by Christo­pher Ketcham

Mean­while, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban Mov­ing Sys­tems, Dominik Suter, a 31– year-old Israeli national, aban­doned his busi­ness and fled the United States for Israel. Suter’s depar­ture was abrupt, leav­ing behind cof­fee cups, sand­wiches, cell phones and com­put­ers strewn on office tables and thou­sands of dol­lars of goods in stor­age.
Suter was later placed on the same FBI sus­pect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijack­ers and sus­pected al-Qaeda sym­pa­thiz­ers, sug­gest­ing that U.S. author­i­ties felt Suter may have known some­thing about the attacks. The sus­pi­cion, as the inves­ti­ga­tion unfolded, was that the men work­ing for Urban Mov­ing Sys­tems were spies. Who exactly was han­dling them, and who or what they were tar­get­ing, was as yet uncertain.

It was New York’s ven­er­a­ble Jew­ish weekly The For­ward that broke this story in the spring of 2002, after months of foot­work. The For­ward reported that the FBI had finally con­cluded that at least two of the men were agents work­ing for the Mossad, the Israeli intel­li­gence agency, and that Urban Mov­ing Sys­tems, the osten­si­ble employer of the five Israelis, was a front oper­a­tion. Two for­mer CIA offi­cers con­firmed this to me, not­ing that movers’ vans are a com­mon intel­li­gence cover. The For­ward also noted that the Israeli gov­ern­ment itself admit­ted that the men were spies. A “for­mer high-ranking Amer­i­can intel­li­gence offi­cial”, who said he was “reg­u­larly briefed on the inves­ti­ga­tion by two sep­a­rate law enforce­ment offi­cials”, told reporter Marc Perel­man that after Amer­i­can author­i­ties con­fronted Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli gov­ern­ment “acknowl­edged the oper­a­tion and apol­o­gized for not coor­di­nat­ing it with Wash­ing­ton”. Today, Perel­man stands by his report­ing. I asked him if his sources in the Mossad denied the story. “Nobody stopped talk­ing to me”, he said.

In June 2002, ABC News’ 20/20 fol­lowed up with its own inves­ti­ga­tion into the mat­ter, com­ing to the same con­clu­sion as The For­ward. Vin­cent Can­nis­traro, for­mer chief of oper­a­tions for coun­tert­er­ror­ism with the CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as hits in searches of an FBI national intel­li­gence data­base. Can­nis­traro told me that the ques­tion that most trou­bled FBI agents in the weeks and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site of their “cel­e­bra­tion” with fore­knowl­edge of the attack to come. From the begin­ning, “the FBI inves­ti­ga­tion oper­ated on the premise that the Israelis had fore­knowl­edge”, accord­ing to Can­nis­traro. A sec­ond for­mer CIA coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cer who closely fol­lowed the case, but who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymity, told me that inves­ti­ga­tors were pur­su­ing two the­o­ries. “One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at Lib­erty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other was that they were at the park loca­tion already”. Either way, inves­ti­ga­tors wanted to know exactly what the men were expect­ing when they got there.

Before such issues had been fully explored, how­ever, the inves­ti­ga­tion was shut down. Fol­low­ing what ABC News reported were “high-level nego­ti­a­tions between Israeli and U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cials”, a set­tle­ment was reached in the case of the five Urban Mov­ing Sys­tems sus­pects. Intense polit­i­cal pres­sure appar­ently had been brought to bear. The rep­utable Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that by the last week of Octo­ber 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained, Deputy Sec­re­tary of State Richard Armitage and two uniden­ti­fied “promi­nent New York con­gress­men” were lob­by­ing heav­ily for their release. Accord­ing to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report, high-profile crim­i­nal lawyer Alan Der­showitz also stepped in as a nego­tia­tor on behalf of the men to smooth out dif­fer­ences with the U.S. gov­ern­ment. (Der­showitz declined to com­ment for this arti­cle.) And so, at the end of Novem­ber 2001, for rea­sons that only noted they had been work­ing in the coun­try ille­gally as movers, in vio­la­tion of their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

Today, the cru­cial ques­tions raised by this mat­ter remain unan­swered. There is suf­fi­cient rea­son — from news reports, state­ments by for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cials, an array of cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence, and the reported acknowl­edg­ment by the Israeli gov­ern­ment—­ to b
elieve that in the months before 9/11, Israel was run­ning an active spy net­work inside the United States, with Mus­lim extrem­ists as the tar­get. Given Israel’s con­cerns about Islamic ter­ror­ism as well as its long his­tory of spy­ing on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What’s incen­di­ary is the idea—­ sup­ported, though not proven, by sev­eral pieces of evi­dence — that the Israelis did learn some­thing about 9/11 in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with Amer­i­can offi­cials. The ques­tions are dis­turb­ing enough to war­rant a Con­gres­sional investigation.

Yet none of this infor­ma­tion found its way into Congress’s joint com­mit­tee report on the attacks, and it was not even tan­gen­tially ref­er­enced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission’s final report. Nor would a sin­gle major media out­let track the rev­e­la­tions of The For­ward and ABC News to inves­ti­gate fur­ther. “There weren’t even sto­ries say­ing it was bull­shit”, says The Forward’s Perel­man. “Hon­estly, I was sur­prised”. Instead, the story dis­ap­peared into the wel­ter of anti-Israel 9/11 con­spir­acy theories.

It’s no small boon to the U.S. gov­ern­ment that the story of 9/11-related Israeli espi­onage has been thus rel­e­gated: the story doesn’t fit in the clean lines of the offi­cial nar­ra­tive of the attacks. It brings up con­cerns not only about Israel’s oblig­a­tion not to spy inside the bor­ders of the United States, its major bene­fac­tor, but about its pos­si­ble fail­ure to have pro­vided the U.S. ade­quate warn­ing of an impend­ing dev­as­tat­ing attack on Amer­i­can soil. Fur­ther­more, the avail­able evi­dence under­mines the care­fully cul­ti­vated image of sanc­tity that defines the U.S.- Israel rela­tion­ship. These are all fac­tors that help explain the story’s dis­ap­pear­ance, and they are com­pelling rea­sons to revisit it now.

Tor­pe­do­ing the FBI Probe

All five future hijack­ers of Amer­i­can Air­lines Flight 77, which rammed the Pen­ta­gon, main­tained addresses or were active within a six-mile radius of towns asso­ci­ated with the Israelis employed at Urban Mov­ing Sys­tems. Hud­son and Bergen coun­ties, the areas where the Israelis were allegedly con­duct­ing sur­veil­lance, were a cen­tral stag­ing ground for the hijack­ers of Flight 77 and their fel­low al-Qaeda oper­a­tives. Mohammed Atta main­tained a mail-drop address and vis­ited friends in north­ern New Jer­sey; his con­tacts there included Hani Han­jour, the sui­cide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strong­men who backed Han­jour in the seiz­ing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with or with­out knowl­edge of the ter­ror­ists’ plans, have been track­ing the men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?

In pub­lic state­ments, both the Israeli gov­ern­ment and the FBI have denied that the Urban Mov­ing Sys­tems men were involved in an intel­li­gence oper­a­tion in the United States. “No evi­dence recov­ered sug­gested any of these Israelis had prior knowl­edge of the 9/11 attack, and these Israelis are not sus­pected of work­ing for Mossad”, FBI spokesman Jim Mar­golin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not respond to ques­tions for this arti­cle.) Accord­ing to the source at ABC News, FBI inves­ti­ga­tors chafed at the denials from their higher-ups. “There is a lot of frus­tra­tion inside the bureau about this case”, the source told me. “They feel the higher ech­e­lons tor­pe­doed the inves­ti­ga­tion into the Israeli New Jer­sey cell. Leads were not fully inves­ti­gated”. Among those lost leads was the fig­ure of Dominik Suter, whom the U.S. author­i­ties appar­ently never attempted to con­tact. Intel­li­gence expert and author James Bam­ford told me there was sim­i­lar frus­tra­tion within the CIA: “Peo­ple I’ve talked to at the CIA were out­raged at what was going on. They thought it was out­ra­geous that there hadn’t been a real inves­ti­ga­tion, that the facts were hang­ing out there with­out any conclusion.”

How­ever, what was “absolutely cer­tain”, accord­ing to Vin­cent Can­nis­traro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a sur­veil­lance net­work in the New York– New Jer­sey area. The network’s pur­pose was to track rad­i­cal Islamic extrem­ists and/or sup­port­ers of mil­i­tant Pales­tin­ian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The for­mer CIA coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cer who spoke anony­mously told me that FBI inves­ti­ga­tors deter­mined that the sus­pect Israelis were serv­ing as Arabic-speaking lin­guists “run­ning tech­ni­cal oper­a­tions” in north­ern New Jersey’s exten­sive Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties. The for­mer CIA offi­cer said the oper­a­tions included taps on tele­phones, place­ment of micro­phones in rooms and mobile sur­veil­lance. The source at ABC News agreed: “Our con­clu­sion was that they were Arab lin­guists involved in mon­i­tor­ing oper­a­tions, i.e., elec­tronic sur­veil­lance. Peo­ple at FBI con­cur with this”. The ABC News source added, “What we heard was that the Israelis may have picked up chat­ter that some­thing was going to hap­pen on the morn­ing of 9/11″.

The for­mer CIA coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cer told me: “There was no ques­tion but that [the order to close down the inves­ti­ga­tion] came from the White House. It was imme­di­ately assumed at CIA head­quar­ters that this basi­cally was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be impli­cated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was a polit­i­cal issue, not a law enforce­ment or intel­li­gence issue. If some­body says we don’t want the Israelis impli­cated in this — we know that they’ve been spy­ing the hell out of us, we know that they pos­si­bly had infor­ma­tion in advance of the attacks, but this would be a polit­i­cal night­mare to deal with.”

The Israeli “Art Stu­dent” Spies

There is a sec­ond piece of evi­dence that sug­gests Israeli oper­a­tives were spy­ing on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the pecu­liar tale of the Israeli “art stu­dents”, detailed by this reporter for Salon.com in 2002, fol­low­ing the leak­ing of an inter­nal memo cir­cu­lated by the Drug Enforce­ment Administration’s Office of Secu­rity Pro­grams. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11 attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli cit­i­zens, pos­ing as art stu­dents and ped­dling cheap paint­ings, had been repeat­edly — and seem­ingly inex­plic­a­bly—­ attempt­ing to pen­e­trate DEA offices and other law enforce­ment and Defense Depart­ment offices across the coun­try. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged in “an orga­nized intel­li­gence gath­er­ing activ­ity”, but to what end, U.S. inves­ti­ga­tors, in June 2001, could not deter­mine. The memo briefly floated the pos­si­bil­ity that the Israelis were engaged in traf­fick­ing the drug ecstasy. Accord­ing to the memo, “the most activ­ity [was] reported in the state of Florida” dur­ing the first half of 2001, where the town of Hol­ly­wood appeared to be “a cen­tral point for these indi­vid­u­als with sev­eral hav­ing addresses in this area”.

In ret­ro­spect, the fact that a large num­ber of “art stu­dents” oper­ated out of Hol­ly­wood is intrigu­ing, to say the least. Dur­ing 2001, the city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activ­ity and served as one of the chief stag­ing grounds for the hijack­ing of the World Trade Cen­ter planes and the Penn­syl­va­nia plane; it was home to fif­teen of the nine­teen future hijack­ers, nine in Hol­ly­wood and six in the sur­round­ing area. Among the 120 sus­pected Israeli spies pos­ing as art stu­dents, more than thirty lived in the Hol­ly­wood area, ten in Hol­ly­wood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men and women had train­ing as intel­li­gence and elec­tronic inter­cept offi­cers in the Israeli mil­i­tary—­ train­ing and expe­ri­ence far beyond the com­pul­sory ser­vice man­dated by Israeli law. Their “trav­el­ing in the U.S. sell­ing art seem[ed] not to fit their back­ground”, accord­ing to the DEA report.

One “art stu­dent” was a for­mer Israeli mil­i­tary intel­li­gence offi­cer named Hanan Ser­faty, who rented two Hol­ly­wood apart­ments close to the mail drop and apart­ment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijack­ers. Ser­faty was mov­ing large amounts of cash: he car­ried bank slips show­ing more than $100,000 deposited from Decem­ber 2000 through the first quar­ter
of 2001; other bank slips showed with­drawals for about $80,000 dur­ing the same period. Serfaty’s apart­ments, serv­ing as crash pads for at least two other “art stu­dents”, were located at 4220 Sheri­dan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed Atta’s mail drop was at 3389 Sheri­dan Street—approximately 2,700 feet from Serfaty’s Sheri­dan Street apart­ment. Both Atta and Mar­wan al-Shehhi, the sui­cide pilot on United Air­lines Flight 175, which smashed into World Trade Cen­ter 2, lived in a rented apart­ment at 1818 Jack­son Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty’s South 21st Avenue apartment.

In fact, an improb­a­ble series of coin­ci­dences emerges from a close read­ing of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission’s staff state­ments and final report, FBI and Jus­tice Depart­ment watch lists, hijacker time­lines com­piled by major media and state­ments by local, state and fed­eral law enforce­ment per­son­nel. In at least six urban cen­ters, sus­pected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijack­ers and/or al-Qaeda­connected sus­pects lived and oper­ated near one another, in some cases less than half a mile apart, for var­i­ous peri­ods dur­ing 2000­01 in the run-up to the attacks. In addi­tion to north­ern New Jer­sey and Hol­ly­wood, Florida, these cen­ters included Arling­ton and Fred­er­icks­burg, Vir­ginia; Atlanta; Okla­homa City; Los Ange­les; and San Diego.

Israeli “art stu­dents” also lived close to ter­ror sus­pects in and around Dal­las, Texas. A 25-year-old “art stu­dent” named Michael Cal­manovic, arrested and ques­tioned by Texas-based DEA offi­cers in April 2001, main­tained a mail drop at 3575 North Belt­line Road, less than a thou­sand feet from the 4045 North Belt­line Road apart­ment of Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI ter­ror sus­pect. Dal­las and its envi­rons, espe­cially the town of Richard­son, Texas, throbbed with “art stu­dent” activ­ity. Richard­son is notable as the home of the Holy Land Foun­da­tion, an Islamic char­ity des­ig­nated as a ter­ror­ist fun­der by the Euro­pean Union and U.S. gov­ern­ment in Decem­ber 2001. Sources in 2002 told The For­ward, in a report unre­lated to the ques­tion of the “art stu­dents”, that “Israeli intel­li­gence played a key role in help­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion to crack down on Islamic char­i­ties sus­pected of fun­nel­ing money to ter­ror­ist groups, most notably the Richard­son, Texas-based Holy Land Foun­da­tion, last Decem­ber [2001]”. It’s plau­si­ble that the intel­li­gence prompt­ing the shut­down of the Holy Land Foun­da­tion came from “art stu­dent” spies in the Richard­son area.

Oth­ers among the “art stu­dents” had spe­cific back­grounds in elec­tronic sur­veil­lance or mil­i­tary intel­li­gence, or were asso­ci­ated with Israeli wire­tap­ping and sur­veil­lance firms, which prompted fur­ther con­cerns among U.S. inves­ti­ga­tors. DEA agents described Michael Cal­manovic, for exam­ple, as “a recently dis­charged elec­tronic inter­cept oper­a­tor for the Israeli mil­i­tary”. Lior Baram, ques­tioned near Hol­ly­wood, Fla., in Jan­u­ary 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intel­li­gence “work­ing with clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion”. Hanan Ser­faty, who main­tained the Hol­ly­wood apart­ments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the Israeli mil­i­tary between the ages of 18 and 21. Ser­faty refused to dis­close his activ­i­ties between the ages of 21 and 24, includ­ing his activ­i­ties since arriv­ing in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le Monde mean­while reported that six “art stu­dents” were appar­ently using cell phones that had been pur­chased by a for­mer Israeli vice con­sul in the U.S.A.

Sus­pected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, ques­tioned at Dallas-Fort Worth Air­port in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wire­tap­ping and elec­tronic eaves­drop­ping com­pany NICE Sys­tems Ltd. (NICE Sys­tems’ Amer­i­can sub­sidiary, NICE Sys­tems Inc., is located in Ruther­ford, New Jer­sey, not far from the East Ruther­ford site where the five Israeli “movers” were arrested on the after­noon of Sep­tem­ber 11.) Ben Dor car­ried in his lug­gage a print-out of a com­puter file that referred to “DEA Groups”. How he acquired infor­ma­tion about so-called “DEA Groups” — via, for exam­ple, his own employ­ment with an Israeli wire­tap­ping com­pany—­ was never deter­mined, accord­ing to DEA documents.

“Art stu­dent” Michal Gal, arrested by DEA inves­ti­ga­tors in Irv­ing, Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions soft­ware com­pany Amdocs Inc., which pro­vides phone-billing tech­nol­ogy to clients that include some of the largest phone com­pa­nies in the United States as well as U.S. gov­ern­ment agen­cies. Amdocs, whose exec­u­tive board has been heav­ily stocked with retired and cur­rent mem­bers of the Israeli gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary, has been inves­ti­gated at least twice in the last decade by U.S. author­i­ties on charges of espionage-related leaks of data that the com­pany assured was secure. (The com­pany stren­u­ously denies any wrong-doing.)

Accord­ing to the for­mer CIA coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cer with knowl­edge of inves­ti­ga­tions into 9/11-related Israeli espi­onage, when law enforce­ment offi­cials exam­ined the “art stu­dents” phe­nom­e­non, they came to the ten­ta­tive con­clu­sion that “the Israelis likely had a huge spy oper­a­tion in the U.S. and that they had suc­ceeded in iden­ti­fy­ing a num­ber of the hijack­ers”. The Ger­man daily Die Zeit reached the same con­clu­sion in 2002, report­ing that “Mossad agents in the U.S. were in all prob­a­bil­ity sur­veilling at least four of the 19 hijack­ers”. The Fox News Chan­nel also reported that U.S. inves­ti­ga­tors sus­pected that Israelis were spy­ing on Mus­lim mil­i­tants in the United States. “There is no indi­ca­tion that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but inves­ti­ga­tors sus­pect that the Israelis may have gath­ered intel­li­gence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it”, Fox cor­re­spon­dent Carl Cameron reported in a Decem­ber 2001 series that was the first major exposé of alle­ga­tions of 9/11-related Israeli espi­onage. “A highly placed inves­ti­ga­tor said there are ‘tie-ins’. But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, say­ing, ‘evi­dence link­ing these Israelis to 9/11 is clas­si­fied. I can­not tell you about evi­dence that has been gath­ered. It’s clas­si­fied information.’”

One ele­ment of the alle­ga­tions has never been clearly under­stood: if the “art stu­dents” were indeed spies tar­get­ing Mus­lim extrem­ists that included al-Qaeda, why would they also be sur­veilling DEA agents in such a com­pro­mis­ing man­ner? Why, in other words, would for­eign spies bum­ble into fed­eral offices by the scores and risk expos­ing their oper­a­tion? An expla­na­tion is that a num­ber of the art stu­dents were, in fact, young Israelis engaged in a mere art scam and unknow­ingly pro­vided cover for real spies. Inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist John Sugg, who as senior edi­tor for the Cre­ative Loaf­ing news­pa­per chain reported on the “art stu­dents” in 2002, told me that inves­ti­ga­tors he spoke to within FBI felt the “art stu­dent” ring func­tioned as a wide-ranging cover that was coun­ter­in­tu­itive in its obvi­ous­ness. DEA inves­ti­ga­tors, for exam­ple, uncov­ered evi­dence con­nect­ing the Israeli “art stu­dents” to known ecstasy traf­fick­ing oper­a­tions in New York and Florida. This was, accord­ing to Sugg, planted infor­ma­tion. “The expla­na­tion was that when our FBI guys started get­ting inter­ested in these folks [the art stu­dents] — when they got too close to what the real pur­pose was — the Israelis threw in an ecstasy angle”, Sugg told me. “The argu­ment being that if our guys thought the Israelis were involved in a smug­gling ring, then they wouldn’t see the real pur­pose of the oper­a­tion”. Sugg, who is writ­ing a book that explores the tale of the “art stu­dents”, told me that sev­eral sources within the FBI, and at least one source for­merly with Israeli intel­li­gence, sug­gested that “the bum­bling aspect of the art stu­dent thing was intentional.”

When I reported on the mat­ter for Salon.com in 2002, a vet­eran U.S. intel­li­gence oper­a­tive with expe­ri­ence sub­con­tract­ing both for the CIA and the NSA sug­gested a sim­i­lar pos­si­bil­ity. “It was a noisy oper­a­tion”, the vet­eran intel­li­gence oper­a­tive said. The oper­a­tive referred me to the film
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”. The intel­li­gence oper­a­tive 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?” U.S. and Israeli offi­cials, dis­miss­ing charges of espi­onage as an “urban myth”, have pub­licly claimed that the Israeli “art stu­dents” were guilty only of work­ing on U.S. soil with­out proper cre­den­tials. The stern denials issued by the Jus­tice Depart­ment were widely pub­li­cized in the Wash­ing­ton Post and else­where, and the end­note from offi­cial­dom and in estab­lish­ment media by the spring of 2002 was that the “art stu­dents” had been rounded up and deported sim­ply because of harm­less visa vio­la­tions. The FBI, for its part, refused to con­firm or deny the “art stu­dents” espi­onage story. “Regard­ing FBI inves­ti­ga­tions into Israeli art stu­dents”, spokesman Jim Mar­golin told me, “the FBI can­not com­ment on any of those inves­ti­ga­tions.” As with the New Jer­sey Israelis, the inves­ti­ga­tion into the Israeli “art stu­dents” appears to have been halted by orders from on high. The vet­eran CIA/NSA intel­li­gence oper­a­tive told me in 2002 that there was “a great press to dis­credit the story, dis­credit the con­nec­tions, pre­vent [inves­ti­ga­tors] from going any fur­ther. Peo­ple were told to stand down. You name the agency, they were told to stand down”. The oper­a­tive added, “Peo­ple who were per­ceived to be gumshoes on [this mat­ter] sud­denly found them­selves ham­mered from all dif­fer­ent direc­tions. The inter­est from the mid­dle bureau­cracy was not that there had been a secu­rity breach but that some­one had both­ered to inves­ti­gate the breach. That was where the ter­ror was”.

Chok­ing off the press coverage

There was sim­i­lar pres­sure brought against the media venues that ven­tured to report out the alle­ga­tions of 9/11– related Israeli espi­onage. A for­mer ABC News employee high up in the net­work news­room told me that when ABC News ran its June 2002 exposé on the cel­e­bra­tory New Jer­sey Israelis, “Enor­mous pres­sure was brought to bear by pro-Israeli orga­ni­za­tions” — and this pres­sure began months before the piece was even close to air­ing. The source said that ABC News col­leagues won­dered, “how they [the pro-Israel orga­ni­za­tions] found out we were doing the story. Pro– Israeli peo­ple were call­ing the pres­i­dent of ABC News. Bar­bara Wal­ters was get­ting bom­barded by calls. The story was a hard sell but ABC News came through the man­age­ment insu­lated [reporters] from the pressure”.

The expe­ri­ence of Carl Cameron, chief Wash­ing­ton cor­re­spon­dent at Fox News Chan­nel and the first main­stream U.S. reporter to present the alle­ga­tions of Israeli sur­veil­lance of the 9/11 hijack­ers, was per­haps more typ­i­cal, both in its par­tic­u­lars and after­math. The attack against Cameron and Fox News was spear­headed by a pro-Israel lobby group called the Com­mit­tee for Accu­racy in Mid­dle East Report­ing in Amer­ica (CAMERA), which oper­ated in tan­dem with the two most highly vis­i­ble pow­er­house Israel lob­by­ists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Amer­i­can Israel Pub­lic Affairs Com­mit­tee (itself cur­rently embroiled in a spy scan­dal con­nected to the Defense Depart­ment and Israeli Embassy). “CAMERA pep– pered the shit out of us”, Carl Cameron told me in 2002, refer­ring to an e-mail bom­bard­ment that even­tu­ally crashed the Fox News.com servers. Cameron him­self received 700 pages of almost iden­ti­cal e-mail mes­sages from hun­dreds of cit­i­zens (though he sus­pected these were spam iden­ti­ties). CAMERA spokesman Alex Safian later told me that Cameron’s upbring­ing in Iran, where his father trav­eled as an arche­ol­o­gist, had ren­dered the reporter “very sym­pa­thetic to the Arab side”. Safian added, “I think Cameron, per­son­ally, has a thing about Israel”—coded lan­guage imply­ing that Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was out­raged at the accusation.

Accord­ing to a source at Fox News Chan­nel, the pres­i­dent of the ADL, Abra­ham Fox­man, tele­phoned exec­u­tives at Fox News’ par­ent, News Corp., to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source said that Fox­man told the News Corp. exec­u­tives, “Look, you guys have gen­er­ally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this stuff out there? You’re killing us”. The Fox News source con­tin­ued, “As good old boys will do over cof­fee in Man­hat­tan, it was like, well, what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, ‘Stop the e-mailing. Stop slam­ming us. Stop being in our face, and we’ll stop being in your face—by way of tak­ing our story down off the web. We will not retract it; we will not dis­avow it; we stand by it. But we will at least take it off the web.’” Fol­low­ing this meet­ing, within four days of the post­ing of Cameron’s series on Fox News.com, the tran­scripts dis­ap­peared, replaced by the mes­sage, “This story no longer exists”.

What did Mossad know and tell the U.S.?

Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed fore­knowl­edge of the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli author­i­ties knew enough to warn the U.S. gov­ern­ment in the sum­mer of 2001 that an attack was on the hori­zon. The British Sun­day Tele­graph reported on Sep­tem­ber 16, 2001, that two senior agents with the Mossad were dis­patched to Wash­ing­ton in August 2001 “to alert the CIA and FBI to the exis­tence of a cell of as many as 200 ter­ror­ists said to be prepar­ing a big oper­a­tion”. The Tele­graph quoted a “senior Israeli secu­rity offi­cial” as say­ing the Mossad experts had “no spe­cific infor­ma­tion about what was being planned”. Still, the offi­cial told the Tele­graph, the Mossad con­tacts had “linked the plot to Osama bin Laden”. Like­wise, Die Zeit cor­re­spon­dent Oliver Schröm reported that on August 23, 2001, the Mossad “handed its Amer­i­can coun­ter­part a list of names of ter­ror­ists who were stay­ing in the U.S. and were pre­sum­ably plan­ning to launch an attack in the fore­see­able future”. Fox News’ Carl Cameron, in May 2002, also reported warn­ings by Israel: “Based on its own intel­li­gence, the Israeli gov­ern­ment pro­vided ‘gen­eral’ infor­ma­tion to the United States in the sec­ond week of August that an al-Qaeda attack was immi­nent”. The U.S. gov­ern­ment later claimed these warn­ings were not spe­cific enough to allow any mit­i­gat­ing action to be taken. Mossad expert Gor­don Thomas, author of Gideon’s Spies, says Ger­man intel­li­gence sources told him that as late as August 2001 Israeli spies in the United States had made sur­veil­lance con­tacts with “known sup­port­ers of bin Laden in the U.S.A. It was those sur­veil­lance con­tacts that later raised the ques­tion: how much prior knowl­edge did Mossad have and at what stage?”

Accord­ing to Die Zeit, the Mossad did pro­vide the U.S. gov­ern­ment with the names of sus­pected ter­ror­ists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who would even­tu­ally hijack the Pen­ta­gon plane. It is worth not­ing that Mihd­har and Hazmi were among the hijack­ers who oper­ated in close prox­im­ity to Israeli “art stu­dents” in Hol­ly­wood, Florida, and to the Urban Mov­ing Sys­tems Israelis in north­ern New Jer­sey. More­over, Hazmi and at least three “art stu­dents” vis­ited Okla­homa City on almost the same dates, from April 1 through April 4, 2001. On August 24, 2001, a day after the Mossad’s brief­ing, Mihd­har and Hazmi were placed by the CIA on a ter­ror­ist watch list; addi­tion­ally, it was only after the Mossad warn­ing, as reported by Die Zeit, that the CIA, on August 27, informed the FBI of the pres­ence of the two ter­ror­ists. But by then the cell was already in hid­ing, prepar­ing for attack.

The CIA, along with the 9/11 Com­mis­sion in its adop­tion of the CIA story, claims that Mihd­har and Hazmi were placed on the watch list solely due to the agency’s own efforts, with no help from Mossad. Their expla­na­tion of how the pair came to be placed on the watch list, how­ever, is far from cred­i­ble and may have served as a cover story to obscure the Mossad brief­ing This
brings up the pos­si­bil­ity that the CIA may have known about the exis­tence of the alleged Israeli agents and their mis­sion, but sought, nat­u­rally, to keep it quiet. A sec­ond, more trou­bling sce­nario, is that the CIA may have sub­con­tracted to Mossad, given that the agency was both pro­hib­ited by law from con­duct­ing intel­li­gence oper­a­tions on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of com­pe­tent Arabic-fluent field offi­cers. In such a sce­nario, the CIA would either have worked actively with the Israelis or qui­etly abet­ted an inde­pen­dent oper­a­tion on U.S. soil. In his 9/11 inves­tiga­tive book, The Loom­ing Tower, author Lawrence Wright notes that FBI coun­tert­er­ror­ism agents, infu­ri­ated at the CIA’s fail­ure to fully share infor­ma­tion about Mihd­har and Hazmi, spec­u­lated that “the agency was shield­ing Mihd­har and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them”.