Australia has now been dragged into the diplomatic row with Israel alongside Britain, France, Ireland and Germany after Dubai police on Wednesday announced that they’d identified 15 more people suspected of involvement in Hamas figurehead Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s assassination in Dubai on January 20. Three of the accused used forged Australian passports.
Dubai police have said they are almost certain Israel was behind the murder.
The three Australians — Nicole McCabe, Adam Korman and Joshua Bruce, all from Melbourne — now live in Israel. Their passports were copied — allegedly by the Israeli secret service Mossad — to help an assassination team of 26 carry out the killing of al-Mabhouh.
Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith held a meeting yesterday with Israel’s ambassador to Canberra, Yuval Rotem. In what The Times UK dubs as “the most robust international response yet to the Dubai killing,” Smith said:
“We have made no conclusion about what to us seems to be a serious abuse of three Australian passports either through forgery or identity fraud,” Mr Smith told reporters.
“If the results of that investigation cause us to come to the conclusion that the abuse of Australian passports was sponsored or condoned by Israeli officials, then Australia would not regard that as the act of a friend.”
The passport identities of another 23 Westerners, including German, French, UK and Irish nationals, were stolen for the plot.
Crikey did a little trawling to get the lowdown on how three innocent Australians’ names were splashed across Israeli spies’ passports, and now across the nation’s newspapers:
So why Australian passports? Victor Ostrovsky, a case officer at Mossad for several years in the 1980s told the ABC’s Middle East correspondent Anne Barker this morning , “consider the fact that Australians speak English and it’s an easy cover to take, very few people know very much about Australia,” he said. “You can tell whatever stories you want. It doesn’t take much of an accent to be an Australian or New Zealander, or an Englishman for that matter. And I know people had been under Australian cover not once [but] quite a few times …”
Has this happened before? Former Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer told The Australian that his government had warned Israel at least once not to issue fake Australian passports to its intelligence operatives.
According to The Oz, Australian authorities approached the Israeli government in the ’90s to seek assurances that Australian passports wouldn’t be tampered with after it was revealed Israeli agents had doctored several New Zealand passports. The Australian reports that during that meeting with Israeli government officials, the Israelis responded with “enraged self-righteousness” at the suggestion that they’d support such an act.
Why do these agents need fake passports? Ostrovsky said, “… you can’t go around with an Israeli passport, not even a forged one, and get away or get involved with people from the Arab world,” he said. “They’ll shy away right away. So most of these [Mossad] operations are carried out on what’s called false flag, which means you pretend to be of another country which is less belligerent to those countries that you’re trying to recruit from. If they can obtain blank passports, which they have in the past from Canada, from England, they do. If not, they just manufacture them.”
How are they forged? Ostrovsky told Barker that there’s a company within Mossad headquarters dedicated to forging passports. “They create various types of papers, every kind of ink. It’s a very, very expensive research department … If they create a passport at a top level for use of that nature … I don’t think anybody will be able to find the difference,” he said.
How do Mossad choose the passports? The Herald Sun reports today that it’s likely the killers “… chose the passports for ID theft carefully, as citizens of those countries involved do not need visa approval for entry to the United Arab Emirates and are not subject to eye scans and the biometric screening required of many other nationalities.”
Ostrokvsky told the ABC that back when he was an agent people were asked … “‘If when you’re here in Israel we may need for security purposes to use your passport, would you allow us to do that? And people would say ‘yes’. There were shelves upon shelves of real passports just waiting to be used.”
What about the photos on the passports that have now been beamed around the world by news outlets? Has this blown the Mossad agents’ cover? According to Israel newspaper Haaretz, the passport photographs of the agents who assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai were “doctored so the agents would not be identified”:
“Various features of the people in the photographs, such as eye color or the line of a lip, were changed — slightly enough so as not arouse suspicion at passport control, but still enough that the real agent could not be recognised.”
Is my passport safe? Simon Canning writes in The Australian, “While hotels may stress that your documents will be safe, the moment your passport leaves your sight, you are playing Russian roulette with your identity. Too many Australians travelling in the Middle East will guard their credit cards and wallet with their lives, but will think nothing of capitulating to the hotel clerk demanding a passport be held.”
How do you make your own fake passport? Website Cool Tools suggests that for the purposes of keeping your real passport safe in dodgy countries it’s a good idea to make a “colour copy of your passport, including the covers”:
“Align the inside sheet of your passport data with the outside passport cover sheet. Glue together. Laminate. Score and fold. You now have a fairly official looking travel document.
I have found that for most purposes — changing money at a bank, rentals, hotel front desks, and even police — this passport clone is sufficient. You hide or store your real one and use this one for everything else except crossing borders…”
OK so it’s not to Mossad standards, but according to the US Passport Agency, “it is perfectly legal for you to make a colour copy of your passport.”
Not much journalism in this article, Crikey, you should be able to do better than parrot the fake passport story and jump to conclusions about Israel. And did you think al-Mabhouh might have been travelling on his own passport?
Who else apart from Israel might have been an enemy of Hamas? For example, does Hamas and Fatah get on well, or do they kill each other too?
What was al-Mabhouh’s reason for going to Dubai? Surely he was not there merely to have an expensive holiday? Where did the money come from in an organisation and country which is strapped for cash and reliant on welfare from Europe and Iran?
But perhaps we don’t want to inquire too closely, after all Dubai is an important trading centre and we would not want to be excluded from any commerce or trade in the Middle East by getting too fussy about who does what to whom. After all, as a nation we have form there don’t we? Like the special blind spot for AWB bribes to Saddam Hussein.
Israelis are so up themselves, aren’t they? So they can fake passports of other countries for their dirty work, but their copies of the Australian ones would not be kosher. Our passports have many inbulit features that make the very difficult to forge. The Israeli copies of our passports may have passed scrutiny in some crap box middle east country, but certainly wouldn’t have passed scrutiny here, the US or Britain.
What does a ‘border protection’ mean???????
Ya gotta love our blow waved homunculus of a ‘foreign minister’ having,according to ABC yesterday, “..a five to six minute meeting with the Israeli Ambassador..”
Wow, that’ll learn ’em won’t it? Wot the hell did he say in ‘5-6’ minutes?
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