Mossad: That's a fanstasy
In an earlier post, I reported that Australian television is claiming that Ben Zygier, known as Prisoner X, was sent to jail for
botching an operation to recover the bodies of three IDF soldiers who disappeared during the First Lebanon War (Operation Peace for Galilee).
Now, the former head of the Mossad division who deals with soldiers missing in action says that there was never any such operation planned by the Mossad.
It didn't exist.
Australian
state television said Zygier unwittingly sabotaged a secret 2007 Mossad mission
to exhume the bodies of three Israeli tank crewmen captured and killed in a
battle with Syrian forces, and disclosed the identity of an alleged Lebanese
agent while making an unauthorized attempt to recruit a man he thought was a
Hezbollah member.
The agent was tasked, according to an Australian
Broadcasting Corporation report, with digging up the bodies of three fallen IDF
soldiers killed in the 1982 Sultan Yacoub battle.
Rami Igra, who headed
the Mossad’s MIA and Captive Persons Division, said the soldiers had been
declared dead by the Military Rabbinate, and that it was wrong to believe that
Mossad would launch an operation to retrieve the bodies.
“The rabbinate
would not declare them dead unless it had undeniable evidence. The claim that an
operation would be launched to retrieve [the bodies] is not only empty, it is
science fiction,” Igra said.
“Zygier was facing 22 years in prison – that
kind of charge is for treachery, not an imaginary operation,” Igra
said. “These claims are nonsense.”
Hmmm.
Labels: Hezbullah, Lebanon, Mossad, Operation Peace for Galilee, Prisoner X, Syria
Zygier imprisoned because he botched operation to retrieve Sultan Yaqub bodies
According to the Australian television program that originally broke the story, Ben Zygier, the Australian-born Mossad spy who hung himself in an Israeli maximum security prison where he was known as Prisoner X, was originally imprisoned by Israel because he
revealed the identity of a Lebanese spy who was arranging for the return of the bodies of
Zach Baumol, Yehuda Katz and Zvi Feldman, who disappeared during the Battle of Sultan Yaqub during the First Lebanon War in 1982. This is from the first link.
According to the report, in 2007 the Mossad recruited former Lebanese
military leader Ziad Al Homsi through, what he claims were, operatives
working for the intelligence organization in China and Thailand.
In strides to get ahead and please the Mossad, Zygier apparently
revealed Al Homsi's name to a Lebanese Hezbollah agent who subsequently
turned him in to Lebanese authorities. Al Homsi faced a 15-year prison
sentence, but was released after only three years.
The Mossad
wanted to utilize Al Homsi, who was well connected from his
participation in operations against Israeli troops in the Bekka Valley
where the remains of three soldiers killed in the Battle of Sultan
Yocoub were believed to rest, ABC Australia reported.
Al Homsi
reportedly said he was charged with the task to organize for the
collection of the missing Israeli soldiers' bodies and to provide them
to another Mossad-aligned party that would carry out the remaining
recovery process.
Al Homsi claimed in the ABC report that he had
worked as a double agent for Lebanon and its intelligence officials had
supported his efforts to gain knowledge of the Israelis' bodies to be
used for bargaining the release of Palestinian prisoners.
I thought I saw somewhere that Israel had denied this story, but I'm not finding it right now.
Labels: Battle of Sultan Yaqub, Mossad, Operation Peace for Galilee, Prisoner X
Court: Prisons Service responsible for death of Prisoner X
A report cleared for publication in the last hour indicates that an Israeli court has ruled that the
Israel Prison Services was responsible for the death of Ben Zygier, the Australian-born Mossad agent who allegedly committed suicide in a prison cell in late 2010.
According do the
document, there is evidence to show which specific IPS employees were
responsible for Zygier's death and they may be subsequently tried.
Hmmm.
UPDATE 11:30 AM
More
here.
Labels: Prisoner X
Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Thursday, March 28.
1)All that glitters
Politico published an analysis of President Obama's recent trip to the Middle East by Josh Gerstein, Obama in Israel: 5 takeaways (h/t The Israel Link). While the article isn't awful, it suffers from a lack of substance. The five takeaways are:
- Bibi and Barack patch it up
- Obama’s new peace strategy: Hug Israel
- Surprise substance: Obama defrosts Israel-Turkey ties
- Urgency of Iran raid decision dialed back
- Obama fears being drawn in on Syria
The first two items are about what is often referred to as "optics." The
substance of the third item has quickly faded as Prime Minister Erdogan
has backtracked from his apparently assurance that he had accepted
Netanyahu's apology. The last two seem to based on what people said or
didn't say publicly. the last item could just have been gleaned from
paying attention to the administration's actions over the past two
years.
One needn't have been a political reporter from a major online news site
to write the article. It required no specialized knowledge of the
Middle East or even much of American politics. A passing familiarity of
headlines over the past four years would have provided enough background
for a reasonably talented writer to come up with those five takeaways.
Barry Rubin summed up the trip in about five paragraphs that had a lot more substance than Gerstein's article:
It is not that Obama was nice toward Israel all along; it is that there
is a new policy based on his realizing there wasn’t going to be a
breakthrough to a comprehensive peace agreement.
There are, however, still two problem areas. First, the president expresses sympathy but not agreement with Israel. His view is:
I understand why you act as you do but you are wrong. You can obtain
lasting peace fast if only you aren’t stubborn and suspicious.
This, however, doesn’t matter very much. The second problem is critical.
How can you be so nice to a country when you help its enemies? How can
you help populate Israel’s borders and neighborhood with those who
openly proclaim their goal of committing genocide on its people?
If one asks: Has Obama helped or hurt Israel’s strategic situation the
answer is that he has quite definitely hurt it overall. If one asks: Has
Obama helped or hurt Israel's ability to deal with that strategic
situation the answer is that he has been about as good--but certainly
not better--as several predecessors by merely continuing past U.S. aid
and other policies.
Whereas Gerstein portrays Obama's outreach to Israel as a new strategy,
it likely was more a realization that the old strategy failed. Gerstein
has no mention of the growing power of the Muslim Brotherhood. Finally,
he never acknowledge that good intentions are not enough.
The "five takeaways" suffered from what a lot of reporting suffers from
nowadays, the elevation of trivia over substance and the boosting of
image above all else.
There is one point that Gerstein makes that's alluded to Professor Rubin
too.
Obama’s second-term strategy became clear during the trip:
express such unqualified, heartfelt love and affection for Israelis and
the state of Israel that they trust him to have Israel’s back in future
peace talks, then coax Palestinians back to the table despite the
improbability that Israel will halt settlement construction outside the
context of some kind of peace deal.
In the media support for Israel is portrayed as emotional; support for a
more "balanced" approach in the Middle East is portrayed as
sophisticated. This is an attitude that President Obama seems to
believe. The problem with the "balanced" approach is that it takes every
charge against Israel at face value and subjects nearly every claim in
Israel's favor to critical scrutiny.
2) Still a mystery
The first report on Prisoner X to appear in the New York Times was Australian Report on Israel’s ‘Prisoner X’ Suggests Melbourne Man Was Mossad Agent by Robert Mackey at The Lede. Drawing exclusively on left wing sources, one paragraph expresses Mackey's theme.
Concerns about censorship, and the reported secret detention of an
Israeli citizen who somehow managed to hang himself in a high-security
prison, prompted a stream of questions for Israel’s justice minister on
Tuesday in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, Haaretz reported.
A followup article by the Jodi Rudoren, the paper's main Israeli correspondent helped foment the paranoia:
Two of Mr. Shai’s colleagues, meanwhile, called for the
formation of a parliamentary committee to investigate the case. And many
Israelis joined social-media campaigns that are demanding more
information.
“No Israeli citizen will be able to sleep comfortably in a country in
which an affair such as Prisoner X can take place,” wrote Uri Misgav, a
blogger for the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, in a lengthy post. “The
Israeli public deserves to know whether the Israeli prisons are holding
on to Prisoner Y and Prisoner Z,” he wrote. “The Israeli public deserves
to be told how all of the monitoring mechanics failed and how such a
systematic failure will not be repeated.”
But Mr. Netanyahu seemed untroubled by the affair. “I rely completely on
the security forces,” he told the cabinet. “I also completely rely on
the legal authorities.”
Early reports that Prisoner X, Ben Zygier, had been jailed without
informing anyone proved to be false as his family was aware of his
imprisonment and he had met with lawyers shortly before his suicide.
Now more details are emerging about the case. Or are they?
Der Spiegel and the Sydney Morning Herald
have launched a joint investigation into Zygier's story. According to
this version, Zygier after an unsuccessful stint in the field was
assigned a desk job. Before taking a leave of absence from the Mossad,
he made contact with a source with connections to Hezbollah in Europe
and unintentionally fed him information that compromised two Israeli
spies in Lebanon.
There are problems with this story. There are a lot of details that
would seem to be classified. Does the reporter know these to be true or
did he speculate? Though a number of sources are quoted, the significant
ones are never named. In other words as Isabel Kershner reported:
Most of the details of Mr. Zygier’s case remain subject to a
strict, court-ordered blackout in Israel, and the story could not be
independently verified.
One detail about the story also rings false.
Homsi, says General Ashraf Rifi, the head of Lebanese
intelligence, was one of the most important catches his agency had ever
made. Homsi was later sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor.
If Homsi was such an important "catch" why was he only sentenced to 15
years in prison?
The Der Spiegel/Sydney Morning Herald would explain the harsh treatment
accorded Zygier, but it stretches credulity. On the other hand it could
be the basis of an exciting new spy novel.
Michael Ross, a former Mossad agent who previously wrote about the case is skeptical.
+ 1 K RT “@tcgriffin: Not sure the latest version of the Ben Zygier story adds up. smh.com.au/national/how-l…compare: abc.net.au/news/2013-02-1…”
— Michael Ross (@mrossletters) March 25, 2013
Ross, in a followup article adds an important caution:
I encourage readers of articles on intelligence matters—and especially
concerning the Mossad—to remember that journalists can only write what
they are told, not what they are able to find out.
One final question: given that the Spiegel/Herald story could not be verified, why did the New York Times report about it?
3) Priorities
Last week the New York Times published an inflammatory cover story in
its magazine written by Ben Ehrenreich. I wrote an e-mail to the paper's
public editor, Margaret Sullivan, that read, in part:
This is how the magazine identified Ehrenreich:
Ben Ehrenreich won a 2011 National Magazine Award in feature
writing. His most recent novel is “Ether,” published by City Lights
Books.
Chemi Shalev of Ha'aretz noted something else about Ehrenreich.
In 2009, Ehrenreich published a direct attack on Zionism in the
Los Angeles Times entitled “Zionism is the Problem”. In the article,
Ehrenreich castigates not only the “deplorable conditions in which
Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank” but “the Zionist
tenets on which the state was founded “as well.
“The problem is functional”, Ehrenreich writes. “Founding a modern
state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is
ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics
of exclusion or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem
is Zionism.”
(Here's a link to that article.)
In other words, Ehrenreich is hostile to the existence of the Jewish
state. The New York Times had an obligation to inform its audience that
its reporter had significant baggage and leave it to its readers to
decide if he is telling the complete story; or just selecting those
parts that advance his own views.
Sullivan, in her latest, mentioned a previous issue with Middle East coverage.
Twitter and Facebook can be dangerous places for
journalists. I wrote about two cases in which problems arose: a sexist
Twitter message from the Times magazine freelancer Andrew Goldman to the
author Jennifer Weiner, and eyebrow-raising Facebook and Twitter
messages by Jodi Rudoren as she began her new post as the Jerusalem
bureau chief.
The Times dealt with the situations in quite different ways: by
suspending Mr. Goldman from his column for a few weeks and by assigning
an editor to work with Ms. Rudoren on her social media efforts. A deputy
foreign editor, Michael Slackman, told me that Ms. Rudoren’s social
media presence eventually fell off as she dug into her new beat and that
she uses it now “primarily to cover the news and far less as a public
journal.” When she does post on Facebook and Twitter now, the messages
are no longer vetted by an editor, according to the foreign editor,
Joseph Kahn, but are “monitored,” as are those of other reporters.
What was important to the New York Times is whether its Israel
correspondent might have tweeted something that was deemed insensitive
to Palestinians even if it had no impact on her reporting. That was
something that the paper dealt with. But to acknowledge that an
anti-Zionist wrote a major story is apparently beyond the scope of the
paper's responsibility to its readers.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Middle East Media Sampler, Mossad, New York Times, Prisoner X, Soccer Dad, US-Israel relationship
'Prisoner X' exposed two Israeli spies to Hezbullah
Germany's
Der Spiegel and Australia's
The Australian are reporting that Ben Zygier, the Mossad agent known as 'Prisoner X' who took his own life in an Israeli prison in 2010, had been sentenced to a minimum of ten years in jail for
exposing two Israeli spies to Hezbullah in a self-initiated bid to 'turn' a Hezbullah spy into a double agent.
According to the report, Siad al-Homsi and Mustafa ali Awadeh were
arrested in May 2009 for spying for Israel in Lebanon and sentenced to
long prison terms after Zygier passed their names to a Hezbollah
operative.
...
Zygier was eventually demoted and ordered to return to Israel in 2007
after his work failed to meet the Mossad's expectations. He left the
organization in 2008 to return to his native Australia, Der Spiegel reported.
The Australian quoted Fairfax newspapers, which carried out the joint investigation into Zygier with Der Spiegel,
as reporting that Zygier's contacts with the Hezbollah operative were
part of a "rogue" operation by which he attempted to get back into the
Mossad's good graces following his demotion.
According to the
report, the alleged Mossad agent had met with the Hezbollah operative in
hopes of turning him into a double agent. The Hezbollah operative who
Zygier hoped to turn then double-crossed him, sending information on the
two informants back to Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut.
Zygier
had given the Hezbollah operative information on the informants,
Israel's top two Lebanese assets, to prove he had access to valuable
knowledge, according to the report.
Fairfax reported that one of
the informants, Siad al-Homsi, had told Israel that he could lead them
to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The report added that Zygier
was carrying discs with further information at the time of his arrest
that he may have intended on passing to the Hezbollah operative as well.
Once
arrested, Zygier quickly confessed to passing the intelligence and was
facing a ten year prison sentence, Fairfax reported, according to the Australian.
Sounds like a tragedy all the way around.
Labels: collaborators, Hezbullah, Lebanon, Mossad, Prisoner X
Australia: No sign Prisoner X involved in Mabhouh assassination
Australia says there is no sign that Ben Zygier, known here as
Prisoner X, used his
Australian passport in connection with the assassination - allegedly by the Mossad - of Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. In fact, there's no evidence that Zygier was involved in the assassination at all.
Australia had no evidence that a dual Australian-Israeli citizen and
suspected Mossad spy, who died in jail in Israel in 2010, had been
involved in the assassination of a Hamas arms procurer in Dubai, Foreign
Minister Bob Carr said on Wednesday.
Carr also said Australia
had found no evidence of the misuse of any of the Australian passports
taken out by the man, Ben Zygier, who had changed his name several times
and obtained new Australian passports each time.
However, Carr said the Zygier case raised unresolved questions about
Australian passports held by dual citizens who work for a foreign
government, and said Australia would lodge the strongest possible
protest if it was found that Israel had used an Australian passport for
spying.
"We have our own sources. None of them have information
at this time that one of his passports was misused. But we are very
alive to the possibility," Carr said as he released a Department of
Foreign Affairs and Trade report into the case.
It will be many years - if ever - before the full truth is known about this case.
Labels: Australia, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Mossad, Prisoner X
Asghari was never in Israel
In an earlier post, I reported on an Iranian request to the United Nations to investigate the 'disappearance' of former Iranian Deputy Defense Minister
Ali Reza Asgheri. Unsurprisingly, Laura Rozen reports, based on sources in the Iranian-American exile community, that Asgheri has
never been in Israel, is not being held in prison here, and did not die in prison here.
But an Iranian-American activist knowledgeable about the 2006 defection of former Iranian deputy defense minister Gen. Ali-Reza Asgari tells POLITICO that Asgari was never in Israel, and that the story that he died in Israel – or that he died at all -- is not true.
“The story is not true,” Pooya Dayanim, a Los Angeles-based Iranian pro-democracy activist told POLITICO Thursday. “I was somewhat observing this situation from the periphery from the time he left Iran. …The news is a complete fabrication and a fantasy.”
Asgari, who served as deputy defense minister under Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, disappeared while on a trip to Turkey in December 2006. Iranian officials insisted that he was kidnapped by a hostile intelligence service such as Israel’s Mossad, but Iranian-American sources have said Asgari sought asylum in the West, and that he was resettled safely abroad, and is alive. But a series of stories in the Israeli press in recent weeks about an unidentified “Prisoner X” dying in an Israeli prison has led to speculation by American blogger Richard Silverstein that the prisoner X who died was probably Asgari. Silverstein has also suggested that Prisoner X may not have commit suicide but was murdered.
Israeli journalists say Prisoner X was not Asgari, but the Israeli press is under a gag order from the court from discussing who Prisoner X was or the circumstances of his case.
My guess is that 'Prisoner X' is someone very high up on Hamas' wish list in exchange for kidnapped IDF corporal Gilad Shalit, and that's why the Israeli press is under a gag order.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Ali Reza Asghari, Gilad Shalit, Prisoner X
