On the afternoon of September 11,

Page 1

CounterPunch

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

Tells the Facts and Names the Names

VOL. 14, NO. 3/4

2007, 3 & 4 of 22 issues.

$2.50

On the afternoon of September 11,

2001, an FBI bulletin known as

a BOLO – “be on lookout”

– was issued with regard to three sus-

picious men who that morning were

seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront

minutes after the first plane hit World

Trade Center 1. Law enforcement of-

ficers across the New York-New Jersey

area were warned in the radio dispatch

to watch for a “vehicle possibly related

to New York terrorist attack”:

White, 2000 Chevrolet van…

with ‘Urban Moving Systems’

sign on back seen at Liberty

State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at

the time of first impact of jet-

liner into World Trade Center…

Three individuals with van

were seen celebrating after

initial impact and subsequent

explosion. FBI Newark Field

Office requests that, if the van

is located, hold for prints and

detain individuals.

What Did Israel Know in

Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes

after the issuance of the FBI BOLO,

officers with the East Rutherford Police

Department stopped the commercial

moving van through a trace on the plates.

According to the police report, Officer

Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli

approached the stopped van, demand-

ing that the driver exit the vehicle. The

driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg,

refused and “was asked several more

times [but] appeared to be fumbling

with a black leather fanny pouch type

of bag”. With guns drawn, the police

then “physically removed” Kurzberg,

while four other men – two more men

had apparently joined the group since

the morning – were also removed from

the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass

median and read their Miranda rights.

They had not been told the reasons for

their arrest. Yet, according to DeCarlo’s

report, “this officer was told without

question by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg],

Cheering Movers and Art Student Spies

• Who Were the Israelis Living Next to

Mohammed Atta?

• What was in the Van on the New Jersey

Shore?

• How did Two Hijackers Land on Watch List

Weeks Before 9/11?

• Who Shut Down Fox News’ Carl Cameron?

BY CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

(Ketcham’s story cont. on page 2 col one)

Ketcham’s Story

BY ALEXANDER COCK-

BURN & JEFFREY ST.

CLAIR

Across these ten pages runs a sober,

carefully reported narrative

by a well-respected reporter, Chris-

topher Ketcham. He’s a journalist

whom publications such as Harper’s

and Salon.com have been happy to

publish. Indeed, it was in May of

2002 that Salon published a 9,000-

word story by Ketcham on the so-

called Israeli “art students” whose

curious activities before 9/11/2001,

around U.S. government offices and

in locations in many cases identical

to those frequented by the 9/11 hi-

jackers, had been the subject of much

speculation.

In the fall of 2005 Ketcham ran

across a short report in the Philadel-

phia Times-Herald about a 166-page

memorandum written by a retired

corporate lawyer named Gerald

Shea. The memo, which Shea sent

to the 9/11 Commission and the rel-

evant Senate and House intelligence

committees, reviewed all publicly

known information about the activi-

ties of possible Israeli intelligence

operatives working in New Jersey,

Florida and elsewhere, and posed the

questions: how much had the Mossad

learned about the hijackers’ plans;

what had they divulged to the agen-

cies of the U.S. government ?

These are not questions likely to

receive an enthusiastic reception in

the U.S. press or in Congress. Shea’s

memo, which he sent to many major

news outlets, received almost no cov-

erage aside from that tiny story in the

Philadelphia Times-Herald (written,

(Israeli spies cont. on page 2 col three)

Page 2

2/COUNTERPUNCH

Editors

ALEXANDER COCKBURN

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Assistant Editor

ALEVTINA REA

Business

BECKY GRANT

DEVA WHEELER

Counselor

BEN SONNENBERG

Published twice monthly except one

in July & one in August, 22 issues a

year

CounterPunch.

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counterpunch@counterpunch.org

‘We are Israeli. We are not your problem.

Your problems are our problems. The

Palestinians are the problem.’” Another

of the five Israelis, again without prompt-

ing, told Officer DeCarlo – falsely – that

“we were on the West Side Highway in

New York City during the incident”.

From inside the vehicle the officers,

who were quickly joined by agents from

the FBI, retrieved multiple passports

and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock.

According to New Jersey’s Bergen Rec-

ord, which on September 12 reported

the arrest of the five Israelis, an inves-

tigator high up in the Bergen County

law enforcement hierarchy stated that

officers had also discovered in the ve-

hicle “maps of the city … with certain

places highlighted. It looked like they’re

hooked in with this”, the source told the

Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. “It

looked like they knew what was going

to happen when they were at Liberty

State Park.”

The five men were indeed Israeli

citizens. They claimed to be in the

country working as movers for Urban

Moving Systems Inc., which maintained

a warehouse and office in Weehawken,

New Jersey. They were held for 71 days

in a federal detention center in Brooklyn,

New York, during which time they were

repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA

counterterrorism teams, who referred to

the men as the “high-fivers” for their

celebratory behavior on the New Jersey

waterfront. Some were placed in soli-

tary confinement for at least forty days;

some were given as many as seven lie-

detector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul

Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to

take a lie-detector test for ten weeks.

Then he failed it.

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 hi-

jackers and suspected al-Qaeda sympa-

thizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities

felt Suter may have known something

(Israeli spies continued from page 1)

it should be noted, by Keith Phucas,

who broke the Able Danger story).

After reading Shea’s full memo,

Ketcham went back to the leads and

sources he’d developed for the earlier

piece that he’d done for Salon. By May

2006 he’d completed an 11,000-word

report for Salon. One hour before it was

due to go up on Salon’s site, the story

was killed. The word from inside Salon

is that the top editors suddenly decided

that there was nothing newsworthy

about Ketcham’s report.

Anyone familiar with the verbal

smokescreens sent up by a publication

killing a story knows well two standard

ploys: one is the last-minute asser-

tion, often after weeks of enthusiastic

editorial preparation, that “there’s

really nothing new here”, that “it’s an

old story”. The other is that the facts

are so explosive, so fresh, that unusu-

ally explicit corroboration is required,

demanding the reporter get multiple

named sources and so forth.

Salon’s editors obviously decided

that an exposé with words like “Israeli

spies” and “9/11” in the same headline

was just too hot to handle. But in that

case why wait to the last minute, after

long hours of editorial work preparing

the story for publication? They prob-

ably didn’t like to admit to themselves

that were just not prepared to take heat

for the story and that they simply got

cold feet.

Ketcham took the story to a number

of other magazines and got nowhere.

Then, in the late summer of 2006 he

took it to the Nation, whose editors

said that yes, they wanted the story, but

wouldn’t schedule it till after the crush

of political coverage in the run-up to the

November elections. The target publi-

cation date was December 8. At the last

minute, the Nation pulled the piece.

When we first read it, we felt – and

still feel – somewhat baffled at the

difficulty this piece had in getting

published. This is a report that deals

with substantiated events that demand

explanation, starting with the van on

the New Jersey shore and the Israelis

who were seen cheering as the planes

crashed into the towers, and who on the

afternoon of 9/11 were arrested follow-

ing an FBI alert.

It is not as though Ketcham is

alone in probing the background and

activities of the celebrating Israelis.

That has been the topic of a fine piece of

investigation published in The Forward

in 2002. The Forward’s sensational

discoveries were studiously ignored by

the press. (“Old story….”, “unsubstan-

tiated”…) Similarly, the saga of the “art

students” has been the object of careful

investigation and broadcast pieces by

Fox News’ Carl Cameron.

Yes, when it comes to Israel and the

U.S. press we are familiar with obstruc-

tions to raising edgy topics. That’s why

we’re glad we have CounterPunch, to

welcome good reporters like Ketcham

in from the cold. CP.

(Ketcham’s story continued from page 1)

“This officer was told without ques-

tion by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg], ‘We

are Israeli. We are not your problem.

Your problems are our problems. The

Palestinians are the problem.’”

Page 3

3/COUNTERPUNCH

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 target-

ing, was as yet uncertain.

It was New York’s venerable Jew-

ish 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 work-

ing for the Mossad, the Israeli intel-

ligence 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 com-

mon intelligence cover. The Forward

also noted that the Israeli government

itself admitted that the men were spies.

A “former high-ranking American in-

telligence official”, who said he was

“regularly briefed on the investigation

edge”, according to Cannistraro.

A second former CIA counterter-

rorism officer who closely followed

the case, but who spoke on condition

of anonymity, told me that investiga-

tors 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”. Ei-

ther 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 of-

ficials”, a settlement was reached in the

case of the five Urban Moving Systems

suspects. Intense political pressure ap-

parently had been brought to bear. The

reputable Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported

that by the last week of October 2001,

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 – sup-

ported, 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 Con-

gressional 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 say-

ing 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. govern-

ment 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 ob-

ligation 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 disappear-

ance – 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 sur-

veillance, were a central staging ground

for the hijackers of Flight 77 and their

fellow al-Qaeda operatives. Mohammed

Atta maintained a mail-drop address

In the months before 9/11, Israel was

running an active spy network in-

side the United States, with Muslim

extremists as the target.

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 de-

clined 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 mov-

ers, 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 of-

ficials, an array of circumstantial evi-

dence, and the reported acknowledgment

by the Israeli government – to believe

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

by two separate law enforcement offi-

cials”, told reporter Marc Perelman that

after American authorities confronted

Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli

government “acknowledged the opera-

tion 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. Can-

nistraro 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 foreknowl-

Page 4

4/COUNTERPUNCH

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 in-

volved 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 torpe-

doed 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 hang-

ing out there without any conclusion.”

However, what was “absolutely cer-

tain”, 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 monitor-

ing operations, i.e., electronic surveil-

lance. 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 go-

ing to happen on the morning of 9/11”.

The former CIA counterterrorism

officer told me: “There was no ques-

tion 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 spy-

ing 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.”

ISRAEL’S “ART STUDENT”

SPIES

There is a second piece of evidence

that suggests Israeli operatives were spy-

ing 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 leak-

ing 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 ac-

tivity”, but to what end, U.S. investiga-

tors, in June 2001, could not determine.

The memo briefly floated the possibility

that the Israelis were engaged in traf-

ficking 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 Penn-

sylvania 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 experi-

ence 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 Is-

raeli military intelligence officer named

Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Holly-

wood apartments close to the mail drop

and apartment of Mohammed Atta and

four other hijackers. Serfaty was mov-

ing 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 apart-

ments, 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.

“It was immediately assumed at CIA head-

quarters that this basically was going to

be a cover-up so that the Israelis would

not be implicated in any way in 9/11.”

Page 5

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 coin-

cidences emerges from a close reading of

the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commis-

sion’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-Qaeda–connected suspects lived and

operated near one another, in some cases

less than half a mile apart, for various

periods during 2000–01 in the run-up to

the attacks. In addition to northern New

Jersey and Hollywood, Florida, these

centers included Arlington and Freder-

icksburg, Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma

City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.

Israeli “art students” also lived close

to terror suspects in and around Dal-

las, 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 Founda-

tion, 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 Founda-

tion 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. investiga-

tors. 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

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. Am-

docs, 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. au-

thorities 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 coun-

terterrorism officer with knowledge of

investigations into 9/11-related Israeli

espionage, when law enforcement of-

ficials 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 Ger-

man 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 indica-

tion that the Israelis were involved in the

9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect

that the Israelis may have gathered intel-

ligence 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 gath-

ered. It’s classified information.’”

One element of the allegations has

never been clearly understood: if the

“art students” were indeed spies target-

ing Muslim extremists that included

al-Qaeda, why would they also be sur-

veilling DEA agents in such a compro-

mising 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

Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth

Airport in May 2001, worked for the

Israeli wiretapping and electronic eaves-

dropping company NICE Systems Ltd.

(NICE Systems’ American subsidiary,

NICE Systems Inc., is located in Ru-

therford, 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 telecommuni-

cations software company Amdocs Inc.,

FBI counter-terror-

ism agents specu-

lated that the CIA

was shielding two

of the hijackers be-

cause it hoped to

recruit them.

5 / COUNTERPUNCH

Page 6

the “art students” had been rounded up

and deported simply because of harm-

less visa violations. The FBI, for its

part, refused to confirm or deny the “art

students” espionage story. “Regarding

FBI investigations into Israeli art stu-

dents”, 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 [investiga-

tors] 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 mat-

ter] suddenly found themselves ham-

mered from all different directions. The

interest from the middle bureaucracy

of ABC News. Barbara Walters was get-

ting 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 hijack-

ers, 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 power-

house Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defama-

tion 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-

In at least six urban centers, suspected

Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or

al-Qaeda–connected suspects lived

and operated near one another, in some

cases less than half a mile apart, for

various periods during 2000–01.

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 obvious-

ness. 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 ex-

plores 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 in-

telligence 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 some-

thing 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, dismiss-

ing 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

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

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 hun-

dreds 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, Ab-

raham 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,

6 / COUNTERPUNCH

Page 7

(Israeli spies continued on page 9)

“Look, you guys have generally been

pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing

putting this stuff out there? You’re kill-

ing 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 re-

tract 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 de-

tailed foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks,

the Israeli authorities knew enough to

warn the U.S. government in the sum-

mer 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 op-

eration”. The Telegraph quoted a “senior

Israeli security official” as saying the

Mossad experts had “no specific infor-

mation 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 plan-

ning to launch an attack in the foresee-

able future”. Fox News’ Carl Cameron,

in May 2002, also reported warnings by

Israel: “Based on its own intelligence,

the Israeli government provided ‘gen-

eral’ 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 intel-

ligence 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 Sys-

tems 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 brief-

ing, Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed

by the CIA on a terrorist watch list; ad-

agency was both prohibited by law from

conducting intelligence operations on

U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of compe-

tent Arabic-fluent field officers. In such

a scenario, the CIA would either have

worked actively with the Israelis or qui-

etly 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 be-

cause it hoped to recruit them”. The two

al-Qaeda men, Wright notes, “must have

seemed like attractive opportunities;

however, once they entered the United

States they were the province of the

FBI...” Wright further observes that the

CIA’s reticence to share its information

was due to a fear “that prosecutions re-

sulting from specific intelligence might

compromise its relationship with foreign

services”.

ditionally, 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 Com-

mission 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 [See accompanying

story on page 8 - “The Kuala Lumpur

Deceit”]. 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 trou-

bling scenario, is that the CIA may have

subcontracted to Mossad, given that the

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.A. and that they had succeeded in

identifying a number of the hijackers”.

When in the spring of 2002 the sce-

nario of CIA’s domestic subcontracting

to foreign intelligence was posed to the

veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative,

with whom I spoke extensively, the op-

erative didn’t reject it out of hand. The

operative noted that in recent years the

CIA’s human intelligence assets, known

as “humint” – spooks on the ground who

conduct surveillances, make contacts,

and infiltrate the enemy – had been

“eviscerated” in favor of the NSA’s far

less perilous “sigint”, or signals intel-

ligence program, the remote intercep-

tion of electronic communications. As

a result, “U.S. intelligence finds itself

going back to sources that you may not

necessarily like to go back to, but are

required to”, the veteran intelligence

operative said. “We don’t like the fact,

but our humint structures are gone. Is-

raeli intel’s humint is as strong as ever.

If you have an intel gap, those gaps are

7 / COUNTERPUNCH

Page 8

The CIA Plants a Cover Story

operative [Khallad]”. Khallad, it was

claimed, had been identified in January

2001 from photographs taken at Kuala

Lumpur. That identification was noted

officially in an alleged January 5, 2001,

CIA cable.

According to the CIA, in the spring

of 2001 there were reported threats of al-

Qaeda attacks on U.S. interests abroad.

A CIA agent whom the Commission

calls “John” – who was later identified

as agent Tom Wilshire by New Yorker

writer Lawrence Wright – “wondered

where the attacks might occur”. Wil-

shire was particularly interested in cable

traffic relating to the Kuala Lumpur

meeting the previous year, specifically

the January 5, 2001, cable that identified

Khallad as having been present at that

January 2000 meeting. It was Wilshire’s

efforts, beginning in May of 2001, that

the CIA claims led to the watch-listing

of Mihdhar and Hazmi on the eve of

the attacks.

Yet a mile-wide hole quickly appears

in this account, because the purported

“definitive” identification of Khallad in

January 2001 had been entirely mistak-

en. In other words, George Tenet in his

statement before the Joint Inquiry was

either lying or woefully uninformed.

According to the CIA’s account, the

identification of Khallad, which oc-

curred a year after the actual Kuala

Lumpur meeting, came as the result

of an FBI/CIA source, who reportedly

was able to pinpoint the photographs of

Khallad taken at the meeting.

But, according to the CIA’s own

Jan. 5, 2001, cable on the matter, the

FBI/CIA source was said to have been

shown photographs only of Mihdhar

and Hazmi. He was not shown a photo-

graph of Khallad. According to the Joint

Inquiry report, it was later discovered,

after Sept. 11, 2001, that the supposed

photograph in question - the one re-

viewed by the informant in January 2001

- was not of Khallad but of Hazmi him-

self. And in fact the source erroneously

identified Hazmi as Khallad. Or so the

Joint Inquiry report claims.

But in fact there is substantial doubt

as to whether even a mistaken identifica-

The possible link between pre-9/

11 Israeli warnings and the

watch-listing of the hijackers

Mihdhar and Hazmi was pointed out in

late 2004 by a retired top corporate law-

yer named Gerald Shea, who compiled

a 166-page memo detailing the alleged

operations of the Israeli groups in New

Jersey, Florida and elsewhere. In the

memo, which is drawn from publicly

available source material and which

he sent to members of the 9/11 Com-

mission and the joint House and Senate

intelligence committees, Shea notes

that neither the 9/11 Commission’s

final report nor the joint report of the

intelligence committees “specifically

mentions any such [warnings] from the

Israeli government”.

Instead, both reports, hewing close-

ly to the CIA’s public stance, attribute

the watch-listing of Mihdhar and

Hazmi solely to the bumbling work of

U.S. intelligence. But a review of the

alleged facts in this route to the watch

list, Shea insists, makes one doubt their

veracity. “The issue is important”, Shea

argues, “because any downplaying of

Israeli warnings … draws attention

away” from the surveillance role the

Israeli groups may have played.

The key element in the CIA’s ac-

count is the claim that in January 2001

the agency had identified an operational

link between the Mihdhar-Hazmi duo

and one of Bin Laden’s most trusted

lieutenants, Khallad, a.k.a. Tawfiq bin

Attash, who was suspected of master-

minding the 2000 bombing of the USS

Cole. According to the CIA, Mihdhar,

Hazmi and Khallad had together at-

tended a high-level al-Qaeda meeting

in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. This

meeting was historic in the annals of

Islamic terrorism, for it was here that

the germ of 9/11 was seeded.

The significance of the establish-

ment of the link with Khallad was such

that CIA Director George Tenet lauded

the discovery in his testimony before

the Joint Inquiry of Congress in 2002,

noting that “this was the first time that

CIA could definitively place al-Hazmi

and al-Mihdhar with a known al-Qaeda

The Kuala Lumpur Deceit

tion was ever made. Three people were

said to have been present when the

FBI/CIA source made the identifica-

tion. These included the questioning

CIA agent, an FBI agent observing,

and the joint source. But, according to

the 9/11 Commission’s own staff state-

ments, the FBI agent later said that he

was unaware of any identification of

Khallad. And the CIA agent, who sup-

posedly conducted the interview, “does

not recall this particular identification

[at all]”, according to the Commis-

sion’s staff statements.

So it turns out no one who was said

to have made the pivotal identification

of Khallad actually recalls having made

the identification. This in turn suggests

it may never have happened.

Indeed, when in May 2001 CIA

agent Tom Wilshire allegedly asked

another agent, whom the 9/11 Commis-

sion does not identify but whom we can

here dub “Alice”, to review the cable

traffic relating to the Kuala Lumpur

meeting, Alice later “cannot [even]

recall this work”, according to the

Commission’s staff statements. (The

reference to Alice’s failed memory was

later deleted, without explanation, from

the Commission’s final report.)

In late July or sometime early in

August, the CIA’s account continues,

Wilshire, still inspired by the purported

identification of Khallad in the Janu-

ary 2001 cable, asked another agent,

“Mary”, to “resume” the work that

Alice could not recall. Mary is said

then to have discovered, on August

21, 2001, that Mihdhar, and possibly

Hazmi, were in the United States. They

were both placed on the watch list on

August 24 in a tortuous culmination of

CIA work that supposedly began with

Tom Wilshire in the spring.

Given the litany of unlikelihoods in

the CIA’s account - not least of which

is the “uncertain, unwitnessed, unre-

membered” identification of Khallad,

as Gerald Shea notes - the reported

Mossad warnings appear to lead a far

straighter course to the watch-listing

of Mihdhar and Hazmi. Christopher

Ketcham

8 / COUNTERPUNCH

Page 9

9 / COUNTERPUNCH

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not closed overnight. It takes years and

years of diligent work, a high degree of

security, talented and dedicated people,

willing management and a steady hand.

It is not a fun business, and it’s certainly

not one without its dangers. If you lose

that capability, well… organizations find

themselves having to make a pact with

the devil. The problem [in U.S. intel] is

very great”.

If such an understanding did exist

between CIA and Mossad with regard

to al-Qaeda’s U.S. operatives, the

complicity would explain a number of

oddities: it would explain the CIA’s

nearly incoherent, and perhaps purposely

deceptive, reconstruction of events as

to how Mihdhar and Hazmi joined the

watch list; it might even explain the

apparent brazenness of the Israeli New

Jersey cell celebrating on the morning of

9/11 (protected under the CIA wing, they

were free to behave as they pleased). It

would also explain the assertion in one

of the leading Israeli dailies, Yedioth

Ahronoth, that in the months prior to

9/11, when the Israeli “art students” were

being identified and rounded up, the CIA

“actively promoted their expulsion”. The

implication in the Yedioth Ahronoth ar-

ticle was that the CIA was simply being

careless, not trying to spirit the Israelis

safely out of the country. At this point

we cannot be certain.

Israeli spying against the U.S. is

of course hotly denied by both govern-

ments. In 2002, responding to my own

questions about the “art students”, Is-

raeli embassy spokesman Mark Regev

issued a blanket denial. “Israel does

not spy on the United States”, Regev

told me. The pronouncements from of-

ficialdom are strictly pro forma, as it is

no secret that spying by Israel on the

United States has been wide-ranging and

unabashed. A 1996 General Accounting

Office report, for example, found that

Israel “conducts the most aggressive

espionage operation against the United

States of any U.S. ally”. More recently,

a former intelligence official told the Los

Angeles Times in 2004 that “[t]here is a

from Americans]”.

What is perhaps most damning is

that the Israelis’ celebration on the New

Jersey waterfront occurred in the first

sixteen minutes after the initial crash,

when no one was aware this was a ter-

rorist attack. In other words, from the

time the first plane hit the north tower,

at 8:46 a.m., to the time the second

plane hit the south tower, at 9:02 a.m.,

the overwhelming assumption of news

outlets and government officials was

that the plane’s impact was simply a

terrible accident. It was only after the

second plane hit that suspicions were

aroused. Yet if the men were cheering

for political reasons, as they reportedly

told the FBI, they obviously believed

they were witnessing a terrorist act, and

not an accident.

After returning safely to Israel in the

late autumn of 2001, three of the five

New Jersey Israelis spoke on a national

talk show that winter. Oded Ellner, who

on the afternoon of September 11 had,

Following a meeting the ADL’s Abe Foxman, 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”.

huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli

activities directed against the United

States”. It is also routine that Israeli

spying is ignored or downplayed by the

U.S. government (the case of convicted

spy Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in

prison in 1986, is a dramatic exception).

According to the American Prospect,

over the last 20 years at least six sealed

indictments have been issued against

individuals allegedly spying “on Israel’s

behalf”, but the cases were resolved

“through diplomatic and intelligence

channels” rather than a public airing in

the courts. Career Justice Department

and intelligence officials who track

Israeli espionage told the Prospect of

“long-standing frustration among inves-

tigators and prosecutors who feel that

cases that could have been made suc-

cessfully against Israeli spies were never

brought to trial, or that the investigations

were shut down prematurely”.

THE QUESTIONS THAT

AWAIT ANSWERS

Remarkably, the Urban Moving

Systems Israelis, when interrogated by

the FBI, explained their motives for

“celebration” on the New Jersey wa-

terfront – a celebration that consisted

of cheering, smiling, shooting film

with still and video cameras and, ac-

cording to the FBI, “high-fiving” – in

the Machiavellian light of geopolitics.

“Their explanation of why they were

happy”, FBI spokesman Margolin told

me, “was that the United States would

now have to commit itself to fighting

[Middle East] terrorism, that Americans

would have an understanding and empa-

thy for Israel’s circumstances, and that

the attacks were ultimately a good thing

for Israel”. When reporters on the morn-

ing of 9/11 asked former Israeli Prime

Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the

effect the attacks would have on Israeli-

American relations, he responded with

a similar gut analysis: “It’s very good”,

he remarked. Then he amended the state-

ment: “Well, not very good, but it will

generate immediate sympathy [for Israel

(Israeli spies continued from page 7)

Page 10

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“Their explanation

of why they were

happy was that …

the attacks were

ultimately a good

thing for Israel.”

like his compatriots, protested to ar-

resting officer Sgt. Dennis Rivelli that

“we’re Israeli”, admitted to the inter-

viewer: “We are coming from a country

that experiences terror daily. Our pur-

pose was to document the event”. By

his own admission, then, Ellner stood on

the New Jersey waterfront documenting

with film and video a terrorist act before

anyone knew it was a terrorist act.

One obvious question among many

comes to mind: If these men were trained

as professional spies, why did they

exhibit such outright oafishness at the

moment of truth on the waterfront? The

ABC network source close to the 20/20

report noted one of the more disturb-

ing explanations proffered by counter-

intelligence investigators at the FBI:

“The Israelis felt that in some way their

intelligence had worked out – i.e., they

were celebrating their own acumen and

ability as intelligence agents”.

The questions abound: Did the

Urban Moving Systems Israelis, ready

to “document the event”, arrive at the

waterfront before the first plane came in

from the north? And if they arrived right

after, why did they believe it was a ter-

rorist attack? What about the strange tale

of the “art students”? Could they have

been mere hustlers, as they claimed,

who ended up repeatedly crossing paths

with federal agents and living next door

to most of the 9/11 hijackers by coinci-

dence? Did the Israeli authorities find

out more about the impending attacks

than they shared with their U.S. coun-

10 / COUNTERPUNCH

terparts? Or did the Israeli spies on the

ground only intercept vague chatter that,

in their view, did not warrant breaking

cover to share the information? On the

other hand, did the U.S. government

receive more advance information about

the attacks from Israeli authorities than it

is willing to admit? What about the 9/11

Commission’s eliding of reported Israeli

warnings that may have led to the watch-

listing of Mihdhar and Hazmi? Were the

Israeli warnings purposely washed from

the historical record? Did the CIA know

more about pre-9/11 Israeli spying than

it has admitted?

The unfortunate fact is that the truth

may never be uncovered, not by offi-

cialdom, and certainly not by a passive

press. James Bamford, who in a coup

of reporting during the 1980s revealed

the inner workings of the NSA in The

Puzzle Palace, points to the “key prob-

lem”: “The Israelis were all sent out of

the country”, he says. “There’s no nexus

left. The FBI just can’t go knocking on

doors in Israel. They need to work with

the State Department. They need letters

rogatory, where you ask a government

of a foreign country to get answers from

citizens in that country”. The Israeli

government will not likely comply.

So any investigation “is now that

much more complicated”, says Bamford.

He recalls a story he produced for ABC

News concerning two murder suspects

– U.S. citizens – who fled to Israel and

fought extradition for ten years. “The

Israelis did nothing about it until I went

to Israel, knocking on doors, and finally

found the two suspects. I think it’d be a

great idea to go over and knock on their

doors”, says Bamford.

The suspects are gone. The trail is

cold. Yet many of the key facts and

promising leads sit freely on the web, in

the archives, safe in the news-morgues

at 20/20 and The Forward and Die Zeit.

An investigator close to the matter says

it reminds him of the Antonioni film

“Blow-Up”, a movie about a photog-

rapher who discovers the evidence of

a covered-up murder hidden before his

very eyes in the frame of an enlarged

photograph. It’s a mystery that no one

appears eager to solve. CP

Christopher Ketcham is a freelance

journalist who has written for Harp-

er’s and Salon. Many of his writings,

including his groundbreaking story on

the Israeli art students, can be read on

his website: christopherketcham.com, as

can the Shea memo.