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The plate number was traced to a van owned by a company called Urban Moving. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was spotted on a service road off Route 3, near New Jersey's Giants Stadium. A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. The men were taken out of the van at gunpoint and handcuffed by police.
Sources tell 20/20 the FBI developed film from a camera taken from the Israelis, and that it shows the three on top of the white van were smiling and appeared to be clowning around. The five Israelis were held at this federal jail for allegedly overstaying their visas.
(OC) In fact, within two weeks, an immigration judge routinely ordered them deported. But that is when, according to sources who spoke to 20/20, the FBI and CIA put a hold on the case. And over the next two months, some of the men were held in solitary confinement, questioned repeatedly and some of them were given up to seven lie detector tests. Clearly this was more than your average immigration case.
(OC) So when they were being questioned and when they were being polygraphed, what were the questions they were being asked?
Mr. GORDON: I believe the questions surrounded what they were doing in Amer-ica, what were they--were doing on September 11th with regard to whether or not they actually had any involvement in the World Trade Center incident. They were asked questions if they had ever been approached by or hired by any non-United States intelligence community.
MILLER: (VO) Since their arrest, there has been plenty of speculation and ru-mor about who these men were and what they were doing that morning. Eventually The Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported that the FBI concluded that at least two of them were Mossad operatives. That is, agents of Israeli intelligence.
Mr. VINCE CANNISTRARO: When the federal investigators checked the names of the people who had been arrested through a national intelligence database, some of the names came up as hits.
MILLER: (VO) Vince Cannistraro is a former chief of operations for counter-terrorism with the Central Intelligence Agency. Now he's a consultant with ABC News. He says many in the US intelligence community believe that some of the men arrested in the white van were in the US working for Israeli intelligence. They speculate that Urban Moving was being used by Israel as an intelligence front.
Mr. CANNISTRARO: ...set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an op-eration, an intelligence operation, against radical Islamics in the area, par-ticularly in the New Jersey/New York area.