Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:23 am
CHAPTER XI: INSIDER TRADING, CELL PHONES; MI-6 AND MOSSAD
A week after 9/11, the Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT, also cited in some reports as the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism), located in Herliya, Israel, called attention to very suspicious patterns of insider trading in put options (options to sell stock) in the shares of United Airlines and American Airlines, two companies whose planes were involved in the 9/11 attacks. Entitled "Black Tuesday: World's Largest Insider Trading Scam," the article was written by Don Radlauer. According to Radlauer's research, there was a 9,000% increase in United Airlines (UAL) put options between September 6 and September 10. Put options trading in UAL stock went up to 285 times the normal daily average on the Thursday before 9/11. American Airlines witnessed a 6,000% increase in put options in comparison to the usual average. In addition, there was a sharp rise in short interest in the shares of brokerage houses that had offices in the World Trade Center. Put options on Morgan Stanley went up to 27 times the usual level, and shorts of Merrill Lynch jumped to 12 times normal. This was accompanied by unusual buying of 5-year US Treasury notes, US government securities which are considered among the safest instruments for asset protection in case of some large world catastrophe.
Put options represent bets that a given stock will decline in value in a specific time frame. If the stock goes down, the trader who buys put options will rack up a profit. Selling the stock of a company short is a way to attempt to profit from the expected decline of the stock. The CBS broadcast Sixty Minutes commented on September 19 that "the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the US stock options market." Bloomberg Business News remarked on September 20 that "this could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your life ... this would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it were a coincidence."
It is widely assumed that the CIA tracks all important stock transactions, including the sensitive area of put options, in real time. The San Francisco Chronicle soon reported that a "source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, the American investment banking arm of the German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of these options." (Marrs 90) Alex Brown (A.B. Brown), supposedly the oldest investment bank in the US. Alex Brown had been swallowed up by Bankers Trust in 1997. Alex Brown had numerous CIA connections. Until 1998, the chairman was A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who left in that year to become counselor to CIA Director George Tenet. On March 26, 2001, Krongard received an important promotion within the CIA. (Marrs 90)
The US Securities and Exchange Commission pledged to get to the bottom of this question, and so did the German Bundesbank, the central banking authority of that country. But all references to 9/11 insider trading soon disappeared from the press. The finance oligarchs were not interested in pursuing this investigation, which appeared by its very nature to undercut the official version of 9/11. The 9/11 commission was eager to liquidate the entire matter in a few mendacious lines:
Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the 9/11 attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options -- investments that payoff only when a stock drops in price -- surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 -- highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single US-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific US-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC and the FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous. (9/11 commission 498 note 130)
Here is yet another example of the 9/11 commission begging the question. The issue is not whether the 9/11 commission's alleged "single US-based institutional investor" had "no conceivable ties to al Qaeda." It is rather whether such an investor had inside foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda, after all, is an organization of patsies whose primary role in the entire affair is to distract attention from the underlying realities of the case. We must conclude once again that the 9/11 commission is lying.
CELL PHONE CALLS?
In the first days and weeks after 9/11, phone calls made by passengers of the hijacked jetliners to persons on the ground played a central role in the fabrication of the official version of 9/11. If the 9/11 commission had been serious, it would have published a complete compendium of the phone calls made by 9/11 victims, with complete transcripts and complete recordings where available. The phone calls should have been thoroughly investigated to determine their authenticity. This is one of the many obvious things which it was the plain duty of the 9/11 commission to do, but which it refused to do. Instead, the 9/11 commission has relied on fragmentary hearsay evidence for the contents of the calls, which it has then used without any process of evidentiary evaluation to shore up its 9/11 story.
The assembling, collating, and evaluation of the entire canon of alleged 9/11 phone calls is a task which goes beyond the scope of the present study, and which needs to be tackled in a separate and comprehensive effort. The alleged Barbara Olsen telephone call, which loomed so large during the first week after 9/11, presents many contradictions; these have been discussed by Gerhard Wisnewski. The main difficulty with the reported Barbara Olsen phone calls is that the sole source is Theodore Olsen, the Solicitor General of the United States and a central figure in an aggressive and reactionary clique which played a key role in the Clinton impeachment and other destabilization operations against the legal government. This was again the same Olsen who had instructed the US Supreme Court that "it is easy to imagine an infinite number of situations ... where government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information out." (Yahoo News, March 22, 2001) Without attempting to set forth the numerous internal problems presented by the available version of the Barbara Olsen phone calls, we can safely disregard this material as very dubious hearsay evidence from an entirely unreliable source.
Other phone calls present mutual contradictions. As Woody Box has pointed out, the two American 11 flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney allegedly each made a separate phone call to report the ongoing hijacking. Ms. Ong talked about hijackers spraying mace, but Ms. Sweeny did not. Ms. Sweeny reported seeing a bomb with yellow wires, which Ms. Ong did not mention. Are the two flight attendants reporting events as seen in different parts of the plane, or are the calls fakes, simulated by well-trained imposters working for intelligence agencies as part of the general orchestration of 9/11? These are important questions, but too much questions of opinion to be considered here.
In conformity with the methodology employed in this study, we rather need to ask if there is anything about the reported 9/11 victims' phone calls which takes us beyond the realm of opinion and into that of physical-technical impossibility. The answer to this is at least a provisional and partial yes: there is persuasive evidence that cell phone calls from planes flying above about 8,000 feet would have been intermittent at certain times, and totally unfeasible at others.
The 9/11 commission report never inquired as to whether cell phone calls can be made from planes at any altitude. It therefore conveys the notion that cell phones would work fine at 10,000 feet, at 20,000 feet, or 30,000 feet, and would allow conversations of several minutes or more in length. Some of the 9/11 phone calls may have been made with GTE Airphones, the telephones typically installed in the seat back in from of each passenger. These required credit cards for activation, and would have been reasonably reliable at most altitudes and in most locations. Other 9/11 phone calls were almost certainly made with cellular wireless telephones. Whether these cell phones could have been used or not on 9/11 in some of the ways described is subject to serious question.
CELL PHONE CALLS NOT FEASIBLE OVER 8,000 FEET
Airlines banned the use of cell phones a number of years ago because the cell phone signals interfered with the navigation systems of their aircraft. For this reason, many people have never tried to use cell phones while traveling in planes. If they did, they might be surprised to find that their cell phones do not work very well, or do not work at all. Professor Michel Chossudovsky contends that "given the prevailing technology in September 2001, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft traveling at high speed above 8,000 feet.
One expert quoted by Chossudovsky comments: "Wireless communications networks weren't designed for ground-to-air communication. Cellular experts privately admit that they're surprised the calls were able to be placed from the hijacked planes, and that they lasted as long as they did. They speculate that the only reason that the calls went through in the first place is that the aircraft were flying so close to the ground. ("Will They Allow Cell Phones on Planes?, by Christopher Elliott ) Just after 9/11, Alexa Graf a spokeswoman for AT&T, told a reporter: "It was almost a fluke that the [9/11] calls reached their destinations ... From high altitudes, the call quality is not very good, and most callers will experience drops. Although calls are not reliable, callers can pick up and hold calls for a little while below a certain altitude." ("Final Contact," by Betsy Harter)
Further doubts were raised about the slovenly and duplicitous methods of the 9/11 commission just a few days after its final report was released in late July 2004. This occurred when American Airlines and Qualcomm announced that they would, in the near future, be able to offer consumers a new wireless technology that would permit airline passengers to use their cell phones while aloft in a commercial airliner. The very fact that this event was placed in the future as of July 2004 was irrefutable real-world evidence that it had not generally been possible in the past, for example in September 2001. (See "American Airlines and QUAL COMM Complete Test Flight to Evaluate In-Cabin Mobile Phone Use" )
This innovation was notable enough to attract the attention of the press. One paper commented: "Travelers could be talking on their personal cell phones as early as 2006.Earlier this month [July 2004], American Airlines conducted a trial run on a modified aircraft that permitted cell phone calls." (Washington Post, July 27, 2004) Aviation Week described the new technology as follows:
For the test flight, which took off from Dallas-Fort Worth, an airliner was fitted out with antennas in the front and rear of the cabin to transmit cell phone calls to a small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station. This "pico cell" transmitted cell phone calls from the aircraft via a Globalstar satellite to the worldwide terrestrial phone network. (Aviation Week, July 20, 2004) Needless to say, neither this service, nor the associated third generation hardware, nor the pico cell CDMA base station inside the cabin (which functions as the equivalent of a cell phone communication tower inside the plane) was operational in September 2001.
According to aviation communications experts, the crucial consideration in determining whether the cell phone calls could have been made is the altitude of the aircraft at the time. Once a plane reaches 8,000 feet, which often occurs just a few minutes after takeoff, cell phone calls are in general not feasible. Professor Chossudovsky concludes that, "given the wireless technology available on September 11, 2001, these cell calls could not have been placed from high altitude." The only way passengers could have gotten through to family, friends, and authorities using their cell phones is if the planes were flying below 8,000 feet. And even at low altitudes of below 8,000 feet, cell phone communication is of poor quality. The crucial question is therefore: at what altitude were the planes traveling, when the calls were placed? The details provided by the 9/11 commission on the altitude of the airplanes are fragmentary, but there is no blanket contention that the planes were consistently traveling at low altitude. On the contrary, the 9/11 commission report seems to indicate that a considerable number of the cell phone calls were placed while the planes were traveling at altitudes above 8,000 feet, which is generally the maximum altitude for cell phone transmission. (Michel Chossudovsky, "More Holes in the Official Story: The 9/11 Cell Phone Calls.") Professor Dewdney has arrived at similar conclusions. Here is yet another area where the 9/11 myth and the 9/11 commission report collide with the boundaries of physical reality and possibility.
MI-6 AND MOSSAD
9/11 was carried out primarily by a US-centered rogue network or invisible government faction, but it was not carried out alone. The foreign intelligence service which contributed the most indirect support to 9/11 was unquestionably the British MI-6. The cooperation and interpenetration of the Anglo-American intelligence agencies is so overwhelming and so thoroughly institutionalized that it is hardly noticed by US commentators. The CIA and MI-6 are virtually Siamese twins sharing a number of vital organs. This fact is much deplored by those of us who believe that the British Crown, the City of London, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Oxford Circus (the London home of MI-6) are among the most baneful factors influencing American national life, but it is by now a well-established and entrenched fact. Whatever is known to the US National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, is known simultaneously to the British GCHQ at Cheltenham, by virtue of bilateral intelligence sharing agreements. Some light has been thrown on this phenomenon by Claire Short, when she reported that the red boxes sent to her by the UK intelligence service contained texts of private conversations of Kofi Annan which had been bugged by the Anglo-Americans. GCHQ has also had a recent whistle-blower who has fleshed out other parts of this picture. Many of these arrangements go back to World War II, and they have never been abrogated. The British functioned as the junior partners of the US invisible government during the Iran-contra affair, and they continue to do so today. In addition, although the British may be the junior partners in terms of military assets and disposable resources, they are often very much the senior partner when it comes to developing strategies and plans. Who could know the Arab and Moslem worlds better than the British orientalists? The overall Anglo-American plan for the balkanization of the Middle East, the Bernard Lewis plan, is really a distillation of two centuries of historical experience by the British Arab Bureau and the British India Office. The extraordinarily close US-UK alliance lets the British side do what it wants within institutional channels, discretely, and silently. If we were to detail the extent of British participation in the history of NATO state- sponsored terrorism, in the Afghan guerilla movement against the Soviets, in the foundation of al Qaeda, in the development of the figure of Bin Laden (who once reportedly kept a pied-a-terre in the London suburb of Wembley) in the role of London as the premier world center of Islamic fundamentalism and of other terrorism, and a host of other subjects, we would essentially have to re-write almost this entire book from a slightly different point of view. There can be in short no doubt that the main supporting role in 9/11 was played by British intelligence and British assets generally.
CIA and MI-5/MI-6 have also practiced a certain division of labor. Although congressional and parliamentary oversight is usually derisory, there is always the chance that an investigation may reveal embarrassing secrets. Therefore it has sometimes seemed advantageous to have the CIA undertake certain tasks in the UK, and to have MI-6 do certain jobs in the US -- precisely to avoid the problem of legislative oversight in the country whose territory was being violated. During World War I and World II, the British were happy to run operations designed to get the US embroiled in war -- operations which were welcomed by the Wall Street finance oligarchy. In 1976, by contrast, CIA Director George Bush was implicated in a campaign to overthrow the Labour Party government of Britain by helping to orchestrate a series of scandals. (Tarpley 1992 internet edition) This campaign was part of a transatlantic effort to install the unspeakable Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister.
The Israelis, by contrast, have never wanted to accept the reciprocity of intelligence sharing which the British have more or less instituted. Israel is far less willing to share its state secrets than the British have been. The result has been that the Israelis have had to work hard to purloin the kind of US secrets which the British have obtained as a matter of course. The archetypal British deployment in this regard occurred when they staffed their Washington Embassy with Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, and Guy Burgess. The British got the information they wanted, and some of it even ended up in Moscow and Beijing -- thanks to these three dedicated triple agents of the British Crown. This trio had some close scrapes, but they never saw the inside of jail. The Israelis, by contrast, had to rely on US Navy civilian employee Jonathan Pollard, who was found out in the mid-1980s and sentenced to life in prison, where he still remains despite pleas on his behalf by Netanyahu. British espionage can use the existing channels set up by treaties and agreements; the Israelis have to improvise networks informally as they go along, which can often be more risky.
Perhaps this is why the more picaresque stories of foreign intelligence involvement in the US during 2001 tend to focus on the Israelis. One such episode involved five Israeli moving men who were arrested on 9/11 after cavorting on a New Jersey rooftop while they were filming, with evident jubilation, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.
According to Haaretz, they "were arrested after they went up on the: roof of a building and posed grinning for photographs with the burning towers in the background. Police found a large amount of cash in their car and suspected them of being members of a terrorist group." They were later charged with living and working in the US without permits and were ordered deported. The five were held for more than two months in a Brooklyn prison. Israeli Ambassador David Ivry, Richard Clarke's friend, claimed they were being held under poor conditions. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two New York Congressmen worked to secure their release. When the men were arrested, they all had two sets of passports, one Israeli and one European, prompting the law enforcement authorities to consider them Mossad agents and apparently suspects in the 9/11 attacks. In addition, An Israeli drug gang was rounded up shortly after the 9/11 attacks. One of the gang leaders, whose apartment was two blocks from the WTC, was arrested when he refused to evacuate his apartment in the emergency. Drugs, cash, and guns were discovered in his apartment, and he was arrested, as were his accomplices. (Haaretz, October 29, 2001)
The five moving men were finally deported, according to the New York Times of November 21, 2001. According to this report, "The five were asked to take polygraph tests before being allowed to leave. But Paul Kurtzberg refused on principle to divulge much about his role in the Israeli Army or subsequent work for people who may have had ties to Israeli intelligence." Kurtzberg's attorney, Steven Noah Gordon, said that his client and the others had all finally agreed to the polygraph exams. One of Kurtzberg's interrogations lasted seven hours. The other four Israelis were Oded Ellner, Omer Gavriel Marmari, Sivan Kurzberg, and Yaron Shmuel. Two additional Israelis were detained in Cleveland, both of whom had just completed their service in the Israeli Defense Forces. At least 50 Israelis were detained after 9/11, with arrests reported in San Diego, Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis, New York, and Cleveland. (New York Times of November 21, 2001)
At the time of 9/11, Israeli intelligence was clearly in an aggressive mode. Mexican authorities arrested two Israeli men on October 10, as they attempted to enter the Legislative Palace in Mexico City. The two men were armed with 9-mm pistols, nine grenades, explosives, three detonators, and 58 bullets. The two men, Salvador Gersson Smike and Sar Ben Zui, were wrestled to the ground by a group of Mexican workers, and were then detained by the Mexican Attorney General's office. (Cronica de Roy, October 13, 2001)
MEGA
In January 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a phone conversation between an Israeli official at the embassy in Washington, and Danny Yatom, the head of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service. The official wanted permission from the spy boss to "go to Mega" in order to procure a copy of a confidential letter that had been sent by then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, containing US assurances about a recently negotiated agreement for an Israeli military withdrawal from the Hebron area in the West Bank. Yatom, according to the NSA intercept, rejected the request, admonishing his agent, "This is not something we use Mega for." (Washington Post, May 7, 1997) A name mentioned in relation to the Mega scandal was that of Leon Fuerth, Vice President Albert Gore's national security adviser, and a fanatical supporter of the Likud. The Washington Post, in a 1998 profile of Fuerth, reported that he had been under suspicion by US intelligence officials of delivering sensitive US policy information to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud. Why was the Mega issue dropped? In March 1999, British author Gordon Thomas asserted in his book entitled Gideon's Spies that Israel had blackmailed the Clinton Administration with a threat to release tapped telephone conversations between the President and Monica Lewinsky. In her testimony before independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Lewinsky had reported that the President had warned her, on March 29, 1997, at the height of the Mega hunt, that he suspected the White House telephones were being tapped by agents of an unnamed foreign country.
THE CARL CAMERON REPORTS, DECEMBER 2001
US public attention was focused on Israeli intelligence activities by a series of three news features by Carl Cameron in mid-December 2001. Cameron had received detailed information from Washington sources. At the time of this report, Cameron said that 60 Israelis were still being held by US authorities. As many as 140 Israelis had been arrested, including many before the 9/11 attacks. According to Cameron, many of the Israelis "stated they served in military intelligence, electronic surveillance intercept and/or explosive ordnance units." The Israelis, some of whom were "described as active Israeli military or intelligence operatives, have been detained on immigration charges or under the new Patriot Anti-Terrorism Law," Cameron reported. According to this report, there was "no indication the Israelis were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it." On this sensitive issue, a highly placed investigative source told Fox News there were "tie-ins," but refused further details. "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified, cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It is classified information," the source said. An Israeli Embassy spokesman offered categorical denials, and said any suggestion of Israelis spying on or in the United States is simply not true. Another group of Israelis in North Carolina was suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs whom the U.S. authorities were investigating for links to terrorism. It was further reported that numerous US government agencies were part of a working group that had been compiling evidence in the case since the mid-1990s. The probe had documented hundreds of incidents in cities and towns across the country; the investigators had concluded that this extensive pattern might "well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity." Many Israelis detained claimed that they were art students from the University of Jerusalem or Bezalel Academy. These self-styled Israeli art students often sought to make contact with US government personnel by saying they wanted to sell cheap art or handiwork. Cameron's documents indicated that these art students had "targeted" and penetrated military bases, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and dozens of other government facilities -- including even secret offices and unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel. Another phase of the investigation, said Cameron, had resulted in the detention and arrest of dozens of Israelis working at kiosks and pushcarts in American malls, where they had been selling toys called "Puzzlecar" and "Zoomcopter." These vendors had ceased their operations when press reports surfaced about Israelis being arrested for immigration violations.
A report obtained by Cameron from the General Accounting Office investigation which referred to Israel under the euphemism of "Country A" reported: "According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the government of country A conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the U.S. of any U.S. ally." A Defense Intelligence Agency report specified that Israel had a "voracious appetite for information .... The Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every fact of their political and economic policies." "[Israel] aggressively collects military and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target." "Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to achieve its collection objectives," the DIA document concluded. (Carl Cameron, "Suspected Israeli Spies Held by U.S." Fox News, Dec. 11-14, 2001)
AMDOCS
Another of Cameron's installments dealt with the role of the Israeli-controlled company AMDOCS in the installation of the new White House communications system during the mid-1990s. This issue had surfaced earlier. According to a May 2000 story in Insight magazine, the employees of an Israeli company had enjoyed almost unsupervised access to White House telephone lines and other extremely sensitive communications equipment. The Insight article, entitled "FBI Probes Espionage At Clinton White House," reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing an Israeli operation to spy on top U.S. officials through hacking into secure telephone networks. "More than two dozen US intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials have told Insight that the FBI believes Israel has intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing basis," the story said, specifying that the investigation involved eavesdropping on calls to and from the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the State Department. According to Insight, the FBI was tracking an Israeli businessman working for a local phone company, whose wife was suspected of being a Mossad officer working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Federal agents searched the businessman's office, and found a list of the FBI's most sensitive phone numbers, including "black" lines used for wiretapping. "Some of the listed numbers were lines that the FBI used to keep track of the suspected Israeli spy operation," said Insight. Authorities were alerted to this operation by a phone manager who became suspicious about the activities of a subcontractor working on phone-billing software and hardware designs for the CIA; the subcontractor was employed by an Israeli-based company. Insight reported that the means of spying involved a private company which provides record-keeping software and support services for major phone companies in the United States. Insight quoted an anonymous US government source as saying, "It is a politically sensitive matter. I can't comment on it beyond telling you that anything involving Israel on this particular matter is off-limits. It's that hot." Insight did not name this firm as AMDOCS, but Cameron later supplied the name.
Cameron reported that, over the previous year and a half, the FBI had been investigating Bell Atlantic and the telecommunications billing company AMDOCS of Chesterfield, Missouri. According to Cameron's sources, a senior-level employee of AMDOCS had a separate TI data phone line running directly from his St. Louis offices to Tel Aviv. Cameron noted that AMDOCS had the contracts with the 25 largest telephone companies in the United States to handle their directory assistance, calling record and billing work, which in effect gave AMDOCS real-time access to every telephone in the US, including records of all phone calls. According to Cameron, AMDOCS had been investigated on several occasions by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, for suspected ties to the Israeli Mafia, as well as to espionage. In 1999, the National Security Agency issued a TOP SECRET/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information report, warning that US phone records were getting into the hands of foreign governments -- specifically the Israeli government. US authorities were especially concerned about the possibility that the Israeli Mafia was monitoring their communications traffic. One reason for this concern was a 1997 incident in which FBI, Secret Service, DEA and LAPD telecommunications were "completely compromised by Israeli organized crime," using precisely the data streams supervised by AMDOCS. In this instance, a major Federal and local investigation of an Israeli-linked organized-crime ring, trafficking in cocaine and ecstasy, had been thwarted, because "the bad guys had the cops' beepers, cell phones, and even home phones under surveillance." Investigators concluded that AMDOCS may have been the source of the information.
And AMDOCS was not the only Israeli company with access to White House communications. The London Sunday Times had reported in the spring of 2001 that Israeli intelligence agents had used Telrad, a company subcontracted by Nortel to develop a communications system for the White House, to tap data flowing from the White House. These data were copied into a secret Israeli computer in Washington and then transferred to Tel Aviv two to three times a week. According to this report, Israel had intercepted e-mails from President Clinton as a result of this operation. Telrad was Israel's leading telecommunications company, and began by supplying phones to the Israeli Ministry of Communications in 1951. In 2001, Telrad provided "secure communications systems for the Israeli Defense Forces," according to the website of its major parent company, Koor Industries. Koor owned 80% of Telrad; the other 20% was owned by Nortel. Nortel itself was reported to be in a marketing partnership with Comverse. (London Sunday Times, May 21, 2000)
Comverse was Comverse Infosys, an Israeli-controlled company which provided "wire tapping equipment for law enforcement." Using Comverse software, law enforcement agencies employ computers to tap into the elaborate nationwide system of telephone switchers and routers, routing the targeted phone conversations into the computers of investigators authorized to do the wiretaps. Comverse managed and maintained the computers and the software, giving Comverse potential access to all of the data. Fox reported that "Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned October 18th in a hand delivered letter from 15 local, state, and federal law enforcement officials, who complained that "law enforcement's current electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today" than they were before Comverse was brought in under new US federal legislation. In Israel, Fox reported, Comverse worked so closely with the government that the Ministry of Industry and Trade (formerly headed by Ariel Sharon) paid 50% of the firm's research and development costs. Fox added: "But investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue, or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse, is considered career suicide." Fox reported that the FBI center at Quantico, Virginia handled the government contracting and purchasing of the wiretap equipment and, "for years they have thrown much of the business to Comverse. A handful of former US law enforcement officials involved in awarding Comverse government contracts over the years were then hired to work for the company. Numerous sources say some of those individuals were asked to leave government service under troubling circumstances. What troubles investigators most is that in some cases in New York, certain suspects altered their behavior dramatically right after supposedly secret wire taps had begun, and this caused grave concern that they were tipped in advance." (Fox News, Dec. 13, 2001)
COMVERSE INFOSYS
Fox linked the Israeli spy operation to September 11, saying that "U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks fear that suspects may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of AMDOCS." This segment dealt with another Israeli high-tech company, Comverse Infosys, which furnished wiretapping equipment for U.S. law enforcement. Under a 1994 law, private telecommunications and computer companies were required to make their network of switchers and routers available to law enforcement for wiretapping. Some investigators believed that Comverse electronic eavesdropping equipment had a "back door" through which wiretaps could be intercepted by unauthorized parties. One source said that the standing joke among U.S. law-enforcement agents was that their wiretaps were going directly to Tel Aviv.
Secretary of State Colin Powell commented on the Israeli arrests at a State Department briefing held on December 13:
The Israeli Embassy in Washington offered its usual blanket denial of any Israeli espionage in the US. Pro-Israeli pressure groups mobilized in the wake of the Carl Cameron broadcasts in an effort to suppress this highly embarrassing and suspicious news. Among the most active was a group called CAMERA ("Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America"), which launched an e-mail, fax, and phone call campaign, to force Fox TV to drop its probe of the Israeli espionage scandal. Fox soon caved in, and no more reports were broadcast. Fox had also removed the transcripts of Cameron's reports from its website by the end of December 2001.
In the fall of 2002, the German liberal weekly Die Zeit of Hamburg returned to the question of Israeli espionage in the US before 9/11. This paper concluded that "between December 2000 and April 2001 a whole horde of lsraeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, followed the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States. In their secret investigations, the Israelis came very close to the later perpetrators of September 11. In the town of Hollywood, Florida they identified the two former Hamburg students and later accused terror pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi as possible terrorists. Agents lived in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock." According to Die Zeit, "the Israelis provided a list including the names of at least four of the 19 hijackers of September 11, but this was apparently not treated as sufficiently urgent by the CIA and therefore not passed on to the FBI." According to this account, the US agencies dawdled and temporized, and then reacted with annoyance when the massive presence of Israeli espionage was discovered. Two who were on the alleged Israeli list were Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, both supposedly on American 77, the plane the government claims hit the Pentagon. (Die Zeit, October 1, 2002) The Israelis doubtless knew a great deal in advance, but they can always point to their pro forma warning to the US government that an attack was imminent.
Adding up these reports, we can conclude that Israel maintained a massive and illegal espionage operation in the US, spying on all phases of American life, from the White House and the federal agencies through the business world to the foot traffic in shopping malls. Israel minutely observed the Atta-Shehhi-Jarrah-Hanjour patsy operation, and the Israeli government formally warned the US about it. The central contention coming out of the Carl Cameron reports is once again that "U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks fear that suspects [meaning the 19 alleged hijackers] may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of AMDOCS." Naturally, this evaluation presupposes the validity of the official version which is contested and rejected here. If the 19 patsies were working under the direction of a faction of the US invisible government, as is contended here, what could the role of the Israelis have been? Could the Israelis have functioned as a cutout, allowing certain kinds of communication between the US mole network and the patsies? This is possible, but there is no compelling reason to assume it. The very serious matters of Israeli agents of influence in the US government attempting to co-determine US policy towards Iran and other countries, urgently raised by the FBI investigation of Larry Franklin as an Israeli mole in the Pentagon in late August 2004, is discussed in the closing chapter.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz later reported that, about two hours before American 11 hit the North Tower, two employees of the Israeli company Odigo who worked in Herzliya, Israel, had received an email message warning that terror attacks in New York City were imminent. Odigo was an internet instant messaging service. The message had been sent through Odigo's instant messaging. Odigo had offices in New York City about two blocks from the World Trade Center. The full text was never made public. (Haaretz, September 26, 2001) The FBI was informed of this message, but, true to form, did nothing. The last press references to the Odigo warnings came in late November 2001. The 9/11 commission ignored this matter.
A week after 9/11, the Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT, also cited in some reports as the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism), located in Herliya, Israel, called attention to very suspicious patterns of insider trading in put options (options to sell stock) in the shares of United Airlines and American Airlines, two companies whose planes were involved in the 9/11 attacks. Entitled "Black Tuesday: World's Largest Insider Trading Scam," the article was written by Don Radlauer. According to Radlauer's research, there was a 9,000% increase in United Airlines (UAL) put options between September 6 and September 10. Put options trading in UAL stock went up to 285 times the normal daily average on the Thursday before 9/11. American Airlines witnessed a 6,000% increase in put options in comparison to the usual average. In addition, there was a sharp rise in short interest in the shares of brokerage houses that had offices in the World Trade Center. Put options on Morgan Stanley went up to 27 times the usual level, and shorts of Merrill Lynch jumped to 12 times normal. This was accompanied by unusual buying of 5-year US Treasury notes, US government securities which are considered among the safest instruments for asset protection in case of some large world catastrophe.
Put options represent bets that a given stock will decline in value in a specific time frame. If the stock goes down, the trader who buys put options will rack up a profit. Selling the stock of a company short is a way to attempt to profit from the expected decline of the stock. The CBS broadcast Sixty Minutes commented on September 19 that "the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the US stock options market." Bloomberg Business News remarked on September 20 that "this could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your life ... this would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it were a coincidence."
It is widely assumed that the CIA tracks all important stock transactions, including the sensitive area of put options, in real time. The San Francisco Chronicle soon reported that a "source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, the American investment banking arm of the German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of these options." (Marrs 90) Alex Brown (A.B. Brown), supposedly the oldest investment bank in the US. Alex Brown had been swallowed up by Bankers Trust in 1997. Alex Brown had numerous CIA connections. Until 1998, the chairman was A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who left in that year to become counselor to CIA Director George Tenet. On March 26, 2001, Krongard received an important promotion within the CIA. (Marrs 90)
The US Securities and Exchange Commission pledged to get to the bottom of this question, and so did the German Bundesbank, the central banking authority of that country. But all references to 9/11 insider trading soon disappeared from the press. The finance oligarchs were not interested in pursuing this investigation, which appeared by its very nature to undercut the official version of 9/11. The 9/11 commission was eager to liquidate the entire matter in a few mendacious lines:
Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the 9/11 attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options -- investments that payoff only when a stock drops in price -- surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 -- highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single US-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific US-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC and the FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous. (9/11 commission 498 note 130)
Here is yet another example of the 9/11 commission begging the question. The issue is not whether the 9/11 commission's alleged "single US-based institutional investor" had "no conceivable ties to al Qaeda." It is rather whether such an investor had inside foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda, after all, is an organization of patsies whose primary role in the entire affair is to distract attention from the underlying realities of the case. We must conclude once again that the 9/11 commission is lying.
CELL PHONE CALLS?
In the first days and weeks after 9/11, phone calls made by passengers of the hijacked jetliners to persons on the ground played a central role in the fabrication of the official version of 9/11. If the 9/11 commission had been serious, it would have published a complete compendium of the phone calls made by 9/11 victims, with complete transcripts and complete recordings where available. The phone calls should have been thoroughly investigated to determine their authenticity. This is one of the many obvious things which it was the plain duty of the 9/11 commission to do, but which it refused to do. Instead, the 9/11 commission has relied on fragmentary hearsay evidence for the contents of the calls, which it has then used without any process of evidentiary evaluation to shore up its 9/11 story.
The assembling, collating, and evaluation of the entire canon of alleged 9/11 phone calls is a task which goes beyond the scope of the present study, and which needs to be tackled in a separate and comprehensive effort. The alleged Barbara Olsen telephone call, which loomed so large during the first week after 9/11, presents many contradictions; these have been discussed by Gerhard Wisnewski. The main difficulty with the reported Barbara Olsen phone calls is that the sole source is Theodore Olsen, the Solicitor General of the United States and a central figure in an aggressive and reactionary clique which played a key role in the Clinton impeachment and other destabilization operations against the legal government. This was again the same Olsen who had instructed the US Supreme Court that "it is easy to imagine an infinite number of situations ... where government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information out." (Yahoo News, March 22, 2001) Without attempting to set forth the numerous internal problems presented by the available version of the Barbara Olsen phone calls, we can safely disregard this material as very dubious hearsay evidence from an entirely unreliable source.
Other phone calls present mutual contradictions. As Woody Box has pointed out, the two American 11 flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney allegedly each made a separate phone call to report the ongoing hijacking. Ms. Ong talked about hijackers spraying mace, but Ms. Sweeny did not. Ms. Sweeny reported seeing a bomb with yellow wires, which Ms. Ong did not mention. Are the two flight attendants reporting events as seen in different parts of the plane, or are the calls fakes, simulated by well-trained imposters working for intelligence agencies as part of the general orchestration of 9/11? These are important questions, but too much questions of opinion to be considered here.
In conformity with the methodology employed in this study, we rather need to ask if there is anything about the reported 9/11 victims' phone calls which takes us beyond the realm of opinion and into that of physical-technical impossibility. The answer to this is at least a provisional and partial yes: there is persuasive evidence that cell phone calls from planes flying above about 8,000 feet would have been intermittent at certain times, and totally unfeasible at others.
The 9/11 commission report never inquired as to whether cell phone calls can be made from planes at any altitude. It therefore conveys the notion that cell phones would work fine at 10,000 feet, at 20,000 feet, or 30,000 feet, and would allow conversations of several minutes or more in length. Some of the 9/11 phone calls may have been made with GTE Airphones, the telephones typically installed in the seat back in from of each passenger. These required credit cards for activation, and would have been reasonably reliable at most altitudes and in most locations. Other 9/11 phone calls were almost certainly made with cellular wireless telephones. Whether these cell phones could have been used or not on 9/11 in some of the ways described is subject to serious question.
CELL PHONE CALLS NOT FEASIBLE OVER 8,000 FEET
Airlines banned the use of cell phones a number of years ago because the cell phone signals interfered with the navigation systems of their aircraft. For this reason, many people have never tried to use cell phones while traveling in planes. If they did, they might be surprised to find that their cell phones do not work very well, or do not work at all. Professor Michel Chossudovsky contends that "given the prevailing technology in September 2001, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft traveling at high speed above 8,000 feet.
One expert quoted by Chossudovsky comments: "Wireless communications networks weren't designed for ground-to-air communication. Cellular experts privately admit that they're surprised the calls were able to be placed from the hijacked planes, and that they lasted as long as they did. They speculate that the only reason that the calls went through in the first place is that the aircraft were flying so close to the ground. ("Will They Allow Cell Phones on Planes?, by Christopher Elliott ) Just after 9/11, Alexa Graf a spokeswoman for AT&T, told a reporter: "It was almost a fluke that the [9/11] calls reached their destinations ... From high altitudes, the call quality is not very good, and most callers will experience drops. Although calls are not reliable, callers can pick up and hold calls for a little while below a certain altitude." ("Final Contact," by Betsy Harter)
Further doubts were raised about the slovenly and duplicitous methods of the 9/11 commission just a few days after its final report was released in late July 2004. This occurred when American Airlines and Qualcomm announced that they would, in the near future, be able to offer consumers a new wireless technology that would permit airline passengers to use their cell phones while aloft in a commercial airliner. The very fact that this event was placed in the future as of July 2004 was irrefutable real-world evidence that it had not generally been possible in the past, for example in September 2001. (See "American Airlines and QUAL COMM Complete Test Flight to Evaluate In-Cabin Mobile Phone Use" )
This innovation was notable enough to attract the attention of the press. One paper commented: "Travelers could be talking on their personal cell phones as early as 2006.Earlier this month [July 2004], American Airlines conducted a trial run on a modified aircraft that permitted cell phone calls." (Washington Post, July 27, 2004) Aviation Week described the new technology as follows:
Qualcomm and American Airlines are exploring ways for passengers to use commercial cell phones in-flight for air-to-ground communication. In a recent 2-hour proof-of-concept flight, representatives from government and the media used commercial Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) third-generation cell phones to place and receive calls and text messages from friends on the ground.
For the test flight, which took off from Dallas-Fort Worth, an airliner was fitted out with antennas in the front and rear of the cabin to transmit cell phone calls to a small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station. This "pico cell" transmitted cell phone calls from the aircraft via a Globalstar satellite to the worldwide terrestrial phone network. (Aviation Week, July 20, 2004) Needless to say, neither this service, nor the associated third generation hardware, nor the pico cell CDMA base station inside the cabin (which functions as the equivalent of a cell phone communication tower inside the plane) was operational in September 2001.
According to aviation communications experts, the crucial consideration in determining whether the cell phone calls could have been made is the altitude of the aircraft at the time. Once a plane reaches 8,000 feet, which often occurs just a few minutes after takeoff, cell phone calls are in general not feasible. Professor Chossudovsky concludes that, "given the wireless technology available on September 11, 2001, these cell calls could not have been placed from high altitude." The only way passengers could have gotten through to family, friends, and authorities using their cell phones is if the planes were flying below 8,000 feet. And even at low altitudes of below 8,000 feet, cell phone communication is of poor quality. The crucial question is therefore: at what altitude were the planes traveling, when the calls were placed? The details provided by the 9/11 commission on the altitude of the airplanes are fragmentary, but there is no blanket contention that the planes were consistently traveling at low altitude. On the contrary, the 9/11 commission report seems to indicate that a considerable number of the cell phone calls were placed while the planes were traveling at altitudes above 8,000 feet, which is generally the maximum altitude for cell phone transmission. (Michel Chossudovsky, "More Holes in the Official Story: The 9/11 Cell Phone Calls.") Professor Dewdney has arrived at similar conclusions. Here is yet another area where the 9/11 myth and the 9/11 commission report collide with the boundaries of physical reality and possibility.
MI-6 AND MOSSAD
9/11 was carried out primarily by a US-centered rogue network or invisible government faction, but it was not carried out alone. The foreign intelligence service which contributed the most indirect support to 9/11 was unquestionably the British MI-6. The cooperation and interpenetration of the Anglo-American intelligence agencies is so overwhelming and so thoroughly institutionalized that it is hardly noticed by US commentators. The CIA and MI-6 are virtually Siamese twins sharing a number of vital organs. This fact is much deplored by those of us who believe that the British Crown, the City of London, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Oxford Circus (the London home of MI-6) are among the most baneful factors influencing American national life, but it is by now a well-established and entrenched fact. Whatever is known to the US National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, is known simultaneously to the British GCHQ at Cheltenham, by virtue of bilateral intelligence sharing agreements. Some light has been thrown on this phenomenon by Claire Short, when she reported that the red boxes sent to her by the UK intelligence service contained texts of private conversations of Kofi Annan which had been bugged by the Anglo-Americans. GCHQ has also had a recent whistle-blower who has fleshed out other parts of this picture. Many of these arrangements go back to World War II, and they have never been abrogated. The British functioned as the junior partners of the US invisible government during the Iran-contra affair, and they continue to do so today. In addition, although the British may be the junior partners in terms of military assets and disposable resources, they are often very much the senior partner when it comes to developing strategies and plans. Who could know the Arab and Moslem worlds better than the British orientalists? The overall Anglo-American plan for the balkanization of the Middle East, the Bernard Lewis plan, is really a distillation of two centuries of historical experience by the British Arab Bureau and the British India Office. The extraordinarily close US-UK alliance lets the British side do what it wants within institutional channels, discretely, and silently. If we were to detail the extent of British participation in the history of NATO state- sponsored terrorism, in the Afghan guerilla movement against the Soviets, in the foundation of al Qaeda, in the development of the figure of Bin Laden (who once reportedly kept a pied-a-terre in the London suburb of Wembley) in the role of London as the premier world center of Islamic fundamentalism and of other terrorism, and a host of other subjects, we would essentially have to re-write almost this entire book from a slightly different point of view. There can be in short no doubt that the main supporting role in 9/11 was played by British intelligence and British assets generally.
CIA and MI-5/MI-6 have also practiced a certain division of labor. Although congressional and parliamentary oversight is usually derisory, there is always the chance that an investigation may reveal embarrassing secrets. Therefore it has sometimes seemed advantageous to have the CIA undertake certain tasks in the UK, and to have MI-6 do certain jobs in the US -- precisely to avoid the problem of legislative oversight in the country whose territory was being violated. During World War I and World II, the British were happy to run operations designed to get the US embroiled in war -- operations which were welcomed by the Wall Street finance oligarchy. In 1976, by contrast, CIA Director George Bush was implicated in a campaign to overthrow the Labour Party government of Britain by helping to orchestrate a series of scandals. (Tarpley 1992 internet edition) This campaign was part of a transatlantic effort to install the unspeakable Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister.
The Israelis, by contrast, have never wanted to accept the reciprocity of intelligence sharing which the British have more or less instituted. Israel is far less willing to share its state secrets than the British have been. The result has been that the Israelis have had to work hard to purloin the kind of US secrets which the British have obtained as a matter of course. The archetypal British deployment in this regard occurred when they staffed their Washington Embassy with Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, and Guy Burgess. The British got the information they wanted, and some of it even ended up in Moscow and Beijing -- thanks to these three dedicated triple agents of the British Crown. This trio had some close scrapes, but they never saw the inside of jail. The Israelis, by contrast, had to rely on US Navy civilian employee Jonathan Pollard, who was found out in the mid-1980s and sentenced to life in prison, where he still remains despite pleas on his behalf by Netanyahu. British espionage can use the existing channels set up by treaties and agreements; the Israelis have to improvise networks informally as they go along, which can often be more risky.
Perhaps this is why the more picaresque stories of foreign intelligence involvement in the US during 2001 tend to focus on the Israelis. One such episode involved five Israeli moving men who were arrested on 9/11 after cavorting on a New Jersey rooftop while they were filming, with evident jubilation, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.
According to Haaretz, they "were arrested after they went up on the: roof of a building and posed grinning for photographs with the burning towers in the background. Police found a large amount of cash in their car and suspected them of being members of a terrorist group." They were later charged with living and working in the US without permits and were ordered deported. The five were held for more than two months in a Brooklyn prison. Israeli Ambassador David Ivry, Richard Clarke's friend, claimed they were being held under poor conditions. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two New York Congressmen worked to secure their release. When the men were arrested, they all had two sets of passports, one Israeli and one European, prompting the law enforcement authorities to consider them Mossad agents and apparently suspects in the 9/11 attacks. In addition, An Israeli drug gang was rounded up shortly after the 9/11 attacks. One of the gang leaders, whose apartment was two blocks from the WTC, was arrested when he refused to evacuate his apartment in the emergency. Drugs, cash, and guns were discovered in his apartment, and he was arrested, as were his accomplices. (Haaretz, October 29, 2001)
The five moving men were finally deported, according to the New York Times of November 21, 2001. According to this report, "The five were asked to take polygraph tests before being allowed to leave. But Paul Kurtzberg refused on principle to divulge much about his role in the Israeli Army or subsequent work for people who may have had ties to Israeli intelligence." Kurtzberg's attorney, Steven Noah Gordon, said that his client and the others had all finally agreed to the polygraph exams. One of Kurtzberg's interrogations lasted seven hours. The other four Israelis were Oded Ellner, Omer Gavriel Marmari, Sivan Kurzberg, and Yaron Shmuel. Two additional Israelis were detained in Cleveland, both of whom had just completed their service in the Israeli Defense Forces. At least 50 Israelis were detained after 9/11, with arrests reported in San Diego, Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis, New York, and Cleveland. (New York Times of November 21, 2001)
At the time of 9/11, Israeli intelligence was clearly in an aggressive mode. Mexican authorities arrested two Israeli men on October 10, as they attempted to enter the Legislative Palace in Mexico City. The two men were armed with 9-mm pistols, nine grenades, explosives, three detonators, and 58 bullets. The two men, Salvador Gersson Smike and Sar Ben Zui, were wrestled to the ground by a group of Mexican workers, and were then detained by the Mexican Attorney General's office. (Cronica de Roy, October 13, 2001)
MEGA
In January 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a phone conversation between an Israeli official at the embassy in Washington, and Danny Yatom, the head of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service. The official wanted permission from the spy boss to "go to Mega" in order to procure a copy of a confidential letter that had been sent by then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, containing US assurances about a recently negotiated agreement for an Israeli military withdrawal from the Hebron area in the West Bank. Yatom, according to the NSA intercept, rejected the request, admonishing his agent, "This is not something we use Mega for." (Washington Post, May 7, 1997) A name mentioned in relation to the Mega scandal was that of Leon Fuerth, Vice President Albert Gore's national security adviser, and a fanatical supporter of the Likud. The Washington Post, in a 1998 profile of Fuerth, reported that he had been under suspicion by US intelligence officials of delivering sensitive US policy information to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud. Why was the Mega issue dropped? In March 1999, British author Gordon Thomas asserted in his book entitled Gideon's Spies that Israel had blackmailed the Clinton Administration with a threat to release tapped telephone conversations between the President and Monica Lewinsky. In her testimony before independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Lewinsky had reported that the President had warned her, on March 29, 1997, at the height of the Mega hunt, that he suspected the White House telephones were being tapped by agents of an unnamed foreign country.
THE CARL CAMERON REPORTS, DECEMBER 2001
US public attention was focused on Israeli intelligence activities by a series of three news features by Carl Cameron in mid-December 2001. Cameron had received detailed information from Washington sources. At the time of this report, Cameron said that 60 Israelis were still being held by US authorities. As many as 140 Israelis had been arrested, including many before the 9/11 attacks. According to Cameron, many of the Israelis "stated they served in military intelligence, electronic surveillance intercept and/or explosive ordnance units." The Israelis, some of whom were "described as active Israeli military or intelligence operatives, have been detained on immigration charges or under the new Patriot Anti-Terrorism Law," Cameron reported. According to this report, there was "no indication the Israelis were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it." On this sensitive issue, a highly placed investigative source told Fox News there were "tie-ins," but refused further details. "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified, cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It is classified information," the source said. An Israeli Embassy spokesman offered categorical denials, and said any suggestion of Israelis spying on or in the United States is simply not true. Another group of Israelis in North Carolina was suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs whom the U.S. authorities were investigating for links to terrorism. It was further reported that numerous US government agencies were part of a working group that had been compiling evidence in the case since the mid-1990s. The probe had documented hundreds of incidents in cities and towns across the country; the investigators had concluded that this extensive pattern might "well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity." Many Israelis detained claimed that they were art students from the University of Jerusalem or Bezalel Academy. These self-styled Israeli art students often sought to make contact with US government personnel by saying they wanted to sell cheap art or handiwork. Cameron's documents indicated that these art students had "targeted" and penetrated military bases, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and dozens of other government facilities -- including even secret offices and unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel. Another phase of the investigation, said Cameron, had resulted in the detention and arrest of dozens of Israelis working at kiosks and pushcarts in American malls, where they had been selling toys called "Puzzlecar" and "Zoomcopter." These vendors had ceased their operations when press reports surfaced about Israelis being arrested for immigration violations.
A report obtained by Cameron from the General Accounting Office investigation which referred to Israel under the euphemism of "Country A" reported: "According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the government of country A conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the U.S. of any U.S. ally." A Defense Intelligence Agency report specified that Israel had a "voracious appetite for information .... The Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every fact of their political and economic policies." "[Israel] aggressively collects military and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target." "Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to achieve its collection objectives," the DIA document concluded. (Carl Cameron, "Suspected Israeli Spies Held by U.S." Fox News, Dec. 11-14, 2001)
AMDOCS
Another of Cameron's installments dealt with the role of the Israeli-controlled company AMDOCS in the installation of the new White House communications system during the mid-1990s. This issue had surfaced earlier. According to a May 2000 story in Insight magazine, the employees of an Israeli company had enjoyed almost unsupervised access to White House telephone lines and other extremely sensitive communications equipment. The Insight article, entitled "FBI Probes Espionage At Clinton White House," reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing an Israeli operation to spy on top U.S. officials through hacking into secure telephone networks. "More than two dozen US intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials have told Insight that the FBI believes Israel has intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing basis," the story said, specifying that the investigation involved eavesdropping on calls to and from the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the State Department. According to Insight, the FBI was tracking an Israeli businessman working for a local phone company, whose wife was suspected of being a Mossad officer working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Federal agents searched the businessman's office, and found a list of the FBI's most sensitive phone numbers, including "black" lines used for wiretapping. "Some of the listed numbers were lines that the FBI used to keep track of the suspected Israeli spy operation," said Insight. Authorities were alerted to this operation by a phone manager who became suspicious about the activities of a subcontractor working on phone-billing software and hardware designs for the CIA; the subcontractor was employed by an Israeli-based company. Insight reported that the means of spying involved a private company which provides record-keeping software and support services for major phone companies in the United States. Insight quoted an anonymous US government source as saying, "It is a politically sensitive matter. I can't comment on it beyond telling you that anything involving Israel on this particular matter is off-limits. It's that hot." Insight did not name this firm as AMDOCS, but Cameron later supplied the name.
Cameron reported that, over the previous year and a half, the FBI had been investigating Bell Atlantic and the telecommunications billing company AMDOCS of Chesterfield, Missouri. According to Cameron's sources, a senior-level employee of AMDOCS had a separate TI data phone line running directly from his St. Louis offices to Tel Aviv. Cameron noted that AMDOCS had the contracts with the 25 largest telephone companies in the United States to handle their directory assistance, calling record and billing work, which in effect gave AMDOCS real-time access to every telephone in the US, including records of all phone calls. According to Cameron, AMDOCS had been investigated on several occasions by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, for suspected ties to the Israeli Mafia, as well as to espionage. In 1999, the National Security Agency issued a TOP SECRET/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information report, warning that US phone records were getting into the hands of foreign governments -- specifically the Israeli government. US authorities were especially concerned about the possibility that the Israeli Mafia was monitoring their communications traffic. One reason for this concern was a 1997 incident in which FBI, Secret Service, DEA and LAPD telecommunications were "completely compromised by Israeli organized crime," using precisely the data streams supervised by AMDOCS. In this instance, a major Federal and local investigation of an Israeli-linked organized-crime ring, trafficking in cocaine and ecstasy, had been thwarted, because "the bad guys had the cops' beepers, cell phones, and even home phones under surveillance." Investigators concluded that AMDOCS may have been the source of the information.
And AMDOCS was not the only Israeli company with access to White House communications. The London Sunday Times had reported in the spring of 2001 that Israeli intelligence agents had used Telrad, a company subcontracted by Nortel to develop a communications system for the White House, to tap data flowing from the White House. These data were copied into a secret Israeli computer in Washington and then transferred to Tel Aviv two to three times a week. According to this report, Israel had intercepted e-mails from President Clinton as a result of this operation. Telrad was Israel's leading telecommunications company, and began by supplying phones to the Israeli Ministry of Communications in 1951. In 2001, Telrad provided "secure communications systems for the Israeli Defense Forces," according to the website of its major parent company, Koor Industries. Koor owned 80% of Telrad; the other 20% was owned by Nortel. Nortel itself was reported to be in a marketing partnership with Comverse. (London Sunday Times, May 21, 2000)
Comverse was Comverse Infosys, an Israeli-controlled company which provided "wire tapping equipment for law enforcement." Using Comverse software, law enforcement agencies employ computers to tap into the elaborate nationwide system of telephone switchers and routers, routing the targeted phone conversations into the computers of investigators authorized to do the wiretaps. Comverse managed and maintained the computers and the software, giving Comverse potential access to all of the data. Fox reported that "Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned October 18th in a hand delivered letter from 15 local, state, and federal law enforcement officials, who complained that "law enforcement's current electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today" than they were before Comverse was brought in under new US federal legislation. In Israel, Fox reported, Comverse worked so closely with the government that the Ministry of Industry and Trade (formerly headed by Ariel Sharon) paid 50% of the firm's research and development costs. Fox added: "But investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue, or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse, is considered career suicide." Fox reported that the FBI center at Quantico, Virginia handled the government contracting and purchasing of the wiretap equipment and, "for years they have thrown much of the business to Comverse. A handful of former US law enforcement officials involved in awarding Comverse government contracts over the years were then hired to work for the company. Numerous sources say some of those individuals were asked to leave government service under troubling circumstances. What troubles investigators most is that in some cases in New York, certain suspects altered their behavior dramatically right after supposedly secret wire taps had begun, and this caused grave concern that they were tipped in advance." (Fox News, Dec. 13, 2001)
COMVERSE INFOSYS
Fox linked the Israeli spy operation to September 11, saying that "U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks fear that suspects may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of AMDOCS." This segment dealt with another Israeli high-tech company, Comverse Infosys, which furnished wiretapping equipment for U.S. law enforcement. Under a 1994 law, private telecommunications and computer companies were required to make their network of switchers and routers available to law enforcement for wiretapping. Some investigators believed that Comverse electronic eavesdropping equipment had a "back door" through which wiretaps could be intercepted by unauthorized parties. One source said that the standing joke among U.S. law-enforcement agents was that their wiretaps were going directly to Tel Aviv.
Secretary of State Colin Powell commented on the Israeli arrests at a State Department briefing held on December 13:
Reporter: There were 60 Israeli citizens who have been picked up in the post- September 11 sweep, many of whom, if not all of whom, are connected to Israeli intelligence .... Are you concerned about such intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and have you taken up this issue with your counterpart in Israel?
Powell: I'm aware that some Israeli citizens have been detained, and I've been in touch with the Israeli government as to the fact that they have been detained in making sure that they have rights of access to Israeli diplomatic personnel here in the United States. With respect to why they are being detained, and the other aspects of your question, whether it's because they are in intelligence services or what they were doing, I will defer to the Department of Justice and the FBI to answer that, because, frankly, I deal with the consular parts of that problem, not the intelligence or law-enforcement parts of that problem.
The Israeli Embassy in Washington offered its usual blanket denial of any Israeli espionage in the US. Pro-Israeli pressure groups mobilized in the wake of the Carl Cameron broadcasts in an effort to suppress this highly embarrassing and suspicious news. Among the most active was a group called CAMERA ("Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America"), which launched an e-mail, fax, and phone call campaign, to force Fox TV to drop its probe of the Israeli espionage scandal. Fox soon caved in, and no more reports were broadcast. Fox had also removed the transcripts of Cameron's reports from its website by the end of December 2001.
In the fall of 2002, the German liberal weekly Die Zeit of Hamburg returned to the question of Israeli espionage in the US before 9/11. This paper concluded that "between December 2000 and April 2001 a whole horde of lsraeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, followed the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States. In their secret investigations, the Israelis came very close to the later perpetrators of September 11. In the town of Hollywood, Florida they identified the two former Hamburg students and later accused terror pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi as possible terrorists. Agents lived in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock." According to Die Zeit, "the Israelis provided a list including the names of at least four of the 19 hijackers of September 11, but this was apparently not treated as sufficiently urgent by the CIA and therefore not passed on to the FBI." According to this account, the US agencies dawdled and temporized, and then reacted with annoyance when the massive presence of Israeli espionage was discovered. Two who were on the alleged Israeli list were Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, both supposedly on American 77, the plane the government claims hit the Pentagon. (Die Zeit, October 1, 2002) The Israelis doubtless knew a great deal in advance, but they can always point to their pro forma warning to the US government that an attack was imminent.
Adding up these reports, we can conclude that Israel maintained a massive and illegal espionage operation in the US, spying on all phases of American life, from the White House and the federal agencies through the business world to the foot traffic in shopping malls. Israel minutely observed the Atta-Shehhi-Jarrah-Hanjour patsy operation, and the Israeli government formally warned the US about it. The central contention coming out of the Carl Cameron reports is once again that "U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks fear that suspects [meaning the 19 alleged hijackers] may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of AMDOCS." Naturally, this evaluation presupposes the validity of the official version which is contested and rejected here. If the 19 patsies were working under the direction of a faction of the US invisible government, as is contended here, what could the role of the Israelis have been? Could the Israelis have functioned as a cutout, allowing certain kinds of communication between the US mole network and the patsies? This is possible, but there is no compelling reason to assume it. The very serious matters of Israeli agents of influence in the US government attempting to co-determine US policy towards Iran and other countries, urgently raised by the FBI investigation of Larry Franklin as an Israeli mole in the Pentagon in late August 2004, is discussed in the closing chapter.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz later reported that, about two hours before American 11 hit the North Tower, two employees of the Israeli company Odigo who worked in Herzliya, Israel, had received an email message warning that terror attacks in New York City were imminent. Odigo was an internet instant messaging service. The message had been sent through Odigo's instant messaging. Odigo had offices in New York City about two blocks from the World Trade Center. The full text was never made public. (Haaretz, September 26, 2001) The FBI was informed of this message, but, true to form, did nothing. The last press references to the Odigo warnings came in late November 2001. The 9/11 commission ignored this matter.