Wayne MADSEN | 19.03.2015 | 00:00
In the final countdown to the Israeli election, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu charged that there was a vast left-wing international conspiracy against him with the primary perpetrators being the Scandinavian countries. Ironically, right-wing Israeli propaganda outlets and their enablers in the West are often fond of pointing to Israel’s critics as being part of a conspiracy of «anti-Semites» who believe Israel and Jews control the world’s political and financial systems. However comical Netanyahu’s statements about Scandinavia serving as the center of anti-Likud worldwide operations, it is true that Israel has, for decades, infiltrated Scandinavian political parties, parliaments, newspapers, and intelligence agencies to promote Israel’s cause diplomatically and in the media.Denmark has borne the brunt of Israeli infiltration. While he was the chief of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET), Jakob Scharf, who is of Jewish descent, steered Danish intelligence closer to Israel’s Mossad than had any of his predecessors. Danish intelligence first became associated with Mossad in 1974 when the Kilowatt Group, which brought together Israeli intelligence officials with Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and other European intelligence agencies to deal with growing Arab terrorism.
As the head of the PET, Scharf quickly pounced on Danish Islamist leaders who were outraged by the publication in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in unflattering and blasphemous terms.
Jyllands-Posten’s cultural editor, Flemming Rose, who approved the publication of the cartoons, was identified as being linked to various neo-conservative and Israel Lobby operatives in Washington, including the pro-Israeli American Enterprise Institute. While Scharf warned against international Islamist conspiracies to carry out terrorism, he was conveniently silent on the international conspiracy by Israeli propagandists to incite violence by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The cartoon operation, which incited violence that resulted in deaths from riots staged in cities throughout the Muslim world, never registered on Scharf's "criminal conspiracy meter" since he was part and parcel of it.
Rose is not the only pro-Israel agent-of-influence in the Danish media. In 2010, Danish-Israeli «journalist» Herbert Pundik, also known as Nahum Pundak, in an interview with the Dagbladet Information, a Danish daily newspaper, admitted that he had worked for Mossad for ten years while working as a journalist for both Dagbladet Information and Politiken. In fact, Pundik only «officially» severed his relationship with Mossad after he was appointed Politiken’s editor-in-chief in 1970. Moreover, Danish military intelligence was aware of Pundik’s role as an agent for Mossad since Peter Isloe, the deputy chief of the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (DDIS), received copies of Pundik’s intelligence reports submitted to Mossad. Among the intelligence passed on to Mossad by Pundik were reports from predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria and Somalia. Pundik’s double agent status as a Mossad spy working for two major Danish newspapers was never discovered by the Nigerians or Somalis.
Denmark has also served as a choice base of operations for Israel’s clandestine commerce with Iran, including illicit weapons sales. Although this clandestine commercial link reached its crescendo during the Iran-contra operations run by Lt. Col. Oliver North and his Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) colleagues in the 1980s, it continues to this date albeit at a diminished pace.
It is also known that Mossad has used Danish intelligence to keep tabs on Danish citizens of Arab, particularly Palestinian descent, as well as Arab permanent residents and political asylum seekers in Denmark. This surveillance has also been extended to Norway as a result of links between Mossad and the Norwegian Intelligence Service.
Relations between Mossad and its Norwegian counterpart improved following the 1973 botched attempt by Mossad to assassinate in Norway the «Black September» Palestinian terrorist Ali Hassan Salameh. Mossad’s Special Operations Unit’s assassination team included a number of Mossad agents of Scandinavian descent, including Dan Arbel, a former Danish citizen, and Marianne Geldinkof, a former native of Sweden. However, the man the Mossad assassination team shot at point blank range on a street in Lillehammer was not Salameh but fluent Norwegian-speaker Ahmad Bushiki, a waiter in a Lillehammer restaurant. The error was costly for Mossad. Norwegian intelligence severed all official ties with Mossad and a chill in Israeli-Scandinavian relations even affected Mossad’s warm links with their Danish counterparts.
The Israeli government relied on Norwegian attorney Annæus Schjødt to represent the Israeli agents, four men and two women, arrested by the Norwegian police for Bushiki’s murder. Schjødt later married one of the female assassins. Schjødt’s father, also an attorney, prosecuted wartime Norwegian Nazi leader Vikdun Quisling at his trial in Oslo after the Second World War. Israel’s attempt to use the son of a Norwegian prosecutor of the Nazi leader to argue for leniency for the Mossad assassins, thus playing up the «Holocaust card», proved fruitless. Five out of the six Mossad killers were sentenced to prison terms in Norway but were granted early release in 1975 after pressure was exerted by Israel and its agents-of-influence in Oslo. Arbel reportedly gave Norwegian intelligence details of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program in return for a better prosecution deal. Salameh was assassinated by Mossad in 1979 in Beirut. It was later discovered that Mossad killed Salameh while he was an active CIA agent.
Mossad was also known to have set up a number of front companies in Denmark from which they recruited agents to spy for Israel. A number of Danes, Jews and non-Jews, were never made aware that they were collecting intelligence for Israel, often to the detriment of Danish national security.
One of Israel’s proactive agents-of-influence of the Norwegian parliament, Jan Simonsen of the right-wing and anti-immigrant Progress Party, made a laughing stock out of himself for constantly nominating George W. Bush and Tony Blair for the Nobel Peace Prize. Simonsen cited their role in eliminating Iraq’s «weapons of mass destruction», weapons, which it turns out, never existed.
Mossad’s activities in Sweden have been no less alarming. Gunnar Ekberg, a former agent for Swedish military intelligence (IB), wrote in his book, «They’ll Die Anyway», that Mossad approached Swedish military intelligence and offered to assassinate a number of leading Swedish left-wing intellectuals. Specifically, Mossad offered the IB to assassinate Jan Guillou, a Swedish journalist who exposed the existence of the IB, which was, at the time, a partner of the Mossad in tracking down Palestinian activists resident in Sweden.
Israel’s influence operations in Sweden are mainly centered on the media assets of the Swedish Jewish Bonnier family, which owns outright or has a controlling interest in the newspapers Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Dagens Industri, and TV4. The family’s influence is also felt in Finland, where it owns the newspapers Iltalehti and Kauppalehti. A number of Scandinavian publications also pick up pro-Israeli (and anti-Russian) items from the Baltic News Service, which is also owned by the Bonnier family. A member of the family, Elisabeth Borsiin Bonnier, while, coincidentally serving as Sweden’s ambassador to Israel, launched an attack against journalist Donald Bostrom in 2009 for an article in Aftonbladet, a competitor of the Bonnier family’s media, reporting that the Israeli military was harvesting organs from dead Palestinians.
One of Israel’s most prominent agents-of-influence in Finland was Finnish diplomat Max Jacobson. He was almost elected Secretary General of the United Nations had it not been for a veto from the Soviet Union.
Netanyahu talks of a non-existent Scandinavian conspiracy against Israel when there is no evidence of any such fanciful plot. However, when the tables are turned, the history of Israeli plotting against Scandinavia is worthy of a large history volume.
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