Have you seen this man?

Zev William Barkan

If you recognize him, contact the nearest New Zealand consulate or the American FBI office nearest to you at once.

by Bridget Carter
New Zealand Herald

Police made a public appeal on national television for a suspected Mossad spy two days after Israelis were arrested for allegedly trying to fraudulently obtain a New Zealand passport.

Zev William Barkan, 37, appeared on the reality programme Police Ten 7 last month as being wanted for fraudulently obtaining a New Zealand passport.

The photo of Barkan used on the programme was the one he submitted for an urgent passport last month in the name of a wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy sufferer, "Mr A", who has name suppression.

But the police now believe the missing man has left the country and admit they do not know where to find him.

Barkan had been in and out of the country since November on a US passport and court documents reveal that he flatted for several weeks with a woman in Sandringham, stayed with a couple in Mt Eden and told people he was here to go on a sailing course.

While in New Zealand he saw a doctor.

People he stayed with called him Jay. They said he returned late at night, always ate out and said his family had a doors and windows business where he lived in Washington DC.

The spies who stole my name
by Bridget Carver, Eugene Bingham and Phil Taylor
New Zealand Herald
July 3, 2004

An Auckland family have told how their tetraplegic son's identity was stolen by an Israeli secret agent who moved in just down the road.

Zev Barkan, who has fled New Zealand and escaped the justice faced yesterday by his two co-accused spies, lived within 300m of the man in whose name he applied for a passport to assume a New Zealand identity.

"Barkan lived in the street next door to where [the victim] was living," said his father, speaking exclusively to the Weekend Herald.

"He must have been able to see all these handicapped people going around in wheelchairs. I don't know if that is relevant or coincidence."

The story of the handicapped man caught up in the spy story emerged yesterday after two men pleaded guilty to a charge of trying to obtain a false New Zealand passport.

Urie Kelman and Eli Cara were remanded in custody and will be sentenced on July 15.

Mystery still surrounds how the spies selected their victim, who lives in care.

The family - whose identity is suppressed - were drawn into the world of international intrigue when a Department of Internal Affairs officer, Ian Tingey, rang them in March asking if their son had applied for a passport and had travel plans.

The victim, who is his 30s and has cerebral palsy due to brain damage at birth, is in no state to do either.

"[My son] is quite intelligent, he just can't speak, can't toilet or feed himself," said the father. "He is a person in his own right. He lives in his own world and most of it is in his head - he can't talk to you and me.

"He has a fully operational brain - he was writing plays when he was about 11 or 12."

He communicates by using a device with a protruding connection which is attached to his head. He uses it to tap onto a computer pad and can thereby slowly type.

Mr Tingey became suspicious about a passport application made in the victim's name after a phone call from a well-spoken man who claimed to be the applicant and was seeking to speed up the process.

The caller faxed through a travel itinerary and ticketing information to help the process. But Mr Tingey had noted the caller had what he thought was an underlying Canadian or American accent.

On March 19, Mr Tingey contacted the victim's father and was told the applicant could not be his son.

"When we first heard about it, we thought goodness gracious, how outrageous," said the father. "How the hell have they got hold of our details?"

The victim himself treats it in a minor way, his father said.

When Barkan applied for the passport, he used the victim's birth certificate, which had been applied for using the victim's mother's name.

She is no longer married to the victim's father and has lived in Britain for two years working with cerebral palsy victims.

"They used her married name, which she hasn't used for God knows how long, and they also used her middle name, which she has never answered to," said the father. The mother flew out from Britain to see if she could help with police inquiries, but there was nothing she could add as to why her son was selected.

"It's great the police have caught these guys but it still doesn't answer the questions of how and why they targeted him," said the father.

When Internal Affairs informed the police about its suspicions, a covert operation began.

Detectives uncovered details of four people, their movements in and out of the country, where they stayed, cars they rented.

The men were Kelman, Cara, Barkan and a fourth person, whose identity police have not discovered.

The police summary of facts lists the occupations of the three as unknown, but senior Government figures believe they are agents for Mossad, Israel's secret service.

The guilty plea came suddenly, after a fast-tracked depositions hearing and extraordinary efforts by Kelman to avoid being photographed by the media.

Kelman and Cara claimed not to know each other or Barkan but police say inquiries reveal otherwise.

There were calls made between cellphones found in the possession of Kelman and Cara, and keys to a car rented by Barkan were found in Kelman's possession.

The defendants have claimed they met Barkan by chance and were merely good Samaritans helping someone. They initially denied knowing there was anything illegal in what they or Barkan did.

Soon after beginning inquiries, police learned that Cara particularly was a regular visitor to New Zealand, having travelled here 24 times between October 2000 and March 2004. He used two Israeli passports, the second a replacement.

Cara claimed to be a travel agent and to operate a Sydney travel agency. But inquiries by the Weekend Herald indicate it does not exist - or if it does, it operated illegally.

Barkan appears to have come to New Zealand with the purpose of illegally obtaining a New Zealand passport using an assumed identity.

He first came here, according to the police summary of facts, in November 2003, travelling on a United States passport which identified him as an Israeli.

Later that month, Barkan visited a doctor's surgery in Lynfield, using the victim's name.

On December 3, Barkan left the country. The next day Internal Affairs received an order for a birth certificate in the victim's name. This was processed and the certificate sent to the Auckland post office box number supplied.

Barkan, Cara and Kelman all travelled in and out of New Zealand during December, apparently working on the passport scam.

In March, all three returned to New Zealand. On March 6, Barkan rented an inner-city apartment on a short-term agreement in St Paul St.

Six days later he returned to the Lynfield doctor complaining of a minor ailment. Barkan told GP Keith Way to witness his passport application, telling him it was needed urgently as he was soon to marry in Australia. The doctor filled out the form.

On March 13 an urgent application for a passport was lodged with Internal Affairs in Wellington. With it was a genuine birth certificate and a passport-sized photograph of Barkan. Cara left New Zealand that day. Barkan left a week later.

Kelman stayed in Auckland, where on a Kiwi International Hotel registration form he entered the same vehicle which records indicate was rented to Barkan. This was March 21, the day police began their sting.

Cara and Kelman were arrested on March 23, after plainclothes police watched as the passport was delivered. According to the police summary, the day began with a male caller refusing to pick up the passport in person and requesting it be delivered to Travcour, a Queen St company specialising in travel documentation. Undercover police made the delivery.

About 1.25pm Travcour received a telephone request from a male caller that the package containing the passport be couriered to the St Paul's address at which Barkan had rented an apartment earlier in the month.

Undercover police again made the delivery. The apartment manager told them that an ex-tenant (Barkan) had phoned requesting permission for a package to be delivered to the office and asking that he be phoned when it arrived.

A detective noticed a person - whom he later identified as Cara - at a cafe across the road monitoring movements. About 2.35pm the manager was contacted. He confirmed the package had arrived. The caller told him a taxi would pick it up. At 2.38pm a call was made from Cara's phone to one used by Barkan.

An alert taxi arrived at 3pm and, watched by Cara, the driver picked up the package. The taxi driver was told to go to a Freemans Bay location.

There Kelman was waiting.

"On seeing plainclothes police, Kelman hid his cellphone in bushes then walked swiftly from his observation area," a prosecutor told the court. Soon after, Kelman's phone began to ring. A policeman retrieved it and answered it. It was the taxi driver saying he had arrived.

A former Mossad spy living in New Zealand has said he suspects the agency is behind the scam.

He said New Zealand passports were prized by spy agencies, particularly Israel's, because they didn't arouse the suspicion of border officials, particularly in the Arab world which regarded the New Zealand as sympathetic to Palestinians.

The Mossad Penetrates US Intelligence Communications

How Israeli Intelligence can tap into any American telephone…and get away with it

Los Angeles, 1997, a major local, state and federal drug investigating sours.  The suspects:  Israeli organized crime with operations in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Canada, Israel and Egypt.  The allegations: cocaine and ecstasy trafficking, and sophisticated white-collar credit card and computer fraud.

The problem: according to classified law enforcement documents obtained by Fox News, the bad guys had the cops’ beepers, cell phones, even home phones under surveillance.  Some who did get caught admitted to having hundreds of numbers and using them to avoid arrest.

"This compromised law enforcement communications between LAPD detectives and other assigned law enforcement officers working various aspects of the case.  The organization discovered communications between organized crime intelligence division detectives, the FBI and the Secret Service."

Shock spread from the DEA to the FBI in Washington, and then the CIA.   An investigation of the problem, according to law enforcement documents, concluded, "The organization has apparent extensive access to database systems to identify pertinent personal and biographical information."

When investigators tried to find out where the information might have come from, they looked at Amdocs, a publicly traded firm based in Israel.   Amdocs generates billing data for virtually every call in America, and they do credit checks.  The company denies any leaks, but investigators still fear that the firm's data is getting into the wrong hands.

When investigators checked their own wiretapping system for leaks, they grew concerned about potential vulnerabilities in the computers that intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls.  A main contractor is Comverse Infosys, which works closely with the Israeli government, and under a special grant program, is reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its research and development costs by Israel's Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Some American terrorist investigators fear certain suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks may have managed to stay ahead of them, by knowing who and when investigators are calling on the telephone.  How?

By obtaining and analyzing data that's generated every time someone in the U.S. makes a call.

Here's how the system works. Most directory assistance calls, and virtually all call records and billing in the U.S. are done for the phone companies by Amdocs Ltd., an Israeli-based private elecommunications company.

Amdocs has contracts with the 25 biggest phone companies in America, and more worldwide.  The White House and other secure government phone lines are protected, but it is virtually impossible to make a call on normal phones without generating an Amdocs record of it.

In recent years, the FBI and other government agencies have investigated Amdocs more than once.  The firm has repeatedly and adamantly denied any security breaches or wrongdoing.  In 1999, the super secret national security agency, headquartered in northern Maryland, issued what's called a Top Secret sensitive compartmentalized information report, TS/SCI, warning that records of calls in the United States were getting into foreign hands – in Israel, in particular.

Investigators don't believe calls are being listened to, but the data about who is calling whom and when is plenty valuable in itself.  An internal Amdocs memo to senior company executives suggests just how Amdocs generated call records could be used.  “Widespread data mining techniques and algorithms.... combining both the properties of the customer  (e.g., credit rating) and properties of the specific ‘behavior….’” Specific behavior, such as who the customers are calling.

The Amdocs memo says the system should be used to prevent phone fraud.   But U.S. counterintelligence analysts say it could also be used to spy through the phone system.  The N.S.A has held numerous classified conferences to warn the F.B.I. and C.I.A. how Amdocs records could be used.  At one NSA briefing, a diagram by the Argon national lab was used to show that if the phone records are not secure, major security breaches are possible.

Another briefing document said, "It has become increasingly apparent that systems and networks are vulnerable.…Such crimes always involve unauthorized persons, or persons who exceed their authorization...citing on exploitable vulnerabilities."

Those vulnerabilities are growing, because according to another briefing, the U.S. relies too much on foreign companies like Amdocs for high-tech equipment and software.  "Many factors have led to increased dependence on code developed overseas.... We buy rather than train or develop solutions."

U.S. intelligence does not believe the Israeli government is involved in a misuse of information, and Amdocs insists that its data is secure. What U.S. government officials are worried about, however, is the possibility that Amdocs data could get into the wrong hands, particularly organized crime.  And that would not be the first thing that such a thing has happened.  As a case in point, in a 1997 drug trafficking case in Los Angeles, in which telephone information, the type that Amdocs collects, was used to "completely compromise the communications of the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEO and the LAPD."

There was a report, you'll recall, that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, did indeed send representatives to the U.S. to warn, just before 9/11, that a major terrorist attack was imminent.  How does that leave room for the lack of a warning?

What investigators are saying is that that warning from the Mossad was nonspecific and general, and they believe that it may have had something to do with the desire to protect what are called sources and methods in the intelligence community.  The suspicion being, perhaps those sources and methods were taking place right here in the United States.

An Israeli-based company called Amdocs Ltd. that generates the computerized records and billing data for nearly every phone call made in America.  U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks fear that suspects may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of Amdocs.

The concern about phone security extends to another company, founded in Israel, that provides the technology that the U.S. government uses for electronic eavesdropping.

The company is Comverse Infosys, a subsidiary of an Israeli-run private telecommunications firm, with offices throughout the U.S.  It provides wiretapping equipment for law enforcement.  Here's how wiretapping works in the U.S.

Every time you make a call, it passes through the nation's elaborate network of switchers and routers run by the phone companies.  Custom computers and software, made by companies like Comverse, are tied into that network to intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls, and at the same time transmit them to investigators.

The manufacturers have continuing access to the computers so they can service them and keep them free of glitches. This process was authorized by the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA.   While CALEA made wiretapping easier, it has led to a system that is seriously vulnerable to compromise, and may have undermined the whole wiretapping system.

Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned Oct. 18 in a hand-delivered letter from 15 local, state and federal law enforcement  officials, who complained that "law enforcement's current  electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today than they  were at the time CALEA was enacted."

Congress insists the equipment it installs is secure.  But the complaint about this system is that the wiretap computer programs made by  Comverse have, in effect, a back door through which wiretaps themselves can  be intercepted by unauthorized parties.

Adding to the suspicions is the fact that in Israel, Comverse works closely with the Israeli government, and under special programs, gets  reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its research and development costs by  the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade.  But investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest  Israeli spying through Comverse is considered career suicide.

Eyes And Ears Of The Nation - US Hires Morons As Spies
by: Amanda Ripley
Time Magazine
June 27, 2004

Thousands of truckers, bus drivers and rest-stop workers are being enlisted to spot terrorists. Is this comforting news?

On.a blazing hot morning last week, 75 men and women of the highway — bus drivers,truckers and van operators — convened at a nondescript office building in Little Rock, Ark., to be trained as terrorist hunters. The Department of Homeland Security this year gave $19.3 million to the American Trucking Associations, which is based in Alexandria, Va., to recruit a volunteer "army" called Highway Watch. So far, 10,000 truckers have signed on to become amateur sleuths. Over the next year, the goal is to add tollbooth workers, rest-stop employees and construction crews, creating a corps of 400,000 people drawn from every state.

Waiting for the training to begin, Jo Anna Cartwright, who manages the rural public bus system in northern Arkansas, said she had not yet encountered any terrorists in her job, as far as she knew. "We got a terroristic phone call the other day," she said, "but it turned out it was just the boyfriend of an employee." Her bus drivers pay special attention to a gentleman from Afghanistan who recently married a regular rider, she said. Cartwright had come to the training to learn what else she could do.

The tutorial was led by Jeffrey Beatty, a security consultant, formerly of the FBI and CIA. He started by showing clips of alQaeda training videos. "They are out there training for operations in the U.S. homeland. Make no mistake about it," he said, warning that Little Rock cannot afford to be complacent. "You're getting a presidential library here — for a President who launched cruise missiles against al-Qaeda," Beatty said, referring to Bill Clinton. There are not enough police and federal agents to protect all of America, but transportation workers could be a "force multiplier," he said. "We want to turn the hunters into the hunted," he intoned for the first of four times that day.

So how exactly does one spot a terrorist on the highway? Members of Highway Watch are given a secret toll-free number to report any suspicious behavior — people taking pictures of bridges, for example, or passengers handling heavy backpacks with unusual care. "We want to hear from you when something just doesn't look right," Beatty said. "Say you're out at a truck stop and you see someone hanging out near your truck, wearing a jacket. Maybe it's too hot out for a jacket. Go back inside, alert someone and check him out through the window."

But — and this is important — Highway Watch members are just messengers, not superheroes, Beatty said. The hotline call center in Kentucky logs the information it receives in a database and contacts law enforcement when necessary. It usually isn't. Of the 200 or so calls that come in each month, only about 10 have anything to do with suspected terrorism. Most callers report abandoned vehicles, stranded motorists or roadway hazards. Highway Watch members are instructed to look for certain kinds of behavior — not certain kinds of people. "Profiling is bad. Bad, bad, bad," Beatty said.

Still, listening to his ominous warnings and the bravado that comes easily to the former Delta Force commander, one has no difficulty imagining an empowered civilian getting carried away. And Americans generally have not reacted well to institutionalized nosiness. In 2002 the Justice Department proposed something called Operation TIPS, which would have encouraged not just truckers but also cable installers and mail carriers, among others, to report suspicious behavior. But before the program could begin, it was buried in opposition from the left and the right. Americans did not want to become a "nation of snitches," as the libertarian Cato Institute put it.

Highway Watch, which will receive an additional $22 million next year, preserves the part of TIPS concerned with monitoring behavior in public space. The Department of Homeland Security has also launched Port Watch, River Watch and Transit Watch. Then there are the familiar Neighborhood Watch groups, many of which have expanded their missions to include homeland security. In New York City, government outsourcing of surveillance has even trickled down to doormen and building superintendents, thousands of whom are being trained to watch out for strange trucks parked near buildings and tenants who move in without furniture.

After the session in Little Rock, two newly initiated Highway Watch members sat down for the catered barbecue lunch. The truckers, who haul hazardous material across 48 states, explained how easy it is to spot "Islamics" on the road: just look for their turbans. Quite a few of them are truck drivers, says William Westfall of Van Buren, Ark. "I'll be honest. They know they're not welcome at truck stops. There's still a lot of animosity toward Islamics." Eddie Dean of Fort Smith, Ark., also has little doubt about his ability to identify Muslims: "You can tell where they're from. You can hear their accents. They're not real clean people."

That kind of prejudice is hard to undo, but it's a shame Beatty's slide show did not mention that in the U.S., it's almost always Sikhs who wear turbans, not Muslims. Last year a Sikh truck driver who was wearing a turban was shot twice while standing near his tractor trailer in Phoenix, Ariz. He survived the attack, which police are investigating as a hate crime.

The Highway Watch website boasts that the program is open to "an elite core sic of truck drivers" who must have clean driving and employment records. In fact, their records are not vetted by the American Trucking Associations. At the Little Rock event, some came in off the street without preregistering. However, the organization is highly security conscious about other parts of its operations. It refuses to disclose the exact location of its hotline call center or the number of operators working there. "It could be infiltrated," says Dawn Apple, Highway Watch's director of training and recruitment.

What's clear is that Highway Watch is a morale booster for drivers. "I don't want to sound too hokey, but truck drivers are a very patriotic bunch," says Mike Russell, a spokesman for the organization. "It made sense for us to take advantage of what we do every day — which is, basically, patrol major highways through a windshield."

Just three days after his training in Little Rock, veteran Wal-Mart truck driver Danny Ewell found cause to call Highway Watch. On Father's Day, as he was leaving a Red Lobster in Johnson City, Tenn., he saw a young man walking between two cars with an orange T shirt draped over his arm. Peeking out from under the T shirt was a semiautomatic weapon. "Because of the training, I knew to look at his height and his hair color, and I got the make and plates of his car," Ewell says. "Normally I would have just looked at his clothes. But now I know to look for things that won't change." Ewell called 911 and Highway Watch. Local police responded but were unable to find the man. Ewell, at least, had done his part.

Comment: It is comforting to realize that our security is in the hands of such  dedicated professionals. Governor Ridge’s men will no doubt soon  be receiving clown suits to set them off from the other shelter occupants.

'Boston Phoenix' IDs 'Anonymous' CIA Officer
by E&P Staff
 June 30, 2004

NEW YORK The active U.S. intelligence officer known only as "Anonymous," who has gained world renown this month as author of an upcoming book called "Imperial Hubris," is actually named Michael Scheuer, according to an article in the Boston Phoenix today by Jason Vest.

Speculation about his identity has run rampant since a June 23 article in The New York Times discussed the book and the background of the author. The book, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror," asserts, among other things, that Osama bin Laden is not on the run and that the invasion of Iraq has not made the United States safer.

In that June 23 piece, the Times identified Anonymous as a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the Counterterrorist Center's bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999, adding that a "senior intelligence official" held that revealing the man's full name "could make him a target of Al Qaeda." Anonymous has appeared in brief television interviews always in silhouette.

According to Vest, "Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer -- and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics."

Vest in his article notes that "at issue here is not just the book's content, but why Anonymous is anonymous. After all, as the Times and others have reported, his situation is nothing like that of Valerie Plame, a covert operative whose ability to work active overseas cases was undermined when someone in the White House blew her cover to journalist Robert Novak in an apparent payback for an inconvenient weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence report by her husband, Joseph Wilson. Anonymous, on the other hand, is, by the CIA's own admission, a Langley, Va.-bound analyst whose identity has never required secrecy.

"A Phoenix investigation has discovered that Anonymous does not, in fact, want to be anonymous at all -- and that his anonymity is neither enforced nor voluntarily assumed out of fear for his safety, but rather compelled by an arcane set of classified regulations that are arguably being abused in an attempt to spare the CIA possible political inconvenience. In the Phoenix's view, continued deference by the press to a bogus and unwanted standard of secrecy essentially amounts to colluding with the CIA in muzzling a civil servant -- a standard made more ridiculous by the ubiquity of Anonymous's name in both intelligence and journalistic circles."

When asked to confirm or deny his identity in an interview with the Phoenix, Anonymous declined to do either, explaining, "I've given my word I'm not going to tell anyone who I am, as the organization that employs me has bound me by my word."

Jonathan Turley, a national-security-law expert at George Washington University Law School, told Vest, "The requirement that someone publish anonymously is rare, almost unheard-of, particularly if the person is not in a covert position. It seems pretty obvious that the requirement he remain anonymous is motivated solely by political concerns, and ones that have more to do with the CIA."

The CIA did not respond to a call from the Phoenix, and declined to comment on the book or the author to the Associated Press last Friday.