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MYSTERY OF 'ISRAELI SPIES' IN AMERICA: THE ECSTASY FACTOR DRUGS ENTER STORY OF 120 PHONY 'ART STUDENTS'
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by Ed Blanche, Special to The Daily Star Was Affair Linked To Investigation Of
Six months after a flurry of reports that US authorities had rounded up and quietly deported some 120 young Israelis, most of them posing as "art students" while apparently spying on US government agencies before and after Sept. 11, their activities remain shrouded in mystery. There has been speculation they were part of an espionage operation by Israel against its strategic ally, but it has never been explained what the purpose of that supposed mission might have been or whether it was related in some way to the suicide attacks in which more than 3,000 people perished. US authorities insist there was no spying involved, that the young Israeli men and women were deported because of visa problems, even though a security report by the US Drug Enforcement Administration ( DEA ) in June 2001, leaked to the media in December 2001, concluded that they were involved in "organized intelligence-gathering activity." The mainstream US media has been uncharacteristically silent on this bizarre episode, as it has been in earlier instances when there were suspicions that Israeli intelligence agencies were engaged in clandestine operations in the US. This is even more unsettling since several government agencies have said unequivocally over the years that Israel "aggressively" conducts such operations in America. But suspicion that the young Israeli "art students" were indeed involved in espionage has not dissipated. And it's not hard to see why. Some of them were serving in the military - one was identified as the son of a two-star general - at the time they were first detected by US security authorities in at least 42 cities and towns across the country in January 2001, or had been assigned to intelligence branches during their military service. Most failed polygraph tests when questioned about their activities. All said they were students at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem or the "University of Jerusalem" ( presumably the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which is known as the Hebrew University ), but no record of the identities they admitted to were enrolled at either institution, now or in the past. Some dogged and independent US journalists have not been deterred by the bland denials issued by the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government agencies and have continued to investigate this puzzling and increasingly sinister affair. While they suspect a government cover-up to avoid an espionage scandal that could damage relations with Israel ( and antagonize the powerful pro-Israel lobby ), they have also postulated some alternative theories as to what it was all about. Christopher Ketcham, a freelance journalist based in New York, reported in a lengthy online article this month that one scenario is that the whole affair was linked to a major DEA investigation into a global drug-trafficking operation controlled by Israelis. Whether or not that theory has any validity is open to question and Ketcham, who quotes several DEA and US intelligence sources in his article, expresses some skepticism about what he calls "the art student/drug dealer conspiracy." But this is worth examining because it leads from the expanding activities of Israel's crime syndicates in the US to a trail of clandestine operations by serving or former Israeli military men in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s with right-wing paramilitary forces and the drug cartels with whom they shared an enmity toward left-wing guerrilla organizations. Some of these operations were carried out on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. Viewed through this prism, Ketcham's "art student/drug dealer conspiracy" starts to intersect with the murky world of espionage, covert arms deals and terrorism. One of the primary targets of the "art students," according to the DEA report, was the DEA itself and individual agents. Several of the "students" were found seeking access to buildings housing DEA and other federal agencies. The group apparently had links to an Israeli electronics company in the US that deals with government departments, including providing wiretapping equipment to the FBI. At the time, the DEA was investigating the activities of an Israeli organized crime syndicate that controls the multibillion-dollar trade in "ecstasy," an amphetamine derivative that is sold in pill form. The US is a major market and in 2000 the Customs Service seized some 7 million ecstasy tablets. In May 2001, the Israeli mastermind of this operation, Oded Tuito, was arrested by Spanish police in Castelldefels outside Barcelona. His capture triggered a plethora of extradition requests from around the world, including the United States, and on Aug. 15, 2001, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted him and 11 alleged associates for running an international drug trafficking ring that smuggled an estimated 100,000 pills a month into that city. He has been indicted on similar charges in New York and Pittsburgh. Two other Israelis, identified as Michel Elkaiam and Simon Itach, believed to be Tuito's top lieutenants, were also arrested in Barcelona later. In November, police in Britain, Germany, Israel, Australia and the Netherlands arrested 17 people, including two other Israelis held in Amsterdam, who were believed to be key figures in the ring. In other swoops around the same time, 1.6 million ecstasy pills weighing 400 kilograms were seized in Lubeck, Germany, hidden in a shipment of dried flowers bound for Australia, where another Israeli was arrested. Another 40 kilograms were intercepted in London and 4 kilograms in the the Dutch city of Haarlem. But these successes barely dented a criminal enterprise, largely controlled by Israeli syndicates, involving what Interpol says is now the world's most popular illegal drug. Officials estimate that more than 500 million ecstasy pills are consumed every year. One DEA official called Tuito "the most notorious ecstasy trafficker known to law enforcement authorities in Europe, Israel and the US." He cornered the market a couple of years ago by buying up the entire output of pills manufactured in clandestine laboratories in the Netherlands, the main producer. The dozens of Dutch labs are believed to supply 80 percent of the world market. According to DEA officials, Tuito bought the pills at 50 cents apiece and sold them at $28.
US authorities believe Tuito has been seeking to form alliances with US crime families, but in an equally sinister development the United Nations Narcotics Control Board reported in February that Colombian drug cartels were now shipping cocaine to Europe to exchange it for ecstasy which was smuggled into the US through Latin America. Israel has a long history of involvement with the Colombian and other cartels in Latin America. Former Israeli Army and intelligence officers supplied the drug barons with weapons and trained their private armies, including special assassination squads, throughout the 1980s. One of the more notorious of these Israelis, a lieutenant colonel in the army reserve named Yair Klein, was convicted by an Israeli court in 1991 for illegally exporting arms to the Colombian cartels. He was fined $40,000. In 1998, Klein, a balding ex-paratrooper, was indicted in Bogotá on charges of training Colombian paramilitaries in terrorist tactics in the 1987-89. He was allegedly one of four Israelis hired by Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, one of the Medellin cartel's most violent bosses, who was later assassinated. Klein turned up in war-torn Sierra Leone running guns to rebels. He was arrested there in January 1999 and freed 16 months later. His current whereabouts are unknown, but Israeli arms dealers are still working with Colombian paramilitaries. On May 7, Nicaraguan and Panamanian authorities launched an investigation into how 3,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 5 million rounds of ammunition shipped from Nicaragua by two Israeli-owned arms companies to Colombia on Nov. 10, 2001, and wound up in the hands of the United Defense Forces of Colombia, a group the US government has branded as terrorist. There's another bizarre twist to this tale. According to US law enforcement officials, Tuito, who used such diverse couriers as New York strippers and Spanish grandmothers to smuggle pills to the US, also employed a group of young ultra-Orthodox Hassidic Jews from New York on the premise that their obvious religious aura would get them through customs inspections without trouble. In the 1980s, with Israelis deeply involved in Latin America's political turmoil, US and British investigations found that New York's Hassidic community was being used to launder as much as $200 million a year in drug cartel profits. One such operation was linked to David Marcus Katz, who controlled much of Israel's arms dealings in Central America from his base in Mexico City throughout the 1970s and 1980s. A 1992 report by Yediot Ahronot, based in part on FBI documentation, said Israeli intelligence organizations were directing a US-based money laundering network, including those run by Hassidic Jews, and using some of the profits to finance clandestine operations. So, all this may shed some light on this puzzling episode that the US government insists was "blown way out of proportion." Ketcham says he was told by the CIA: "We've just closed the book on it. And I recommend that you do the same." The mystery of the Israeli "art students" who weren't really students at all remains unsolved, but it seems there are people in the DEA and FBI who are not prepared to leave it at that. More to come.
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The
flamboyant Tuito allegedly stamped his pills with the Star of David and a
Tweety Bird logo, apparently because it amused him that it sounded so much
like his own name. 
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