In September 2001, The New York Times and Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that approximately four hours after the attack on the World Trade Center, the FBI arrested five Israelis who had been filming the smoking skyline from the roof of a white van in the parking lot of an apartment building, for "puzzling behavior".
They were charged with illegally residing in the United States and working there without permits. The Israelis were said to have been videotaping the disaster with what was interpreted as cries of "joy and mockery".
The men were held in detention for more than two months, during which time they were subjected to interrogation and lie detector tests, before being deported back to Israel; one of the men, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take the test for ten weeks, and then failed it.
The five men worked at the company Urban Moving Systems, owned and operated by Dominick Suter. After the men were arrested the FBI searched their offices and questioned Suter, however, Suter fled to Israel before he could be questioned further.
According to a former CIA chief of operations for counterterrorism Vince Cannistraro, there was speculation that Urban Moving Systems may have been a front for an intelligence operation investigating fund-raising networks channeling money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
ABC News cited this report on June 21, 2002, adding that the FBI had concluded that the five Israelis had no foreknowledge of the attacks.
“Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw them won't forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence.
Maria, who asked us not to use her last name, had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. She remembers a neighbor calling her shortly after the first plane hit the towers.
She grabbed her binoculars and watched the destruction unfolding in lower Manhattan. But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye.
Maria says she saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. ‘They seemed to be taking a movie’, Maria said.
The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck Maria were the expressions on the men's faces. ‘They were like happy, you know… They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange’, she said.
She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. Before long, the FBI was also on the scene, and a statewide bulletin was issued on the van.
The plate number was traced to a van owned by a company called Urban Moving. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was spotted on a service road off Route 3, near New Jersey's Giants Stadium. A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. The men were taken out of the van at gunpoint and handcuffed by police.
The arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion about the men. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. A box cutter was found in the van. But perhaps the biggest surprise for the officers came when the five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens.
According to the police report, one of the passengers told the officers they had been on the West Side Highway in Manhattan ‘during the incident’ — referring to the World Trade Center attack. The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers, ‘We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem’. The other passengers were his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari.
When the men were transferred to jail, the case was transferred out of the FBI's Criminal Division, and into the bureau's Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which is responsible for espionage cases, ABCNEWS has learned.
One reason for the shift, sources told ABCNEWS, was that the FBI believed Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation.
After the five men were arrested, the FBI got a warrant and searched Urban Moving's Weehawken, N.J., offices.
The FBI searched Urban Moving's offices for several hours, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives. The FBI also questioned Urban Moving's owner. His attorney insists that his client answered all of the FBI's questions. But when FBI agents tried to interview him again a few days later, he was gone.
Three months later 2020's cameras photographed the inside of Urban Moving, and it looked as if the business had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse.
The owner had also cleared out of his New Jersey home, put it up for sale and returned with his family to Israel.
Steven Gordon, the attorney for the five Israeli detainees, acknowledged that his clients' actions on Sept. 11 would easily have aroused suspicions. ‘You got a group of guys that are taking pictures, on top of a roof, of the World Trade Center. They're speaking in a foreign language. They got two passports on 'em. One's got a wad of cash on him, and they got box cutters. Now that's a scary situation’.
But Gordon insisted that his clients were just five young men who had come to America for a vacation, ended up working for a moving company, and were taking pictures of the event.
The five Israelis were held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, ostensibly for overstaying their tourist visas and working in the United States illegally. Two weeks after their arrest, an immigration judge ordered them to be deported. But sources told ABCNEWS that FBI and CIA officials in Washington put a hold on the case.
The five men were held in detention for more than two months. Some of them were placed in solitary confinement for 40 days, and some of them were given as many as seven lie-detector tests.
Since their arrest, plenty of speculation has swirled about the case, and what the five men were doing that morning. Eventually, The Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported the FBI concluded that two of the men were Israeli intelligence operatives.
Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA who is now a consultant for ABCNEWS, said federal authorities' interest in the case was heightened when some of the men's names were found in a search of a national intelligence database.
Israeli Intelligence Connection?
According to Cannistraro, many people in the U.S. intelligence community believed that some of the men arrested were working for Israeli intelligence. Cannistraro said there was speculation as to whether Urban Moving had been ‘set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area’.
Under this scenario, the alleged spying operation was not aimed against the United States, but at penetrating or monitoring radical fund-raising and support networks in Muslim communities like Paterson, N.J., which was one of the places where several of the hijackers lived in the months prior to Sept. 11.
For the FBI, deciphering the truth from the five Israelis proved to be difficult. One of them, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks — then failed it, according to his lawyer. Another of his lawyers told us Kurzberg had been reluctant to take the test because he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.
Sources say the Israelis were targeting these fund-raising networks because they were thought to be channeling money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, groups that are responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Israel. ‘[The] Israeli government has been very concerned about the activity of radical Islamic groups in the United States that could be a support apparatus to Hamas and Islamic Jihad’, Cannistraro said.
The men denied that they had been working for Israeli intelligence out of the New Jersey moving company, and Ram Horvitz, their Israeli attorney, dismissed the allegations as ‘stupid and ridiculous’.
Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, goes even further, asserting the issue was never even discussed with U.S. officials.
‘These five men were not involved in any intelligence operation in the United States, and the American intelligence authorities have never raised this issue with us’, Regev said. ‘The story is simply false’.
Despite the denials, sources tell ABCNEWS there is still debate within the FBI over whether or not the young men were spies. Many U.S. government officials still believe that some of them were on a mission for Israeli intelligence. But the FBI told ABCNEWS, ‘To date, this investigation has not identified anybody who in this country had pre-knowledge of the events of 9/11’.
Sources also said that even if the men were spies, there is no evidence to conclude they had advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. ‘The investigation, at the end of the day, after all the polygraphs, all of the field work, all the cross-checking, the intelligence work, concluded that they probably did not have advance knowledge of 9/11’, Cannistraro noted.
As to what they were doing on the van, they say they read about the attack on the Internet, couldn't see it from their offices and went to the parking lot for a better view. But no one has been able to find a good explanation for why they may have been smiling with the towers of the World Trade Center burning in the background. Both the lawyers for the young men and the Israeli Embassy chalk it up to immature conduct.
According to ABCNEWS sources, Israeli and U.S. government officials worked out a deal — and after 71 days, the five Israelis were taken out of jail, put on a plane, and deported back home.
While the former detainees refused to answer ABCNEWS' questions about their detention and what they were doing on Sept. 11, several of the detainees discussed their experience in America on an Israeli talk show after their return home.
Said one of the men, denying that they were laughing or happy on the morning of Sept. 11, ‘The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event’”. -ABC News - June 21, 2002: Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?
According to the FBI, an Israeli intelligence gathering operation was set up in Weehawken, New Jersey, posing as a fake moving company, whose employees failed polygraph tests, whose owner was questioned but then mysteriously flees the United States.
Based on the government data that was released on August 28, 2007, Urban Moving Systems was awarded federal funding in the amount of $498,750 and non-federal funding in the amount of $166,250 for a total of $665,000 and the payout date was June 22, 2001. So, in other words, the U.S. government funded an Israeli intelligence gathering operation tied to an FBI investigation.
It was also determined that the Israeli owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominick Suter, dropped his business a few days after 9/11 and fled the country for Israel. He was in such a hurry to flee America that some of Urban Moving System's customers were left with their furniture stranded in storage facilities. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect list as Mohammed Atta and the 19 hijackers.
These five men have since been dubbed the infamous “Dancing Israelis”, and they and their employer Urban Moving Systems have been documented by the 9/11 truth community and, to some degree, made known to the American public.
However, there is another significant group of five foreign-born men also connected with the events that took place on September 11, 2001, that is linked to the mysterious death of a DMV clerk whose car was set aflame.
On the morning of February 5th, 2002, two cousins from New York, Shaker Hammad and Abdelmuhsen Hammad, picked up three other men, Mohamed Fares, Mostafa Abou-Shahin, and Omar Khayata, and then traveled to Memphis Tennessee to meet with Khaled Odtallah. They later appeared in a gray Dodge Durango and a white Toyota Avalon and parked outside the Department of Motor Vehicles office.
At the time, Tennessee was one of four states that didn’t require a social security number when applying for a Driver’s License or State ID – many people could carry utility bills as proof of residence. Some Tennessee residents felt that the state government the preceding year decided it would be a good idea to give undocumented immigrants a valid Tennessee driver’s license, under the guise that it would make them better drivers.
Ultimately, the law did not require undocumented immigrants to have much proof that they lived in the state, and soon after state driving testing centers became swamped with immigrants trying to get their driver’s license.
The Middle Eastern men sat inside the cars, but, eventually, an African American woman in a blue blazer and grey slacks had arrived to start her day off at work. Her name was Katherine Smith, and she was one of the main DMV clerks. Shortly after she showed up, Odtllah left the Toyota and joined the morning line of people rushing into the building, clutching four signed driver’s license applications. As a DMV examiner, Smith screened applicants at the front counter and gave written and road tests, processing 300 to 400 driver’s license applicants in her office each day.
On the applications Odtllah was carrying, each man listed his address as a gated community just outside Memphis, 2840 Morning Lake Drive. None of the men had checked the application’s organ donor box. At the DMV, the applications were approved and entered into the computer system. When Odtllah walked outside, he had entered a whole new reality as the FBI was waiting for him.
The case began with a tip from a New York FBI agent who stated that a confidential informant told them of their trip to Memphis for the licenses. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks several months prior, federal agents have paid closer attention to allegations of identity theft and identity fraud. The FBI tracked these Arab-Americans whom they had already suspected of having terrorist connections as were many other Middle-Eastern suspects and associates or had provided aide, black market services such as fake IDs and or involved in other fraudulent scams for or with 9/11 hijackers, as discovered in other major cities from the FBI’s initial Dragnet investigation after Sept 11th, at the time.
Agents in New York received a tip that these men would be traveling to Memphis that day, and the bureau’s agents in Tennessee had staked out Smith’s home and the motor vehicle office. When Odtllah and the others pulled out of the parking lot, agents flashed blue lights and pulled them over. With Odtllah, police found Hammad, Fares, Abou-Shahin, and Khayata, the later of whom was a juvenile (actually making it 6 suspects), and thus his identity was kept concealed due to his age. All of them were taken into custody and arrested for fraudulently attempting to obtain IDs from Smith, who was also charged.
When arrested, Sakher Hammad was carrying a WTC pass dated for Sept 5. He told police he had been working on the sprinkler system. He showed them his business card: Magic Plumbing and Heating. The address was listed as his residence in Brooklyn, NY, and the phone number was an answering machine saying “Rocky’s” voice mail was full.
When Katherine Smith was arrested, authorities say she admitted to helping Odtllah obtain licenses for his “cousins” on a half-dozen occasions in the past year. An FBI agent later testified that Odtllah was charging up to $2000 each to help people get their new identities.14 The other five men were arrested and detained, and due to world events after the 9/11 attacks and the presumption floating around about men of Middle Eastern descent, investigators attempted to search for 9/11 links since all of them were foreign nationals and three of them were in the country illegally.
- Khaled Odtallah, 31, born in Jerusalem. He lived in Shelby County and previously owned Phillips 66 gas station.
- Sakher (“Rocky”) Hammad, 24, from New York, was a naturalized citizen from Jordan and was the one who ran to transport from New York to Memphis, intending to buy the driver’s licenses.
- Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad, 32, whose age was unknown at the time, was in the country illegally after overstaying his Visa and is also Sakher’s cousin, who drove the route.
- Mohammed Fares, 19, born in Venezuela, had a Venezuelan passport. His family is from Lebanon, where he lived for a time. After walking across the border from Mexico into California he went to New York. He claimed he needed a license to drive a van for a clothing company, but the FBI could not find the firm.
- Mostafa Said Abou-Shahin, 26, from Egypt, was a carpenter who was living in the U.S. illegally. He had said he could not get a driver’s license in New York.
In regard to Ms. Smith, the following is excerpted from the Associated Press:
“Katherine Smith was a woman of modest means. She had a couple hundred dollars in a credit union account, a couple hundred more than that in checking, according to court records. She had a 1999 Ford Escort with a $10,000 lien and the Acura.
She and her daughter shared a one-story home in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood in the shadow of Memphis’ Liberty Bowl stadium. The neat little house is worth $65,000; Smith owed $55,000 on it. She had worked for mental health agencies before joining the motor vehicle division in 1992. She was earning just over $23,000 a year.
Neighbors say they hardly saw the woman because she was working all the time. After hours, she worked taking care of an elderly woman.
‘She worked day and night’, says Peola Wright, who lives two doors down. She called Smith a nice lady who sang in the church choir and tried to get neighbors to attend services.
The neighborhood is a few miles from where Khaled Odtllah lived, but it seems a world away.
According to records, Odtllah’s last address was the Grove, a gated community in the Memphis suburb of Cordova, with swimming pools, tennis courts and spas.
Police say Odtllah came to the United States about 13 years ago from Jerusalem and had beenin Tennessee for about 2 1/2 years. Smith later told officials she met Odtllah at his gas station. He sold her the Acura, which was still in Odtllah’s name when Smith died.
Somewhere along the line, police say, Smith and Odtllah became business partners”. -Associated Press
On Feb 11th, the day Smith was to appear in court, her Acura sat in an FBI garage in Memphis. She died the day before she was set to testify for helping five Middle Eastern men obtain fraudulent Tennessee driver’s licenses. From the aforementioned Associated Press article:
“Shortly before 1 a.m. last Sunday, witnesses saw flames erupt from the back seat of a 1992 Acura Legend as it crawled along a two-lane road skirting farm fields in the little Tennessee town of Piperton.
The driver breathed in the flames, her lungs searing, as the car veered off the road and came to rest against a utility pole near the Mississippi state line. There were no skid marks or furrows in the grass to indicate the driver had hit the brakes.
A witness rushed up and pulled open the car door, but the driver was not moving. She appeared to be already dead. When the first volunteer firefighters arrived, the car was engulfed in flames.
From the very beginning, it didn’t look right, said Steve Kellett, chief of the Piperton Volunteer Fire Department.
The car had been moving too slowly for the accident to cause much damage. The wooden pole was barely dented. The radiator was pushed in a few inches, but the engine block was undamaged. Most important, the gas tank had not ruptured. The cardboard packaging for a replacement headlamp in the trunk was barely scorched.
What could have caused a fire so severe that it cooked the passenger compartment of the sedan down to the frame and burned the driver beyond recognition? If someone had been trying to make this death look like an accident, they had done a lousy job.
Police began investigating the death as a homicide, though they have not ruled out suicide. The mystery deepened the next day when dental records identified the victim as Katherine Smith, 49, a state driver’s license examiner”. -Associated Press
The connection to 9/11 emerged when FBI agents found a visitor’s pass for the World Trade Center – dated September 5th – in Hammad’s wallet. He claimed to be a plumber who had worked on the building’s sprinklers.
One can’t help but question whether “worked on the building’s sprinklers” is a euphemistic replacement for “sabotaged the fire prevention sprinkler system”.
FBI agents also testified that investigators found evidence of some kind of accelerant in the burned-out interior of Smith’s car.
Four of the men were eventually deported. Sakher Hammad was quietly returned back to his home in New York.
Furthermore, Israeli intelligence later attempted to link a supposed meeting in Prague between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence with the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks—a secondary result of which was to help along the passage of the Patriot Act. The Prague meeting was initially reported by Czech officials, although there were many conflicting accounts where different Czech officials claimed the opposite.
Since this meeting likely never occurred, there is no need to provide further evidence to disprove the claim, sourced from "Israeli security", that a flask full of anthrax was given to Atta during the meeting.
Aside from the Prague-anthrax connection, further attempts were made to link the anthrax-letter attacks to both the 9/11 hijackers and, again, to Iraq. The letters themselves contained messages that were deliberately suggestive of hijacker involvement, proclaiming “09-11-01, this is next,” adding “Death to America, death to Israel” for dramatic flair.
Despite the massive FBI probe into the case, no definitive answers were ever provided as to who was responsible. The total incompetency of the FBI, however, didn’t stop independent journalists from delving into the case themselves.
From these investigations came a series of very strange discoveries, not the least of which was the fact that the weaponized anthrax strains used in the letter-attacks originated in U.S. Army labs.
Although two different people were selected as the “fall-men”, the baseless accusations against neither of them stuck. The second of the two, one Dr. Ayaad Assaad, an Egyptian-American scientist, worked at the Fort Detrick facility from which samples of anthrax, among other dangerous biological compounds, went missing years before the letter-attacks.
In seemingly unrelated events at Fort Detrick, Dr. Assaad’s colleagues, primarily a group of researchers led by a man named Phillip Zack, engaged in bizarre and juvenile harassments directed against him. This same Phillip Zack was a suspect in a 1992 internal Army inquiry, thought to be making unauthorized access, by cover of night, to a biological compounds lab, where pathogens like anthrax, Ebola, and the Hanta virus had gone missing.
Moreover, in late September 2001, an anonymous letter sent to military-police officials in Quantico, Virginia, alleged that Dr. Assaad was behind a terrorist plot to use biological agents in the United States. This accusatory letter was sent after the anthrax-letters were mailed, but before they were discovered to contain anthrax. This would indicate that some third-party, somebody other than Dr. Assaad, had foreknowledge of the attacks.
Although the true culprits of the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks remain a mystery, this highly peculiar series of events seems to suggest there is much more to the story than simply a second act of terrorism perpetrated by the same group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
One might speculate that this Phillip Zack, or somebody closely related, had a hand in the anthrax-letters, based on his unauthorized access to pathogens labs, his clear hatred for Dr. Assaad, and the strange letter sent by an alleged former colleague of Assaad’s, ascribing the guilt to him. There is more to be said about this story, but the important point here is that despite almost zero solid evidence pointing to Iraq, nor to the 9/11 hijackers, the Bush Administration was more than willing to use such an event as a pretext for war.
In the end, most of the high-ranking government officials involved in kicking off the Iraq invasion have subsequently come out to admit there were no WMDs, and no ties between Hussein and the World Trade Center attacks.
Unfortunately, due to fear of being told to take off the “tinfoil hat”, most people wouldn't even be open to a factual inquiry into the actual events of 9/11/2001 that the American public never received from the corporate press about how foreign and domestic intelligence agencies conned the U.S. Congress into fighting Israel's war.