Israelis and their seemingly strange tricks

[Air.177]

As Suggested By Hoepoe in FS's thread, I would like to discuss some of the stuff that appears out of the ordinary to an outsider, but that seems to work quite well for them. Like the Dummy corded mag, the small pockets on some of the web slings, etc, etc.

Anyone with any insight would be greatly appreciated

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Air.177

As Suggested By Hoepoe in FS's thread, I would like to discuss some of the stuff that appears out of the ordinary to an outsider, but that seems to work quite well for them. Like the Dummy corded mag, the small pockets on some of the web slings, etc, etc.

Anyone with any insight would be greatly appreciated

Is the mag dummy corded, or does the cord just happen to pass behind the mag in the two pics?

I do like the cuff on the forend for snapping dummy cords on. I might rotate it a bit though.

TR

[optactical]

There seems to be a glitch in the matrix, this is for some reason appearing as the latest thread in the gear forum when looking at the forum home page.

Just thought I was losing my mind for a minute there.

[Razor]

I moved it here from the gear forum, as the topic is more technique oriented than specificly gear oriented. That may account for the 'glitch'.

[Roguish Lawyer]

I tried inviting Kata, an Israeli gear maker, here a while back. An unnamed 7th Grouper scared them away, IIRC. Shall I try again?

[NousDefionsDoc]

Originally Posted by Roguish Lawyer

I tried inviting Kata, an Israeli gear maker, here a while back. An unnamed 7th Grouper scared them away, IIRC. Shall I try again?

Who?

[Roguish Lawyer]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

Who?

You mean, "who, me?"

I don't think you really scared them away. You just made some Buy American remarks or something, IIRC.

[NousDefionsDoc]

Well I'm sorry if I offended your friends. I don't see anything wrong with "Buy American", especially when it comes to military kit - they buy American as well.

Tell them to come on back if you want, I won't talk bad about their cra...products or anything.

[zeroalpha]

Australians aware of agent's connection to Mossad

By NICKY HAGER

Australian intelligence officials knew the man at the centre of the Kiwi Israeli spy scandal was a long-time Mossad agent well before he began the New Zealand passport operation.

Since serving three months in prison in New Zealand, Elisha Cara has returned to Israel. He resigned from Mossad and recently got a job as a manager in credit card company Visa Israel.

Cara set up a base in Sydney and travelled to and from New Zealand 24 times between October 2000 and March 2004 without any apparent interest from the local intelligence services.

Details of the case and confirmation of Cara's Mossad background have been leaked by Western Europe-based foreign intelligence sources.

The sources, none of whom are New Zealanders, reveal that Cara had headed another Mossad mission that went spectacularly wrong just two years before being put in charge of obtaining illegal New Zealand passports.

Cara's colleagues, Uriel Kelman and Zev Barkan (also known as Zev Bruckenstein), were also fulltime officers in Mossad, the 53-year-old agency with an estimated 1200 staff and headquarters about 10km north of Tel Aviv.

Cara was 50, Kelman, 30, and Barkan, 36, at the time of Cara and Kelman's arrests. Their mission: to obtain "top quality" false passports for use in sensitive Mossad operations.

In contrast, the Israeli diplomat expelled from Canberra several weeks ago in mysterious circumstances, Amir Lati, is definitely not a Mossad agent, the sources say.

According to the sources, earlier in Cara's Mossad career he took part in a routine liaison meeting between Mossad and its "friendly counterparts" in Australia, exchanging views and sharing intelligence. They say that it showed "complacency" in Mossad that the same officer was later used for a covert operation in a country where his name and face were known.

It also suggests that the Australian Security Intelligence Service and the New Zealand SIS are not being vigilant in their monitoring of Israeli spies. The passport scam was uncovered only because of Mossad carelessness - using an agent without a New Zealand accent to talk to an immigration official.

Since Cara's presence provided clear evidence of Mossad links, it is unclear why the agents got away with a minimal three months' prison.

Government security agencies are sensitive about false pass-

ports being used by foreigners for illegal activities and Foreign Minister Phil Goff noted that Cara's passports could be for "an assassination in a third country".

Prime Minister Helen Clark and an ASIO spokesperson would not be drawn on Australia's prior knowledge of Cara.

The Australia-New Zealand operation was, according to the sources, aimed entirely at obtaining false passports for use in covert Mossad operations elsewhere on the world. It was "a standard operation, nothing unusual or dangerous". Cara's three years in Sydney were a normal part of the time-consuming preparations for important Mossad operations.

Former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky has described the different "qualities" of passports used by the agency: top, second, field operation and throwaway. Top-quality passports - the kind Cara was tasked with obtaining in New Zealand - are real passports with a real person's name that can withstand official checks in the country of origin.

The passport operation employed full-time Mossad staff and local Jewish citizens (called sayanim) who help Mossad within foreign countries. In New Zealand, one sayanim participant was apparently former Auckland Jewish Council member Tony Resnick.

The passport scam was discovered when the agents applied for a passport in the name of an Auckland man with cerebral palsy. Agent Zev Barkan flew into New Zealand to have his photograph accompany the application, which would have provided a top-quality passport with the agent's face and the name of a real New Zealander.

The man with cerebral palsy belonged to St John Ambulance, where Resnick worked as an ambulance officer. Resnick's suspected role was finding identities for false passports. He fled to Israel after Cara and Kelman were arrested.

[zeroalpha]

Mossad man’s history of bungles

DON’T EXPECT the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad to be named in an apology about the Israeli spy scandal, but it was indeed Mossad at the centre of the affair. And the spy at the centre of last year’s New Zealand passport scam had made a hash of an earlier Mossad operations too.

The man who commanded the New Zealand operation, long-time Mossad agent Elisha Cara, had headed an intelligence mission to Cyprus that went spectacularly wrong just two years before being put in charge of obtaining illegal New Zealand passports. Since serving three months in prison in New Zealand he has returned to Israel, resigned from Mossad and recently been appointed to a job as a manager in the company Visa Israel.

Details of the case and the agent’s Mossad background have been leaked by Western Europe-based foreign intelligence sources.

In the late 1990s Cara was head of a specialist surveillance unit in the agency's Neviot department, which collects intelligence for Mossad by break-ins, street surveillance, installing listening devices and other covert methods. In Hebrew, Neviot means a spring of water.

In late 1998, while head of the Neviot unit, Cara dispatched two Mossad officers, Udi Hargov and Igal Damary, on an ill-conceived intelligence-collecting mission to Cyprus. While staying in a fishing village called Zigi on the southern coast of Cyprus, the owner of the holiday flat the agents were renting became suspicious and called the police.

The police found radio communication scanners, a laptop computer, cellular phones and eight maps of Cyprus in their flat. The agents were arrested and charged with conspiracy, spying and illegal possession of telecommunications equipment. The police prosecutor argued that they were spying on a "very sensitive army operation" at the nearby Vassiliko port.

The case, which has similarities to the New Zealand affair, caused major controversy in Cyprus. The pair pleaded not guilty and then there was behind-the-scenes pressure to have the charges dropped. Attorney-General Alecos Markides said his Israeli counterpart visited him twice and US senators and a cabinet minister from an unnamed European Union country approached then president Glafcos Clerides over the matter.

In the end the government dropped spying and conspiracy charges, choosing instead a minor telecommunications charge and a charge of approaching a restricted area. The agents were sentenced to three years in prison then pardoned by president Clerides after serving nine months.

The inside story, according to the intelligence sources, is that Cara had sent the two agents to Cyprus to conduct surveillance of a Lebanese Hezbollah target (the Cyprus government was wrong about them monitoring its military). The operation was of course a complete failure. It was not surprising they were caught, the sources say, because Cara had sent two men with no operational experience - one from the headquarters finance department and the other from research.

They say that after such a failure, the result of "very poor judgement", any normal security agency would require the head of the operation to resign. But they say Mossad has a strong culture of "personal favours" between long-term colleagues, where people are promoted according to factions and friendships. In Cara's case, after the "Cyprus fiasco" he was moved sideways into a job in the staff department and later promoted again by senior Mossad official and long-time friend Hagai Hadas. It was Hadas who arranged for Cara's promotion to head the "New Zealand Australia operation".

The intelligence sources say that Cara's promotion to the New Zealand operation, after botching the Cyprus one, is symptomatic of poor decisionmaking at the top levels of Mossad.

The Israel newspaper Haaretz - in a feature article last week entitled "Spy vs Spy" -reported bloody power struggles occurring within Mossad. It said there are two senior staff vying for the position of deputy director and thus being in line to become director of Mossad in September 2007. They are "H", the director of Headquarters Directorate, and "N", head of the Tsomet department that collects intelligence by having well-placed spies on the payroll in foreign countries.

The director of Headquarters Directorate ("H") is - according to the sources - Hagai Hadas, the man who promoted Cara to the New Zealand passport operation. The article said he is central to the power struggles occurring inside Mossad (which is officially called the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations).

In the 1990s Hadas (a former army paratrooper) was head of the top secret "Kesaria" (or "Massada") unit, which "together with its assassinations unit Kidon is the 'holy of the holies'" in Mossad. Kesaria is responsible for running Mossad's most secret agents, known as "combatants" (Lohamim in Hebrew). These are Jewish people, usually of Arab origins and Arabic speaking, who are sent under "borrowed identities" to conduct special operations in "target countries" - "the most hostile Arab countries".

After helping Cara, Hadas left the agency after more than 20 years and briefly tried a job in business. When the current director, General Meir Dagan, was appointed in September 2002, he rehired Hadas to fill the no. 3 position at Mossad, responsible for non-operational units and long-term planning (Dagan had restructured Mossad into two halves, operational directorate and Hadas' headquarters directorate). Hadas is now hoping the replace the current deputy director, Tamir Fredo - with other senior staff "very nervous" about the outcome. A climate of backbiting, disappointment and resignations exists in Mossad.

The outcome of the power struggles will have implications for Middle East politics. The current director, Dagan, was appointed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whom he served under in the Israeli Army. In the 1970s Sharon had appointed Dagan to head an undercover commando unit "to seek out, arrest and liquidate" Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. He later had the same role in Lenanon. Dagan subsequently headed Sharon's election-day headquarters when he became Prime Minister.

A former Mossad officer quoted in Haaretz said that when Dagan arrived at Mossad he brought him an intelligence report only to be told "from tomorrow I want only a list of targets for liquidation". Former staff are concerned about Mossad increasingly becoming "a Mafia-style Murder Inc."

The foreign intelligence sources argue that Dagan has a "tendency to adventurism [and] a lack of understanding of intelligence collection methods". As a result Mossad is "in deep trouble" and "less and less appreciated by its foreign counterparts" - overtaken in effectiveness by the Israel Security Service (Shabak) internally and other western agencies internationally.


It is, they say, typical of the Mossad culture that there was no serious internal inquiry into the "botched" operation in New Zealand, just as there was none into the Cyprus one. Instead, according to Haaretz, when the New Zealand passport scandal broke Dagan simply "ordered division heads to make their staff sign a secrecy document pledging that they would not talk" about the affair. The sources fear that a Hadas-run agency would continue the paratrooper approach to intelligence.

[Roguish Lawyer]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

Well I'm sorry if I offended your friends.

Worse than that. You offended my clients! Now I'm going to have to go medieval on your ass.

[casey]

Originally Posted by Roguish Lawyer

Worse than that. You offended my clients! Now I'm going to have to go medieval on your ass.

LOL, Can I have your car ?

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by casey

LOL, Can I have your car ?

Dibs on his whiskey collection!!

TR

Given that I already claimed dibs on NDD's boot...

would that make it more fair?

FrontSight

[NousDefionsDoc]

You guys crack me up.