US scientist charged with attempted spying for Israel

A top American scientist who once worked for the Pentagon and the US space agency NASA was arrested Monday and charged with attempted spying for Israel, the Department of Justice said.

Stewart David Nozette, 52, developed an experiment that fueled the discovery of water on the south pole of the moon, and previously held special security clearance at the Department of Energy on atomic materials, the DOJ said.

He is charged with "attempted espionage for knowingly and willfully attempting to communicate, deliver, and transmit classified information relating to the national defense of the United States to an individual that Nozette believed to be an Israeli intelligence officer," the DOJ said.

Nozette had been dealing with an FBI undercover agent in a sting operation, the department said, adding there was no wrongdoing by Israel.

Nozette, who was arrested in the Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland and taken into custody, could make his first court appearance Tuesday on the charge, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

"The conduct alleged in this complaint is serious and should serve as a warning to anyone who would consider compromising our nation's secrets for profit," said David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security.

In addition to stints with NASA and the Department of Energy, Nozette worked at the White House on the National Space Council under then-president George H.W. Bush in 1989 and 1990.

"From 1989 through 2006, Nozette held security clearances as high as top secret and had regular, frequent access to classified information and documents related to the US national defense," the Justice Department said.

In early September, Nozette received a phone call from a person "purporting to be an Israeli intelligence officer, but who was in fact an undercover employee of the FBI," the DOJ said.

"Nozette met with the UCE (undercover employee) that day and discussed his willingness to work for Israeli intelligence," informing the agent that "he had, in the past, held top security clearances and had access to US satellite information."

The scientist offered to "answer questions about this information in exchange for money."

Over the next several weeks, Nozette and the undercover agent exchanged envelopes of money for answers to lists of questions about US satellite technology.

"In addition, Nozette allegedly offered to reveal additional classified information that directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, and other major weapons systems," DOJ said.

FBI agents retrieved a manila envelope left by Nozette in a designated location this month that "contained information classified as both top secret and secret that concerned US satellites, early warning systems, means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack, communications intelligence information, and major elements of defense strategy."

Source: Blacklisted News

Israeli art students show up at interesting times

The way the corporate media would have it believed is that Israeli “art students” who aggressively sell cheap art door-to-door, usually at federal office buildings and the houses of government employees, are merely traveling abroad after their military service in Israel to “see the world.” In fact, these “art students” are classic intelligence operatives who have appeared before and after major terrorist events and covert operations conducted by the Mossad.

WMR has learned that an Israeli art student cased the offices of an investigator of the suspicious February 26, 2004, death of Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski. Trajkovski’s Beechcraft King Air 200 crashed near Stolac, Croatia, in southern Bosnia while en route to an investors’ conference in Mostar.

After the crash, U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Lawrence Butler quickly met with Nikolai Gruevski, the minister of finance in the VMRO-DPMNE government. Gruevski was an ardent supporter of denationalization, a globalist, and supporter of NATO membership for Macedonia. Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski, although a Social Democrat, was also seen as close to the globalists.

Although Trajkovski, a Methodist minister, was also a member of the VMRO-DPMNE party he was viewed as less accommodating to international demands for privatization of state enterprises in Macedonia.

After Trajkovski and his party were killed in the plane crash, Macedonian and Bosnian authorities complained that NATO’s investigation of the plane crash was secretive and the two countries’ aviation authorities were kept in the dark. Many Macedonian officials were opposed to allowing the United States to investigate the crash and there was confusion about who had access to the two “black boxes” on Trajkovski’s plane. NATO troops stationed in Bosnia were the first to arrive at the crash scene.

In April 2004, Crvenkovski, the pro-American, won the Macedonian presidential election. VMRO-DPMNE officials charged that there was massive ballot box stuffing in th election and refused to accept the results. The pro-U.S. Gruevski is now the prime minister of Macedonia.

Although the crash of the King Air 200 was blamed on dense fog, on Febriary 27, 2004, the Xinhua news agency reported another scenario, one that suggests terrorism: “A suspected blast occurred on board shortly before the crashed Macedonian presidential plane went lost from radar, a local Bulgarian radio reported Thursday. The report quoted Sasho Yordanovski, editor-in-chief of the Macedonian magazine Forum, as saying that there have been two versions of the cause of the tragic incident, which claimed the lives of the Macedonian president and other eight people. One version attributed the accident to bad weather conditions in the area early Thursday and the other suggested a technical failure of the 25-year-old aircraft . . . Besides the president, the victims include his councilors Dimka Ilkova-Boshkovic, Risto Blazhevski and Anita Lozanovska, foreign affairs official Mile Krastevski, two bodyguards Atse Bozhinovski and Borsi Velinov, and two pilots Marko Markovski and Branko Ivanovski.”

WMR has learned that an independent firm hired to investigate the crash was not able to conduct its investigation because its private investigator received death threats if he went to the Balkans to conduct his probe. In addition, a young Israeli male “art student” showed up selling art sketches at the U.S. offices of the investigation firm. The Israeli arrogantly entered three office rooms in the facility without invitation. When asked by office workers what he was doing, he abruptly left. No other offices in the vicinity received a visit from the art student. It was later discovered that the office’s surveillance camera had been disabled by an intruder.

The reported involvement of Israeli security advisers in the coup d’état in Honduras also puts into another perspective the following report from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on the espionage activities involving Israeli art students in the months prior to 9/11:

“Tegucigalpa Country Office

“On February 28, 2001, a couple attempted to sell at the residence of the Tegucigalpa Country Attaché. His neighbors advised the Country Attaché that a man and a woman in a red car were trying to open the CA’s gate. The neighbors asked the couple what they wanted and advised them that no one was home. The couple left the area. No identification information was revealed.”

Some FBI counter-intelligence agents are painfully aware that Israelis traveling on tourist visas in the United States and who mask their true intelligence functions as art students, movers, and mall kiosk vendors pose a significant hostile intelligence threat to U.S. national security. However, the FBI agents are also aware that any push to pursue Israeli agents will result in career-ending personnel actions taken as a result of pressure from the all-too-powerful Israel Lobby in the United States.

Source: Online Journal

Dual loyalty among Iraq war cheerleaders and spies

The best line in Nathan Guttman's piece in the Forward about the Justice Department's effort to prove that a pro-Israel spy ring was operating inside the Pentagon, AIPAC and the Israeli Embassy came from Steve Rosen, the former AIPAC lobbyist whose indictment on espionage charges the Justice Department recently dropped.

In 2003 the Justice Department stung Rosen. Here is how it went down. The feds had flipped a Pentagon analyst named Larry Franklin, who had been passing along secrets to Rosen and fellow AIPAC'er Keith Weissman. And in June 2003 they gave Franklin a fake cable saying that Israeli agents in Kurdistan were in mortal danger. Franklin brought the paper to Weissman at a restaurant. Weissman went back to AIPAC. Rosen promptly told an Israeli diplomat.

Franklin told the Forward that the AIPAC guys' actions crossed a line. The Forward got in touch with Rosen, who bridled.

"Franklin did not expect us to warn the Israelis that they would be kidnapped and killed? That’s like telling officials of the NAACP that there is going to be a lynching, but don’t warn the victims, because it is a secret.”

Rosen's response is fascinating for a few reasons. First, it shows that he sees himself as part of the Jewish nation, which transcends geographical borders. It is an expression of loyalty to the Jewish people. Second, his analogy of AIPAC to the NAACP during Jim Crow was echoed by Jeffrey Goldberg, the pro-Israel journalist, in a New York event two years ago where he said that gentiles can't say what is anti-Semitic, Jews can; just as blacks know what is racist and whites are not able to make that determination.

There is a second Goldberg echo here. In 2002 Goldberg wrote a piece from Kurdistan for the New Yorker on Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons that basically said that Saddam was another Hitler bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. The piece ended, of all places, at the Israeli embassy in Washington, where Goldberg talked to a diplomat about Israel's destruction of the nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. The Kurdistan-Israel connection.

The Goldberg piece reminds us of the backdrop for the Justice Department investigation: the Iraq War. Franklin says that the Justice Department investigation was aimed at Doug Feith, the Under Secretary at the Pentagon, who pushed the Iraq war. Indeed, Justice was conducting this investigation through the spring of 2003, even as the U.S. was launching the disastrous Iraq war (at Goldberg's urging, too).

It is obvious in retrospect that a lot of the energy for the investigation must have come out of a feeling inside the Justice Department that Iraq war supporters were not being upfront about their true loyalty, Israel, which of course had been attacked by Iraq several times.

I share that feeling; and one of my grand irritants is Doug Feith's non-mea-culpa book of last year, War and Decision, where he basically put all the blame on George Bush, absolved the neoconservatives of any agency in the war, and failed to report the long memorandum purporting to link Al-Qaeda and Saddam that his office provided the White House to goad the country to war. At about the same time, Jeffrey Goldberg was also writing a piece for the New Yorker arguing that Saddam and Al-Qaeda had made an "alliance."

I believe that Feith and Goldberg pushed the war in good part out of concern for Israel's security. Goldberg has had dual loyalty. He once moved to Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Forces, back when he thought that anti-Semitism was a river running under American society. Feith, who is now a blogger (which is what he should have been doing instead of plotting the destruction of an Arab society), has often put Zionism and Israel first-- and he has good reason to do so. He says in his book that his Polish father narrowly escaped the Holocaust. "Both of his parents, four of his sisters, and all three of his brothers--my grandparents, aunts, and uncles--were murdered in the Holocaust."

Anyone with that background would be preeminently concerned about anti-Semitism. And the primacy of the Holocaust in the Jewish memory/experience means that Jewish liberals and even leftists have given the neoconservatives little resistance as they pushed a militant case on behalf of the Middle East's only democracy. We are all waking up from that now, the Jewish community is. The process will not be complete until neoconservatives and their adjutants are compelled to answer openly, Why do they feel unsafe in America? Is there any real basis for this insecurity?

Source: Mondoweiss

Israel 'Spy Scandal' Figure Larry Franklin Breaks Silence

He insists he did it for his country, to head off a disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq.

But instead, Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin found himself charged with giving classified information to suspected agents of Israel. In 2006 he was sentenced to almost 13 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, later reduced to probation and 10 months house arrest for cooperating with the feds.

Today, the former Iran specialist is mopping floors at a Roy Rogers near his home in West Virginia and serving a 100 hour community service sentence at a halfway house for abused children

Now, breaking silence for the first time since he became entangled in the Israel-spy-ring-that wasn't, Franklin says he gave sensitive information to a pro-Israel lobbyist in hopes that it would be passed on to the White House.

He also admitted telling an Israeli official "that the Iranians were planning to kill Americans in Iraq."

The information was a "mosaic" of Iran's secret preparations for combating U.S. troops in Iraq, Franklin said, including the names and locations of Iran's secret agents and safe houses in Iraq.

He didn't think it was classified, he says. Now he realizes at least some of it was. He pled guilty in 2006.

But back in 2003, with the invasion of Iraq only weeks away, he was desperate to persuade the White House to put on the brakes.

So when Steven J. Rosen, an official with the American-Israel Public affairs Committee (AIPAC), told Franklin that he was friendly with Elliott Abrams, head of the Middle East desk in the White House National Security Council, Franklin said he "jumped at the chance" to get the information to him.

As it turned out, however, the FBI had an open investigation of Israeli espionage in Washington, going back to the 1990s.

Franklin, Rosen and Keith Weissman, another AIPAC official with whom he had been meeting, had just walked into it.

On May 2005, all three were charged with violations of the 1917 Espionage Act.

Only later, Franklin said, did he find out that "two tics" (items) on his list were considered classified.

Critics complained loudly that a conviction would criminalize the routine exchange of information among officials, journalists and think tanks.

Exactly four years later the charges were dropped. The government said the judge set too high a bar for the government to prove that the defendants had conspired to harm the national security of the United States.

Last week, Franklin, 62, said he was ready to talk.

"I have been silent for five years ..." he said by e-mail. "The release will be therapeutic."

We met at the Dupont Circle office of his attorney, famed criminal defense lawyer Plato Cacheris.

Looking tired and disheveled, Franklin sounded like he could use some therapy.

Once a top Iran expert at the Pentagon, holder of a PhD in Asian Studies, Franklin has found only odd jobs since being confronted by the FBI in 2004: ditch digger, church janitor, cleaning sewers, parking lot attendant at Charles Town Race Track, and so on. His wife is wheelchair-bound with a spinal disease. A teenage son was traumatized by the FBI investigation, he says.

Over an hour-long interview with Cacheris at his side, however, Franklin was more than happy to discuss a range of topic that had fascinated national security journalists since the case broke in 2004.

Among them: his leaks to AIPAC officials; details of a secret meeting he attended in Rome in December 2001 with the legendary Iranian conspirator, Manucher Ghorbanifar; and reports that someone had encouraged him to fake his suicide to avoid testifying against the AIPAC defendants.

Franklin also had bitter complaints about the FBI, which tapped his phone and forced him to wear a wire during a meeting in which he offered Rosen a phony classified document that the bureau had prepared.

All through that 10-week period, he and Cacheris said, the FBI never advised him he could be arrested himself and should get a lawyer.

***

Franklin says he was desperate in early 2003 to get his information about Iranian preparations to kill Americans in Iraq into the hands of a White House policy-maker.

The problem was, he didn't know anyone close to White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

Even though he worked for two of the most powerful officials in the Pentagon, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the undersecretary for policy, Douglas Feith, "I was just a little guy," he insisted.

He says he was worried that the Bush administration had "no policy on Iran," much less a plan for dealing with Iranian subversion when U.S. troops entered Iraq.

"By that time I was underwhelmed by the Bush-Rice team," he said.

Even Wolfowitz and Feith, leading neoconservative hawks, Franklin said, "thought Iran could be part of the solution in Iraq and not part of the problem, that they would see a common interest with us in getting rid of Saddam, and that by shock-and-awe we would scare them into ground-level neutrality."

("That's not at all an accurate rendering of my thinking," Feith responded by e-mail.)

Franklin said he was "entirely convinced" that the invading Americans would be "coming home in body bags in bunches," as a result of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, about which the administration knew nothing.

"They were preparing an entrapment for us, to get us in and never let us out," Franklin maintained, and the Bush administration had "no policy" to deal with it.

"Larry was frustrated because U.S. policy was contradictory," Hillary Mann Leverett, a national security council official who dealt with Franklin, recalled in a telephone interview.

On the one hand, Pentagon neoconservatives were pressing for "regime change," said Leverett, who was the NSC's director of Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs in 2002-2003.

On the other, White House and State Department officials were arguing for continuing discreet talks with Iran over Afghanistan and Al Qaeda,

The gridlock prevented the administration from producing a concensus National Security Policy Directive, on Iran.

"My impression was that we didn't have a policy," said another Bush White House official who worked on Middle East issues, "the principals were way too polarized. In that sense, it's correct to say we didn't have a policy."

So when AIPAC official Rosen intimated that he had good White House contacts, Franklin "jumped at the chance" to get his report into the right hands, he said.

"Rosen boasted of his contacts in the NSC and the State Department - he was dropping all these names that I recognized -- he dropped the name of Elliott Abrams, head of Middle East policy for the national security staff," Franklin said.

"When Rosen dropped his name, among others, I seized upon that ... If I could get [Abrams] to slow things down, maybe I could get Rice - Condoleezza Rice, to pause and say, 'Hey, maybe we really do need a foreign policy on Iran before we invade the country next door.'"

Rosen assured him he would get his Iran information to Abrams, Franklin said.

"But he didn't do that. He went to The Washington Post and the political officer at the Israeli embassy." (Rosen's indictment spelled out those acts.)

"He was duped -- he was duped real, real good," said a senior law enforcement official involved in the case. Another said, "My feeling was that they took advantage of him."

Franklin shook his head.

"No...this was my initiative. I was not directed by him," he said.

Why, I asked didn't he just call Abrams or somebody else at the NSC himself? Surely they would know who he was - or he could quickly inform them.

Franklin turned up a palm.

"Again, I was just - even though I had access to Wolfowitz and could go up to his office, I was just a little guy."

"I should have done a lot of things," he added. "I mean, I made some stupid decisions. Yeah, that would've been the better thing to do."

What's next? A book, of course.

Source: CQ Politics

DOJ moves to reverse AIPAC espionage case guilty plea and jail time

On May 1, government prosecutors dropped their espionage prosecution of former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employees Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.

Many expected a criminal trial to yield unprecedented accountability -- AIPAC’s opaque internal operations and unquenchable thirst for classified government information would finally be laid bare. Others saw the unprecedented application of the 1917 Espionage Act against non-government employees as a threat to freedom of speech.

Presiding Judge T.S. Ellis’ pretrial rulings made it nearly impossible for government prosecutors to prevail -- requiring them to reveal sensitive government information in court. Curiously, Ellis even wanted prosecutors to prove the defendants’ states of mind and ethereal intentions to harm the US rather than strict statutory culpability under the 1917 Espionage Act. Normally, Americans could now be either thrilled, outraged, or just blissfully unaware that the case has finally ended.

Except that it hasn’t ended.

Those concerned with rule of law were provided mixed relief but subtle hints of future maneuvers. In their formal motion (PDF) that Judge T.S. Ellis drop the case government prosecutors fired a Parthian shot by highlighting the “requirement of meeting an unexpectedly higher evidentiary threshold in order to prevail at trial.”

The New York Times recorded Joseph Persichini Jr. -- the top official at the F.B.I.’s Washington office -- was “disappointed” while FBI agents were “infuriated.” But the Times also hinted at politicization, reporting the decision chain extended from career attorneys all the way up to Attorney General Eric Holder -- who approved dropping the case. Dana J. Boente, Obama’s new acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was omnipresent at negotiations. Boente’s formal statement seemed to exude remorse “the inevitable disclosure of classified information that would occur at any trial in this matter, we have asked the court to dismiss the indictment.”

The AIPAC investigation did yield Colonel Lawrence Franklin’s guilty plea for leaking classified information to Rosen and Weissman. Franklin was sentenced to a $10,000 fine, 151 months of prison, and three years of supervised release. Surely with Franklin ensconced in jail, few would be again tempted to influence US policies through high stakes classified information gambits. Justice would have been done, to some degree. But is all the scripted remorse and regret just a ruse?

On May 19, a powerful coalition of 125 Rabbis signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting a probe into whether “anti-Semitism and/or anti-Israel sentiments” played any role in the original investigation of AIPAC. Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post published an article titled “Was Case Against AIPAC Lobbyists Anti-Semitic?“ It sternly noted that the case “wasn’t a total loss for the government” because it did win Franklin’s guilty plea. That plea is the only remaining evidence that wrongdoing occurred -- but for the Israel lobby, history reveals even this is totally unacceptable.

Last year, shortly before George W. Bush left office, intense lobbying finally won the posthumous pardon of Charles Winters. Winters was convicted of violating U.S. arms embargos for his role in the illicit shipment of aircraft to Jewish fighters in Palestine in 1948.

A Protestant from Boston, Winters didn’t have the lifelong ideological drive of co-conspirators Hank Greenspun and Al Schwimmer. Neither ever served any jail time. Greenspun, a newspaper man in Nevada, won a presidential pardon when John F. Kennedy entered office. Schwimmer simply emigrated to Israel. Both subsequently went on to play major roles in the Israeli arms smuggling segment of the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s. But the fact that only Winters ever did time for crime (18 months in jail and a $5,000 fine) was a lingering stain that couldn’t be erased. This has relevance for the plight of Lawrence Franklin.

AIPAC and other arms of the Israel lobby can’t now openly lobby President Barak Obama for a Franklin pardon so soon after his administration graciously dropped the case. But AIPAC also can’t wait four to eight years for a pardon or even function effectively while Lawrence Franklin languishes in prison for what many supporters consider heroic behavior.

The Bureau of Prisons -- which assigned Franklin inmate number 70425-083 -- indicates he is still not yet in custody, Fortunately for Franklin he may never set foot into his assigned minimum security prison in Cumberland, Maryland. Attorney General Eric Holder holds the key to his future.

The Department of Justice has recently admitted errors and asked a federal court to free two Alaskans and review their convictions in connection with the Senator Ted Stevens corruption probe.

Former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder’s earlier and seemingly inexplicable recommendation that President Bill Clinton pardon tax fugitive Marc Rich once looked both tawdry and even career threatening before he became attorney general in the Obama administration Given recent moves to free other Bush era convictions, the incident looks highly relevant and so is the process to secretly erase Franklin’s guilty plea and sentence in court.

On May 14, US attorneys quietly filed a sealed motion (PDF) “as to Lawrence Anthony Franklin” in the Eastern District of Virginia. Judge Ellis then granted a hearing for June 12 at 9AM. On June 2, they filed a sealed memorandum about Franklin. Though sealed motions are of course secret, it is likely that under the watchful eye of Eric Holder the DOJ’s political appointees are arranging yet another special favor for the Israel lobby in order to steer around the Obama pardon dilemma.

As is now customary, any potential future downsides and details of such a sealed deal are not allowed to be publicly debated. Just as quiet clemency for Schwimmer and Greenspun paved the way for weapons smuggling to Iran, this quiet effort will undoubtedly yield some future crisis.

If Eric Holder springs Franklin he will have issued a facto license to AIPAC -- the likes of which haven’t been seen since former Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach quashed the DOJ’s massive drive to register the entire lobby as Israeli foreign agents. AIPAC can then not only traffic in as much classified US national defense information as it can carry, but execute larger and more audacious covert activities at US taxpayer expense under the immunizing banner of Israel.

In the broadest sense the AIPAC espionage scandal hasn’t ended -- it may be only just beginning.

By Grant F. Smith

Source: Online Journal

Mossad still stalking malls near U.S. military bases

Cells of young Israeli intelligence operatives continue to openly solicit relationships with U.S. military personnel from shopping mall kiosks, according to an informed source.

WMR has learned that one such kiosk operates at the MacArthur Center Mall in Norfolk, Virginia, where a number of U.S. Navy personnel from the nearby naval bases are regularly confronted by aggressive young Israelis selling Dead Sea cosmetic products who inquire about where the personnel are stationed and the nature of their jobs. Young Israeli women working at the kiosk also appear to want to strike up a closer relationship with some of the naval personnel.

The use of young Israelis, many of whom continue to serve in a reserve status with the Israel Defense Force, as intelligence agents, has changed somewhat over the past decade. Young Israeli “art students” first conducted unsolicited visits to the homes and offices of federal and military employees trying to sell cheap Chinese-made bogus Israeli artwork while casing neighborhoods and office buildings.

Israeli-operated mall kiosks have transitioned from selling toys to cosmetics.

On August 7, 2005, WMR reported: In November 2001, the INS arrested several Israelis, including some with military backgrounds, selling Puzzle Car and Zoom Copter toys from shopping mall kiosks and vending carts. Many of the malls were located near U.S. government facilities, including the Pentagon and CIA. A majority of the Israelis, arrested for visa violations instead of espionage, worked for a Florida-based company called Quality Sales. A spokesman for the company admitted the company hired vacationing Israeli students but they had the wrong visas. The spokesman also revealed the Israelis were deemed “special interest” cases by INS-- a new government designation applied to terrorism suspects in the wake of 911. Federal authorities suspect the Israelis were using the kiosks as intelligence fronts in the same manner that Israelis were using door-to-door art sales as covers. The National Counterintelligence Center (NCIX) stated in a report issued in March 2001 that, “In the past six weeks, employees in federal office buildings located throughout the United States have reported suspicious activities connected with individuals representing themselves as foreign students selling or delivering artwork. Employees have observed both males and females attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings.” The report was temporarily removed from the NCIX web site.

One of the malls where the Israeli”toy sellers” based their operations was the Pentagon City Mall, just across Interstate 395 from the Pentagon. In July 2004, the mall served as the rendezvous point for alleged Israeli Pentagon spy Larry Franklin and Keith Weissman, an AIPAC official. Franklin warned Weissman that Iranian agents were going to start attacking American soldiers and Israeli agents in Iraq. Weissman then went to brief the account of the meeting to Steve Rosen, another senior AIPAC official. They both informed the Israeli embassy in Washington and Glenn Kessler, a reporter for The Washington Post. Those phone calls were being wiretapped by the FBI as part of its investigation of a major Israeli spy ring in the United States, an investigation that had been going on since before the 9/11 attacks. The FBI was also monitoring meetings between Franklin, Weissman, and Rosen, including one held in February 2003 at the Arlington, Virginia, Ritz-Carlton hotel, which adjoins the Pentagon City Mall.

In February 2005, an Israeli man named Ohad Cohen was deported, along with four other Israelis, from Omaha, Nebraska. In what was becoming a common occurrence in the United States, a total of 10 Israelis, who were working at shopping mall kiosks in the Omaha and Lincoln areas, were deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for illegally working in the United States on tourist visas. The Israelis operated out of Omaha’s Oak View Mall and Lincoln’s Gateway Westfield Mall. The Federal government probe was reported to be part of a wider probe of Israeli shopping mall kiosk activity throughout the Midwest. In December 2004, FBI and immigration officers arrested 15 Israelis in Minnesota and three operating from a mall kiosk in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Omaha is also the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC).

On January 13, 2009, WMR reported: WMR has also learned of other Israeli mall kiosks around the country that hired aggressive Israeli young men and women who badger customers and ask personal questions. Israeli mall kiosks engaged in the aggressive sales practices have been set up at the North Shore Mall in Peabody, Massachusetts, and Northeast Mall in Hurst, Texas, a Dallas suburb. The mall kiosks in Peabody sell Israeli hand cream and nail files. The kiosk in Hurst has a male overseer, about 45 years old, who lives in the Bahamas.

Many of the Israeli mall vendors claim ignorance when told by customers that Israeli mall kiosks were identified as Mossad front operations in a Fox News report. More incredibly, some Israelis feign ignorance when the term “9/11” is used. They claim not to know what the term means.

In the same report, WMR reported: Last month, police in New South Wales, Australia, arrested the leader of an Israeli “art student” ring who was selling mass-produced paintings from China as valuable artwork from Israel. The Israeli man arrested, age 23, fit the profile of a number of Israeli “art students” rounded up, detained, and deported by U.S. authorities in the months prior to 9/11. The “art students” were casing federal offices, military installations, and the homes of federal agents and officials.

The Israeli was arrested by police in Wamberal on Australia’s eastern central coast. Fifty Chinese-made oil paintings were found in the Israeli’s Mitsubishi station wagon. He was attempting to sell the paintings for between 500 and 1,000 Australian dollars. The Israelis in Australia visited a number of homes and claimed they were university students from Israel. The Israeli arrested lived in Sydney’s Bondi Beach neighborhood.

Recently, there was yet another story about the use of Israeli mall kiosk operators as intelligence agents. In the most recent case in Perth, Australia, an Australian man was arrested and charged with violation of an Australian hate crime law for exposing the activities of Israeli-run mall kiosks owned by an Israeli firm in Melbourne whose products are called “Seacret -- Minerals From The Dead Sea.” The president of the Australian Union of Jewish Students lodged a criminal complaint against the investigator who maintained that Israeli nationals were attempting to obtain classified information on the Royal Australian Navy’s Collins class submarine as well as other defense programs.

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Online Journal