The details were remarkable in their consistency. Two “art students” in St Louis had been caught “diagramming the inside of a Drug Enforcement Agency building.” In another federal building in Dallas, another pair had been stopped doing the same thing. In several cities, other “art students” had shown up at the homes of senior federal officials—men with unlisted addresses, known as “black addresses” in the U.S. intelligence community. In other cities—Phoenix and San Diego were two—the “students” had been found in possession of photographs of federal agents and their unmarked cars. All the reports said that the students had given their address as the “University of Jerusalem” or the “Bezalei Academy of Arts” in the city.
The FBI had asked the State Department to have the United States embassy in Israel run a check. It reported that no “University of Jerusalem” existed. The nearest was the city’s Hebrew University, and it had no record of the “students.” The Bezalei Academy was genuine. But the dates of birth, passport numbers, and in some cases military registration numbers of the “art students” were not listed on the academy’s enrollment list, or lists of those who had attended up to ten years before. While this information was being obtained, FBI agents in Washington had traced the cell phones the mysterious “students” were carrying. All had been purchased by an Israeli diplomat in Washington who had now returned to Israel.
The news caused consternation in FBI headquarters. Robert Mueller, then the bureau’s director, called for a meeting with George Tenet. Uppermost in their minds was whether they were facing another spying operation by Mossad. But would an agency that had made its name for unrivaled planning and stealth have mounted one that, on the surface at least, was so amateurish?
Tenet placed a call to Halevy, who denied that any operation was going on.
He was lying. The operation had been his brainchild. Stung by the refusal—and this was months before the September 11 attacks—to take heed of Mossad’s warnings that al-Qaeda was a growing threat within the United States, Halevy had decided to test how vigilant were American defenses. Students from their final year at the Mossad training school on the outskirts of Tel Aviv had been selected to go to America. It would not be the first time that Mossad had used its students for this purpose; it gave them valuable field experience, and anything they acquired could be useful to Mossad.
Halevy had chosen to run the operation with only a few Mossad staff involved. Again, it was not uncommon for a director general to do this. But what made it unusual was that the preplanning and cover stories were a disaster waiting to happen. Just as at Lillehammer and on the streets of Amman—both debacles that had cost Halevy’s predecessors their jobs—there was an element of recklessness about what the “art students” had been briefed to do that baffled the FBI. Surely, Mossad could not have slipped so far, to be running something like this?
As the FBI began its investigation, the inevitable happened: the news leaked. Soon a number of reporters were trying to pin down the story. Much of their initial reporting was wide of the mark. The “art students” were described as “Middle Easterners” and “speaking Arabic.” They were identified as members of an unnamed terrorist group.
Then the Fox News channel entered the arena. It assigned a hardworking reporter, Carl Cameron, to the story. He picked up the first hint that this could be a Mossad-generated operation.
That provoked an immediate response from the vast and powerful Jewish lobby in Washington, whose tentacles reach out across America. The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a leading political lobby, able to penetrate Congress, the intelligence community, and the White House. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) has equally powerful connections. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) are strident watchdogs over what the media publish about Israeli affairs.
The moment Cameron went on air on the Fox network to announce he had uncovered “a possible espionage and surveillance operation by Israelis against al-Qaeda operatives in the U.S.,” the combined resources of the Jewish lobby directed their fire against him.
But even as they launched their first volley, Cameron was saying in a second report that “many of the Israelis had failed polygraph tests when asked about their alleged surveillance activities in the United States.”
In Paris,
With renewed ferocity, the Jewish lobby set to work.
