Group, which then became the sole owner of the company.[1] On 9/11, Zim’s headquarters was in Haifa, Israel, and it had worldwide regional offices in Hong Kong, Hamburg, Germany, and Manhattan, New York/Norfolk, Virginia.[2]

At the time of the 9/11 attacks Zim was one of two Israeli companies with lease contracts at the World Trade Center. The other Israeli tenant, Clear Forest, had a small office of 18 employees on the 47th floor of WTC 1 (the North Tower). According to the Jerusalem Post, Clear Forest had only four or five employees at the WTC on 9/11 and all escaped uninjured.[3] Although there were some variances in the WTC 1 tenant rosters between various media organizations, the majority showed that Zim occupied all of the 16th floor (WTC floor space approximated 50,000 square feet), 10,000 square feet of the 17th floor, and some space of the 29th floor of WTC 1.[4] Zim had about 250 employees at the WTC before its move-out, which would require somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 to 60,000 square feet of office space.[5]

Amazingly fortunate for Zim, the company moved out of the WTC around Sept. 4, 2001 and into a newly built office building in Norfolk, VA, even though they had a significant remaining lease obligation at the WTC.[6] In fact, Zim picked this lucky move-out date about six months before they actually moved. An April 3, 2001 article in the Virginian-Pilot stated that Zim “expects to open its new [Norfolk] building by Sept. 4 and will eventually employ 235 people.”[7] Coincidently, pilot hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan Shehhi were inexplicably in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area in February and April 2001 at the time Zim was apparently in the search and planning process for their Norfolk building.[8] Although Zim is reported to have had about 10 of its purported 20 remaining employees at the WTC on 9/11, none were killed or injured.[9] However, other media reports stated that Zim had 35 sales and marketing people and additional computer personnel remaining at the WTC on 9/11, indicating Zim had a small percentage of its remaining staff at the WTC on 9/11.[10]

Zim found the site in Norfolk, obtained all permits, drew up the architectural plans, and built its 2-story 45,000 square-foot steel frame/brick veneer office building in only six months, which is about as fast as humanly possible for a commercial office project.[11] It is so fast, that they even have a special name for it in real estate jargon; it’s called fast tracking, as a typical development period would be closer to one year.[12] [13] Fast track construction is utilized when a company needs to have their building completed in a short time as standard design and construction procedures are compressed to meet that goal. The added development challenges and construction risks of fast tracking were summed up by Zim’s real estate company when they stated in April 2001, “Since accepting Zim’s fast track project last month, Hunter has been involved in assisting with site location, selecting the development team of architects and general contractor, and developing strategic relocation plans for Zim’s employees… It is a terrific assignment that presents many challenges, not the least of which is to ensure that the site is completed by move-in by September 2001.”[14]

Zim’s remaining lease term had long been a point of debate, with 9/11 conspiracy debunkers claiming there was no evidence that Zim’s WTC lease term extended beyond their move-out date. However, a FOIA request to the Port Authority of New York-New Jersey by LetsRollForums.com resulted in a copy of the WTC tenant roster with lease expiration dates.[15] The Port Authority document showed that Zim entered into a 10-year lease contract starting on March 1, 1996 and expiring on Feb. 28, 2006, or about four and a half years after Zim’s September 2001 move-out date.[16] Confirmation that Zim’s remaining lease extended beyond their move-out date was further established by a Crain’s New York Business article on April 9, 2001 that stated, “Rising rent wasn’t an immediate concern [for Zim’s relocation decision] — several years remain on the lease.”[17]

Assuming Zim leased around 60,000 square feet at $30/square-foot at the WTC, its four and a half year remaining lease obligation would have been about $8 million.[18] Strangely, Zim did not seem concerned about high leasing costs when it entered into a relatively long 10-year lease in March 1996, and there is also no evidence that Zim tried to sublease its space in the six months they were planning and building their new office building in Norfolk. This is not the expected action of a company that stated their reason to vacate the WTC was to cut costs. Fortunately for Zim any worry about their $8 million lease liability disappeared when the WTC came crashing down on 9/11.

The burning question is why did Zim have to chance the added risks and challenges of fast tracking the development of their Norfolk office to guarantee its completion by Sept. 4, 2001 when it still had perfectly fine office space at the WTC with an existing four and a half year $8 million lease obligation? Zim’s public excuse that they moved to cut costs does not explain why it was mandatory that the Norfolk office be completed by Sept. 4, 2001. The fast track development process cost Zim more money and added unnecessary development risks. What difference would six months have made (i.e., fast track vs conventional development time period) when they still had occupancy rights with a significant lease obligation at the WTC? Apparently, Zim knew they had to be out of the WTC before September 11th, and that is why they did everything in their power to ensure they would be out of the WTC and in their new Norfolk office by Sept. 4th.

CIA Israeli Intelligence Assessment Regarding Zim Shipping and Mossad

A 1979 CIA Assessment of Israeli Intelligence shows that the CIA has long suspected that Zim has been used for Israeli intelligence support and cover.[19] [20] The CIA Israeli Assessment had this to say about Zim:

Other Israeli government organizations that provide support to the [Israeli] intelligence and security community are the Ministries of Finance and tourism, El Al, and the national shipping line, Zim. Unofficial Zionist organizations based in Israel and Jewish communities throughout the world also give aid to Israel operations when needed… Official organizations used for [Israeli intelligence] cover are Israeli Purchasing Missions and Israeli Government Tourist, El Al, and Zim offices, Israeli construction firms, industrial groups and international trade organizations also provide non-official cover. Individuals working under deep or illegal cover are normally charged with penetrating objectives that require a long-range, more subtle approach, or with activities in which the Israeli Government can never admit complicity.[21]

The CIA Israeli Assessment provides additional insight into Israel’s intelligence apparatus, including its methods and processes. In an interview with Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv in the early 80’s, former Mossad chief Isser Harel called the assertions of the document “malicious, dilettantish, distortions… but probably authentic,” and stated that the publication of the document had been a nightmare for him.[22] The CIA document basically shows that Israel has the means and experience to carry out false flag attacks by recruiting Arabs as deep cover operatives in covert operations, something they could also have done in the 9/11 operation. Deep cover operatives are often planted years in advance of the execution of an operation and can take on identities and backgrounds to fit the operation. Among many other important findings, following are some Israeli intelligence processes and methods that could have been pertinent to the 9/11 operation (references to sections of the CIA Israeli Assessment are given in parentheses):

The Israeli intelligence and security community is completely loyal and if the government requested the execution of a certain task, legal and illegal, it would be accomplished. (Section A3.b)
Mossad is also charged with inciting disturbances calculated to create mutual distrust among the Arabs and to draw Western sympathy away from the Arab cause. (Section B1)
The fact that Lebanon has a mix of Christians, Druze, and Muslim population has made that country attractive for intelligence projects and Israel has covert assets and has run operations in Lebanon. (Section B1)
Much of the activity against the Arabs in the Near East is based on “deep cover operations” by Israeli illegals or the recruitment of Arabs in third-countries followed by their dispatch or normal rotation back home to Arab areas. (Section B2)
Elishu (Eli) Cohen, an Egyptian-born Jew, was involved in Israeli sabotage operations (false flag attacks) against American and British installations in Egypt in 1952. (Section B2) Cohen’s sabotage operation became known as the Lavon Affair, a confirmed Israeli false flag operation against the US.[23]
The CIA Israeli Assessment provides two examples of Israeli “deep cover” operations, where Israeli operatives were put in place years in advance to establish other identities and backgrounds (i.e., “legends”). One operation required Eli Cohen to take the identity of a Syrian Arab while the other operation required an Israeli Johann Lotz to move to Germany for a couple of years to establish an identity of a German African Corps officer.[24] (Section B2) (Similarly, three of the pilot hijackers spent several years in Hamburg, Germany where they allegedly became radicalized Islamists.[25])
Mossad activities are generally conducted through Israeli official and semiofficial establishments, deep cover enterprises in the form of firms and organizations, some especially created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective, and penetrations effected within non-Zionist national and international Jewish organizations. (Section B4)
Many Israelis have come from Arab countries where they were born and educated and appear more Arab than Israeli in speech, demeanor, and attitude. By forging passports and identity documents of Arab and western countries and providing sound background legends and cover, Mossad has successfully sent into Egypt and other Arab countries Israelis disguised and documented as Arabs or citizens of European countries. (Section B4)
The Israelis have used false-flag recruitment pitches extensively and successfully. In several cases they approached citizens of Western European nations under the cover of a national NATO intelligence organization for operations in Arab target countries. (Section B4)
Shin Beth has picked up local Arab espionage agents on their way back to neighboring countries and doubled them (turned them into Israeli spies) in coordination with Military Intelligence. (Section C4)
Israel’s long history of false flag terror operations intended to blame Arabs is extensive and beyond the scope of this article; however, there are several confirmed and dozens of suspected operations since Israel’s creation in 1948.[26] Israel’s skillful use of deep cover Arab operatives and other covert tactics listed above sometimes makes it difficult to link Israel directly to the false flag events. A case in point is where the CIA notes above that Israeli intelligence operatives working for Zim are “normally charged with objectives that require a long range approach where the Israeli Government can never admit complicity.” This covert activities concept is often referred to as “plausible deniability” and is used to remove any direct connection to the covert operation. Even though Israel’s fingerprints have been all over many false flag attacks in the past, the smoking gun has been eliminated by design. Thus, one has to look at all other evidence in likely false flag operations to assess involvement and guilt.

Pilot Hijackers Exhibit Modus Operandi of “Non-al-Qaeda” Deep Cover Operatives

There are many anomalies and contradictions in the backgrounds, timelines, and activities of the 9/11 pilot hijackers which indicate they could have been deep cover operatives in a broader 9/11 conspiracy. A good analysis of the many hijacker contradictions between the 9/11 Commission findings (or omitted facts), the FBI’s Hijacker Timeline, and various media reports can be found at Historycommons.org.[27] A prime example of one of the many contradictions is that at least two hijackers ended up on alleged Zionist Jack Abramoff’s connected Suncruz gambling boat on Sept. 5, 2001 when the FBI Hijacker Timeline showed the hijackers elsewhere.[28] The 9/11 Commission also ignored this evidence and much more in their report.

The hijackers also did their best to leave behind an obvious trail of evidence that was easily found and quickly gave the FBI the support to tie them to the 9/11 operation stymieing any substantive investigation of the many anomalies and contradicting evidence.[29] [30] Not to mention the obvious plants of evidence like hijacker passports in the WTC and other wreckage.[31] Lastly, military operation Able Danger identified several al-Qaeda connections inside the US as early as December 1999, including Atta and other alleged 9/11 hijackers; however, the operation was shut down by senior military officials and lawyers who also prevented the unit from sharing the valuable information with the FBI for reasons that were wrong and inaccurate.[32]

Although the facts and evidence around the many hijacker anomalies and falsehoods are very detailed and complex and beyond the scope of this paper, following is a brief summary of some of the evidence suggesting the pilot hijackers were not what the US government said they were, and indicating that they may have been deep cover operatives (the Endnotes include references and links to sources with more detail).

Mohammed Atta — Journalist and author Daniel Hopsicker did very good investigative work around Atta when he interviewed various individuals who came across Atta; and found that Atta’s real life persona was nothing like the portrait painted by the FBI and the 9/11 Commission. In his book, “Welcome to Terrorland,” Hopsicker found among other things that Atta drank alcohol and ate pork (against Muslim beliefs), did drugs and partied heavily, slept with strippers, and spoke Hebrew.[33] [34] This is not the behavior of a devout Muslim who is planning to kill himself and then hopes to go to heaven and be greeted by 99 virgins. If Atta was not the Muslim extremist who believed deeply in his faith, as the US government made him out to be, then who was he? Atta came from an upper middle class Egyptian family and was fluent in 5 different languages, including English, despite supposedly never having spent any time in an English-speaking country before 9/11.[35]

Ziad Jarrah — Jarrah came from an affluent Lebanese family and by all accounts was a non-political non-devout Muslim brought up in private Catholic schools. Ziad’s two Lebanese cousins, Ali and Yusef Jarrah, were confessed and convicted spies for Israel. Although the February 2009 New York Times stated, “the men [Ziad and Ali Jarrah] were 20 years apart in age [actually 16] and do not appear to have known each other well,” it is apparently a subjective statement that is not based on any specified fact.[36] On the contrary, an October 23, 2001, article in the Los Angeles Times indicates that the cousins came from a “close-knit family” and that Ziad spent lots of time at the cousins’ house in Marj, as Ali’s apparently younger brother, Salim Jarrah, was Ziad’s age.[37] Marj is a small town in the agricultural Bekka Valley area of Lebanon where Ali had been a spy for Israel since around 1983. As it appears that Ali helped recruit his brother Yusef as a spy for Israel, it is likely that he could have done the same for his cousin Ziad.

The contradictions and discrepancies with the official story concerning Jarrah are revealing and significant. An excellent and well referenced article by Paul Thompson in Sept. 2002, entitled “The Two Ziad Jarrah’s” shows that there were two similar Ziad Jarrah’s in different places at the same time on several occasions and that Ziad’s real life persona was also nothing like the one portrayed by the 9/11 Commission.[38] Thompson also shows many timeline discrepancies in Jarrah’s alleged travels and activities, and that a slew of people who knew him best said he never exhibited devout Muslim tendencies nor did he ever express extremist ideology. Ironically, the 9/11 Commission’s sole support for Jarrah’s radicalization comes from a July 2002 classified German intelligence report.[39] The only noted source in the 9/11 Commission report on Jarrah’s Islamic radicalization comes from his girlfriend, Aisel Senguen, whose earlier statements in the press (as pointed out by Thompson) contradict statements attributed to her by the Commission.

Marwan Shehhi — Shehhi was Atta’s right hand man and shadowed him in the US for the 15 months before 9/11. He was also in the military of the United Arab Emirates (a US ally) while attending school in Hamburg from 1996 to 1999. Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi allegedly went to Osama Bin Laden’s training camp in Afghanistan in December 1999 and met OBL for the first time. According to the 9/11 Commission, the speed with which OBL chose the three for the 9/11 operation was remarkable.[40] Why did OBL so quickly choose three unknowns he had just met for the biggest and most complex terrorist operation in history, or could the three potential deep cover operatives actually have proposed the 9/11 plans to him?[41] Was this “choice” actually a fictitious part of the official story of 9/11 intended to portray OBL as the culprit?

Hani Hanjour — Saudi pilot hijacker Hani Hanjour arrived for a second time in the US in April 1996, the exact month and year that Jarrah and Shehhi went to Hamburg, suggesting the deep cover operation may have begun as early as then.[42] Although Hanjour was the most experienced of all the pilot hijackers, he was not allowed to rent a single-engine Cessna airplane several weeks before 9/11 because the instructors, after taking three test flights with him, judged his flying skills too poor. However, the plane Hanjour allegedly flew on 9/11 (Flight AA 77 targeting the Pentagon) executed a very difficult turn and descent that reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver, with one air traffic controller commenting, “The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane.”[43] Hanjour’s sophisticated flying maneuver on 9/11 is contradicted by all the other information corroborating his poor flying skills.

Zim and Other Israeli Groups Potential Involvement in the 9/11 Deep Cover Operation

The fact that Zim probably had at least six months foreknowledge of the specific attack date would suggest they probably had foreknowledge of the entire 9/11 operation. Indeed, even the alleged 9/11 hijackers did not start making their 9/11 flight reservations until Aug. 25, 2001.[44] However, Zim’s 9/11 connections do not end with their timely move-out of the WTC or with their known support and cover for Israeli intelligence (with its history and means of false flag attacks against the US). Zim also happened to be a tenant in a building that was most likely taken down by controlled demolition and there is evidence linking explosives to other Israeli groups in the NY/NJ area.[45] Coincidently, the owner of all three WTC towers that came down crashing down in controlled demolition style on 9/11, Larry Silverstein, was friends with three ex-Israeli Prime ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu, to whom he was speaking weekly with at the time.[46]

An in-depth investigative report In December 2013 by this author on the “Celebrating/Dancing Israelis” shows that the FBI detected explosives in the Israelis’ van when they were apprehended on 9/11.[47] Although the FBI analyzed explosive samples taken from the Celebrating Israelis’ (CIs) vehicle, the lab results were never revealed in the FBI investigative documents, and were curiously still pending about two weeks after they were taken.[48] There is no rational or explainable reason for the FBI not to have completed the explosive tests in this time frame and the most logical reason for the FBI not showing the results is because the van tested positive for explosives.

The CIs happened to work for an Israeli-related moving company in the NJ/NY area, Urban Moving Systems (“UMS”), which was also apparently searched for explosives two days after 9/11.[49] (There were also at least three other Israeli-related moving companies in the immediate area with one under investigation by the FBI in conjunction with moving one of the hijackers.[50]) Coincidently, CI Yaron Shmuel worked for an Israeli explosives company after 9/11, which suggests he may have had a background in explosives.[51] In addition, five of fourteen Israeli Art students, or 37 percent, who provided their Israeli military backgrounds to US investigators worked in explosive ordnance units.[52] Thus, Israel had the expertise and human resources in the US to wire the WTC’s for demolition and the moving companies to help transport the explosives and devices.

It just so happens that at least two of the CIs were Mossad operatives and were involved in other US counterintelligence investigations according to various media sources.[53] The New York Times noted that the FBI even initially suspected the CIs of assisting the hijackers.[54] Several news agencies also reported that UMS was an Israeli intelligence front company.[55] The owner of UMS, Dominik Suter, fled back to Israel on Sept. 14, 2001 after being questioned by the FBI two days earlier.[56] In May 2002 the names of Suter and his wife appeared on an FBI 9/11 Watch List Report, which included among others, OBL, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”), all 19 hijackers (why if dead?), and 15 Arab individuals from Hamburg.[57] Out of over 300 names, those of Suter and his wife are two of just a few that are not Arab names.[58] This author’s investigative report showed that there was an obvious FBI cover-up in the investigation and that the CIs had foreknowledge of the attacks and that the CIs and other Israelis were probably more deeply involved in the 9/11 operation.[59]

Given the CIs and UMSs various connections to Israeli intelligence and explosives, and Zim’s known support and cover for Israeli intelligence, there is the possibility that the explosives used to take down the three WTC towers were manufactured in Israel and imported to the US on Zim ships. Coincidently, Zim’s main NY/NJ shipping port on 9/11 was Red Hook Port (“RHP”) in Brooklyn, which is a mere 3-mile drive to the WTC and by far the closest and most conveniently accessible to the WTC of the four NY/NJ area ports.[60] However, RHP is also the smallest (less than 4% of total NY/NJ port volume) and most logistically inferior of all the ports with no rail or air service and poor highway access. A December 1996 New York Times article noted that RHP excels in “specialized cargoes” and products that can be uploaded quickly and delivered to the immediate New York City area at night.[61] Although Zim received New York City tax credits in conjunction with the move to RHP, no other large international shippers like Zim appear to have chosen the small and inefficient RHP as their primary NY/NJ port. Zim is not at RHP now, and they may have moved out as early as November 2002.[62]

There are also several other potential Israeli connections to the Red Hook Port. At least one, and as many as four of the Celebrating Israelis, lived about one and a half miles from RHP.[62] In addition, another large Israeli related moving company (Moishes Moving) had an office/warehouse within a couple miles of RHP and two rental trucks found at UMS shortly after 9/11, were from a rental company located about two miles from RHP.[63] Zim first entered into its RHP contract in November 1996, and there is a confluence of alleged pilot hijackers and Israeli-connected events around that time which suggests the possible initiation of the 9/11 deep cover operation:

March 1996 — Zim Shipping extends its lease at the WTC to February 28, 2006, locking itself into a long 10-year lease obligation with no apparent concern for high leasing costs (see above).
April 1996 — Alleged pilot hijacker Ziad Jarrah arrives in Greifswald, Germany, and Marwan Shehhi moves to Hamburg (Jarrah moves to Hamburg around September 1997).[64]
April 1996 — Alleged pilot hijacker Hani Hanjour moves to the US for seven months. Hanjour will have several stays in US and allegedly come back for the last time in Dec. 2000.[65]
November 1996 — Zim Shipping transfers its NY/NJ port operations from the area’s most modern and busiest port of Port Elizabeth to the much smaller and logistically inferior Red Hook Port.[66]
April 1997 — The likely Israeli intelligence front company Urban Moving Systems is incorporated.[67]
A second confluence of events between the hijackers and various Israeli groups takes place in late 1999/early 2000, perhaps indicating a subsequent phase of the deep cover operation:

December 1999/January 2000 — Hamburg pilot hijackers Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi allegedly attend OBL’s training camp in Afghanistan and allegedly are quickly chosen by OBL for the 9/11 operation (though the hijackers Afghanistan travel is not substantiated by the redacted FBI Hijacker Timeline).[68] [69]
November 1999 — Zim renews its Red Hook Port contract with the City of New York, probably for the same three-year period as in the original contract.[70]
December 1999 — Zim claims that they started looking for a new office location; although there is no other evidence to support this claim.[71]
Around October 1999 — Urban Moving Systems moves from a personal residence into its Weehawken office.[72]
Beginning of 2000 — Israeli Art Student activity begins in the US.[73]
Beginning 2000 — Hijackers Khalid Mihdhar and Nawaf Hazmi enter the US and move to San Diego.[74]
At least two of the CIs apprehended on 9/11 were under investigation in relation to other US counterintelligence investigations including one in San Diego.[75]
Other Important Geographic Nexus’ Between Pilot Hijackers and Zim

It has been well documented that certain Israeli groups had very close geographic and timeline connections to the three Southeast Florida 9/11 hijacker cells and the one in Paterson, New Jersey. The largest concentration of Israeli Art Students just happened to be located in Southeast Florida where the largest concentration of 9/11 hijacker cells were located.[76] The Paterson hijacker cell was in very close proximity to the CIs, UMS, and at least three other Israeli-related moving companies in that immediate area.[77] Zim’s WTC location was 25 miles from the Paterson cell’s apartment and Zim also has an office in Miami about 25 miles south of the hijackers’ main area of Hollywood, Florida. Coincidently, the pilot hijackers spent time in 8 of the 11 US cities where Zim had offices on 9/11, also including Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia, Jacksonville, Florida, Chicago, and Los Angles.[78] There is no obvious explanation for Jarrah’s two trips to Jacksonville and Atta and Shehhi’s stay in Brunswick, Georgia just happened to be approximately 75 miles between Savannah and Jacksonville.

Another critical area of activity for the alleged 9/11 hijackers was Hamburg, Germany. Hamburg was home to three of the pilot hijackers who had been living there since at least 1996 and where the 9/11 plans allegedly started to take form around early 2000.[79] Coincidently, one of Zim’s four worldwide offices is in Hamburg, giving them a significant presence in two of the three areas most crucial to the alleged hijackers and the 9/11 operation (New York and Hamburg).[80] In addition, 8 of 17 (44 percent) Israeli Art Students with known embarkation cities came to the US from Frankfurt, Germany in late March 2001.[81] Also, CI Yaron Shmuel just happened to hold a German passport.[82] Unfortunately, it is not known if, when, and where, Yaron Shmuel lived in Germany and if he had any potential connections to the Hamburg cell. In its investigation of the CIs, the FBI did not check with German intelligence to determine if Shmuel lived in Germany and if he may have had any association with the alleged Hamburg cell.[83]

Zim also had another of its four German offices in the river port city of Dusseldorf, a city which pilot hijacker Ziad Jarrah visited at least six times from October 2000 to August 2001.[84] The story is that Jarrah had a German-born girlfriend of Turkish descent in the Dusseldorf area (Bochum), and that is why, in the midst of the allegedly most sophisticated terrorist operation of all time (that would lead to his death); he visited her regularly in the year before 9/11. Jarrah’s Dusseldorf girlfriend may have been a cover story similar to that of Israeli operative Johann Lotz, who married a German woman (while still being married to an Israeli woman) in order to establish his deep cover identity/legend while part of an Israeli intelligence operation.[85]

Between three of his trips to Dusseldorf Jarrah also visited Lebanon, a country bordering Israel and the home of his family, including his two cousins who were spies for Israel at the time. Jarrah’s travels during this time period also included stopovers in cities where Zim had other offices, including Hamburg, Munich, Athens, Newark/New York, Atlanta, Jacksonville, and Miami. Lastly, Jarrah inexplicably visited the city of Thessaloniki, Greece (May 16 to 22, 2000), a month before coming to the US, another city where Zim has an office.[86] Dusseldorf and other cities may have been “debriefing” locations for Jarrah. Ziad’s Israeli spy cousin, Ali Jarrah, was debriefed by his Israeli handlers in Belgium, Italy and Israel, and also obtained travel documents to Israel from Greece, Turkey, and Jordan.[87] Zim has offices in Belgium, Italy, and Greece, and Ziad Jarrah travelled to Greece and Jordan, and had a stop-over in Istanbul on Dec. 26, 2000 before continuing on to Lebanon the next day (per FBI Hijacker Timeline).

A final confluence of hijacker and Israeli group activities kicks off at the end of 2000 and continues through to the 9/11 attacks:

November/December 2000 — The number of Israeli Art Student incidents increase at this time and continue through at least June 2001.[88]
December 2000 — Hamburg pilot hijackers Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi spend their supposed first time in the Southeast Florida area which is the area of the largest concentration of Israeli Art Students.[89]
December 2000 — Pilot Hijacker Hani Hanjour re-enters the US for the last time.[90]
March 2001 — Zim enters into a fast track development contract to guarantee completion of its Norfolk office building by Sept. 4, 2001 (see above). Zim probably started its due diligence and negotiations of the development project a couple of months before.
March 2001 — At least eight Israeli Art Students enter the US in Dallas from Frankfurt, Germany (see Endnote 81).
April to June 2001 — The thirteen “muscle hijackers” (aka patsies) enter the US, primarily from Jeddah Saudi Arabia, a renowned CIA consulate/outpost.[91] [92]
April 2001- Alleged hijacker cells headed by Atta, Jarrah and Shehhi begin to be set up in the Southeast Florida area.[93]
May 2001 — An alleged hijacker cell headed by pilot hijacker Hanjour is set up in Paterson, New Jersey.[94] Alleged hijackers Khalid Mihdhar and Nawaf Hazmi are also members of this cell.
May to July 2001 — Four of the five CIs start working at UMS and appear to enter US around this time.[95] At least one, and possibly two CIs, had round trip air tickets coming from Israel to Newark on June 15, 2001 and returning Sept. 12, 2001, suggesting at least three months foreknowledge of the specific attack date. The other four CIs also had air tickets leaving the US immediately after Sept. 11th, suggesting not just foreknowledge, but probable involvement in the 9/11 operation.[96]
May to 9/11 (approximately) — Employment at Urban Moving Systems increases.[97]
July 2001 — Saudi hijacker Khalid Mihdhar re-enters the US for the last time.[98]
July/August 2001 — UMS inexplicably rents a second warehouse in Bayonne, New Jersey, next to Port Jersey, which is several miles south of the WTC and the second closest NY/NJ port to it.[99]
July 2001 — Alleged Zionist and Israeli-connected Larry Silverstein closes on the acquisition of WTC Towers 1 and 2.[100]
Zim America’s president, Shaul Cohen-Mintz, was quoted in the Journal of Commerce on October 18, 2001: “Naturally, no one is debating any more whether we had to move or not… Some people said it [the move] was like an angel sitting on our shoulders.”[101] Unfortunately, Zim’s move had a lot less to do with an angel and divine intervention than with giving the devil his due, with the devil wearing the Star of David while waving the Zim Shipping flag. And the debate now is not whether Zim had to move — they knew they had to — but how much foreknowledge Zim had and how deeply they may have been involved in the 9/11 operation.

The evidence presented in this article shows that Zim most likely had six months or more foreknowledge of the 9/11 attack date and was probably more deeply involved in what was almost certainly a false flag operation. The evidence further suggests that at least two pilot hijackers (Atta and Jarrah), and possibly all four, were probably deep cover operatives, put in place as many as five years in advance to establish identities and backgrounds (legends) of Islamic extremists. The evidence in this article has also touched on the many anomalies and contradictions involving the official story around the 9/11 hijackers and the alleged plans of the 9/11 operation between the key parties of OBL, KSM, and the pilot hijackers. Indeed, an overwhelming amount of the US’s evidence on the 9/11 plans relies on testimony garnered from torture and that is probably why KSM, Ramzi Binahshibh, and others still await trial more than 10 years after being apprehended.

Given Israel’s known history and practice of utilizing Arabs in deep cover intelligence operations, coupled with the atrocious and poorly transparent US investigations of the 9/11 attacks, it’s naïve and even ignorant to disregard the likelihood that some or all of the 9/11 pilot hijackers were used in a deep cover covert capacity by Israel. Israeli undercover intelligence officials working for Zim, UMS, and other Israeli groups in the US on 9/11 could well have been handlers for the hijackers or protected them from arrest, or even assisted them in the operation as once suggested in the New York Times on Sept. 13, 2001. The evidence presented in this article clearly points in this direction.'

Although this article was published in 2014, I had never seen it. There is a lot of info in there I had no idea of, and I suspect many more 9/11 Truthers have not seen it.