Israeli Outlaws in America - The Case of Rafi Eitan

CounterPunch, August 25, 2003:

Israeli Outlaws in America

The Case of Rafi Eitan

By Kurt Nimmo

Is Rafi Eitan in the United States and if so why hasn't the FBI arrested him?

Eitan is the former chief of Mossad operations in Europe and the man who recruited the U.S. Navy counter-intelligence specialist Jonathan Pollard to spy on the United States. As well, Eitan once headed the top-secret science and technology spy unit known as Leshkat Kesher Madao, or Lekem (supposedly dismantled following Pollard's bust).

According to Richard Sale (Pollard Recruiter Resurfaces in U.S., UPI, July 31, 2003) and federal law enforcement officials, "Eitan has, for the last year or so, been traveling to the United States on an Israeli passport, but using an alias."

Eitan apparently landed at Columbus, Ohio, and then moved around the Midwest on a prolonged road trip. Eitan "the stinker" has been photographed in the company of "known dealers who belong to a ring dealing in the drug ecstasy," one federal law enforcement official told Sale.

Last year two major Israeli Ecstasy traffickers were extradited to the United Sates, much to the displeasure of the Israeli government. The DEA claims "Israeli organized crime figures" control around 70 percent of the worldwide market in Ecstasy. "The FBI is looking for evidence that Eitan is, or has been engaging, in questionable activities related to this ring," a federal law enforcement official told UPI.

For his part in the Pollard spy scandal, Rafi Eitan was promoted to a senior position with the largest state-owned business enterprise in Israel -- the Israel Chemicals Company. He received the job based on the recommendation of Ariel Sharon. "It's generally agreed that Eitan was to take the brunt of blame for the [Pollard] mess," a former official close to confidential details of the case told UPI. "In return for his silence, Sharon would make sure he got a good job." In 1987, Eitan boasted to an Israeli newspaper that all of his actions had been undertaken with the knowledge of his Israeli superiors.

But Eitan was not the only Israeli to be rewarded for snooping on America. Aviem Sella, an Israeli Air Force expert in nuclear targeting and delivery of airborne nuclear weapons, was Pollard's handler. When Pollard was arrested for passing satellite photographs and weapon systems data to the Israelis, Sella hurried back to Israel, and was soon promoted to Brig. Gen. in Israel's Air Force. "This raised such an outcry of protest in the United States that Sella was quietly moved to the Israeli Defense Force Defense College," writes Sale.

Apparently, spying on the United States is relatively easy for the Israelis. According to a 1979 CIA report (quoted by Michael Saba, Pollard in Perspective): "The Israeli intelligence service depends heavily on the various Jewish communities and organizations abroad for recruiting agents and eliciting general information ... Israeli agents usually operate discreetly within Jewish communities and are under instructions to handle their missions with utmost tact to avoid embarrassment to Israel." Pollard, who studied politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University after graduating from Stanford University, was one such "asset" in the American Jewish community.

Is it possible Eitan is working "discreetly within Jewish communities" in regard to drug dealing as well -- or did the FBI simply hallucinate the whole thing? And if the FBI indeed knows the whereabouts of Eitan, why haven't they arrested him? He is, after all, a wanted man in America.

According to Carl Cameron of Fox News -- in a series of reports that have subsequently disappeared from the Fox News website -- in 1997 the Israelis organized "cocaine and ecstasy trafficking, and sophisticated white-collar credit card and computer fraud... the bad guys had the cops beepers, cell phones, even home phones under surveillance. Some who did get caught admitted to having hundreds of numbers and using them to avoid arrest." An investigation revealed the Israeli crime network possessed "extensive access to database systems to identify pertinent personal and biographical information" of law enforcement officers.

How did a network of drug dealers get this sensitive information? "When investigators tried to find out where the information might have come from, they looked at Amdocs, a publicly traded firm based in Israel," Cameron reported. "Amdocs generates billing data for virtually every call in America, and they do credit checks."

But it seems Amdocs was not only involved with Israeli drug dealers. "More than two dozen U.S. intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials have told Insight [magazine] that the FBI believes Israel has intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing basis," write J. Michael Waller and Paul Rodriguez. "The worst penetrations are believed to be in the State Department. But others say the supposedly secure telephone systems in the White House, Defense Department and Justice Department may have been compromised as well. The problem for FBI agents in the famed Division 5, however, isn't just what they have uncovered, which is substantial, but what they don't know yet."

Amdocs "helped Bell Atlantic install new telephone lines in the White House in 1997... [and] a senior-level employee of Amdocs had a separate T1 data phone line installed from his base outside of St. Louis that was connected directly to Israel... investigators are looking into whether the owner of the T1 line had a 'real time' capacity to intercept phone calls from both the White House and other government offices around Washington, and sustained the line for some time, sources said. Sources familiar with the investigation say FBI agents on the case sought an arrest warrant for the St. Louis employee but [Clinton] Justice Department officials quashed it."

Waller and Rodriguez quoted one senior government official as saying: "It is a politically sensitive matter. I can't comment on it beyond telling you that anything involving Israel on this particular matter is off-limits. It's that hot."

Apparently, the Justice Department and the FBI have a lot to hide, if we are to believe Jeffrey Steinberg and Edward Spannaus. According to these two journalists, the Israelis are behind a "massive ecstasy trafficking operation, delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal drugs, manufactured in the Netherlands, to cities across the United States. The drug trafficking operation is also engaged in black market diamond smuggling, using Hassidic Jews as couriers... Portions of the funds garnered from the illegal operations, according to sources, are funneled to offshore bank accounts of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Some of these dirty funds were reportedly diverted to Sharon's election campaigns. This Israeli mafia apparatus receives technical support via a number of Israeli communications firms, that subcontract with major American telephone companies and government law enforcement agencies... Every time the DEA, FBI and Los Angeles Police Department task force infiltrated an agent inside the Orgad ring [Israeli Jacob 'Cookie' Orgad was arrested by a joint anti-drug task force in April 2000], his or her identity was blown within a matter of days. Every time a court ordered wiretap was put in place, the target immediately 'began behaving like Mother Teresa,' according to a source familiar with the case."

On August 16, Steinberg commented on Eitan's alleged resurfacing in the United States. "Eitan is making these high-risk journeys, U.S. and Israeli sources report, because he is directing plans for a major terrorist attack on American soil -- a new 9/11 -- to be blamed on either Muslim or Latin American terrorists... sources -- both Israeli and American -- have warned that Eitan is putting the finishing touches on such an operation, which coincides with Vice President Dick Cheney's aggressive promotion of the idea that the United States is facing an imminent new 9/11 attack. Cheney launched this propaganda offensive at his July 24, 2003 speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, and he has been stumping the country, ever since, asserting an imminent terror attack."

Regardless of the validity of Steinberg's terrorism claim, one has to ask why the FBI hasn't arrested Rafi Eitan. There is, after all, an outstanding federal warrant for his arrest, so why is he allowed to make road trips across America?

Is it possible the FBI has orders to keep their hands off Eitan? "One of the people who have been recently pulled out of mothballs is (Sharon's) old pal Rafi Eitan," reported the Israeli newspaper Maariv in March 2002. Is it possible Sharon sent Eitan to America?

Sharon knows who calls the shots in Washington. "I want to tell you something very clear," Sharon reportedly told his foreign Minister Shimon Peres in October, 2001 (according to Israel radio Kol Yisrael), "don't worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it."

Most Americans may not know it, but apparently the FBI does.

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent online gallery Ordinary Vistas. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's forthcoming volume, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

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