Israel's 'Prisoner X' was Australian Mossad agent, documentary claims

[Magda Hassan]

Interesting contrast in the way Australian government knowledge of Zygier's death is being covered.

Mysterious life and death of Australian Mossad agent

DEBKAfileSpecial ReportFebruary 13, 2013, 12:30 PM (GMT+02:00)Tags: Australia Ben Zygier-Ben Alon Intelligence Mossad Israel

Prisoner X - Ben Zygier



Ben Zygier, Australian citizen and Mossad agent, was not the first Prisoner X to be held secretly in an Israeli jail. Double agents caught after turning traitor or crossing the lines into crime for personal motives are the exception - but not unknown in most spy agencies. In the 1950s, Israeli agent Mordecai (Mottele) Kedar was secretly incarcerated for many years for betraying his mission.
The Australian ABC went to great lengths to uncover the story of the Israeli-Australian double citizen, aka Ben Alon, who committed suicide on Dec. 15, 2010 at the age of 34 in a top-security cell of Ayalon Prison where he was held in solitary confinement. A former inmate of that cell is said to have been Yitzhak Rabin's assassin Yigal Amir.
After a longstanding Israeli gag order, his name was finally released for publication Wednesday, Feb. 13.
According to ABC, after his death, his body was flown to Melbourne, Australia, where his family, active in the local Jewish community, buried him one week later. The headstone on his grave bears his name and the dates of his birth and death. The ABC investigation disclosed that an autopsy was conducted by the Israeli Forensic Institute which issued a death certificate listing the cause of death as asphyxiation by hanging in the name of Ben Alon. Also found was a second Australian passport in the name of Ben Allen.
An Israeli organization called ZAKA, religious volunteers known for recovering the remains of Jewish terrorism victims, arranged for the body to be flown to Melbourne.
ABC reporters left no stone unturned to discover the reason for the extraordinary cover-up by the Israeli government. Was this a matter of national security? And what did the Australian authorities know? When Ben Zygier died in that prison what questions were asked by Australian diplomats and what were they told? And, finally, how did he manage to kill himself in a top-security cell under constant surveillance?
A senior Israeli intelligence official, who remained anonymous, told Australian TV that if what Ben Zygier did and knew were made public, it would pose an immediate threat to Israel as a nation state.
International protocols demand that when a foreign national is jailed or dies, their diplomatic mission must be informed. The Australian new investigators assumed that whatever crime or sin Ben Zygier committed, it must have involved espionage, possibly treachery, and very, very sensitive information endangering Israel.
Still, despite their best professional efforts, ABC's reporters did not find a single lead to the mysterious story of Prisoner X or verify any wild conjectures. One tied him to various episodes in which Israeli Mossad undercover agents were found operating on Australian passports; another, to the Iranian defector, Gen. Ali Ashgari, who disappeared from his hotel in Istanbul with suitcases full of Iranian nuclear secrets.
They were only able to establish that Ben Zygier was a lawyer by profession.
One of the many questions still open is how was he able to commit suicide? Warren Reed, a former Australian secret service agent, disclosed that not only are cameras installed in this type of cell, but sensors which measure the inmate's heart, respiration and perspiration rates. How did his watchers fail to notice that he had stopped breathing and his heart was no longer beating?
One possible answer is that in the Mossad training courses he underwent, he was taught how to take his own life under the noses of his captors, and used this method to kill himself.
Early Wednesday, the Australian Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the minister, Bob Carr, had ordered a new investigation into Canberra's conduct in the affair, after it emerged that Israeli authorities had told a diplomat at the Australian Embassy in Tel Aviv about the arrest of Australian citizen Ben Zygier. But the diplomat never relayed the information to Canberra through the conventional channels, he said.
DEBKAfile: "Conventional channels" is a term used in inter-governmental intelligence relations. Its use may indicate that the Tel Aviv embassy passed the Israeli notice to the Australian spy agency not the "conventional channels" of the foreign ministry.
This comment opens up more suggestive enigmas: Who was Ben Zygier, or Ben Allen, working for? Was it the Israeli Mossad or Australian intelligence - or both?
In any case, the Australian authorities may have had their own reasons for cooperating in the tight information clampdown imposed by Israel on the Ben Zygier affair.
http://www.debka.com/article/22760/Myste...ssad-agent

Ben Zygier: ASIO suspect who died in Israeli jail

DateFebruary 14, 2013
Ruth Pollard

Middle East Correspondent

WHEN Ben Zygier died alone in a maximum-security prison in Israel he was under investigation by ASIO, which suspected him of using his Australian passport to spy for Israel, Fairfax Media can reveal.
Benji, as he was known in Jerusalem, reacted angrily when Fairfax Media confronted him in early 2010 with allegations that he was working for Israel's security agency, Mossad.
''Who the f--- are you?" an incredulous Mr Zygier asked Fairfax's then Middle East correspondent Jason Koutsoukis. ''What is this total bullshit you are telling me?''
He expressed shock at the suggestion he was under any kind of surveillance and said that he had also changed his name for personal reasons.

''I have never been to any of those countries that you say I have been to,'' Mr Zygier said. ''I am not involved in any kind of spying. That is ridiculous.''
Koutsoukis said: "He was at first angry, then exasperated that I wouldn't accept his denials at what I was putting to him.
''He told me he was like any other Australian who had made aliyah [immigration to Israel] and was trying to make a life in Israel.''
Fairfax Media spoke to Mr Zygier in Israel in early 2010 after learning that ASIO was investigating at least three dual Australian-Israeli citizens who had emigrated to Israel in the past decade. At the time, ASIO would not comment on the case. On Wednesday, the agency again refused to comment.
Each of the men had travelled back to Australia separately to change their names and obtain a new passport, two intelligence sources said at the time in Koutsoukis' story published in The Age.
One man had changed his name three times, and others had changed theirs twice, the source said, from names that identified them as European-Jewish to ones that were Anglo-Australian.
In each case, the men had used the new passports to travel to Iran, Syria and Lebanon - all countries that do not recognise Israel and do not allow Israelis, or anyone with an Israeli stamp in their passport, to enter. Israel also bans its citizens from travelling to these countries for security reasons.
Along with his Ben Zygier identity, he also used Ben Alon, Ben Allen and Benjamin Burrows.
At the time, Fairfax Media was investigating the men's involvement with a European communications company that had a subsidiary in the Middle East. The company's chief executive denied the men were ever employed by the organisation.
It is believed - although Fairfax Media has been unable to confirm - that Mr Zygier travelled back to Australia in 2009 to do an MBA at Monash University.
A source at the time observed him over several days sitting with a group of students from Saudi Arabia and Iran at the university's Caulfield campus.
The source said: ''[Australian Taxation Office] records from 2008 show that he applied for and was approved a HECS loan for postgraduate studies at Monash University where he is currently [November 2009] studying.''
Since 2006, Monash has been involved in education in Middle Eastern countries, and in 2007 it proposed an initiative for higher-degree students from Saudi Arabia.
Apart from his move to Israel and his MBA study, little is known about Mr Zygier's movements over the decade before he died, except that he was working in insurance law at the Australian firm Deacons in 2002.
In Israel Mr Zygier married a local woman with whom he had two children, the ABC reported.
It was well known that Israel approached people who emigrated from other countries to assist it by handing over their passports, an Israeli intelligence expert told Fairfax in 2010.
''Their names are used later but the person providing the passport is not involved,'' the expert said.
It is understood the ASIO investigation into Mr Zygier and the two other men began at least six months before the January 10, 2010, assassination of senior Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, widely believed to have been carried out by Mossad using Australian and European passports.
Three of those suspected of taking part in the assassination were travelling on Australian passports, using the names of dual Australian-Israeli citizens, authorities in Dubai confirmed.
There is no suggestion that the three Australian names linked to Mabhouh's assassination are connected to Mr Zygier or the other men investigated by ASIO.
After initially denying the Australian government had any knowledge that one of its citizens was detained in Israel, Foreign Minister Bob Carr said some officers in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade were aware of his detention.
The revelations raises questions about how much the Australian government knew about the conditions under which Mr Zygier was being held in the maximum security Ayalon Prison.
The ABC's Foreign Correspondent program, which named Mr Zygier as ''Prisoner X'', said he hanged himself in the specially constructed cell that was meant to be suicide proof.
Mr Zygier was held in isolation - and in secret - in Unit 15, a separate wing of Ayalon Prison that contains just a single cell in Israel's most secure prison in Ramla, near Tel Aviv.
The cell is believed to have been built for Yigal Amir, who murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995.
It is described as a cell within a block within a prison. The inmate in Unit 15 was allowed no visitors and even after his death his identity was a state secret, protected by a court-issued gag order despite continuing protests from human rights groups.
''He is simply a person without a name and without an identity who has been placed in total and utter isolation from the outside world,'' a prison official was quoted as saying in the Israeli media in 2010, when news of ''Prisoner X'' first broke, and was then suppressed.
It is unclear what, if anything, Australia was told by the Israeli authorities about the death in custody of one of its citizens, or whether any consular assistance was provided to Mr Zygier during his time in solitary confinement.



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/ben-zy...z2Kol8cz4F