[Comrade Ogilvy]

Israel's passport factory might be another arm of terrorism
8/11/2004 12:48:00 PM GMT

Speaking of international terrorism, both privatized and state-sponsored, passports and other identity papers are the coin of the realm. Terrorists targeting America are particularly trying hard to obtain Canadian and New Zealand passports, basically because the holders don't need visas across a wide swathe of the globe, including the United States.

Now, as everybody is wondering when and where the next terror attack on the U.S. will occur, and U.S., British, and Pakistani agents halting an important Al Qaeda operation, discovering how its members get travel documents provides important clues as to how they operate – and who supports them, could it be Israel?!

Everybody knows about the "passport farm" Israeli agents set up in New Zealand, in which four employees of the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, were caught trying to obtain a New Zealand passport in the name of a housebound paraplegic. Uriel Kelman and Eli Cara were captured, and put in jail, while Prime Minister Helen Clark openly raged against what was undoubtedly an Israeli intelligence operation. And ever since there have been a few rather interesting, yet gloomy, developments.

It turns out that the ringleader, Ze'ev William Barkan, who escaped before New Zealand security could catch him, was and most probably still is a member of the Israeli diplomatic corps, having served at embassies in Vienna and Brussels. He was last seen in North Korea, traveling with a Canadian passport as "Kevin Hunter," where he turned up in Pyongyang as a "consultant" brought on to help the North Korean government build a "security fence" in order to keep their people in. Now that the East Germans have wound up in history's dustbin, the Israelis take over as experts in the field.

Barkan is a man of many skills, according to the Sydney Morning Herald “He goes to Laos, Cambodia, Burma and Thailand and deals with gangs who rob tourists of their valuables and passports. Barkan is mostly interested in passports and there have been a number of Australian passports.' Intelligence analysts in New Zealand believe Barkan, a former navy diver in the Israeli Defence Force, was trying to secure a 'clean' passport for use in a sensitive Israeli undercover operation in the region, less risky than a forged passport."

The inner workings of Barkan's New Zealand operation were brought to surface when the fourth suspect in the case, Tony Resnick, was outed. Mr. Resnick, 35, who fled the day after the arrest of Kelman and Caras, was a paramedic with the St. John Ambulance in Auckland before taking a job as a healthcare lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology. He had previously worked as a paramedic in Israel, and, in his capacity as a paramedic in New Zealand, had possibly visited the home of the targeted paraplegic.

Benefiting from Resnick's connections to wheelchair-bound and otherwise incapacitated New Zealanders, Barkan's network targeted people who would not likely be traveling abroad, and set up a passport farm by stealing their identities. The Israelis were caught by a suspicious official, who checked their references and laid a trap. But the question that is no doubt haunting the government of New Zealand is how many times did they succeed before

Knowing about such operations– and to what purpose was Israel gathering travel documents?

To answer this question we first need to have a look at Israel's history in this regard. The failed assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Jordan caught the Israelis on the passport issue: the assassins were outfitted with Canadian travel documents. This incident no doubt came to mind as New Zealand government officials contemplated the meaning and purpose of Israel's underground passport factory.

The case of the Mossad's New Zealand hijinks took a Canadian twist when that country's foreign ministry announced that it was investigating the matter of Barkan's passport. New Zealand's foreign minister, Phil Goff, replied:

"I have read with interest the Canadians are following up allegations he may have traveled at some point on a stolen Canadian passport. When he came to New Zealand my understanding was he was travelling on a U.S. passport. Clearly there would be co-operation between police forces in different countries to try to get to the bottom of these things."

So there's an American twist, too. Barkan had an American accent, and said he came from Washington, D.C., where his family supposedly was in the "windows and doors" business. The Sydney Morning Herald asserted his Washington residence, and says Barkan grew up there as Zev Bruckenstein, where his father was director of religious studies at a synagogue.

Thus the U.S. should put the fact that the Israelis have become experts in scrambling passports into consideration in its mission to crackdown Al Qaeda terrorists. Recent activity in New Zealand ought to be of immediate concern.

The Israeli government has refused to either deny or claim "credit" for the activities of its agents in Kiwi-land, let alone apologize. In this age of terror, however, an Israeli underground operation that systematically and illegally collects Western passports is bound to raise all sorts of suspicions – and rightly so.

If they did it to the Kiwis, and the Canadians, then similar trick aimed at obtaining U.S. passports on American soil is not far from imagining.

The danger of that, alone, ought to motivate U.S. government officials to do everything possible to assist New Zealand and Canada in the hunt for Barkan and bringing him to justice, and yet, so far, nobody heard of a single step taken regarding this matter. The possibility that Barkan is indeed an American may eventually force the Washington spin team into performing the requisite verbal gymnastics.

Doesn’t this bring suspicions that make Mossad involved with the terrorists who threaten the U.S. and Europe with attacks? Don’t be too surprised, because it wouldn’t be the first time.

http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi%2Dbin/cons ... asp?id=151