Underwear Bomber Redux – Was Mutallab An Israeli “Secret Weapon”?

By way of deception… thou shalt control key airports

By Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley For OpEdNews

(editorial note:  VT broke this story initially and thanks Joe Quinn and Naill Bradley for their fine journalism and great investigative work.  Gordon Duff for the staff of VT)

After repeatedly denying that the Christmas Underwear Bomber™ had any help in his misguided attempt to blow up Detroit-bound Flight 253 on Christmas day 2009, or that there was any sign of an accomplice on over 200 hours of Amsterdam airport security tapes, the US government recently, and very quietly, chose to admit that it had been watching Mutallab all along and that it’s now looking for his accomplice at Amsterdam airport.

In one of only a few mainstream news reports on the US government’s reversal, the Detroit News stated:

    The State Department didn’t revoke the visa of foiled terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because federal counter-terrorism officials had begged off revocation, a top State Department official revealed Wednesday.

    Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab’s visa wasn’t taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would’ve foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.

    “Revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, “rather than simply knocking out one soldier in that effort.”

ABC News also reported:

    Federal agents also tell ABCNews.com they are attempting to identify a man who passengers said helped Abdulmutallab change planes for Detroit when he landed in Amsterdam from Lagos, Nigeria.

Of course, that’s not an admission that Mutallab had an accomplice, but it says a lot following six weeks of repeated denials on the existence of accomplices.

If US federal counterterrorism officials, aka the FBI, specifically requested that Mutallab be allowed to fly to Detroit from Amsterdam, it lends a lot more credence to the report by lawyer and eyewitness Kurt Haskell who has repeatedly claimed that Mutallab was escorted to the gate in Amsterdam by a “sharply dressed Indian-looking man”. If we accept Haskell’s statement (and at present there is no reason not to) then a reasonable explanation is that the accomplice was tasked with ensuring that Mutallab got on the plane and was a member of either the US intelligence services or the intelligence services of another US-friendly nation.

Haskell himself has presented just such an analysis on his web site.

But what are we to make of the claim by the US State Department that the goal of this little maneuver was to “get closer to apprehending the terror network he [Mutallab] is accused of working with”?

Surely if US intelligence was aware that Mutallab was a terrorist threat they would have at least taken the precaution of making very sure that the flight onto which he was to be escorted was not a target of the “terror network”? Surely a thorough rub down, or a strip-search would not have been out of the question for such a threat to US national security?

Take your pick; either US intelligence is so incompetent that they did not first check if this known terrorist was carrying a bomb onto the plane, or they staged the entire operation themselves in order to keep the Islamic terrorism bandwagon rolling.

One of the most interesting things about the Christmas day underwear bombing fiasco is that it played out on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. If Mutallab had no passport and was escorted to the gate by a “sharply-dressed man”, then it is unlikely that he went through normal security checks at the airport. We have no doubt that an agent of the US government could quite easily bypass security at any airport, but we also believe it would be difficult to prevent this fact from leaking out to the press, particularly from officials and security personnel working at Amsterdam Schiphol airport.

To enable a person to bypass all airport security would require a very particular presence at the airport in question, something akin to a little self-contained “kingdom”.

Recently, Joe exchanged a few emails with a Dutch reporter who has extensive experience of the internal workings of Amsterdam airport. He told me:

    Israel […] needs US-weapons – and spare-parts. Most of this stuff is since many years brought to Israel by cargo planes (Hercules, B-747) that used Schiphol (Amsterdam) as the needed half-way-stop. Officially they were civil planes, but they were treated as state – (military) planes. There is legally a big difference in status.

    Because this weaponry was in many cases of a very sophisticated and for that reason classified kind, it needed protection on the way from the US to Israel. The Dutch authorities therefore agreed upon the fact that Israel was given a special secluded area (hangar and apron) that would be guarded by Israeli personnel.

These guardians were not of El Al (Israeli national airline). They were members of Shin Bet, the Mossad-branch that looks after civil safety. For the young people that manned it, it was a way of performing their conscription duties.

Members of Shin Bet did not only guard military airplanes. They also provide for safety of passenger-planes. I do not know whether it is the same at other airfields, but at Schiphol everyone could see them at work at the gates of El Al planes.

In fact the young girl who flew as a passenger with the Israeli cargo-plane that crashed in Amsterdam (Anat Solomon) had done a tour as a Shin Bet safety-officer at Schiphol and flew home for her wedding.

After the crash members of the Shin Bet-group at Schiphol were speedily brought to the crash-site, to see if they could gather some of the classified stuff that was on board the crashed plane. Officially this was in contradiction with Dutch laws about the treatment of crash-sites, but it was agreed to by a secret agreement between the Dutch and Israeli government – as a logical consequence of the fact that only Israelis would know what sort of classified weaponry was onboard.

Facts about the existence of an ‘Israeli part of Schiphol’ were officially given by the Parliamentary Enquiry Commission; they were given in interrogation reports (of El Al and Shin Bet personnel) by the police, they were given by Mr. Jeroen Pelttenberg, El Al’s station-manager at Schiphol, and by some other people that were in some way or another confronted with the situation.

These guardians were not of El Al (Israeli national airline). They were members of Shin Bet, the Mossad-branch that looks after civil safety. For the young people that manned it, it was a way of performing their conscription duties.

Members of Shin Bet did not only guard military airplanes. They also provide for safety of passenger-planes. I do not know whether it is the same at other airfields, but at Schiphol everyone could see them at work at the gates of El Al planes.

The El Al cargo crash into an apartment block in the Bijlmer suburb of Amsterdam in 1992 gives us an idea of the “sophisticated weaponry” and “spare parts” the Mossad was (still is) siphoning from the US arsenal through its transport hub at Amsterdam airport. Israelis arrived at the scene of the crash to retrieve incriminating evidence (the dead and injured residents of Bijlmer be damned). Over 1,000 local residents and emergency workers had developed respiratory, neurological and mobility ailments, as well as a rise in cancer and birth defects, by the time an investigation by Dutch journalists in 1998 brought the cargo’s true manifest to light:

    Almost six years after the event, on 30 September 1998, editors Harm van den Berg and Karel Knip of the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad published the results of an extensive investigation they had carried out into the crash. They had obtained the freight documentation for the flight, and made public for the first time its real cargo. The manifest confirmed the plane was carrying 400 kilograms of depleted uranium as ballast, but also showed that it carried among its cargo about 10 tons of assorted chemicals. The chemicals included ten 18.9-litre plastic drums of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), and smaller amounts of isopropanol and hydrogen fluoride: three of the four chemical precursors for the production of Sarin nerve gas.

    A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office immediately denied that Flight 1862 had been carrying Sarin precursors. When this was contradicted hours later by an El Al spokesman, the Prime Minister’s office acknowledged that the chemicals were onboard but stated that “the material was non-toxic and was to have been used to test filters that protect against chemical weapons”. An explanation that Earth Island Journal found “puzzling”, since “it only takes a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin – sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city.”

On January 29, 1999, Dutch attorney general Vrakking testified at official hearings that the El Al security detachment at Schiphol was a branch of the Mossad. It also emerged that El Al planes are never inspected by Dutch customs or the Dutch Flight Safety Board at Amsterdam Schiphol.

Journalists say Dutch security officials have told them that the Netherlands has allowed Israel to make secret military air shipments through Schiphol since the 1950s. Former Dutch Defense minister Henk Vredeling, in an interview with Dutch TV NOS – and apparently caught unawares of the legal implications of admitting complicity in a war crime – proudly recounted secret weapons transports to Israel during the Yom Kippur war in 1973. These shipments apparently lie outside the Atlantic Alliance military treaties because the aircraft going to Israel are not refueled at NATO air bases but at the commercial airport of Schiphol.

The Mossad “state within a state” at the airport has taken full advantage of this loophole. “Schiphol has become a hub for secret weapons transfers because El Al has special status there. Dutch authorities have no jurisdiction over Israeli activities at the airport,” said Henk van der Belt, a member of an investigation team set up by Bijlmer residents.

One of the investigators working on behalf of the Bijlmermeer survivors said that Schiphol had become, and continues to be, “a hub for Israeli secret weapons transfers”. The question we need to answer is; was Mutallab also an Israeli secret weapon in the promotion of the war on terror?

Given the Mossad’s free reign over its little “kingdom” within Amsterdam Schiphol, coupled with the fact that Israeli security firm ICTS is in charge of the regular security operation there, it’s worth reflecting upon a couple of other incidents in recent years. Before the Underwear Bomber came the Shoe Bomber:

    Six months prior to Reid’s near shoe bombing of American Airlines flight 63 from Paris to Miami in December 2001, while memories of 9/11 were still fresh in everyone’s mind, Reid attempted to board an El Al flight from Schiphol to Tel Aviv.

    Reid was taken aside by El Al security and identified as a terrorist suspect. Reid paid for a one-way ticket with cash and would not reveal what he planned to do in Israel.

    However, rather than turning Reid into Dutch security for further action, he was allowed to board the El Al flight by Israel’s Shin Bet security so his movements during his five days in Israel could be monitored.

    Six months later, Reid attempted to ignite his shoe on the flight from Paris to Miami. Israel had not informed British, American, or any other security agency of the concerns about Reid. Reid’s aunt, Claudette Lewis who raised Reid in south London, was quoted as saying she believed her nephew had been “brainwashed.”

    Reid later said El Al failed to detect that he had explosives in his shoes on the flight to Tel Aviv, an amazing revelation considering the Israeli airline’s tight security.

    The links between El Al security and Mossad are extremely close with abundant cross-pollination of senior personnel back and forth.

    The security company that allowed Reid to board American Airlines 63 at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris was ICTS (International Consultants on Targeted Security) International. ICTS’s senior management are all ex-Israeli security officials, many of whom for El Al security.

    It was ICTS that largely developed the passenger “profiling” procedures used at Schiphol and other airports around the world through its subsidiary, ICTS Holland Products BV.

Bear in mind that ICTS also shared security duties on 9/11 at Boston’s Logan Airport and handled security for London’s bus system. This Israeli security firm, effectively a front for the Mossad, has therefore had its personnel on the ground to oversee arguably the four most notorious “al-Qaeda terrorist attacks” against American and British targets.

According to former Mossad spy Victor Ostrovsky, the Mossad organization is relatively small. But the ethos it embodies – rule over others by way of deception – runs deep through its front companies that link ramified networks comprising some of the ‘best’ (most noxiously evil) psychopaths globally.

In 2006 a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Mumbai was escorted back to Schiphol by Dutch fighter planes after the crew became suspicious of some passengers’ behavior. Granted that in the hysterical post-9/11 climate you only need to wear a beard and whisper Allah to warrant suspicions, but 12 people were nevertheless arrested before the Dutch government announced it was a false alarm. A trial run for future scenarios involving Northwest Airlines perhaps?

Last February a Turkish Airlines Boeing crashed upon landing at Schiphol. Another incident that smacks of spy vs spy games, four of the nine passengers killed were US “Boeing employees” returning from Turkey after pitching a “sophisticated airborne radar station” – to be installed in a Turkish airforce Boeing 737 – to the Turkish military brass on behalf of the Pentagon.

Zombie Nation

Amsterdam Schiphol has had the DNA-tearing ‘naked’ scanners in operation since 2007. Although that’s irrelevant in Mutallab’s case because he was escorted around normal security procedure, the incident was used to promote these machines en-masse, a plan we are told was on the backburner until now because of ‘fears for people’s privacy.’

Completely overlooked is the brazen conflict of interest exemplified by former head of the Department of Homeland Security and dual US-Israeli citizen Michael Chertoff, who ran around giving dozens of media interviews touting the need for the US government to buy more full-body scanners. He stands to net a tidy profit through his security consultancy firm Chertoff Group, which along with other notable former Senators and TSA officials make up the “full-body scanner lobby” that represents the manufacturers cashing in on the sale of these insidious dehumanization devices.

Along with the psychopaths in the US government, racist hard-liners in Israel believe the survival of the state of Israel lies solely in its military strength and that this strength arises from the need to answer the constant threat of war.

Of course, fighting a real and well-equipped enemy is very risky. After all, you might lose. The next best thing is to create the enemy yourself and play both sides against the middle, as they say. Unfortunately it is the masses of ordinary people that find themselves in the middle of the deranged games that psychopaths play.

Gordon Duff

Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.

Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.

Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.

• Gordon’s Archives:  2008-2015
• Gordon’s Archives:  2016-2022