http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/DailyNews/2020_whitevan_02062
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The White Van
Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?
June 21 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.
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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.
We Are Not Your Problem
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.
A Scary Situation
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.
'Plenty of Speculation'
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."
No Pre-Knowledge
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."
ABCNEWS' Chris Isham, John Miller, Glenn Silber and Chris
Vlasto contributed to this report.
