Israeli art students - part 1

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.

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By Christopher Ketcham



May 7, 2002 | In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from
DEA field offices across the country. According to the reports, young
Israelis claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale had
been attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a year. The Israelis
had also attempted to penetrate the offices of other law enforcement
and Department of Defense agencies. Strangest of all, the "students"
had visited the homes of numerous DEA officers and other senior federal
officials.

As a pattern slowly emerged, the DEA appeared to have been targeted in
what it called an "organized intelligence gathering activity." But to
what end, and for whom, no one knew.


Reports of the mysterious Israelis with an inexplicable interest in
peddling art to G-men came in from more than 40 U.S. cities and
continued throughout the first six months of 2001. Agents of the DEA,
ATF, Air Force, Secret Service, FBI, and U.S. Marshals Service
documented some 130 separate incidents of "art student" encounters.
Some of the Israelis were observed diagramming the inside of federal
buildings. Some were found carrying photographs they had taken of
federal agents. One was discovered with a computer printout in his
luggage that referred to "DEA groups."

In some cases, the Israelis visited locations not known to the public
-- areas without street addresses, for example, or DEA offices not
identified as such -- leading authorities to suspect that information
had been gathered from prior surveillance or perhaps electronically,
from credit cards and other sources. One Israeli was discovered holding
banking receipts for substantial sums of money, close to $180,000 in
withdrawals and deposits over a two-month period. A number of the
Israelis resided for a period of time in Hollywood, Fla. -- the small
city where Mohammed Atta and three terrorist comrades lived for a time
before Sept. 11.


In March 2001, the Office of the National Counterintelligence
Executive (NCIX), a branch of the CIA, issued a heads-up to federal
employees about "suspicious visitors to federal facilities." The
warning noted that "employees have observed both males and females
attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings."
Federal agents, the warning stated, had "arrested two of these
individuals for trespassing and discovered that the suspects possessed
counterfeit work visas and green cards."

In the wake of the NCIX bulletin, federal officials raised several
other red flags, including an Air Force alert, a Federal Protective
Services alert, an Office of National Drug Control Policy security
alert and a request that the Immigration and Naturalization Service
(INS) investigate a specific case. Officials began dealing more
aggressively with the "art students." According to one account, some
140 Israeli nationals were detained or arrested between March 2001 and
Sept. 11, 2001. Many of them were deported. According to the INS, the
deportations resulted from violations of student visas that forbade the
Israelis from working in the United States. (In fact, Salon has
established that none of the Israelis were enrolled in the art school
most of them claimed to be attending; the other college they claimed to
be enrolled in does not exist.) After the Sept. 11 attacks, many more
young Israelis -- 60, according to one AP dispatch and other reports --
were detained and deported.

The "art students" followed a predictable modus operandi. They
generally worked in teams, typically consisting of a driver, who was
the team leader, and three or four subordinates. The driver would drop
the "salespeople" off at a given location and return to pick them up
some hours later. The "salespeople" entered offices or approached
agents in their offices or homes. Sometimes they pitched their artwork
-- landscapes, abstract works, homemade pins and other items they
carried about in portfolios. At other times, they simply attempted to
engage agents in conversation. If asked about their studies, they
generally said they were from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in
Jerusalem or the University of Jerusalem (which does not exist). They
were described as "aggressive" in their sales pitch and "evasive" when
questioned by wary agents. The females among them were invariably
described as "very attractive" -- "blondes in tight shorts or jeans,
real lookers," as one DEA agent put it to Salon. "They were flirty,
flipping the hair, looking at you, smiling. 'Hey, how are you? Let me
show you this.' Everything a woman would do if she wanted to get
something out of you." Some agents noted that the "students" made
repeated attempts to avoid facility security personnel by trying to
enter federal buildings through back doors and side entrances. On
several occasions, suspicious agents who had been visited at home
observed the Israelis after the "students" departed and noted that they
did not approach any of the neighbors.

The document detailing most of this information was an internal DEA
memo: a 60-page report drawn up in June 2001 by the DEA's Office of
Security Programs. The document was meant only for the eyes of senior
officials at the Justice Department (of which the DEA is adjunct), but
it was leaked to the press as early as December 2001 and by mid-March
had been made widely available to the public.

On the face of it, this was a blockbuster tale, albeit a bizarre and
cryptic one, full of indeterminate leads and fascinating implications
and ambiguous answers: "Like a good Clancy novel," as one observer put
it. Was it espionage? Drug dealing? An intelligence game? The world's
wackiest door-to-door hustle? Yet the mainstream media has almost
entirely ignored the allegations or accepted official "explanations"
that explain nothing. Even before the DEA memo was leaked, however,
some reporters had begun sniffing around the remarkable story.

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