The art of spying

The Forward is using the Larry Franklin 'mole' story as a hook to resurrect that old urban myth about the Israeli "art students" spying on the US. Apparently, they've now arrived in Canada.

In the most recent case, government authorities in Canada have insisted that all the evidence collected indicates the young, self-described "art students" — all of them Israelis in the country on visitor's visas — were involved in something far more prosaic than espionage: the importation of tragically bad, dirt-cheap paintings from the Far East that were then sold at wildly inflated prices door-to-door in some of the more upscale neighborhoods in western Canada. In some cases, the paintings sold for more than 100 times their value, prompting authorities in Calgary to issue a warning to the public to be wary of art fraud, said Detective Frank Cattoni of the Calgary Police Department. The alert made no mention of espionage.

The Forward ends by quoting a security expert who speculates that perhaps the Mossad had used the group to plant one or two genuine spies. But he adds:

Even if there were some kernel of truth to the original spying allegations, it is unlikely, Berlet said, that such an operation would have survived the media storm it encountered when details of the DEA report surfaced in the United States. It's even more unlikely, he says, that such an operation would be resurrected immediately afterward in Canada or anywhere else.
"It strains credulity that once you have an operation blown, you'd simply recycle it," Berlet said. "That's almost unheard of; that's not done. You're placing your agents at too high a risk."

I'm still waiting for someone to produce one of these students -- I couldn't see one media report where the reporter had actually ever spoken to one of these kids, supposedly freely roaming North American streets. 'Til that happens, this is just an urban myth.

UPDATE: A reader from Jerusalem emails me:
"I have, in fact, met some of the Israeli art students. When I was in Phoenix waiting for my aliya go through (in January of 2001), a group of them went around my parents’ neighborhood, which was an extremely strange thing to do since NO ONE goes knocking door-to-door in Phoenix. Two women came to the door and my parents invited them in and they were rather fartumlt that someone would leave all of the splendor that is America for Israel. (It was really odd to say, “Oh, you’re Israeli art students? I’m in the middle of making aliya… .”) So, I can thus attest to the fact that they do, in fact, exist.
"Unfortunately... the art they were peddling was really a bit too hideous to buy. Based on the conversation we had, my sense was that the students were using their "art" as an excuse to take a trip to the states and were using the sales to fund the trip."