Re: Israeli art students - part 1

Part 3

"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' fucking around just to see how far they could
push the envelope -- which they seem to have pushed pretty damn far,
given the page after page after page of intrusions and snooping
alleged."

The Israeli embassy denies the charges of a spy ring. "We are saying
what we've been saying for months," spokesman Mark Reguev told Salon,
referring to the Fox series in December. "No American official or
intelligence agency has complained to us about this. The story is
nonsense. Israel does not spy on the United States."

Whether or not the "art students" are Israeli spies, Reguev's blanket
disavowal is untrue: Israel does spy on the United States. This should
come as no surprise: Allies frequently spy on each other, and Israeli
intelligence is renowned as among the best and most aggressive in the
world. Israel has been at war off and on since its birth as a nation in
1948 and is hungry for information it deems essential to its survival.
And America's relationship to Israel and support for it is essential to
the survival of the Jewish state. Add these things up, and espionage
against the United States becomes understandable, if not justifiable.

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