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What about him? I just got an e-mail blasting Aviv as a con-artist, par excellence.
Here is an excerpt from Wikepedia as background:
Any thoughts out there?Quote:
Juval Aviv, also written as Yuval Aviv (born February 24, 1947), is the president of Interfor Inc., a corporate investigations firm in New York. He is best known as the source of the 1984 book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by George Jonas, on which Steven Spielberg's film Munich was based...
Israel's consul-general in Los Angeles doesn't seem to have glowing things to say about him either:
Haartz article reprintQuote:
"It is, in fact, based on things that [self-styled Mossad man] Yuval Aviv told the author," Danoch said. "This same Yuval claimed to have been in the Mossad and the head of a Mossad team, a claim that was untrue. At most he was a 'selector' for El Al for a few months," Danoch said, referring to the airline's unarmed security personnel who interview departing passengers.
... took out the who sent, etc...
Quote:
Aviv is a fabricator who will lie about anything to anybody, but his specialty is conning major American news outlets. One of his more malevolent performances followed the bombing of Pan Am 103 – his bio says “Mr. Aviv served as lead investigator for Pan Am Airways into the Pan Am 103 – Lockerbie terrorist bombing.” Lead investigator for whom? For what agency?
Aviv’s story, for those who weren’t paying attention at the time, was that the bombing was the work of a rogue element of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA 1) which was attempting to cover up the fact that it was allowing Monzer al-Kasser to smuggle drugs into the US in return for his assistance, through his contacts in Syria, in recovering the US hostages in Beirut. The US media ate it up. One of the most gullible was Pierre Salinger, by then reduced to stringing for ABC in Paris, and fading in and out of lucidity. Salinger was a believer. It appeared Aviv’s run might come to an end when he was trapped in a 60 Minutes sting: I believe Mike Wallace was the interviewer; in any case, Aviv was the ardent tale-spinner who, by this time, had attracted the attention of the CIA’s head of the Counter-Terrorism Center, Vince Cannistraro. Wallace quoted Cannistraro to Aviv, Aviv scoffed at Cannistraro’s assertions, Wallace asked if Aviv would be willing to make the same comments to Cannistraro’s face, and Aviv, bluffing his way along, said he certainly would be. At that point Vince walked onto the set...
... Aviv is good at “predicting” things – I saw a sign recently that said “The success of a rain dance owes a great deal to timing.” Along about Tuesday Aviv will claim that within four days Saturday will happen, and there are people who will be dazzled by his prescience. There are many Israeli “security experts” running around the US claiming to have warned people things were going to happen before they happened. And lo! they were ignored. Ignored! These claims usually are made after the event, and are difficult to check.
Impossible to check would be the claim that “Juval Aviv was the Israel Agent whom the movie ‘Munich’ was about . . .” “Munich” was based on the book, “Vengeance”, by George Jonas. Jonas may or may not be the author’s name, but whoever he is, he is represented as the man who ran the operation. The Israelis claim Jonas is a fraud, and that he never worked for Mossad, but after all that is a major theme of the book itself, isn’t it? – that the team would be disowned. If Aviv was the leader of the operation, is it likely that a person with his appetite for publicity would have taken the name George Jonas to write the book? Or, if Jonas is an imposter who claims to have run the operation, would not Aviv, who is here represented as “the Israeli Agent whom the movie ‘Munich’ was about, not have challenged George Jonas bona fides? Jonas can’t be too much of a deep mystery: he is described at the end of “Vengeance” this way: George Jonas was born in Hungary and emigrated to Canada in 1956. ‘By Persons Unknown’ (with Barbara Amiel), published in 1977, became a number one best seller in Canada and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for nonfiction in the United States.” And so on. Perhaps the association with Barbara Amiel explains why Juval Aviv has not challenged George Jonas, whose alleged exploits the sender attributes to Jonas. One source says Amiel was married to Jonas for a time; however that may be, she is now married to Conrad Black, recently convicted in Chicago for looting his company. Amiel is a pro-Israel right-winger who would know the difference between Juval Aviv and George Jonas.
It really is not clear who Juval Aviv works for. It is a constant source of wonder that so many of these Israeli “heroes” end up peddling their security “expertise” here...
My contribution to this thread reduces to a remark about the film.
Whoever wrote the Munich’s scenario, he was a knowledgeable person at some point; unless Steven Spielberg hired a consultant specialist during the making. For, some scenes in this movie are too true to come from someone’s imagination. I mean, this remark concerns more especially all scenes involving actors playing the members of what the Munich’s aficionados on imdb call the “French Family.”