9-11/Israel did it/Israeli art scam

Across the world there have been numerous reports of people who identify themselves as Israeli art students fraudulently selling fake paintings to unsuspecting collectors. The scam is closely related to a number of high-profile espionage allegations against Israel during the 2001-2002 period in the United States.

The scam

The "Israeli art student scam" is a confidence trick in which scammers, claiming to be travelling Israeli art students, approach people in their homes or on the street and attempt to sell them oil paintings and frames for excessive prices. The paintings are represented as original and valuable art by up-and-coming talents but are in fact cheap, mass-produced works bought wholesale from China. The scammers explain that they are directly approaching people with offers because properly exhibiting the work in an art gallery would be prohibitively expensive. Framing is often provided at a later date by mobile vans in order to obtain the phone numbers of willing "marks" and extract as much money as possible.

The scam has been reported in Canada , Australia, New Zealand and Seattle .

The Australian Northern Territory police have released a warning about the scheme.

2001-2002 Israeli art student spying scandal

During the 2001-2002 period in the United States there were official reports of hundreds of young Israelis posing as art students spying on federal buildings and employees.

In January 2001 Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) field offices around the country reported that the "art students" had been attempting to penetrate offices for over a year, as well as other law enforcement and Department of Defence agencies. They had also visited the homes of many DEA officers and senior federal officials and attempted to sell art. Suspicious agents observed that when the "art students" departed they did not approach their neighbours. DEA Agents reported on 130 incidents involving "art students". Some "art students" were caught diagramming the architecture of federal buildings. Some were found to have photographed federal officials.

According to Jane's Intelligence Digest, in 2002 FBI officials claimed that the "art students" were "running a major eavesdropping operation that had penetrated into the highest echelons of the US administration".

Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive warning

In March 2001, the US Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) issued a warning about people identifying themselves as "Israeli art students" attempting to bypass security and gain entry to federal buildings, and even to the private residences of senior federal officials under the guise of selling art. Subsequent to the NCIX bulletin, officials raised other red flags, including an United States Air Force, a Federal Protective Service (United States), an Office of National Drug Control Policy security alert and a request that the Immigration and Naturalization Service investigate a specific case. The "art students" were subsequently treated with more caution by officials.

Leaked Drug Enforcement Agency report

A leaked 60-page DEA report in 2002 revealed that up to 200 young Israelis had been arrested in America in the past year, of which about 140 were arrested before the September 11 attacks. The other 60 were arrested on October 31, 2002 by the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Diego, Kansas City, Cleveland, Houston and St. Louis, Missouri. Rather than selling art, these Israelis were working in kiosks in shopping centres across America selling toys. The FBI was investigating the kiosks as a front operation for espionage activities. The report said that most of the Israelis interrogated by Americans reported having served in the Israeli Defence Force in military intelligence, electronic signals interception and explosive ordnance units. One of the detainees was an Israeli general's son, another was a former bodyguard to the chief of the IDF, and another had operated Patriot missiles. In 2002 several officials dismissed reports of a spy ring and said the allegations were made by a Drug Enforcement Agency who was angry his theories had been dismissed.

The DEA report also claims that Israeli companies that had provided telephony services for U.S. businesses and U.S. federal organizations were connected to the "art students" and advised that Israeli telephony companies should be investigated. It raised the possibility that "back doors" had been installed in communications equipment to assist Israeli espionage.

September 11 allegations

It has been suggested that operatives in this "art student spy ring" were tracking the 9/11 hijackers and knew that the attacks were going to take place, although the Drug Enforcement Agency|DEA memo was primarily concerned with the students' efforts to foil investigations into unrelated Israeli organized crime.

German weekly Die Zeit published two articles regarding the September 11 controversy, one of which, titled "Next Door to Mohammed Atta" concerned allegations that Israeli intelligence had been tailing the 911 hijackers before the attack.

Some of the Israeli "art students" lived for a period of time in Hollywood, Florida, the same small city where Mohammed Atta and fellow terrorists had lived before September 11. Michael Ruppert in his book Crossing the Rubicon claimed that the ring had "heavy operations in some areas connected with 9/11". Ruppert and Alexander Cockburn have also argued that there was disproportionate media silence about the issue .

Canadian espionage rumors

In August 2004, a number of Israeli "art students" in Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Toronto and Ottawa were deported from Canada for working in the country illegally. The Calgary Herald wrote that the deportations "raised the specter of international espionage". However, claims that a spy ring was operating in Canada that were raised by newspapers were dismissed by Canadian officials. Officials noted that the Canadian art scammers did not target government officials or offices but instead focused on wealthy neighbourhoods

Denial of spy ring by officials

In 2002 several officials dismissed reports of a spy ring and said the allegations were made by a Drug Enforcement Agency who was angry his theories had been dismissed. Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden describe the claims as an "urban myth"

Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz also published an article on the spying allegations, noting that most of the allegations were based upon a single internal report from the DEA. It also noted that the U.S. administration was "desperate to keep the affair quiet" .

Official Israeli response

The Israeli government has denied the espionage allegations, calling them nonsense.

History of this article

An article on this topic entitled "Israeli art students" was created at Wikipedia in 2006 and deleted according to this discussion. No accessible record of the contents of the first article has survived.

A new and likely independent attempt to document the affair was started on 3rd March 2010 and brought up to a reasonable basic standard (size c. 11,000 characters) in a single day by a single good-faith editor. This is the version seen here - naturally it has not reached the usual standard of Wikipedia articles since there has been no cooperative input. However, it is already probabaly better than most starting articles and better than some "stable" or semi-permanent articles.

The following day (4th March) the new article was effectively vandalised by a different, hugely experienced editor who added "The Great Arab Refugee Scam", an ancient and entirely discredited Zionist myth, along with a new myth "Palestinian population scam on US taxpayers" increasingly popular at Wikipedia. No action was taken by administrators against this very experienced (over 25,000 edits) editor who vandalised the article, despite the well-recognised and immensely disruptive effect of irrelevant edits to an article still in development.

On the same day (ie less than 24 hours from creation), the article was nominated for deletion, another common and highly disruptive way of preventing an article ever being developed to a respectable standard. As so often before, the creator was forced to stop development while defending his creation. However, on this occasion, another editor arrived and made very major modifications, high-lighting the scam nature of the affair with particular reference to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and down-playing the very considerable spying scare that had been triggered back in 2001 (200 Israeli "students" were arrested, 140 before and 60 after 911, and some commmentators thought the proportion of military communication specialists amongst them was unusually high).

As a result of the re-write, the deletion (known at Wikipedia as an AfD, 'Article for deletion') failed. The price for this survival was to have the article changed to minimise and white-wash the affair almost to invisibility. The text now (July 2010) refers to fraud by "Chinese, French, Israeli, and other nationalities pretending to be art students". The article mentions the 2001 concerns about spying but only to virtually dismiss them, quoting the Seattle Times "[a]n internal DEA report ... gave rise to an urban myth that shaped much of the reporting about the scam" and "Espionage Ruled Out in Case of Bad Art" and says that concerns of spying were "never validated" as if they were somehow disproved.

Missing from Wikipedia

While the current Wikipedia article only mentions spying once in the text, even the references (temporarily?) left behind in the re-write give a quite different impression eg "US arrests 200 young Israelis in spying investigation ... some of them former members of military intelligence units" in the Daily Telegraph, March 7, 2002 and "Were they part of a massive spy ring ... knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA?" Sunday Herald (UK) and "Israeli student 'spy ring' revealed" in the Guardian. Even an Israeli report asks "Spies or students?". and (in translation from German) "The Mossad agents were interested therefore also in the leader of the assassins, Mohammed Atta, and one of its most important accomplices, Marwan Al-Schehhi".

Another article referenced (but no longer high-lighted) in the Wikipedia article gives what we would probably call the official version. While making quite serious allegations at the individuals who have been "described as aggressive ... attempt to engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch. ... suspects possessed counterfeit work visas and green cards ... also gone to the private residences of senior federal officials" it then calls the affair an "urban myth" and downplays the self identification of the arrested as "Israeli art students", even claiming there is a second "perhaps a non-Israeli group" which "may have ties to a Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalist group". The scurrilousness of this attempt to blame others (by religious identification!!) is breath-taking indeed.