9-11/Israel did it/Israeli art scam

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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. [1][2][3] 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 [1], Australia[2], New Zealand [4] and Seattle [3].

The Australian Northern Territory police have released a warning about the scheme.[5]

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. [6]

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".[7]

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.[8] 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. [6]

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.[9][10] 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.[11]

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. [12]

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.[13]

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. [14] [15]

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. [6] 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[16] [17].

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 [18]

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" [19]

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" [12].

Official Israeli response

The Israeli government has denied the espionage allegations, calling them nonsense. [12]

History of this article

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

This version of the article was created on Wikipedia 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. The following day it was effectively vandalised by a different (hugely experienced, > 25,000 edits) 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 editor, 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.

Unusually, on this occasion the deletion (know as an AfD) failed, resulting in the original article still being available to us. The price for this survival was high since (in July 2010) there is no longer a mention of the Israel connection in the title which now reads "Art student scam" and the text ascribes the fraud to "Chinese, French, Israeli, and other nationalities pretending to be art students". Only one mention of spying is still mentioned in the text, where it is said to have been "never validated" as if it had somehow been disproved. This is not the impression given by many of the international reports cited eg[20][21][22] [23] - even an Israeli report asks "Spies or students?".[24]

The existing Wikipedia article (July 2010) blames the concerns about spying on "[a]n internal DEA report, leaked in 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, gave rise to an urban myth that shaped much of the reporting about the scam"[25][26][27]

References

  1. ↑ a b "Israeli art scam" preying on people's kindness Calgary Sun 2009-08-19
  2. ↑ a b Oil painting scam hits the Border Border Mail 2009-04-22.
  3. ↑ a b Information On An Israeli Art Scam Komo News 2006-08-30.
  4. ↑ Door slammed on ‘original’ art scam Star News Group, 2006-01-18.
  5. ↑ http://www.nt.gov.au/pfes/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewMediaRelease&pID=5664&y=2006&mo=11 Police warn against art scam] Northern Territory police 2006-11-22.
  6. ↑ a b c The Israeli "art student" mystery Salon.com, 2002-05-07.
  7. ↑ Allies and Espionage, Jane's Intelligence Digest, 2002-03-15.
  8. ↑ Suspicious Visitors to Federal Facilities Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (archived at Internet Archive)
  9. ↑ US arrests 200 young Israelis in spying investigation Telegraph. 7th March 2002.
  10. ↑ Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA? Sunday Herald (UK) via Internet Archive
  11. ↑ U.S. officials dismiss report of Israeli spies Washington Post March 7, 2002, Accessed October 18, 2008.
  12. ↑ a b c Spies, or students? Were the Israelis just trying to sell their paintings, or agents in a massive espionage ring? Haaretz, 2002-05-07.
  13. ↑ An Enigma: Vast Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in the US. Le Monde (Paris) March 5, 2002. Retrieved 2010-01-12.
  14. ↑ Deadly Mistakes Die Zeit, 2002-10-02.
  15. ↑ Next Door to Mohammed Atta Die Zeit 2002-10-02.
  16. ↑ "Crossing the Rubicon" Michael E. Ruppert, New Society Publishers 2004 ISBN=0865715408, 9780865715400 p.263.
  17. ↑ "The Politics of Anti-Semitism" Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, AK Press p.124 ISBN 1902593774, 9781902593777.
  18. ↑ Espionage Ruled Out in Case of Bad Art Forward Magazine.
  19. ↑ U.S. officials dismiss report of Israeli spies March 7, 2002 Washington Post. Accessed October 18, 2008.
  20. ↑ US arrests 200 young Israelis in spying investigation Daily Telegraph, March 7, 2002. Accessed April 25, 2010.
  21. ↑ Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA? Sunday Herald (UK) via Internet Archive
  22. ↑ Suspicious Visitors to Federal Facilities Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, archived at Internet Archive.
  23. ↑ Israeli student 'spy ring' revealed The Guardian, March 6, 2002. Accessed March 6, 2010.
  24. ↑ Spies, or students? Were the Israelis just trying to sell their paintings, or agents in a massive espionage ring? Haaretz, May 7, 2002.
  25. ↑ U.S. officials dismiss report of Israeli spies Seattle Times March 7, 2002, Accessed October 18, 2008.
  26. ↑ Espionage Ruled Out in Case of Bad Art The Forward.
  27. ↑ an Tür mit Mohammed Atta Die Zeit, October 2002.
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