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.
    
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.     
    








 

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