Blinken’s Father Was Robert Maxwell’s Lawyer, Friend Of Ghislaine

Sec. of State Anthony Blinken’s father was Sam Pisar:

It was an unusual sight: An American advocating on behalf of Soviets in the Soviet legal system.

But, in a sense, Pisar was the perfect man for the job. For years, he’d pushed for greater Western engagement with the Soviet Union and other adversarial nations, saying that through increased connections, chiefly trade, East and West could reduce the risk of a catastrophic military clash and improve the lives of people living under oppressive regimes. He encapsulated his ideas in a 1970 book titled Coexistence & Commerce as well as other writings, and his work informed U.S. presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

Pisar’s life story is remarkable on many levels. He was one of the youngest survivors of Adolf Hitler’s death camps, whisked to freedom by U.S. troops; he went from European black marketeer to receiving doctorates in law from Harvard and the Sorbonne; he advised French and American presidents and was granted U.S. citizenship through a special act of Congress; he served as a lawyer for Hollywood stars, corporate bigwigs, UNESCO and the International Olympic Committee; he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; he wrote new text for Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3 (“Kaddish”) that shared his story through a conversation with God; and to his final days he worked to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.
Samuel Pisar at the Auschwitz Memorial in front of a map showing different locations from which people were deported to Auschwitz.

Pisar, who died in 2015, also left a lasting imprint on the man tapped to be America’s next secretary of State: his stepson, Antony Blinken. A suave, self-assured diplomat, Blinken has often spoken of how Pisar’s Holocaust survival story instilled in him the importance of maintaining America’s status as a beacon of freedom on a planet where too many remain in shackles.”

And even more interestingly, Pisar was the lawyer of fraudster and Mossad operative Robert Maxwell.... and thus a friend of sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, his daughter and long-time lover and pimp of pedophile and Mossad-operative Jeffrey Epstein.

And then there’s also this:

Tweet (Jaak Waller):

“Curiously left out of this family history was the fact that his biological father founded private equity firm Warburg Pincus with Eric Warburg, nephew of Paul Warburg architect of the Federal Reserve System. Totally normal Americana stuff.”

Tweet (Mark Ames):

nouvelobs.com/monde/20190812

twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/

 

Private Equity Firm CEO Leon Black Paid Epstein $150 Million

From The Daily Beast:

“The CEO of the private equity firm Apollo is stepping down after the company’s board discovered he paid out $150 million to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Leon Black, who is also the chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, said Monday he would be stepping down sometime before his 70th birthday in July. Apollo’s board had ordered an inquiry into Black after The New York Times reported in October that he had wired up to $75 million to Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl. Black has denied any involvement in Epstein’s international sex trafficking ring and has not been accused of sexual misconduct.”

Bloombergquint has more details about the networks which helped both:

[Lila: Can we say Mossad agent?]

“Epstein, a Brooklyn native, was an enigma to many inside and outside of finance. He attended Cooper Union and New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences but left both without a degree. He briefly had a job at Bear Stearns Cos. and before his first arrest worked extensively for lingerie mogul Les Wexner. The L Brands founder severed ties with Epstein after his first conviction.”

Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/what-leon-black-got-for-paying-jeffrey-epstein-158-million

 

Bharara’s Israeli & Pakistani In-Laws (Update 1/23/14)

UPDATE (1/23/14)

According to this site, Bharara’s net worth is approximately $1 million and his annual salary is approximately $200,000? No references or explanations about where they got those figures.

Not sure…

UPDATE (1/23/14):

Bharara was naturalized in 1980, along with his parents.

(He would have been 12 at the time. He emigrated from India to the US in 1970, when he was 2).

(The full list of Gupta/India posts is too long to be inserted here, so please search for “Rajat Gupta” or “Bharara” or “War on India” on my blog, to get the rest. The Gupta posts cannot be searched for on Google. They don’t show up.)

ORIGINAL POST

The surprises never end:

Preet Bharara is not only half-Sikh, he is married to a woman whose father  is Pakistani and whose mother is Israeli.

That makes Bharara’s three children Jewish (Jewish ethnic descent is through the mother’s line).

Q: Does Bharara’s wife have/retain Israeli citizenship?

Why is this line of reasoning important?

Because Sikh militants have had close ties with Pakistan’s intelligence, ISI.

And, the ISI is reportedly trying to revive Sikh militancy within India, where it has subsided, even while it has grown outside India, because of funding by third-parties.

QUOTE:

“The minister [R.P.N. Sing] said the National Investigation Agency has been investigating into the funding of the banned Babbar Khalsa International (BKI).

Singh said the NIA has registered a case against Punjab-based operatives of BKI based on the allegation that they are receiving funds from UK-based BKI operatives to commit terrorist acts in India with active material and logistic support from Pakistan-based BKI leaders.” (Times of India, August 13, 2013)

Furthermore, Mossad reportedly helped create the Sikh militant movement directing it through an old-boy network of Sikhs in the Indian army.

Here are more details:

New York Times, Aug 9, 2009:

“His [Bharara] father, a Sikh, and his mother, who was Hindu, were born in what is now Pakistan, before India and Pakistan were separate countries.

In the violent migration that occurred after the 1947 partition, his father and mother both moved to the Indian side, with their families losing property and most of their possessions, Mr. Bharara has said.

His wife’s father, a Muslim, also moved, from the Indian side into Pakistan, also losing his home “and much, much more,” as Mr. Bharara put it. And his wife’s mother was born in Palestine, after her father, who was Jewish, escaped with his family from Nazi Germany.”

Bharara, the son of a Sikh doctor from Amritsar, which was the site of the Golden Temple massacre, is married into a Pakistani-Israeli/Ashkenazi family.

That alone should set off alarm bells.

But, in addition, the whole Devyani Khobragade incident seems to have had the support of a radical Sikh campaign against Indian sovereignty.

Indian intelligence has unearthed Mossad/Israeli agents have been making contacts with radical Islamic groups, as well as with the radical left, in Kochi, in Kerala state (from where the diplomat’s maid is alleged to have come).

Perhaps action, not just alarm, is warranted.

Does Preet Bharara have ties to the Khalistani movement?

Mossad agents pose as American spies, recruit for war on Iran

Christopher Bollyn (who increasingly proves his reliability as a researcher):

“A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.

Buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush’s administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives — what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.
– “False Flag” by Mark Perry, Foreign Policy, 13 January 2012

When we looked back at all the things that had happened we felt that two things were unclear. First, if they are from NATO, why did they not meet with us in Afghanistan where they have bases and where they can contact us in a much more easy and secure manner. The second issue was that the first time they informed us that NATO forces wanted to meet with us we thought they were going to speak about eastern parts of Iran, because NATO forces are stationed in Afghanistan. But they insisted that we should transfer our operations from the eastern border region to the capital. We thought that this was very strange. When we thought about it we came to the conclusion that they are either Americans acting under NATO cover — or Israelis.
– Abdolmalek Rigi (1983 – 2010), founder of Jundallah in interview with Press TV (Iran)

Extracts from the article ‘Israeli Mossad agents posed as CIA spies to recruit terrorists to fight against Iran’ in Ha’aretz (Israel), 13 January 2012:

Israeli Mossad agents posed as CIA officers in order to recruit members of a Pakistani terror group to carry out assassinations and attacks against the regime in Iran, Foreign Policy revealed on Friday, quoting U.S. intelligence memos. Foreign Policy’s Mark Perry reported that the Mossad operation was carried out in 2007-2008, behind the back of the U.S. government, and infuriated then U.S. President George W. Bush.

According to a currently serving U.S. intelligence officer, Perry reports, when Bush was briefed on the information he “went absolutely ballistic.”

Perry quotes a number of American intelligence officials and claims that the Mossad agents used American dollars and U.S. passports to pose as CIA spies to try to recruit members of Jundallah, a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization that has carried out a series of attacks in Iran and assassinations of government officials.

According to the report, Israel’s recruitment attempts took place mostly in London, right under the nose of U.S. intelligence officials. “It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. “Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”

“The report sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was putting Americans at risk,” the intelligence officer told Perry. “There’s no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.”

The intelligence officer said that the Bush administration continued to deal with the affair until the end of his term. He noted that Israel’s operation jeopardized the U.S. administration’s fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was under immense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah.

According to the intelligence officer, a senior administration official vowed to “take the gloves off” with Israel, but ultimately the U.S. did nothing.

“Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us,” Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. “If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they’re supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don’t think that’s true.”

The following video by Russia Today features a 2010 interview with Webster Tarpley about the Iranian capture of Abdolmalek Rigi, the founder and former commander-in-chief of the terrorist group Jundallah. As one might expect, Tarpley does not even mention Israel or Israelis as he blames the CIA and NATO for being behind the terror attacks of Jundallah (basing his claims on Seymour Hersh and ABC News, no less).  This is typical Tarpley, who protects the Zionist state by consistently ignoring evidence of Israeli involvement in acts of false-flag terrorism – like 9/11.  To understand what’s behind Tarpley’s pro-Israel bias, see my article “Webster Tarpley’s Disinfo” from January 2010.”

War On India: RAW Fighting Back Against Mossad In India

This is from a Wayne Madsen report from February 2012 this year

“An Israeli Chabad sect couple, Rabbi Sheneor Zalman and his wife Yaffa Shenoi, have been told by Kerala police to leave India in fifteen days. The two are suspected by the Indian intelligence, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) of being involved in a covert operation in India linked to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack in which six Chabad members were killed in a shootout between Dawood Ibrahim’s Pakistan-based gangsters and the residents of Mumbai’s Chabad House. The incident was reported as a major act of terrorism when, in fact, it was score settling between Ibrahim’s drug syndicate and Chabadniks who were seen as moving in on Ibrahim’s control over the Mumbai drug trade.

WMR has previously reported that Chabad houses around the world are believed by multiple intelligence agencies to be centers for Mossad activity operating under religious “cover.”

RAW agents apparently staked out the couple’s pricey residence in Kochi as late night meetings were conducted with suspect individuals under Indian intelligence surveillance. The Israeli couple had lived in Kochi for almost two years. After being presented with evidence of espionage by the intelligence and police services, the Ernakulum District in Kochi decided to order the Israeli couple deported.

Chabad Jews and Mossad were forced to leave their former base in Goa as a result of increased RAW and federal police surveillance of their activities, believed to include the shipment of heroin from Afghanistan to Southeast Asia in the east and the United Arab Emirates to the west. The Israeli Mossad and Chabad re-located their operations to Kochi, which had replaced Goa as a major drug trans-shipment point.

In addition, Mumbai bombing suspect David Headley is believed to have maintained contact with the Mossad station in Goa prior to the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Headley is believed to have also maintained links with Ibrahim’s crime syndicate in Pakistan and the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group in planning false flag terrorist attacks in India. Then the green light for the Mumbai attacks was given, Ibrahim’s men decided to use the occasion to also attack their drug smuggling competitors at the Mumbai Chabad House.

Kochi had, according to WMR’s Indian intelligence sources, also served as a clandestine communications support facility for Israeli Dolphin-class submarines and their contingent of naval divers operating in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea. The submarines are believed to be targeting Iran in the event of an outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Iran.

Indian intelligence also believes the Israelis in Kochi were targeting the classified communications of the Indian naval base in Kochi, the headquarters for the Indian Navy’s Southern Command. By targeting the Kochi naval base and the anti-submarine warfare intelligence elements there and at the Indian naval air station on Willingdon Island, the Israelis were capable of providing warning to Israeli forces of Indian, Chinese, American, British, and French warships transiting past the tip of southern India to the Arabian and Red Seas.

Rabbi Zalman and his wife denied all charges against them and insisted they were meeting people day and night as a service to the local Jewish community.

Our sources say that after years of being played by Mossad, RAW has finally taken action against a major Mossad operating cell in the country.

Comment:

Earlier this year, India, like China, had skirted the sanctions imposed on Iran by the US, through barter and rupee accounts, bypassing the dollar altogether.

Recall that January-February (early in the year)  is also when the government began stalling about turning over its evidence to the Rajat Gupta defense, despite repeated requests, following Gupta’s arraignment in October 2011 on federal criminal charges.

It is also the same time that Goldman Sachs stated publicly that it no longer expected criminal charges (paraphrase), even though in August 2011, Blankfein had feared that eventuality enough to go out and hire a criminal defense attorney.

Sometime then, it seems, a deal got struck, involving letting Corzine and Blankfein out of the sights of the prosecution and instead throwing Gupta to the wolves. Hence the bizarre rulings of Judge Rakoff, a friend of the defense attorney and also apparently on good terms with Bharara, who prevented the defense from showing crucial evidence while allowing damaging hearsay from the prosecution.

Do all of these seemingly unrelated events have a common source – increasing tension between the NWO elites and India?
One faction of RAW (Research and Analysis Wing, the Indian intelligence service) reportedly wants to play along with the CIA and Mossad. Another faction wants to show third-world solidarity with Iran and Pakistan.

The RAW crack-down could explain why there was a noticeable intensification of negative media reports on India and pressure on the PM through the derogatory Time cover I blogged about previously.

In response, the Indian government has told Mr. Mittal to stop bashing it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/transatlantic-alliance-between-rothschilds-and-rockefellers-for-wealth-management-7805035.html

Mittal is connected to the Rothschilds through his investments in RIT Capital,through his ownership with Evelyn and Lynn Rothschild of “FirstMark Communications International LLC” and “FieldFresh Foods”.

Evelyn is head of N. M. Rothschild, which has links to the Agora Inc. publishing network, which encompasses the hard money/patriot/libertarian crowd.

[LR: I learned about this connection only after leaving and have blogged about it since then, as much as possible, given my one-time connection to them. In my previous blog posts about them, I noted various associations, but also noted that Agora’s flag-ship publications didn’t seem to promote views similar to what George Soros might be expected to promote. Soros is a Rothschild agent, according to some observers.  However, quite recently,  researching Lakshmi Mittal’s connection with Rothschild, I came across some more evidence of ties between the Agora network and the Rothschilds. If this new evidence pans out, then the Rees-Mogg link  – noted by Bill Engdahl a while back –  is likely also a Rothschild connection.

Agora then would be related to both Rothschild and Rockefeller interests.]

[Note: Recently, another Rothschild, Jacob, bought a 37% stake in David Rockefeller’s business, so both families are consolidating investments.]

Kochi, the focus of Chabad and the drug-trade, is also the site of the killing of two unarmed Indian fishermen by an Italian vessel in February, following which murder charges have been brought against the culprits.

Alleged Israeli Agent Arrested Over January Killing Of Hamas Leader

Raf Sanchez at Times Online June 12, 2010:

“An alleged Israeli agent wanted in connection with the killing of a Hamas leader in Dubai has been arrested in Poland.

A man using the name of Uri Brodsky is suspected of having supplied a fake German passport to a member of the Mossad assassin squad that was said to responsible for the slaying of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in January. German authorities issued a European-wide arrest warrant and he was picked up by Polish authorities earlier this week, said a spokesperson for the German federal prosecutor’s office which is seeking his extradition.”

Read the rest of this article at The Time Online (UK)

Is The Flotilla Story About Perception Or Reality?

“The bid to shape global perceptions by portraying the Palestinians as victims of Israel  (my emphasis) was the first prong of a longtime two-part campaign. The second part of this campaign involved armed resistance against the Israelis.”

—  Stratfor (George Friedman) cited by John Mauldin’s Outside the Box Continue reading

Gaza Flotilla Like Jewish Refugees In Exodus Says Former Mossad Agent

Victor Ostrovsky in SpyTalk at The Washington Post:

“The Israeli commando attack on a civilian flotilla was “so stupid it is stupefying,” says former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky. Ostrovsky spent six years in the Israeli navy, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander before Mossad recruited him in 1982. He quit after four years and in the 1990s he wrote two highly critical, first-person books about the intelligence service. Continue reading

Reports Suggest Wikileaks May Be Front – Updated

Update: I thought back to the climate-gate e-mails, which, I’d momentarily forgotten, were uploaded to wikileaks. If wikileaks were a Soros-funded disinformation operation, I wonder if it would be uploading emails that damage the AGW theory. That tends to make me wonder about the reason the left-liberals might not like wikileaks.

Update III: Here’s Justin Raimondo on the subject. Raimondo thinks the only people who criticize wikileaks are limousine liberals and tin-foil hat conspiracists…for now, I’ll let him have the last word:

“A child could understand this, but it’s way beyond the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and also far beyond the comprehension of the “liberal” Mother Jones magazine, which ought to change its name to Encounter. Kushner “reports” this nonsense uncritically, and even cites the loony John Young, of Cryptome.org, who rants:

“’WikiLeaks is a fraud,’ [Young] wrote to Assange’s list, hinting that the new site was a CIA data mining operation. ‘Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy.’”

Kushner has all bases covered: the white-wine-and-brie liberals who would rather look the other way while their hero Obama slaughters children on the streets of Baghdad, and the tinfoil hat crowd who can be convinced Wikileaks is a “false flag” operation.”

Update II: I should reiterate, I don’t endorse the WM piece. I merely present it…

Update I: I should also add that it doesn’t mean the documents they unearth might not be very important or useful. That’s not what I think this report is suggesting. A front always has a legitimate purpose, which gives it its credibility. How to differentiate disinformation from honest error? Well, evidence of someone/some outfit being funded by intelligence or government agencies; obvious lies or distortions repeated even when evidence contradicts the distortion; giving credence to very few sources or setting up some voices as totally credible and not listening to the range of voices; character assassination rather than rational debate, stigmatization; lack of self-criticism; unwillingness to rethink ideas when faced with new facts.

From The Wayne Madson Report via Alex Constantine:

“In January 2007, John Young, who runs cryptome.org, a site that publishes a wealth of sensitive and classified information, left Wikileaks, claiming the operation was a CIA front. Young also published some 150 email messages sent by Wikileaks activists on cryptome. They include a disparaging comment about this editor [Alex Constantine] by Wikileaks co-founder Dr. Julian Assange of Australia. Assange lists as one of his professions “hacker.” His German co-founder of Wikileaks uses a pseudonym, “Daniel Schmitt.”

Wikileaks claims it is “a multi-jurisdictional organization to protect internal dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers who face legal or other threats related to publishing” [whose] primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we are of assistance to people of all nations who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.”

In China, Wikileaks is suspected of having Mossad connections. It is pointed out that its first “leak” was from an Al Shabbab “insider” in Somalia. Al Shabbab is the Muslim insurgent group that the neocons have linked to “Al Qaeda.”

Asian intelligence sources also point out that Assange’s “PhD” is from Moffett University, an on-line diploma mill and that while he is said to hail from Nairobi, Kenya, he actually is from Australia where his exploits have included computer hacking and software piracy.

WMR has confirmed Young’s contention that Wikileaks is a CIA front operation. Wikileaks is intimately involved in a $20 million CIA operation that U.S.-based Chinese dissidents that hack into computers in China. Some of the Chinese hackers route special hacking program through Chinese computers that then target U.S. government and military computer systems. After this hacking is accomplished, the U.S. government announces through friendly media outlets that U.S. computers have been subjected to a Chinese cyber-attack. The “threat” increases an already-bloated cyber-defense and offense budget and plays into the fears of the American public and businesses that heavily rely on information technology.”

My Comment:

Julian Assange was always sending me emails and requests to join wikileaks a couple of years ago. I thought the outfit was interesting, but I don’t really deal in “secret” documents or cloak-and-dagger stuff, because something founded on distrust is bound to founder on distrust.

Even media activism has the same result. You start wondering if everything you’re reading is disinformation. At a certain point, you have to ask, so what if it is? Can’t I still arrive at the right conclusions by operating from strict rules of reason and ethics?

It seems to me that you can figure out what is going on without going under cover or hacking or stealing classified information because propaganda has a very distinctive flavor you get to recognize after some time.  I’ll leave the exciting spy v spy stuff to more adventurous sorts.  I can’t confirm anything in this piece, but since it’s something I’ve wondered about myself and since it looks like there’s at least one other person (besides Alex Constantine) who’s wondering as well, Assange’s co-worker, it becomes blog-worthy.  I remain agnostic.-to-mildly skeptic about wikileaks….

UK Foreign Office Warning to Travelers About Israeli Passport Forgery

I didn’t have time to complete this post from a week ago, but with the really bizarre story of the Polish plane, I thought I should revisit it, as is:

At the end of March, Haaretz (March 31) reported that the British Foreign Office issued a travel advisory last week to citizens traveling to Israel and Palestine, “hours” after it decided to expel an Israeli diplomat.

The risk applies in particular to passports without biometric security features,” the warning on the [UK foreign office] Web site said. “We recommend that you only hand your passport over to third parties including Israeli officials when absolutely necessary.”

This follows confirmation last week that killers of a Hamas operative in Dubai used forged passports from multiple countries, including the UK, Australia, France, Ireland, and Germany.

An editor at the Guardian notes that this is the lowest point in Anglo-Israeli relations since 1988, when an Israeli diplomat was expelled for being an agent of the Mossad.

Current relations with Israel are already strained, because senior Israeli officials visiting the UK have been threatened with arrest for alleged war crimes.

[Note:

The Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in January in a hit that Dubai police have said they are 99 percent certain was the work of Israel’s spy service, Mossad. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied this.

Dubai has named 27 alleged conspirators in the pursuit and killing of the Palestinian, and has claimed that they used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports to enter and depart from Dubai. More than half of the people identified share the names of foreign-born Israeli nationals].

Earlier, UK foreign secretary David Miliband had said there were “compelling reasons” to believe Israel was responsible and had called the use of 12 forged British passports “intolerable,” according to an earlier report by the BBC (March 23).

Meanwhile, Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, confirmed there would be no diplomatic retaliation, but expressed disappointment at Miliband’s decision. Israel has previously said there is no proof it was behind the killing at a Dubai hotel.

Israel claims the Australians are also going to follow suit, says this report:

“Official Israeli sources told The Australian newspaper that there is a high chance that Australia will follow Britain’s lead and also expel a high ranking Israeli diplomat. “It appears that Israeli officials have received indications in Canberra that Australia is preparing to expel a diplomat,” it said in the newspaper.”

Meanwhile, according to The Australian (March 31) ECAJ president Robert Goot told The Australian: “I think it would be an extreme reaction or possibly an overreaction (to expel an Israeli diplomat). The Jewish community would hope the Australian government might adopt a more nuanced position, depending on the outcome of the (Australian Federal Police) investigation.”

That’s not likely, now that former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky has told ABC Radio that the spy agency had used Australian passports for previous operations before last month’s hit on a top Hamas commander in Dubai that has been blamed on Israel. (see the Sydney Morning Herald (Feb 26, 2010)

Israel has previously dismissed claims from Ostrovsky, who has detailed various accusations against the country in his books. He said Mossad prefers to use “false flag” passports, as Israeli papers frequently invoke suspicion in the Middle East.

“They need passports because you can’t go around with an Israeli passport, not even a forged one, and get away or get involved with people from the Arab world,” he said.

“So most of these (Mossad) operations are carried out on what’s called false flag, which means you pretend to be of another country which is less belligerent to those countries that you’re trying to recruit from.”

Ostrovsky said Mossad had a “very, very expensive research department” dedicated to manufacturing the fake documents which simulates different types of paper and ink.

The Australian newspaper also said Ali Kazak, a former Palestinian representative to Australia, had warned in 2004 that a Mossad agent in Sydney had obtained 25 false Australian passports.

According to The Age (Feb 26, 2010), in Dec 2004, a second secretary in the Israeli embassy in Canberra was recalled because he was suspected of ties to passport fraud in New Zealand, where in March 2004 two suspected Mossad agents were convicted for fraudulently trying to get local passports. The New Zealand case eventually led to the downgrading of diplomatic ties and the canceling of Israeli PM Moshe Katsav’s visit.

The same report notes that Mossad used forged Canadian passports in 1997 in a bungled plot to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshal.

Then, as now, the Israeli prime minister, who has to approve all assassination attempts, was Benjamin Netanyahu.