Showing posts with label Spying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spying. Show all posts
When You "Stand With Israel" They're Peeking Behind Your Back Checking Out Your Private Parts
in Spying, United States
Israel’s Aggressive Spying in the U.S. Mostly Hushed Up
By Jeff Stein
When White House national security advisor Susan Rice’s security detail cleared her Jerusalem hotel suite for bugs and intruders Tuesday night, they might’ve had in mind a surprise visitor to Vice President Al Gore’s room 16 years ago this week: a spy in an air duct.
According to a senior former U.S. intelligence operative, a Secret Service agent who was enjoying a moment of solitude in Gore’s bathroom before the Veep arrived heard a metallic scraping sound. “The Secret Service had secured [Gore’s] room in advance and they all left except for one agent, who decided to take a long, slow time on the pot,” the operative recalled for Newsweek. “So the room was all quiet, he was just meditating on his toes, and he hears a noise in the vent. And he sees the vent clips being moved from the inside. And then he sees a guy starting to exit the vent into the room.”
Did the agent scramble for his gun? No, the former operative said with a chuckle. “He kind of coughed and the guy went back into the vents.”
To some, the incident stands as an apt metaphor for the behind-closed-doors relations between Israel and America, “frenemies” even in the best of times. The brazen air-duct caper “crossed the line” of acceptable behavior between friendly intelligence services – but because it was done by Israel, it was quickly hushed up by U.S. officials.
Despite strident denials this week by Israeli officials, Israel has been caught carrying out aggressive espionage operations against American targets for decades, according to U.S. intelligence officials and congressional sources. And they still do it. They just don’t get arrested very often.
As Newsweek reported on Tuesday, American counter-intelligence officials told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees at the end of January that Israel's current espionage activities in America are "unrivaled and unseemly," going far beyond the activities of other close allies, such as Germany, France, the U.K. and Japan.
“It has been extensive for years,” a former top U.S. security official toldNewsweek Wednesday after Israeli Intelligence Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, among other top Israeli officials, “unequivocally” denied theNewsweek report, saying Israel stopped all spying operations in the U.S. after Jonathan Pollard was convicted of spying for Israel in 1987. One anonymous official was quoted in the Israeli media as saying Newsweek’s account “had the whiff of anti-Semitism in it.”
But a former U.S. intelligence operative intimately familiar with Israeli espionage rejected the anti-Semitism charge. “There is a small community of ex-CIA, FBI and military people who have worked this account who are absolutely cheering on [the Newsweek] story,” he said. “Not one of them is anti-Semitic. In fact, it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It has only to do with why [Israel] gets kid-glove treatment when, if it was Japan doing it or India doing it at this level, it would be outrageous.”
Beginning in the mid-1990s, well after Israel promised to stop spying in the U.S. in the wake of the Pollard affair, the FBI regularly felt compelled to summon Israeli diplomats in D.C. for a scolding, two former top counterintelligence officials told Newsweek. During the decade following 9/11, one said, the Israelis were summoned “dozens” of times and told to “cut the shit,” as one, a former top FBI official, put it. But as an “ally,” the Israelis almost always got off with only a warning.
But no matter how stern the FBI’s lecture – usually delivered personally to the embassy’s senior intelligence representative – the Israelis were unmoved, another former top intelligence official said. “You can't embarrass an Israeli,” he said. “It’s just impossible to embarrass them. You catch them red-handed, and they shrug and say, 'Okay now, anything else?'”
Always lurking, former intelligence officials say, was the powerful “Israeli lobby,” the network of Israel’s friends in Congress, industry and successive administrations, Republican and Democratic, ready to protest any perceived slight on the part of U.S. security officials. A former counterintelligence specialist told Newsweek he risked Israel’s wrath merely by providing routine security briefings to American officials, businessmen and scientists heading to Israel for meetings and conferences.
“We had to be very careful how we warned American officials,” he said. “We regularly got calls from members of Congress outraged by security warnings about going to Israel. And they had our budget. When ... the director of the CIA gets a call from an outraged congressman–’What are these security briefings you're giving? What are these high-level threat warnings about travel to Tel Aviv you're giving? This is outrageous’ – he has to pay close attention. There was always this political delicacy that you had to be aware of.”
The annual exercise in which the State Department publishes security profiles on foreign countries gave the intelligence agencies huge headaches, he added. “When we were doing the annual threat rating for the U.S. Embassy and consulates [in Israel], it was always a huge debate,” he said. “The intelligence community would always be urging the highest level of threats, while the State Department would be saying, ‘This is not going to go over very well, we can't give this kind of rating, because there will be certain consequences in terms of travel warnings and restrictions.’ It was always a big, big debate on how you rate the threat over there.”
But the danger is real, he and other former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with Israel’s methods say. Israeli agents “go after senior U.S. Navy officers on shore leave in Haifa, after space industry officials, or scientists with intellectual property, anywhere. This has always been a huge concern for the community.”
In the States, Israeli officials and businessmen are forever trying to lure attractive American targets to visit Israel. Representatives of Maf’at, an administrative body that yokes the Israel Defense Ministry to its military industries, give U.S. counterintelligence agencies great concern, one of the former U.S. intelligence officials said. "They were the ones that really caused us a lot of concern. Because they had a plausible reason to attend all these conferences and defense contracting facilities and whatnot. It was a great cover vehicle for industrial espionage,” he said.
“I remember speaking to one U.S. scientist who was at a conference and being worked by a group from [Israel],” the former U.S. intelligence operative continued. “And this scientist, who was savvy enough to recognize what she saw, said it was really unbelievable how the elicitation techniques were being used – the invitations to come over – basically getting the data dump from a fellow scientist. And the naïveté on the part of the American scientists was really striking. We saw this all the time.”
Israeli officials were brazen enough to pitch even him. After giving a speech at a recent security industry gathering in Washington, he said, he was approached by the commercial attaché of the Israeli Embassy. “He said, ‘Oh, it was great to hear your background, that was a great talk you gave, how interesting,’ and so forth. And I thought, Here it comes, here comes the pitch. And sure enough, he said, ‘Have you ever thought of coming over? We'd love to have you come over, we’ll pay all your expenses while you're over there, we'll give you the tour…’ I thought to myself, Come on guys, come on.”
“Their goal,” he continued, “is to get contacts to come out of the U.S. and over there and then wine them, dine them, assess them, see what their weaknesses are. I mean, we had government officials going over there who were offered drugs, like, ‘Hey, do you want to go get some pot?’ What? These are U.S. government officials. The drugs, women coming to your hotel room – they throw everything at you. No matter how high the official.”
On Wednesday, Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz batted away such espionage allegations, saying “Israel does not spy in the U.S., does not enlist spies in the U.S., and does not do intelligence gathering in the U.S.” Likewise, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said he “would not agree to any spying on the United States, neither directly nor indirectly.” He called the allegations, attributed by Newsweek to intelligence officials who have briefed Congress, “malicious.”
But current and former U.S. intelligence officials stood their ground.
“It really spans the gamut of everything you can think of,” said a former U.S. intelligence official who has been a familiar face in the executive suites of several U.S. security agencies over the decades. “It used to be when French students came to the United States as interns, summer employees and things like that, they all had a French DGSE officer they had to report back to at the embassy,” he said. “Similar things occur with respect to the Israelis … [who] have a lot of Israeli travelers in the United States."
Such blanket accusations infuriate defenders of Israel, who detect that “whiff of anti-Semitism” in them. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials who opposed Pollard’s early release were also accused of anti-Semitism.
The high number of young Israelis who overstay their visits to the U.S. has been a sticking point in Israel’s drive to get off the U.S. visa-required list. Another is its failure to regularly report lost and stolen passports to Interpol. A bigger issue has been its rough treatment of Arab Americans and pro-Palestinian activists travelling to Israel. But Israeli efforts to pursue U.S. military, scientific and industrial secrets has also emerged as a major hurdle, if not the major hurdle, in normalizing visa relations, according to congressional sources.
“I was in this briefing — there were several” on Israeli espionage by U.S. security officials in 2013, a former congressional aide told Newsweek. “The one I was in had senior staffers from foreign affairs, the full committee, the subcommittee ... from judiciary, Republicans and Democrats, senior leadership staff. I don’t think there was anyone in there who didn’t work for a member that wasn’t ardently and publicly pro-Israel,” he said.
“And afterwards, we were saying, ‘No way. You’ve got to be fucking kidding.’” The evidence of Israeli spying was overwhelming, he said. Visa waivers was off the table.
“The voices in the room,” the aide recalled, were, “‘There’s just no way that this is possible.’”
Israel pulling the strings of NSA surveillance program
Press TV has conducted an interview with James Fetzer, Professor Emeritus of the University of Minnesota Duluth (Madison) about the United States government spying on American citizens as well as eavesdropping on several world leaders.
The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.
Press TV: I’d like to get your thoughts on the recent US Senate Intelligence Committee’s measures that will allow the continuation of the government sweeping mass surveillance activities. Does this show the complete disregard of the United States for the aftermath of the revelations of its espionage activities?
Fetzer: Well, it has several dimensions. It is completely unconstitutional and it cannot be justified on the basis of domestic terrorism.
The very same Committee that is considering this legislation released a report on October 3, 2012 based upon its review of 680 fusion center reports or fusion centers’ merged Federal State and local anti-terrorism efforts gathered between 2009 and 2010 and in that 680 reports distributed all over the country they found not a single instance, -not one, zero, zilch, naught, none- of domestic terrorist activity.
So, this is clearly not directed at domestic terrorist activities; instead it is directed at opponents of the National Security State. Dianne Feinstein, I am sorry to say, is a stooge of Israel. She is one of many.
The problem here is that the NSA [the National Security Agency] has so much information on all of the members of Congress, all of the members of the Supreme Court, all of the members of the Executive up to including President Obama that they could extort them, they can subject them to pressure, they can threaten to embarrass them and in fact there is every reason to believe that Israel is behind all of this because there is an agreement between the NSA and Israel that all of our raw data should go directly into Tel Aviv. It is a terrible, shocking situation. And I am appalled that the Senate should be seeking some way to legalize it but I can assure you that is because they are under duress by the NSA.
Press TV: Professor Fetzer, revelations by Edward Snowden, week on out, reveal more shocking details about the espionage activities. There is spying on civilians inside the United States, spying on foreign countries, civilians of foreign countries, even leaders of other countries, foes and allies alike.
Just how far does this rabbit hole go?
Fetzer: It is worldwide and massive. They are vacuuming up everyone’s electronic communications, are vacuuming up everyone’s email, cell phones, any form of communication, financial and medical.
Chancellor Merkel was well alarmed because she grew up and born in East Germany which was dominated by the Stasi, the most effective secret organization ever conceived by the mind of man and it turns out at last that our own Department of Homeland Security was modeled after the Stasi in combination with the NSA the HS is seeking to dominate the United States or try to disarm Americans so they cannot stand up and oppose the imposition of tyranny by this administration.
It is a very serious situation. I am very profoundly troubled and the whole world ought to be disturbed by what is going on here.
Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
MAY/HMV
Israeli art students spying again
in Spying, United States
A local ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City, Utah has caused a
stir online with a report suggesting that self-proclaimed
Israeli art students, peddling their artwork from door to
door, have been asking disturbing questions about plans to
build an NSA data center in the area.
"These salespeople say they're Israeli students," ABC4
reporter Brent Hunsaker explained. "They even produce
Israeli passports. They say they're selling their own artwork
to raise money to open a gallery. So why would the Israeli
art students want to know about the National Security
Agency?"
According to Hunsaker, warnings about the students are
being spread through blogs and church bulletins. One
bulletin sent out to Mormon women even claimed that
"federal law enforcement groups are actually investigating
their ties to organized crime and terrorist groups."
The basis for the suspicions goes back to 2002, when a
lengthy article at Salon described how Drug Enforcement
Agency field offices were reporting that "young Israelis
claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale
had been attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a
year. The Israelis had also attempted to penetrate the
offices of other law enforcement and Department of
Defense agencies."
According to author Christopher Ketcham, "Some of the
Israelis were observed diagramming the inside of federal
buildings. Some were found carrying photographs they had
taken of federal agents. One was discovered with a
computer printout in his luggage that referred to 'DEA
groups.' In some cases, the Israelis visited locations not
known to the public -- areas without street addresses, for
example, or DEA offices not identified as such."
These reports were summarized in a June 2001 internal
DEA memo, but what brought the story to public notice
was
a Fox News special in December of that year. It suggested
that the "art students" might have been Israeli spies who
had trailed al-Qaeda members across the United States but
had never shared any information they might have gained
on the plans for September 11 with US authorities.
Ultimately, the more conspiratorial aspects of the story
proved impossible to confirm, and it became one more
unsolved 9/11 mystery. Since then, self-proclaimed "Israeli
art students" have continued to show up from time to time,
but most of them are clearly running a scam.
Police in Ontario, Canada, for example, are currently
issuing warnings about individuals going door to door and
asking hundreds of dollars for "one of a kind" artworks that
are "actually mass-produced oil paintings from China worth
about $15."
The situation is somewhat different in Utah, however,
where the sudden appearance of the art students is being
tied to recent news reports that "the Army has awarded a
$1.2 billion contract to a construction consortium to build
a spacious new data center in Utah for the National
Security Agency's (NSA's) cybersecurity effort."
The facility is part of the Comprehensive National Security
Initiative, launched in 2008, whose aim is to protect
military computer networks from cyber-threats and provide
assistance to the Department of Homeland Security in
securing the federal government's civilian networks.
stir online with a report suggesting that self-proclaimed
Israeli art students, peddling their artwork from door to
door, have been asking disturbing questions about plans to
build an NSA data center in the area.
"These salespeople say they're Israeli students," ABC4
reporter Brent Hunsaker explained. "They even produce
Israeli passports. They say they're selling their own artwork
to raise money to open a gallery. So why would the Israeli
art students want to know about the National Security
Agency?"
According to Hunsaker, warnings about the students are
being spread through blogs and church bulletins. One
bulletin sent out to Mormon women even claimed that
"federal law enforcement groups are actually investigating
their ties to organized crime and terrorist groups."
The basis for the suspicions goes back to 2002, when a
lengthy article at Salon described how Drug Enforcement
Agency field offices were reporting that "young Israelis
claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale
had been attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a
year. The Israelis had also attempted to penetrate the
offices of other law enforcement and Department of
Defense agencies."
According to author Christopher Ketcham, "Some of the
Israelis were observed diagramming the inside of federal
buildings. Some were found carrying photographs they had
taken of federal agents. One was discovered with a
computer printout in his luggage that referred to 'DEA
groups.' In some cases, the Israelis visited locations not
known to the public -- areas without street addresses, for
example, or DEA offices not identified as such."
These reports were summarized in a June 2001 internal
DEA memo, but what brought the story to public notice
was
a Fox News special in December of that year. It suggested
that the "art students" might have been Israeli spies who
had trailed al-Qaeda members across the United States but
had never shared any information they might have gained
on the plans for September 11 with US authorities.
Ultimately, the more conspiratorial aspects of the story
proved impossible to confirm, and it became one more
unsolved 9/11 mystery. Since then, self-proclaimed "Israeli
art students" have continued to show up from time to time,
but most of them are clearly running a scam.
Police in Ontario, Canada, for example, are currently
issuing warnings about individuals going door to door and
asking hundreds of dollars for "one of a kind" artworks that
are "actually mass-produced oil paintings from China worth
about $15."
The situation is somewhat different in Utah, however,
where the sudden appearance of the art students is being
tied to recent news reports that "the Army has awarded a
$1.2 billion contract to a construction consortium to build
a spacious new data center in Utah for the National
Security Agency's (NSA's) cybersecurity effort."
The facility is part of the Comprehensive National Security
Initiative, launched in 2008, whose aim is to protect
military computer networks from cyber-threats and provide
assistance to the Department of Homeland Security in
securing the federal government's civilian networks.
NSA Never Breaks Up Israeli Espionage
NSA Spying Never Catches Israelis – Why Not?
…by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor …and Press TV
- First published on Press TV, July 11th, 2013 -

Snordster – Who and where is he?
[Editors Note: After this ran on Press TV Snordster picked it up for one of his incredible dramatic reading videos which is always a kind of out of body experience for a writer. So you have the choice of sitting back for the movie version at 11 minutes, and/or reading it below.
He had done an earlier one on my Jewish Genome piece that did very well, but this NSA one has 7500 views, not bad at all for this genre. One of these days when I find out how to contact him I will be able say thank you. I just Googled the Press TV title above and it still has a hit count of over 63,000, meaning it has been posted that many times, so we got the word out.
Snordster abridged the title, which creates a different search term. I just Goggled that one and got a count of 262,000, the highest number for anything I have ever done. I hate to quote Hillary, but this shows "it does take a village". Thanks to all of you who help to do the same...Jim W. Dean]
NSA Spying Never Catches Israelis?
YouTube - Veterans Today - – Snordster dramatic reading
Intelligence analysis always follows a dual track of analyzing what you can see…and what you can’t. The massive coverage on the recent Snowden revelations has basically all been theater as most had already been revealed and/or was known about by every Intel agency on the planet.
Two old platitudes come to mind…’Crying Crocodile Tears’, and Shakespeare’s “Me thinks she doth protest too much”. When you cut through all the smoke and mirrors, the essence is very simple.
Snowden, like Assange…despite the huge amount of classified material with all the embarrassing things that involved so many countries, neither of them seemed to know anything about the massive Israeli espionage that is carried out all over the world.

NSA
For example, the field reports from Afghanistan and Iraq involved Israelis being picked up as contractors doing very nasty things, and yes, doing them even to American troops.
None of that stuff made its way into the leakers shocking release pile. We have people who wrote some of those reports, and they were major headlines.
My verdict? No leaker who has had access to the mother-load of dirty Intel laundry on numerous selected countries, and who never releases any on Israel, is for real. They are an operator. Why? Because busting open the Israeli espionage cover-up is the story of a lifetime.
On one side you have a loyal faction of modern Intel professionals trying to monitor and block Israeli penetrations. And then there is the rogue bunch assisting the bad guys for all the rewards offered, not so much by the Israelis themselves but their substantial political helpers.
This battle has been going on for a long time and there is a huge amount of material available even in the declassified files. If you want to find out more, all you have to do is scratch the dirt. It is the espionage scandal of our time and these phony leakers have contributed nothing.
Veterans Today burned Assange in the fall of 2011, with Ziggy Brzezinski helping through his big PBS interview where he spilled the beans about the Assange information being released having been ‘seeded.’ He gave our initial claims a lot more exposure.
So that really leaves only one plausible explanation for ‘missing’ the Israeli espionage angle. Remember I said it would be impossible for a really connected leaker not to know about it. And if Assange and Snowden were really these altruistic goody goodies who cry about the public’s right to know how they are being abused by government spying on them, then why would they give the Zionists a free pass for doing it to all of us?
Press TV readers would know why…because these guys are on an Israeli string. This is simply Intel 101. When everybody is getting embarrassed by leaks except for that one special group, there is no suspect number two.
The Europeans are crying wolf as part of the charade, also. They all have been doing similar communications intercept spying on their own people…and more than a few of them in conjunction with the US under sharing arrangements.

The guilty have escaped so far
The beginning of this came from the alleged 911 hijackers. They had spent time in various European states and moved around different legal jurisdictions as the most normal tactic of that era for avoiding close monitoring by counter-intelligence services.
Communications Intel people did not want to get caught being responsible for missing another major attack, so it was open city on collecting everything they could by whatever means available.
The NSA name for it was Total Awareness. This sometimes would include having other jurisdictions do things that were illegal for you to do in your own country.
For example, years ago Canada intercept sites could collect material on Americans, and we on them, and both could testify that they were not collecting communications domestically and be telling the truth technically. But they were never asked about whether there was a sharing arrangement with anyone. This is part of the theater of Congressional hearings…what does not get asked.
The Israelis have a huge appetite for intercept information and they used their Jewish Lobby political muscle to get their contractors inside many of their friendly country counterintelligence operations, especially communications. In the US, Michael Chertoff literally hardwired them with full promotion and protection from Bush and Cheney.
Remember this is the crowd, along with Rudy Giuliani, who were going to make Bernie Kerik Homeland Security Director after being a high school dropout and detective third class. He was nothing more than a sock puppet for his handlers who would have been running the show.
What kind of leaders would use a tragedy like 911 to put a totally incompetent person in charge of the biggest conglomeration of Intel and law enforcement in history? Many were suspicious that they wanted to make sure that 911 would never be unraveled as to who was really behind it here in the US. Bernie would have been perfect for that. He has been out of jail a month now.
So what we have had going on is a cruel betrayal, not only here in America but in many countries. The War on Terror has been used by elites as an excuse to get a vice grip control over their populations, profiling them on a scale formerly only dreamed about.

“Here’s lookin at ya!”
Why would this be necessary? The only real answer is a looming fear of publics finding out what their governments had really done to them, the extent of the corruption and how thoroughly they had been pillaged.
People learning that their countries had been stolen, that would make them dangerous. They would all turn against those responsible.
The only defense for the elites then would be to quickly round up all those of a certain profile, those who had the leadership skills, the knowledge, and the network strength to fight back.
The data mining ability available to governments now is absolutely incredible. They can find out just about anything about anybody…but not on the Israelis, of course. Think about it. With these new tools we should have been able to decimate Israel’s espionage networks here…political, military, financial, media, academia and the think tanks.
How many Israeli Intel networks have the Western countries broken up since 911? The answer is zero. The Zionists have compromised these Western nations in a variety of ways, with the primary tool being political espionage as that is the pathway you use to get your people deeply embedded in all the important spots.
They spend ten, twenty years, even longer grooming their people to have them ready when the time is right to slip them into sensitive positions. Even our Justice Department has been compromised, as loyal people have gone everywhere to initiate prosecutions only to be told that it was just impossible for “protected entities”.
Assange, and now Snowden, are just side shows…burning up the public attention time clock that could have been much better spent going after the really dangerous threats. You cannot involve the Israelis in anything and have any security. The two are mutually exclusive.

Who is hoovering up who? And why are Israelis found at all the key junctions?
The professional Intel people all know this, but get overruled by the civilian leadership where that fix is in. To call these countries democracies is an embarrassment to the word.
These are conquered countries where people were sold the story about the tooth fairy and who are now struggling to outgrow their childish beliefs as their make believe world comes down around their ears.
All of these countries, their elite class, deem their own people to be their number one threat. And the Israeli Lobby operators are stuck to the elites like glue, promising to protect them when the dark times come…that they will be OK if they are with the right group.
Dear readers, we are not on their ‘right group’ list. We are on the expendable, potential threat one. Even War on Terror veterans found themselves on it, yet many are still refusing to let go of their Teddy Bears and face up to what has to be done.
You can shoot me as the bad news messenger if you want, but that won’t save you. Saving ourselves is going to require some very clear thinking, determination, and building street armies like the Egyptians just did.
When we can put 50 million people into the streets and bring the military over with us, it will be a new Independence day. And the first order of business would be to clean up 911, and not let those responsible walk among us.


