PARIS, March 4: US authorities have broken a network of Israeli spies living in the United States who were burrowing into the justice and defence departments, a French website specialising in intelligence matters reported Monday.

The site, Intelligence Online, said it had exclusive access to a US justice department report that showed “a huge Israeli spy ring operating in the United States was rolled up by the Justice Department’s counter-espionage service” last year.

Around 120 Israelis were arrested or deported as a result of the top-secret operation, which it said had began in April last year and was ongoing.

The website said the ring was active in the states of Arkansas, California, Florida and Texas, and was made up of around 20 cells of between four and eight members who were aged between 22 and 30 and had recently completed Israeli military service in an army intelligence division.

It named several Israelis alleged to be the espionage operatives, including three of 13 Israeli “art students” it said were arrested in the Texan city of Irving on March 26 and 27 last year.

Intelligence Online editor-in-chief Guillaume Dasquie told AFP the network had been trying “to penetrate justice department and defence department systems” through drug-fighting agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which has access to files from other US departments.

“The DEA plays a central role in counter-espionage because of its internal security service, the Office of Security Programs, which was the first to notice the unusual behaviour of young Israeli nationals among its agents,” Dasquie said.

His website said the network’s objectives included some of the most sensitive sites in the United States, such as the Tinker Air Force Base located close to Oklahoma City. It said the US Air Force had requested the help of the Justice Department last May in the investigation against the Israelis.

Dasquie said US investigators were concerned by indications that some of the alleged Israeli spies had been based in the same US cities as people suspected of having helped in the logistics of the devastating September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

For instance, it had been established, he said, that a dozen Israelis, including the alleged surveillance leader, had been based in the Florida town of Hollywood between January and June last year.

US authorities have arrested another dozen people “suspected of being tasked with the logistics of preparing the September 11 attacks” in the same area, he noted.

Dasquie stressed, however, that the “troubling” coincidence was still only one theory being looked into and that there was not enough information to determine whether Israel’s Mossad secret service had been aware of the preparations for the September attacks.

“It has to be verified if these teams were in the same place at the same time before hypotheses are built up,” he said.—AFP