Google html caches have yielded quite a few remnants of PDFs that were taken down. A great resource if you want to see how US capital moves around offshore in Enron Star Wars funds.
But to the main point. MBS is alluding to the Israeli Spy Ring Story. My peregrinations on the WWW reveal this:
The mostly overpriced crap site Intelligence Online (which Le Monde is said to be acquiring) 'broke' the story based in part over a US government report put out last June that included information about Israelis violating their visas and being deported. Le Monde, a/o 4 March, picked up the story, which Reuters then reported Le Monde as reporting. There is apparently a DEA-related aspect to the story, since someone at the DEA is supposed to be a source about the Israeli activities, but the only memo he has leaked is one he wrote himself. The Israeli activities could be corporate spying, could be spying on US agencies with int'l scope, which means just about any agency the federal government actually gives money to, could be Mossad keeping tabs on Atta and the boys knowing full well that the FBI wasn't.
AFP helped disseminate the story worldwide. The FBI has denied the spy ring aspects but has admitted that Israelis have been deported. The Washington Post ran a story which emphasized the FBI denials.
The potential hard news aspects of this, for me anyway, are: that the Mossad might well have known something was up before 9-11 and self-servingly sat on it. For one thing, reports that Israel sent agents to the US to brief the FBI sounds like hogwash. If they knew something was up and wanted to report it, why not just get on a secure phone line to Colin Powell? None of this, by the way, makes me drop my view that some aspect or aspects of a US intelligence operation got infiltrated and the most likely candidate would be the US anti-Hussein organizations. The possible DEA connection fits right in.
The best report I've seen among online newspapers, which is the AFP article, is
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=2932180
No Israeli charged with spying in US: FBI
AFP [ WEDNESDAY, MARCH 06, 2002 7:32:58 AM ]
WASHINGTON: The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Tuesday said that no Israeli had been charged with spying in the US in connection with the probe of a ring of Israeli agents.
On Monday, Intelligence Online, a French website specialising in intelligence matters, reported that US authorities had broken up a ring of Israeli spies living in the US, who were burrowing into the Justice and Defense departments.
The site said that it had exclusive access to a US Justice Department report that showed "a huge Israeli spy ring operating in the United States was rolled up by the Justice Department's counter-espionage service" last year.
"This issue of an Israeli spying network is not an issue," said FBI spokesman Bill Carter. "No Israeli has been charged with espionage by the FBI or the Department of Justice in this matter."
The spokesman recalled, however, that a group of Israeli students "allegedly were involved in activity outside of their visas and they were removed from the US based on that fact."
But he made it clear that "no Israeli individual has been involved in espionage with regard to this matter."
Mark Reguev, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy here dismissed the Intelligence Online report as "nonsense."
An Israeli diplomat, meanwhile, stressed that "the Americans have made no request to Israel on this matter."
"There is currently no Israeli detained in the United States for visa problems. Those who were detained following the (September 11) attacks because the United States was undertaking a large-scale operation to track all the illegal immigrants were sent back to Israel," the source added.
Intelligence Online editor-in-chief Guillaume Dasquie said that the ring had been trying "to penetrate justice department and defence department systems" through drug-fighting agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which has access to files from other US departments.
"The DEA plays a central role in counter-espionage because of its internal security service, the Office of Security Programs, which was the first to notice the unusual behaviour of young Israeli nationals among its agents," Dasquie said.
Rogene Waite, a DEA spokeswoman, said that she could not confirm the report but noted that "there was some suspicious activity that occurred at several of our divisions" in the US.
She said that DEA personnel had been approached at federal buildings and other locations by people reported to be Israeli art students, but she was unable to provide further details.
Waite said that because the activity was suspicious, it was reported to DEA headquarters and compiled into a draft report, and the information was then handed over to the "appropriate federal law enforcement agencies."
Dasquie said that US investigators were concerned by indications that some of the alleged Israeli spies had been based in the same US cities as people suspected of having helped in the logistics of the devastating September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
For instance, it had been established, he said, that a dozen Israelis, including the alleged surveillance leader, had been based in the Florida town of Hollywood between January and June last year.
Dasquie said US authorities had arrested another dozen people "suspected of being tasked with the logistics of preparing the September 11 attacks" in the same area.
He stressed, however, that the "troubling" coincidence was still only one theory being looked into and that there was not enough information to determine whether Israel's Mossad foreign intelligence service had been aware of the preparations for the September attacks.
Intelligence Online said that around 120 Israelis were arrested or deported as a result of the top-secret operation, which it said began in April of last year and was ongoing.
The website said that the Israeli ring was active in the states of Arkansas, California, Florida and Texas and was made up of around 20 cells of four to eight members who were between the ages of 22 and 30 and had recently completed Israeli military service in an Army intelligence unit.