1993 WTC Bombing
On November 5, 1990, in New York City, Meir Kahane, the founder of the terroristic Jewish Defense League (JDL), was assassinated by an Arab assailant. Kahane had been elected to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in 1984, by advocating the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel, but was subsequently barred from office after a new law banned parties that had racist platforms. The history of the JDL and its founder indicates that it functioned as an arm of the Mossad. Kahane’s biographer, Robert Friedman, revealed that “high-ranking members of Mossad” were directing Kahane, and that the “central player” was former Mossad operations chief, Yitzhak Shamir. 168
Kahane had also been an asset of the FBI and the CIA, including a stint for the CIA in Africa as a “news correspondent.” In 1965, under the name “Michael King,” Kahane and Joseph Churba formed a group to mobilise campus support for the Vietnam War, as part of a CIA operation “working both sides” of the Vietnam War issue, simultaneously funding anti-war groups. In 1968, Michael King became Rabbi Meir Kahane. His colleague, Churba, also a rabbi, was a key liaison between the Likudnik right-wing in Israel and neo-conservatives in Washington.169
Churba became an influential asset for Israeli intelligence in U.S. foreign policy-making circles, having been promoted by the John Birch Society and funded by CIA-backed Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon. 170
The man accused of assassinating Kahane was El Sayed Nosair, one of dozens of Arabs who had spent time at the Al Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, where the CIA had once recruited prospects to join the Afghan Jihad in the eighties. According to the February 1993 issue of the newsletter, Inside Israel, Kahane’s son claimed that “both the FBI and Mossad had infiltrated the group to which Nosair belonged.” As reported by Jane Hunter, for the Middle East International, “Benyamin Kahane says he was told by an FBI informant he identifies as Mustafa Shalabi that Nosair’s brother worked for the FBI.” 171 Shalabi, a former colleague of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, later turned up dead.
Many of those involved in Kahane’s assassination later planned the 1993 WTC. As one FBI agent put it, “the fact is that in 1990, myself and my detectives, we had in our office in handcuffs, the people who blew up the World Trade Center in ‘93. We were told to release them.”172
Evidence found in Nosair’s apartment linked him to the “Blind Sheikh”, Omar Abdur Rahman. The charge that Sheikh Omar Abdur Rahman operated with CIA sanction has come from a number of sources, including an anonymous government official, who leaked that it was a CIA officer assigned as a consular official who approved the Sheikh’s visa from the Sudan after the consulate rejected it, according to the New York Times on July 14, 1993. According to Barnett R Rubin, a Columbia University associate professor, and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Abdur Rahman received his visa for having gone to Peshawar on behalf of the CIA, soon after Azzam was killed, “to preach to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime.”173
In the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, thousands of suspected terrorists were rounded up and jailed; among them were Sheikh Omar who was eventually convicted of a conspiracy to blow up New York City landmarks. Emad Salem, the Egyptian bodyguard for Sheikh Rahman and the key witness in the trial, was an FBI informant. Salem testified that the FBI knew about the attack beforehand and told him they would thwart it by substituting a harmless powder for the explosives. However, this plan was called off by an FBI supervisor, and the bombing was not stopped.174
Defense attorney William Kunstler investigated and discovered that not only was Salem a lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian army, he never stopped working for the Egyptian government. Apart from the FBI, Salem was also funded, according to Kunstler, by other sources linked to foreign governments, including money from an organisation founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane.175
Renegade Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky, who left Israel’s secret police agency and wrote his best-selling book, By Way of Deception, told the Village Voice that Israeli intelligence may have been behind the World Trade Center bombing. Ostrovsky says that the Mossad would have infiltrated the radical mosques in New Jersey and Brooklyn, where Abdul Rahman preached and disciples like Sayed Nosair prayed, and almost certainly recruited a close associate of the Blind Sheikh. The insider is recruited in what Ostrovsky calls a “false flag operation.” The Arab “thinks he is being recruited by an Iranian agent or a Libyan,” says Ostrovsky. He never suspects he is actually being “run” by Mossad.176
Ostrovsky points out that in the past the Mossad has effectively used this modus operandi. In the early 1950s, Mossad recruited agents to bomb American buildings in Cairo, hoping to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Nasser. When the facts became known in Israel, the scandal brought down the government. According to Ostrovsky, in 1984 Mossad detonated bombs outside of the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital city, claiming credit in the name of an unknown radical Saudi resistance group. A member of Mossad at the time, Ostrovsky says the purpose was to weaken U.S./Saudi relations, by demonstrating to the U.S. that the regime was fragile and about to fall.177
As reported by Robert Friedman, Ahmad Ajaj, one of the men accused of conspiring to bomb the World Trade Center, may have been a Mossad mole according to Israeli intelligence sources. The FBI had identified Ajaj as a senior Intifada activist in the occupied territories, having close ties to both El Fatah, a constituent group of the PLO, and Hamas. According to federal sources and the Israeli National Police, the Israeli military expelled him to Jordan in 1991, for conspiring to smuggle weapons to El Fatah on the West Bank.
However, according to Kol Ha’ir, a highly regarded weekly in Jerusalem, Ajaj was never involved in Intifada activities, or with the PLO, or Hamas. Citing court papers and other sources, Kol Ha’ir related that Ajaj was actually a small-time crook, and that during his prison stay, after having been sentenced in 1988 for counterfeiting U.S. dollars, he was apparently recruited by Mossad. Curiously, following his release, only a year later, he had seemingly undergone a radical transformation, and became a devout Muslim. 178
Israeli intelligence sources say that the arrest for weapons smuggling and Ajaj’s supposed torture and deportation were staged by Mossad to establish his credentials as an intifada activist. Mossad allegedly “tasked” Ajaj to infiltrate radical Palestinian groups operating outside Israel. Israeli intelligence sources say that it is not unusual for Mossad to recruit from the ranks of common criminals.179
Footnotes:
168 Collins Piper, Michael. “Was Irv Rubin Killed in 9-11 Mop Up?” Exclusive To American Free Press
169 Steinberg, Jeffrey. “LaRouche: Moonies Are Target Too Big To Be Missed”. EIR, November 1, 2002.
170 Collins Piper, Michael. “Was Irv Rubin Killed in 9-11 Mop Up?” Exclusive To American Free Press
171 Jane Hunter, Middle East International, March 19, p. 6
172 ABC News, July 16, 2002.
173 Friedman, Robert. The CIA’s Jihad. March 1995.
174 Blumenthal, Ralph. “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast”. The New York Times. October 28, 1993.
175 Transcript of Paul DeRienzo’s interview with William Kunstler, Broadcast on WBAI in New York on August 3, 1993.
176 Friedman, Robert. “By Way of Deception?”. The Village Voice, April 6, 1993.
177 Ibid.
178 Robert I. Friedman, “Mossad Linked To WTC Bomb Suspect”, Village Voice August 3, 1993.
179 Ibid.
