Let me preference this post by saying that I know I said I was going to post an important essay on 9/11 – but this ain’t it.
This comes from coming across a Twitter thread about a 2002 Salon story about Israeli art students being tied to September 11th. I just kind of scanned it until I saw a reply from a person who said that he remembered purchasing a piece of art from a group who said they were Israeli art students – the summer before 2001.
Someone asked them to post the picture – they did – and I fell down another rabbit hole.
Here’s the thing about coincidences – they’re only coincidences when they happen once. When they keep happening, especially when they involve the same country over and over again, maybe it’s time to ask some questions.
The whole “Israeli art students” saga around 9/11 reads like something out of a spy novel, except it actually happened. Here’s how the story goes:
In 2001, young Israelis were caught all over the country posing as art students and trying to penetrate DEA offices, military bases, and even the homes of federal agents. The Drug Enforcement Administration compiled a 60-page report documenting over 130 incidents. These weren’t actual art students – turns out many had backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence, explosives, and electronic surveillance .
What makes this story particularly eyebrow-raising is where these “students” were living. Some were in Hollywood, Florida – the same tiny town where Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers were hanging out. In one case, Israeli operatives lived at 4220 Sheridan Street, just a few hundred feet from Atta’s address at 3389 Sheridan Street . The geographic overlap between Israeli spies and the future hijackers wasn’t limited to Florida either. Similar proximities showed up in New Jersey, Virginia, Atlanta, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, and San Diego .
Then there’s the small matter of the art group called “Gelatin” that was given access to the 91st floor of the World Trade Center for nearly two years before 9/11. They had construction passes that let them roam freely through the towers. Their big art project involved removing a window and installing a temporary balcony so they could take photos. One of these “artists” has been identified as Hanan Serfaty, an Israeli military intelligence officer and bomb expert who moved nearly $200,000 around in early 2001 .
The official response to all this? Mostly silence. Fox News ran a four-part series on the story in 2001, then mysteriously pulled it from their website after pressure from pro-Israel groups . The mainstream media largely ignored it. When pressed, government officials dismissed it as the work of a “disgruntled DEA employee” – which explains absolutely nothing about why 140 Israelis were actually arrested and deported.
Fast forward to this year, and those newly released JFK documents dropped some interesting breadcrumbs about Israeli connections to American intelligence operations. The documents reveal that James Angleton – the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence – was essentially working for Israel, not America. A 1953 memo states that Angleton’s “main intelligence source was Israel.” Multiple documents show him transferring nuclear weapons secrets to Israel against Kennedy’s explicit orders .
This is the same Angleton who was personally monitoring Lee Harvey Oswald for 17 months before the assassination. The man tracking JFK’s future killer was taking orders from a foreign government that had serious disagreements with Kennedy over nuclear weapons development. Kennedy had been pressuring Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to shut down the Dimona nuclear facility and prevent Israel from getting the bomb .
But these aren’t the only times Israel has been caught with its hand in America’s cookie jar. Take the USS Liberty incident from 1967. Israeli forces attacked an American intelligence ship in international waters, killing 34 crew members and wounding 171 others. The ship was clearly marked as American, flying the US flag in broad daylight with perfect weather conditions. Israeli reconnaissance planes had been circling the ship all morning .
The attack involved coordinated air strikes and torpedo boats. When the crew tried to radio for help, Israeli aircraft blocked the transmissions. When the Liberty launched lifeboats, Israeli forces attacked those too – a violation of international law . The official Israeli explanation? They mistook the clearly marked American ship for an Egyptian vessel. However, an investigation by the Israeli government later found that its naval headquarters had known the ship was American at least three hours before the attack but that this information had not been conveyed to the people who ultimately authorized firing on the Liberty .
More recently, we have the Jonathan Pollard case from the 1980s. This Navy intelligence analyst spent years stealing some of America’s most sensitive secrets and selling them to Israel. In 1984, Pollard sold numerous state secrets, including the National Security Agency’s ten-volume manual on how the U.S. gathers its signal intelligence, and disclosed the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies. Among the most damaging intel Pollard provided was the 10-volume Radio and Signal Intelligence (RASIN) manual, detailing the entire U.S. global listening profile, detailing what communications the National Security Agency was monitoring, from which countries and what the U.S. priorities were.
When Pollard was finally caught, he and his wife tried to flee to the Israeli embassy for asylum. Israel initially denied any connection, then later admitted partial involvement and issued a formal apology. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison but was released in 2015 and immediately fled to Israel, where he received a hero’s welcome .
Then there’s the 2005 AIPAC espionage case, where Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin was caught passing classified information about US Iran policy to lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The FBI had been investigating AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman for years as they cultivated sources within the US government. Franklin’s handler had him wear a wire to entrap the AIPAC officials, feeding them fake classified information about threats to Israeli operatives in Iraq .
The AIPAC case revealed a sophisticated intelligence operation where Israeli interests were systematically extracting classified information from the Pentagon through what appeared to be routine lobbying contacts. The indictment documented “scores of instances of classified information being passed from Pentagon officials to the two AIPAC men, on to Israeli Embassy personnel”. This wasn’t just casual information sharing – it was organized espionage using a prominent lobbying organization as cover.
After the Pollard disaster embarrassed the shit out of Israel in the 1980s, Israeli intelligence shifted tactics. Instead of recruiting individual spies like Pollard, they began using legitimate organizations like think tanks and lobbying groups to maintain “legal” contacts with government officials who could be cultivated for information.
Now look. Before you go off the deep end here – although you should be outraged – the pattern here might show conspiracy, but it definitely shows systematic exploitation of a relationship built on trust. Every time something major happens in America, Israeli intelligence seems to be remarkably well-positioned to observe it. Whether it’s art students monitoring the 9/11 hijackers, CIA officers with divided loyalties tracking presidential assassins, or attacks on American ships that conveniently silence potential witnesses to war crimes.
Maybe these are all just incredible coincidences. Maybe Israeli intelligence is simply very good at being in the right place at the right time. Or maybe we should start asking why a foreign government’s intelligence apparatus keeps showing up in the background of defining moments in American history.
The most troubling part isn’t necessarily what Israel knew or when they knew it. It’s that whenever these connections surface, they get buried faster than a mob informant. The documents disappear, the stories get killed, and anyone asking questions gets labeled an antisemite or conspiracy theorist.
The real question isn’t whether Israel was involved in these events. It’s whether we’re comfortable with a foreign intelligence service having this level of access to and influence over American operations. Because based on these documents and incidents, they’ve been playing a much bigger role in our national security apparatus than most Americans realize.
And that’s not antisemitism talking – that’s just pattern recognition.