Americans have a long history of manufacturing false pretenses for war. We could go back to 1845 with the expansionist war against Mexico, triggered by U.S. provocations on the disputed border area with Texas (the Nueces River according to Mexico, the Rio Grande according to the Texans); skirmishes eventually gave President James Polk (a Texan) the opportunity to declare that the Mexicans “invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil”. After the war, a congressman by the name of Abraham Lincoln argued before Congress the falsity of the casus belli. Thereafter, all the wars waged by the United States have been under false pretenses: the explosion of the USS Maine in the war against Spain, the sinking of the Lusitania for entry into the First World War, Pearl Harbor for the Second, and the Gulf of Tonkin for the bombing of North Vietnam. However, only the explosion of the USS Maine can properly be called a false flag operation.



It is a fact, however, that Israel has a long history and grand expertise in waging false flag attacks. A world history of false flag strategy would need to dedicate half of its pages to modern Israel, a nation less than a century old. The cast was formed even before the creation of the Jewish State, with the bombing of the King David Hotel, the headquarters of the British authorities in Jerusalem. The morning of July 22nd, 1946, six terrorists of the Irgun (the terrorist militia commanded by Menachem Begin, future Prime Minister) dressed as Arabs entered the building, and around the central pillar placed 225 kg of explosives hidden in milkcans, while others spread explosives along the access roads to the hotel to prevent emergency aid. When a British officer showed his suspicion a gunfight broke out and the Irgun members fled, but not before lighting the explosives. The explosion killed 91 people, mostly British, but also 15 Jews.



The strategy was repeated in Egypt during the summer of 1954, with Operation Susannah. The goal was to compromise the Brit’s withdrawal from the Suez Canal, demanded by Colonel Abdul Gamal Nasser with support from President Eisenhower. Egyptian Jews trained in Israel bombed several British targets, then placed the blame on the Muslim Brotherhood, as to discredit Nasser in the eyes of the British and the Americans, and to generate antipathy against Egypt. The accidental detonation of an explosive device allowed the exposure of the conspiracy. The Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon was held responsible, even though he placed the blame on Colonel Benjamin Givli, Director of Military Intelligence (Aman). A secret telegram from Givli, now declassified, confirms his responsibility: “[Our goal] is to break the West’s confidence in the existing [Egyptian] regime. The actions should cause arrests, demonstrations, and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origin should be totally covered while attention should be shifted to any other possible factor. The purpose is to prevent economic and military aid from the West to Egypt”. The scandal, known as the “Lavon Affair”, was largely overlooked in the Israeli and American media, and it was not until more than fifty years later in 2005, that the State of Israel publicly acknowledged its responsibility.

At the time, Ben-Gurion had temporarily withdrawn from his two positions as Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. While still pulling the ropes behind the scene, he had handed the Prime Ministry to Moshe Sharett, who was already serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Defense to Pinhas Lavon. These two men embodied two conflicting visions of Israel. Sharett stood for a moderate Zionism and a respect for international agreements, while Lavon, much like Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, other protégés of Ben Gurion, flirted with a dangerously extremist Zionism. Sharett, writing in his diary in 1955, regretted that “Lavon […] has constantly preached for acts of madness and taught the army leadership the diabolic lesson of how to set the Middle East on fire, how to cause friction, cause bloody confrontations, sabotage targets and property of the Powers [and performs] acts of despair and suicide”. Sharett included Shimon Peres in the same verdict: “he wants to frighten the West into supporting Israel’s aims”. Of this man who would finally become President of Israel at 84 years old, Sharett wrote again in 1957, “I have stated that I totally and utterly reject Peres and consider his rise to prominence a malignant, immoral disgrace”. Livia Rokach, daughter of the mayor of Tel Aviv Israel Rokach, who printed these remarks from Sharett’s diary in Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (1980), criticizes Sharett for having not made public his sentiments; had he alerted Israeli citizens through public debate, he may have very well been able to prevent the final takeover of the Israel State by the most violent brand of Zionism, this breed become so adept at manipulation and systematic betrayal in international relations, who, in the words of Sharett, “raises terrorism to the level of a sacred principle”.

The most famous and most calamitous Israeli false flag attack is that of the USS Liberty, two days before the end of the Six Day War. The USS Liberty was an unarmed American vessel of the NSA stationed in international waters and easily recognizable. On that sunny day of June 8th, 1967, three unmarked Mirage bombers and three torpedo boats carrying Israeli flag bombed, strafed and torpedoed it for 75 minutes — even strafing the lifeboats — with the obvious intention of leaving no survivors. They stopped the carnage only at the approach of a Soviet spy ship, after killing 34 crew members, composed mostly of engineers, technicians and translators. If they had been able to sink the ship without witnesses, the Israelis would most likely have attributed the crime to Egypt, so as to persuade the United States to come along side Israel. Once unmasked, the Israeli government claimed it was a targeting error and offered an apology along with financial compensation. Lyndon Johnson stuck to this ridiculous story, contradicted by all the survivors, under the pretext that “I will not embarrass our ally”. Oliver Kirby, Deputy Director for Operations at the NSA at the time, reported the journalist John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune (2 October 2007) that the transcripts of communications by Israeli planes intercepted and immediately sent to Washington by the NSA, left no doubt that the pilots had identified their target as an American ship before attacking it: “I’m willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew[that the ship was American]”. According to Peter Hounam, author of Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III (2003), the attack on the Liberty had been secretly authorized by the White House as part of the project Frontlet 615, “a secret political agreement in 1966 by which Israel and the U.S. had vowed to destroy Nasser”. Egypt being then an ally of the USSR, world war was clearly in the program. The orders issued by the White House that day, that delayed aid and rescue for several hours, suggest that Johnson not only covered the Israelis after the fact, but conspired with them from the outset.

In 1986, Israel tried to make it seem that a series of terrorist orders were transmitted from Libya to various Libyan embassies around the world. According to former agent Victor Ostrovsky (By Way of Deception, 1990), the Mossad was using a special communication system code named “Trojan Horse” hidden inside enemy territory by Mossad commandos. The system acted as a relay station for faked transmissions originating from an Israeli ship, immediately retransmitted on a radio frequency used by the Libyan state. As the Mossad had hoped, the NSA intercepted and deciphered the transmissions, which were then interpreted as evidence that the Libyans were supporting terrorism, evidence that the Mossad would reinforce by providing the US more faked intelligence of their own. Israel’s strategy relied on Reagan’s promise for retaliation against any country caught in the act of supporting terrorism. As expected, the Americans fell into the trap, dragging with them the British and the Germans: April 14th, 1986, 160 American aircrafts dropped over sixty tons of bombs on Libya, targeting mainly airports and military bases. Among the civilian casualties on the Libyan side was Gaddafi’s adopted, four year old daughter.

The manipulative capacity of the Mossad during that time can be further illustrated by two stories analyzed by Thomas Gordon. On April 17th, 1986, a young Irish woman named Ann-Marie Murphy boarded a flight from London to Tel Aviv, unknowingly carrying 1.5 pounds of Semtex. The man who had given her the bag was her fiancé, a Pakistani named Nezar Hindaoui, who was arrested while trying to find refuge at the Syrian Embassy. He had himself been manipulated by the Mossad, who would achieve their desired result: the Thatcher government broke off diplomatic relations with Syria. In January 1987, the Palestinian Ismail Sowan, a Mossad mole who had infiltrated the PLO in London, was entrusted, by someone claiming to work for his PLO superior, with two suitcases packed with weapons and explosives. Ismail informed by phone his Mossad contact, who told him to take the next flight to Tel Aviv, from where he was sent back to London. What he didn’t know is that the Mossad simultaneously denounced him to Scotland Yard as a suspect in a potential Islamist attack in London. He was picked up on his return to Heathrow Airport and charged on the basis of weapons found at his home. As a result, the Mossad found favor with the Thatcher government.

A third story makes the pattern clearer. After the attack of February 26th, 1993, against the WTC, the FBI arrested the Palestinian Ahmed Ajaj and identified him as a terrorist linked to Hamas, but the Israeli newspaper KolHa’ir showed that Ajaj had never been involved with Hamas or the PLO. According to the journalist Robert Friedman, author of an article in The Village Voice (August 3, 1993), Ajaj was actually nothing more than a petty crook arrested in 1988 for forging currency, sentenced to two and a half years in prison and released a year later thanks to a deal made with the Mossad, for whom he would then infiltrate Palestinian groups. Upon his release, Ajaj underwent a classic sheep-dipping by being once again briefly imprisoned, this time for trying to smuggle weapons for the Fatah into the West Bank. We have, therefore, with the bombing of the WTC in 1993, a prototype and precedent for September 11th, in which is demonstrated the deep involvement of Israel in false flag terrorism.

In the context of the present discussion, it is interesting to note what was written by Philip Zelikow and John Deutch in a December 1998 article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism”, reflecting upon the 1993 bombing, and the consequences if it had been instead a nuclear attack: “An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America's history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans' fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. […] Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force”.

On January 12th, 2000, according to the Indian magazine The Week, officers of Indian Intelligence arrested at Calcutta airport eleven Islamist preachers who were preparing to board a flight to Bangladesh. They were suspected of belonging to al-Qaeda and of intending to hijack the plane. They presented themselves as Afghans who had stayed in Iran before spending two months in India to preach Islam. Unfortunately for their story, they all had Israeli passports. The officer of the Indian Intelligence services told The Week that Tel Aviv “exerted considerable pressure” on Delhi to secure their release.



On October 12th, 2000, in the final weeks of Clinton’s presidency, the destroyer USS Cole en route to the Persian Gulf, was ordered from its homeport of Norfolk to refuel in the port of Aden in Yemen — a rather unusual procedure since these destroyers are generally supplied by a Navy tanker at sea. The captain of the ship expressed his surprise and concern: the USS Cole had recently filled up at the entrance of the Suez Canal, not to mention the fact that Yemen is a hostile zone. The USS Cole was in a docking maneuver when it was approached by a garbage disposal dinghy, which then exploded against the hull, killing 17 sailors and wounding 50. The two “suicide bombers” driving the dinghy also perished. The attack was immediately blamed on al-Qaeda, even though bin Laden did not take responsibility and the Taliban denied that he could have been involved. The accusation gave the United States a pretext to force the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to cooperate in the fight against anti-imperialist Islamism, by closing three paramilitary camps on its territory. What’s more, a few weeks before the elections, the attack would become the October Surprise that brought Bush to power.



John O’Neill was put in charge of the investigation. An experienced counter-terrorism specialist at the FBI for twenty years, he had already investigated the WTC bombing in 1993. His team came to suspect that Israel had fired a missile from a submarine: the hole was indeed indicative of that type of munitions and inexplicable by the explosion of one dinghy. President Saleh shared the suspicions, and spoke in an interview with Newsweek regarding possibility that the attack was due to Israel, “trying to spoil the U.S.-Yemeni Relationship”. O’Neill and his team suffered the hostility of the U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine and were forbidden to dive to fully inspect the damage. Finally, taking advantage of their trip home for Thanksgiving, Bodine refused them reentry to Yemen. The crew of the USS Cole was directed not to speak about the attack except to Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). In July 2001, O’Neill resigned from the FBI. He was soon after offered a position as head of security at the WTC that he was to hold from September 11th, 2001. His body was found in the rubble of the WTC after been missing for two days. As for Barbara Bodine, in 2003 she would integrate the corrupt team of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, under Lewis Paul Bremer.