Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed
into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ...

http://ww1.sundayherald.com/37707

Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed
the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a
devastating terrorist attack on the USA? Neil Mackay
investigates

THERE was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the
Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were
dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and
crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst
atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played
out before their eyes.

Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis?
Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts.
They were Israelis – and at least two of them were
Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the
equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.

Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of
indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just
what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises
one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence
had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they
moved from the Middle East through Europe and into
America where they trained as pilots and prepared to
suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States.
And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual
suffering to the Israeli cause.

After the attacks on New York and Washington, the
former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was
asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for
US-Israeli relations. He said: “It’s very good.” Then
he corrected himself, adding: “Well, it’s not good,
but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel
from Americans].”

If Israel’s closest ally felt the collective pain of
mass civilian deaths at the hands of terrorists, then
Israel would have an unbreakable bond with the world’s
only hyperpower and an effective free hand in dealing
with the Palestinian terrorists who had been murdering
its innocent civilians as the second intifada dragged
on throughout 2001.

It’s not surprising that the New Jersey housewife who
first spotted the five Israelis and their white van
wants to preserve her anonymity. She’s insisted that
she only be identified as Maria. A neighbour in her
apartment building had called her just after the first
strike on the Twin Towers. Maria grabbed a pair of
binoculars and, like millions across the world, she
watched the horror of the day unfold.

As she gazed at the burning towers, she noticed a
group of men kneeling on the roof of a white van in
her parking lot. Here’s her recollection: “They seemed
to be taking a movie. They were like happy, you know
... they didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was
strange.”

Maria jotted down the van’s registration and called
the police. The FBI was alerted and soon there was a
statewide all points bulletin put out for the
apprehension of the van and its occupants. The cops
traced the number, establishing that it belonged to a
company called Urban Moving.

Police Chief John Schmidig said: “We got an alert to
be on the lookout for a white Chevrolet van with New
Jersey registration and writing on the side. Three
individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State
Park after the impact. They said three people were
jumping up and down.”

By 4pm on the afternoon of September 11, the van was
spotted near New Jersey’s Giants stadium. A squad car
pulled it over and inside were five men in their 20s.
They were hustled out of the car with guns levelled at
their heads and handcuffed.

In the car was $4700 in cash, a couple of foreign
passports and a pair of box cutters – the concealed
Stanley Knife-type blades used by the 19 hijackers
who’d flown jetliners into the World Trade Centre and
Pentagon just hours before. There were also fresh
pictures of the men standing with the smouldering
wreckage of the Twin Towers in the background. One
image showed a hand flicking a lighter in front of the
devastated buildings, like a fan at a pop concert. The
driver of the van then told the arresting officers:
“We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your
problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the
problem.”

His name was Sivan Kurzberg. The other four passengers
were Kurzberg’s brother Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded
Ellner and Omer Marmari. The men were dragged off to
prison and transferred out of the custody of the FBI’s
Criminal Division and into the hands of their Foreign
Counterintelligence Section – the bureau’s
anti-espionage squad.

A warrant was issued for a search of the Urban Moving
premises in Weehawken in New Jersey. Boxes of papers
and computers were removed. The FBI questioned the
firm’s Israeli owner, Dominik Otto Suter, but when
agents returned to re-interview him a few days later,
he was gone. An employee of Urban Moving said his
co-workers had laughed about the Manhattan attacks the
day they happened. “I was in tears,” the man said.
“These guys were joking and that bothered me. These
guys were like, ‘Now America knows what we go
through.’”

Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations for
counter-terrorism with the CIA, says the red flag went
up among investigators when it was discovered that
some of the Israelis’ names were found in a search of
the national intelligence database. Cannistraro says
many in the US intelligence community believed that
some of the Israelis were working for Mossad and there
was speculation over whether Urban Moving had been
“set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an
intelligence operation against radical Islamists”.

This makes it clear that there was no suggestion
whatsoever from within American intelligence that the
Israelis were colluding with the 9/11 hijackers –
simply that the possibility remains that they knew the
attacks were going to happen, but effectively did
nothing to help stop them.

After the owner vanished, the offices of Urban Moving
looked as if they’d been closed down in a big hurry.
Mobile phones were littered about, the office phones
were still connected and the property of at least a
dozen clients were stacked up in the warehouse. The
owner had cleared out his family home in New Jersey
and returned to Israel.

Two weeks after their arrest, the Israelis were still
in detention, held on immigration charges. Then a
judge ruled that they should be deported. But the CIA
scuppered the deal and the five remained in custody
for another two months. Some went into solitary
confinement, all underwent two polygraph tests and at
least one underwent up to seven lie detector sessions
before they were eventually deported at the end of
November 2001. Paul Kurzberg refused to take a lie
detector test for 10 weeks, but then failed it. His
lawyer said he was reluctant to take the test as he
had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another
country.

Nevertheless, their lawyer, Ram Horvitz, dismissed the
allegations as “stupid and ridiculous”. Yet US
government sources still maintained that the Israelis
were collecting information on the fundraising
activities of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Mark Regev, of the Israeli embassy in Washington,
would have none of that and he said the allegations
were “simply false”. The men themselves claimed they’d
read about the World Trade Centre attacks on the
internet, couldn’t see it from their office and went
to the parking lot for a better view. Their lawyers
and the embassy say their ghoulish and sinister
celebrations as the Twin Towers blazed and thousands
died were due to youthful foolishness.

The respected New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward,
reported in March 2002, however, that it had received
a briefing on the case of the five Israelis from a US
official who was regularly updated by law enforcement
agencies. This is what he told The Forward: “The
assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front
for the Mossad and operatives employed by it.” He
added that “the conclusion of the FBI was that they
were spying on local Arabs”, but the men were released
because they “did not know anything about 9/11”.

Back in Israel, several of the men discussed what
happened on an Israeli talk show. One of them made
this remarkable comment: “The fact of the matter is we
are coming from a country that experiences terror
daily. Our purpose was to document the event.” But how
can you document an event unless you know it is going
to happen?

We are now deep in conspiracy theory territory. But
there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to
show that Mossad – whose motto is “By way of
deception, thou shalt do war” – was spying on Arab
extremists in the USA and may have known that
September 11 was in the offing, yet decided to
withhold vital information from their American
counterparts which could have prevented the terror
attacks.

Following September 11, 2001, more than 60 Israelis
were taken into custody under the Patriot Act and
immigration laws. One highly placed investigator told
Carl Cameron of Fox News that there were “tie-ins”
between the Israelis and September 11; the hint was
clearly that they’d gathered intelligence on the
planned attacks but kept it to themselves.

The Fox News source refused to give details, saying:
“Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is
classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has
been gathered. It’s classified information.” Fox News
is not noted for its condemnation of Israel; it’s a
ruggedly patriotic news channel owned by Rupert
Murdoch and was President Bush’s main cheerleader in
the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.

Another group of around 140 Israelis were detained
prior to September 11, 2001, in the USA as part of a
widespread investigation into a suspected espionage
ring run by Israel inside the USA. Government
documents refer to the spy ring as an “organised
intelligence-gathering operation” designed to
“penetrate government facilities”. Most of those
arrested had served in the Israeli armed forces – but
military service is compulsory in Israel.
Nevertheless, a number had an intelligence background.

The first glimmerings of an Israeli spying exercise in
the USA came to light in spring 2001, when the FBI
sent a warning to other federal agencies alerting them
to be wary of visitors calling themselves “Israeli art
students” and attempting to bypass security at federal
buildings in order to sell paintings. A Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) report suggested the
Israeli calls “may well be an organised
intelligence-gathering activity”. Law enforcement
documents say that the Israelis “targeted and
penetrated military bases” as well as the DEA, FBI and
dozens of government facilities, including secret
offices and the unlisted private homes of law
enforcement and intelligence personnel.

A number of Israelis questioned by the authorities
said they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art
and Design, but Pnina Calpen, a spokeswoman for the
Israeli school, did not recognise the names of any
Israelis mentioned as studying there in the past 10
years. A federal report into the so-called art
students said many had served in intelligence and
electronic signal intercept units during their
military service.

According to a 61-page report, drafted after an
investigation by the DEA and the US immigration
service, the Israelis were organised into cells of
four to six people. The significance of what the
Israelis were doing didn’t emerge until after
September 11, 2001, when a report by a French
intelligence agency noted “according to the FBI, Arab
terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in
Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood,
Florida, from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct
proximity to the Israeli spy cells”.

The report contended that Mossad agents were spying on
Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi, two of leaders of
the 9/11 hijack teams. The pair had settled in
Hollywood, Florida, along with three other hijackers,
after leaving Hamburg – where another Mossad team was
operating close by.

Hollywood in Florida is a town of just 25,000 souls.
The French intelligence report says the leader of the
Mossad cell in Florida rented apartments “right near
the apartment of Atta and al-Shehi”. More than a third
of the Israeli “art students” claimed residence in
Florida. Two other Israelis connected to the art ring
showed up in Fort Lauderdale. At one time, eight of
the hijackers lived just north of the town.

Put together, the facts do appear to indicate that
Israel knew that 9/11, or at least a large-scale
terror attack, was about to take place on American
soil, but did nothing to warn the USA. But that’s not
quite true. In August 2001, the Israelis handed over a
list of terrorist suspects – on it were the names of
four of the September 11 hijackers. Significantly,
however, the warning said the terrorists were planning
an attack “outside the United States”.

The Israeli embassy in Washington has dismissed claims
about the spying ring as “simply untrue”. The same
denials have been issued repeatedly by the five
Israelis seen high-fiving each other as the World
Trade Centre burned in front of them.

Their lawyer, Ram Horwitz, insisted his clients were
not intelligence officers. Irit Stoffer, the Israeli
foreign minister, said the allegations were
“completely untrue”. She said the men were arrested
because of “visa violations”, adding: “The FBI
investigated those cases because of 9/11.”

Jim Margolin, an FBI spokesman in New York, implied
that the public would never know the truth, saying:
“If we found evidence of unauthorised intelligence
operations that would be classified material.” Yet,
Israel has long been known, according to US
administration sources, for “conducting the most
aggressive espionage operations against the US of any
US ally”. Seventeen years ago, Jonathan Pollard, a
civilian working for the American Navy, was jailed for
life for passing secrets to Israel. At first, Israel
claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but the
government later took responsibility for his work.

It has always been a long-accepted agreement among
allies – such as Britain and America or America and
Israel – that neither country will jail a “friendly
spy” nor shame the allied country for espionage. Chip
Berlet, a senior analyst at Boston’s Political
Research Associates and an expert in intelligence,
says: “It’s a backdoor agreement between allies that
says that if one of your spies gets caught and didn’t
do too much harm, he goes home. It goes on all the
time. The official reason is always visa violation.”

What we are left with, then, is fact sullied by
innuendo. Certainly, it seems, Israel was spying
within the borders of the United States and it is
equally certain that the targets were Islamic
extremists probably linked to September 11. But did
Israel know in advance that the Twin Towers would be
hit and the world plunged into a war without end; a
war which would give Israel the power to strike its
enemies almost without limit? That’s a conspiracy
theory too far, perhaps. But the unpleasant feeling
that, in this age of spin and secrets, we do not know
the full and unadulterated truth won’t go away. Maybe
we can guess, but it’s for the history books to
discover and decide.

02 November 2003


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