Since Hermit likes to cite Le Monde as an authoritative source, I figured
he'd be interested to know how unauthoritative they can be.
Spy Myth is Born
by Daniel Pipes
New York Post
March 11, 2002
In a spectacular scoop, the most serious and authoritative
newspaper of France, Le Monde, announced on its front page last
Tuesday that "An Israeli Spy Network Was Dismantled in the
United States." The lengthy article asserts that "without doubt"
this is the biggest spy story of its type in over 15 years.
But American journalists found not a shred of evidence to support
the claim, and it met with wall-to-wall derision from the U.S. and
Israeli governments.
The Justice Department spokeswoman, for instance, dismissed it
as "an urban myth that has been circulating for months" and
indicated there were no Israelis arrested for espionage. The FBI
spokesman called it a "bogus story" and said "there wasn't a spy
ring."
Actually, any observant reader can sense that Le Monde's account
- with its crazy-quilt of unsourced allegations, drive-by
innuendoes and incoherent obscurities, but no hard facts - makes
no sense.
That one of the world's most prestigious newspapers promotes
such errant nonsense prompts two observations.
First, even the most sober media have a proven weakness for
sensational conspiracy theories. The New York Times found itself
wiping egg off its collective face after lavishing attention in May
1991 on the "October surprise" theory peddled by Gary Sick that,
to win the presidential election in 1980, Ronald Reagan had
conspired with the ayatollahs in 1980 to keep Americans
imprisoned in Iran.
In June 1998, CNN aired "Valley of Death," a would-be exposé of
American troops' use of sarin nerve gas during a clandestine 1970
raid into Laos. The two producers and the on-air narrator (Peter
Arnett) all lost their jobs as a result.
Second, such conspiracy theories do not appear suddenly, but
emerge piecemeal from the muck.
In this case, the notion that found full flower in Le Monde
apparently began life as a passing reference in, of all things, the
September 1998 Starr Report on President Bill Clinton's
relationship with Monica Lewinsky. During their final sexual
encounter, on March 29, 1997, Lewinsky reported that the couple
had a lengthy conversation in which the president told her "he
suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one)
was tapping his telephones."
This was red meat for conspiracy theorists, who immediately
focused on Israel. For example, Gordon Thomas, a British
journalist, in March 1999 announced (in "Gideon's Spies: The
Secret History of the Mossad," from St. Martin's) that Israel's
intelligence service possessed tapes with 30 hours of Clinton-
Lewinsky cooings.
The usually responsible Insight magazine elaborated on this
theory in May 2000 with a story on the "huge security nightmare"
of Israeli spying on high-level U.S. officials by "using telephone-
company equipment at remote sites to track calls placed to or
received from high-ranking government officials, possibly
including the president himself."
Fox News immediately named an Israeli company involved:
Amdocs, Ltd., which supposedly has the records (though not the
contents) of virtually every call made in the United States.
In June 2001, a Justice Department task force issued a 61-page
draft report noting a pattern of activities by Israelis in the United
States and raised the possibility of their being part of an
intelligence-gathering operation - possibly of a drug-trafficking
gang.
In mid-December 2001, Fox News named a second Israeli
telephone company (Comverse Infosys, which it said has access to
nearly all wiretaps placed by U.S. law enforcement), then added
an explosive accusation: Israel had its own spying operation
against militant Islamic groups in the United States and "may have
gathered intelligence about the [9/11] attacks in advance, and not
shared it."
Here, Fox News regurgitated a very tired theme. For example, in a
1990 exposé of the Mossad, "By Way of Deception," Victor
Ostrovsky claimed that Israeli agents knew in advance about the
truck bomb that killed 241 U.S. Marines in October 1983 but did
not warn their American counterparts.
A Paris-based newsletter, Intelligence Online, in late February
reported the U.S. Department of Justice had neutralized a "vast
network of Israeli intelligence agents" by arresting or expelling
120 Israelis.
Finally, Le Monde (which is presently in negotiations to buy
Intelligence Online) completed the process by broadcasting
Intelligence Online's fantasy to the wide world.
All this matters, for conspiracy theories are easier to kill than to
bury. They haunt the fringes of the political spectrum, poisoning
the political debate. Shame, then, on those media outlets that
contributed to this dangerous falsehood.
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