05/06/14 – Jeff Stein – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And next up is Jeff Stein of Spy Talk.
Well, I don't know if it's still called that.
I guess it always will be one way or another.
He's now at Newsweek.
Newsweek.
Maybe he has been for a while.
I don't know.
Welcome to the show, Jeff.
How are you doing?
I'm good, thank you.
Good, good.
Good to talk to you again.
Is it still called Spy Talk?
Let me get that right.
Yes, it is.
Okay, good.
It always will be, right?
Wherever you go.
That's good.
The great Jeff Stein, national intelligence beat reporter here, everybody.
Larissa says hi, by the way.
Israel won't stop spying on the U.S., is the report in Newsweek.
And according to your sources, it says here, there have been some pretty monumental intelligence briefings on Capitol Hill recently about Israeli spying in the United States.
Could you please fill us in?
Well that's it.
Excuse me.
In a nutshell, that U.S. intelligence officials have briefed members of the House Judiciary Committee on Israeli espionage operations in the United States.
And according to my sources, this was shocking to some members of the committee who shared their findings with other House committees and members, relevant members of the Senate.
And that's really what they did, is they just explained the facts of life to these committees who were investigating, who are investigating the question of reducing or eliminating the restrictions on Israeli visas here.
Right.
The visa thing.
First of all, could you elaborate about that?
The bill that looked like it was going to pass there for a while, right?
It's been up in the air for some time.
Israel and its friends have been lobbying the Hill for some time to eliminate these restrictions.
There are some 38 countries which are approved for travel to the United States, or whose citizens are approved for travel to the United States without visas.
And Israel would like to be on that list, but it hasn't satisfied the requirements of the program.
It hasn't even started to try to satisfy the requirements of that program.
There's too many Israelis who want to come to the United States who do not qualify for extended visas here for one reason.
The other two is that Israel discriminates against Arab Americans, Palestinian Americans going to Israel.
And these are the two main considerations in the visa – various varieties of the visa legislation under consideration on the Hill.
But recently, as I reported, U.S. security officials briefed the House Judiciary Committee.
Actually, there have been a number of briefings, and any member who wants a briefing can have one.
And some have had individual briefings, it's my understanding, on the levels of Israeli espionage here, and it's been frightening to some members of Congress.
All right, now, yeah, it's interesting, some of the adjectives you use in this story here about just how astonished the staff and some of the congresspeople were.
I think I'm paging through here, Jeff, but you even have some quotes from some of the intelligence guys who, I take it, told you about this, and – or, well, no, you talked to the staffers, too, I guess, but am I right that you have some intelligence guys who, they're pretty astonished, too, at the lengths to which the Israelis go nowadays, no?
No.
I wouldn't say that they're astonished at all, they're used to it.
An FBI source of mine told me years ago that he used to have to call the Israelis on the carpet every six months and tell them to cut it out.
They're very aggressive here, and it's no secret, certainly no secret to U.S. intelligence officials, security officials who have been dealing with this for 50 years, or as I quote Paul Pilar, a former top CIA official responsible for Israel and the Middle East and South Asia, saying that Zionists were active here raising money and getting equipment before Israel was founded.
This is where a number of countries have come to acquire materials, weapons, in the case of Israel, materials for its clandestine nuclear program and so on.
So this has been going on for a long, long time, and no one really should be shocked by it.
I mean, first of all, spy services spy, that's what they do.
Where Israel has crossed the line, according to security officials and some members of Congress, a number of members of Congress, is that they are a very close ally of ours.
And just like there was outrage in Germany that the NSA was listening in on Angela Merkel's telephone calls, there's outrage on the part of some intelligence officials and members of Congress that Israel, our ally, has crossed a red line here and is very aggressively seeking U.S. defense and technology secrets.
Yeah, well, tell us more about that.
What are they stealing?
Well, defense and technology, advanced software and weapons systems, intelligence, which my sources have said they take home and improve on and, you know, then resell, if not use for their own defensive purposes.
So the whole range, the whole gamut of U.S. technological and military secrets that they can use to their advantage, as well as keeping an eye on what other intelligence services and agents are doing here, Iran, Al-Qaeda, and so on.
So this is where everybody comes, and this is sort of a spying mecca, and the Israelis are very active here.
Well, you know, since you brought that up, let me ask you about that old Carl Cameron story on Fox News from 2001 about some FBI agents telling him that when they looked at how close some Israeli intelligence officers had been in the United States, apparently following the 9-11 hijackers around, or some of them, that their idea was, not that they had solid proof, it didn't sound like, but their idea was how could they not have known?
They clearly knew more than they were telling us.
And I wonder whether you have anything to report along those lines.
I don't know whether you've ever written about that or not, or whether you've ever heard anything about that.
I have looked at that.
I haven't really thoroughly investigated that myself.
I think there's been a lot of criticism of those pieces, and not from the usual quoters.
I think Fox News had trouble with those pieces themselves.
So it's never, I think it's one of those kind of hanging nails of the 9-11 story, and to some extent, the 9-11 conspiracy theorists who allege, you know, it gets tied in with this idea that Israel knew in advance of the 9-11 attacks and so on.
And I'm just not going to comment any further on that, because I don't have any independent knowledge of it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't think Cameron's paraphrase was even really saying that, but just that they knew about these guys in the country, that they were up to something, that they weren't sharing everything they knew with the FBI, that kind of thing.
I don't think he ever said that they must have known the day and time and place of the attack and this and that kind of deal.
But I understand what you mean, though.
But anyway, it is an interesting question, and it does hang there.
And so now, I wonder about this, Jeff.
Is this kind of a big deal, do you think, that Congress is apparently so astonished with some of this information that they've heard from the intelligence officials lately that they're, I guess, not likely to change the status of this visa thing?
It looks like their free pass is canceled?
No?
And then how big of a deal is that?
They don't have a free pass.
They don't have a free pass.
They're trying to get the visa restrictions lifted.
Their push for one has been stopped.
Yeah.
Well, their push for one, first, there are a number of problems with their push for one.
One is that they're trying to do it through Congress.
And that's not good enough, although Congress could legislate, to some degree, a removal of visa restrictions.
There are steps that a country has to go through with the Department of Homeland Security.
It has to meet certain criteria, reporting requirements on, for example, lost and stolen passports.
Well, how about this?
Is there an earlier time where something like this wouldn't have been controversial?
Not that there was any less spying, but because the lobby's clout on Capitol Hill was greater?
Or is it?
Or no?
No, I don't think that that clout has changed at all.
Israel has many friends on Capitol Hill, and it's going through a route that has worked for them before.
However, it is not working now because they have to go through steps with DHS to qualify.
These are not special steps for Israel.
These are special steps for any country, and it can take a number of years.
It took Chile, which is certainly a close friend of ours now, it took Chile three years to qualify for lifting visa restrictions.
Again, there is a bureaucratic course that Israel has to go through, and it hasn't even applied to go through that.
It's announced that a delegation from the foreign ministry is coming here to enter into these steps with DHS, but when I asked a spokesman for the Israeli embassy when that delegation would be arriving, he had no response.
Or he responded that he wouldn't give me a date.
So the Israelis are not going through the steps to really apply seriously for the lifting of these visa restrictions.
So that's just for starters.
And in the opinion of most objective observers, Israel is not going to give up giving Arab Americans and Palestinian Americans a very, very, and activists pro-Palestine.
And former cabinet members, remember Donna Shalala.
All right, well, I'm sorry, we're out of time for this segment.
Thanks so much for your time, Jeff.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
Bye-bye.
And that's Jeff Stein, everybody.
He's writing at Newsweek.
I'm not sure what happened to his audio there.
Newsweek.com.
Israel won't stop spying on us.
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