KIDRON VALLEY

200 Meters

The Trust's Avigdor

Eskin

This is Jerusalem as found by the party of Prince Edward of Wales in his famous 1862 trip to the Holy Land, the first ever by a member of the British Royal Family. This trip set in motion the establishment of two crucial institutions: the Palestine Exploration Fund, still

headed by the Queen today, and a PEF spin-off, the Quatuor Coronati Freemasonic Lodge.

It was the Quatuor Coronati which sent Asher Kaufman to Jerusalem to publicize the Temple, including a false location for it (see AJTF Temple Mount plan) as a "foot-in-the-door" for a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount, the first phase of rebuilding Solomon's Temple. The different "quarters" of the city have remained relatively stable over the past 100 years, until

Ateret Cohanim initiated a Jewish presence in the Muslim Quarter.

In 1915-16, Capt. George Hill, a second generation British SIS agent, was posted in the world's center of Sephardic Jewry at the time, the

Ottoman

port of Salonika. Hill's assignment was to oversee certain crucial aspects of the planned Bolshevik Revolution, a project in which Hill

himself had been active for at least 10 years, since the time he served

as the personal courier into England for the private documents of Bol

shevik money-launderer and playwright Maxim Gorky. Hill's father had

been active in the Jewish merchant-Freemasonic networks of Czarist

Russia, working on the Trust's Bolshevik project, an assignment very relevant to his son's Salonika posting.

Following the success of that project, in November 1917, Hill moved to Moscow as the personal aid to Parvus's old friend and protégé, Leon Trotsky, now minister of war for the Bolsheviks. Hill's assignment, as he records it in his memoirs, Go Spy the Land, and as verified by other accounts, was to set up a military intelligence network for Trotsky and The Trust. Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, thus co-founded by

Hill and Trotsky, was to bear for some decades the imprint of its Trust authors, both of whom operated in the Odessa-Salonika intelligence networks of Parvus. The strong flavor of Levantine Jewry which char acterized the GRU's operations, was in contrast to the Cheka, more

directly under Stalin's personal "Russian" control.

This Levantine Jewish strain was reflected directly in one of the GRU's

most notorious operations, the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra Soviet spy apparatus active in German-occupied Europe during World War II. The

Rote Kapelle was run by three former operatives of the Comintern cell in Palestine, Leopold Trepper, Leon Grossvogel, and Hillel Katz. Though Stalin brutally lashed out at these "cosmopolitan," as opposed to Great

Russian, networks in the purge trials of the 1930s, Stalin only cut back

the Trust, without eliminating it. At the time of his death, in 1953, he was preparing another series of purges aimed at the "cosmopolitans,"

centering around the "Jewish Doctors Plot" preparations. Before he could launch the new round of purges, Stalin died, soon after which, by 1955,

certain deals had been struck with the old Trust partners for joint world domination, but this time with the Russians as a senior partner, not merely a tool. One of the most prominent of those Stalin had targeted to be purged in the Doctors Plot, was a Jewish officer of the GRU,

Colonel Eskin.

Forest Hills, Queens, New York, a Sunday in April, 1984. In the basement of the Young Israel Synagogue, a group of old friends active in Americans

for a Safe Israel (described by one of them as "basically the American Gush Emunim") and related support functions for the Temple Mount plot, are gathered to hear two prominent visitors from Israel. The speaker is GRU Colonel Eskin's son, the 24-year-old Avigdor, now a Soviet

Jewish emigré, resident in Kiryat Arba on the West Bank:

Israel's biggest enemy is communism. Israel should support America's fight against Communists in Nicaragua and Central and South Amer ica. This is more important to Israel's welfare than Israel's own

defense budget worries. If America loses this fight, Israel loses.

Israel must support the New Right in the United States, including prayer in the schools, no abortions, and so forth.

Israel must,

above all, be a "Biblical Israel."

The next speaker, Michael Kleiner, though a Knesset member, a leading figure in the Herut Party, and Eskin's senior, is clearly outclassed by the tall, blond Eskin, fluent in Hebrew, Russian, and English, and attired in a three-piece pin-striped suit, a European white silk shirt, gold pocket

watch, etc.

For the next three weeks, in meeting after meeting, including private

audiences with the U.S. National Security Council, the litany was the same:

build the New Right, fight communism by committing American troops

to Latin America (necessitating, of course, withdrawing U.S. troops from

Europe), and establish a Biblical Israel, key-and-code in Eskin's jargon

for the Temple Mount project. And, always, in meeting after meeti:

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the star of the show was Eskin. As Temple Mount financial angel Robert

Jacobs put it on another occasion, on surveying the young, clean-cut,

yarmulkaed youth working all over his large office in New York's diamond district, "Avigdor is the hottest thing we have going for us. He's eloquent, great with campus kids, attractive, and aggressive.. He's recruited

all of them on his Washington trip," waving his hand around at the New Right Jewish youth.

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A key part of the Eskin-Kleiner 1984 tour was the establishment of

deep ties to the U.S. New Right. At a spring, 1984 press conference in Washington arranged by Jacobs, Kleiner and Eskin spoke on the podium with New Right gurus Richard Viguerie, Jerry Falwell, the Byzantine rite liturgical enthusiast Paul Weyreich, and others in the orbit of the KGB-infested Heritage Foundation. These connections resulted in retur trips by the same crowd to Herut Party headquarters in Israel.

Sen. Jesse Helms with Ariel Sharon at his home, in August 1985.

The Kleiner-Eskin duo also achieved some tangible benefits in the U.S. Congress. As a result of introductions reportedly facilitated by Trust asset Jon Speller of Robert Speller and Sons publishers in New York, themselves active in the Irgun since the 1930s, Kleiner and Eskin caused a complete turn-about of Jesse Helms on the question of Israel. Formerly imbued with a healthy suspicion toward Israeli operations due to the outlook and antics of Sharon and company, Helms, after meeting with Kleiner and Eskin, stunned much of Washington with a call to completely reject President Reagan's peace proposal of 1982, because it called for Israel to ultimately give back the West Bank. As Eskin put it, "I just told him, 'Look, what do you hate the most, the Jews, or the communists?" "

There were also other types of tangible benefits. Kleiner and Eskin reportedly convinced Helms to insert an amendment into the U.S. nu clear agreement with China, whereby Israel will be able to obtain nuclear fuel cheaply.

Throughout his 1984, and subsequent tours, Eskin stressed that the

Temple Mount project "must occur within a broader agenda... a strong

conservative coalition . . . a defense policy. . . . Letting the Jews out of the Soviet Union is terribly important." Eskin, as head of the Israeli Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, has repeatedly stressed this latter point,

and that the Soviet Jews who emigrate to Israel are "like me, very

professional and well educated and can play a great role." Some of them,

indeed very much like him, are already playing a great role. One is Ilya Zemtsov, the right-hand man for a decade to Geidar Aliyev, who was the head of the communist party and the KGB in Azerbaijan. Zemtsov not only moved to Israel, but under the sponsorship of Yuval Ne'eman

(when he was minister of science and technology), founded his own think

tank to advise the ministry. His "former" boss, Geidar Aliyev, is now

the first deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union, number-three in the hierarchy. Zemtsov, through his Israeli connections, has also now become

a consultant to the U.S. National Security Council and the Defense Department, a deployment that makes the Pollard case look like comic

opera.

Zemtsov, like Eskin, spends all his spare time, when not meeting with or writing evaluations for the NSC, urging the release of 400,000 Russian

Jews to Israel. As Zemtsov puts it, "The Soviet Union has the strongest

currency in the world-her Jews."

Eskin's activities have a classic Trust profile. When in New York, he stays with his cousin, Chaim Tepur, an activist and frequent traveller to the Soviet Union on behalf of one of Eskin's old teachers, "dissident"

Josef Begun, around whom a great hue and cry is raised by Trust networks.

E 2

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The Soviet dissident apparatus, with its extensive support base outside the Soviet Union, is vintage Trust. One of the more recent "dissidents"

is Vladimir Bukovsky, on the agenda with Eskin at one NSC meeting,

and, who, together with Lord Nicholas Bethell, founded Radio Free Kabul in London. This was implicated in support operations for the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Another is Pavel

Litvinov, the grandson of Trust operative and former Bolshevik Foreign

Minister Maxim Litvinov.

One of the most celebrated of these "dissident" Trust operations, not irrelevant to the case of Eskin and Zemtsov, was the "persecution" of

Red Orchestra leader Leopold Trepper in Poland in the 1960s. After the

standard international hue and cry, with the establishment of "Free Leopold Trepper" committees everywhere, the old GRU operative was

"freed," went to London, and then into a hero's "retirement" in Israel.

The 'Priestly

Crown' yeshiva

During his U.S. tour, Eskin visited Krieger's house in Los Angeles.

Krieger asked for help in stepping up the pace of Temple Mount devel opments. Krieger reported with some amazement, "Avigdor made some phone calls for me to the Knesset. Forty-five minutes later the phone began to ring. It was Chaim Druckman, Yuval Ne'eman, Geula Cohen,

and Michael Kleiner." (As Eskin reported to an associate, "I know I am

protected at the very highest levels in Israel.") Eskin also introduced

Krieger to "one of the most trusted men in the Temple Mount program,"

the Florida and Israel real estate operative, Dr. Irving Moscowitz. Mos

cowitz visited Krieger's home in Los Angeles.

Though Risenhoover and Krieger's activities are more important than

purposefully tongue-in-cheek exposés in the press would indicate, they are not at the core of the plot-Ateret Cohanim is. The yeshiva's official purpose is to train the prospective "priesthood" for the new Temple, and

ultimately, all strains of the Sharon/Temple Mount plot converge in Ateret. As Menachem Bar Shalom, Ateret's executive director, says,

"There are a few organizations in Jerusalem working on various planes of things around the Temple Mount. All of them put together are not doing as much as Ateret Cohanim. They make a lot of noise, get publicity, hold demonstrations, but none have the overall structure or plan like us

or are here on a 24-hour basis."

The AJTF, led by "new Nehemiah" Risenhoover, view themselves as,

in the main, a support operation for Ateret, regardless of the various

occasional internecine squabbles among the Christian crazies and the Ateret cabalists. Risenhoover and Krieger have created a nonprofit cor

poration registered in the state of California, called "Ateret Cohanim."

AJTF Board member Monroe says that the sole purpose of this tax-exempt foundation will be to "push funds to Ateret in Jerusalem."

In particular, there are two projects which AJTF people report that they and the Ateret group are jointly deployed on: 1) land purchases in and around the Old City, and 2) moving the octogenarian Rabbi of Safad into the Old City, to be the guru for Ateret. Regarding the first part, land purchases, DeLoach reports that the AJTF is forming an "inter national coalition of Gentiles to buy property in the Old City. We have six units. . . . Before we can build the Temple, the property has to be

redeemed from the Arabs. We need intervenors to do this.

great resistance from the Arab community, [but] when one sells, im

mediately the Arab next door wants to sell. We try to purchase imme diately, before there is resistance from the Arab community. We want

to get around this."

We meet

DeLoach reported that Krieger is the AJTF person most intimately

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involved with the land operations. One of the figures Krieger named as involved with the "very vast scale" real estate efforts of the AJTF is Zvi Slonem, a top figure in Gush Emunim and the figure personally involved

in Sharon's extensive land-buying operations in Elon Moreh. According to knowledgeable sources, a great deal of money from Sharon's ministry,

during the time he was agriculture minister, was turned over to Slonem.

However, only 20% actually went to purchase Arab lands. The rest was

used to build up Gush Emunim as Sharon's base.

The Elon Moreh scam, like the Old City speculation, has a "religious"

basis. Elon Moreh was the site of an earlier synagogue-temple of King David, before he conquered Jerusalem, and his son, Solomon, built the Temple on the Mount.

Ateret was set up in 1978, when a former soldier-student in Ramat

Hagolan yeshiva on the Golan Heights, Mattityahu Dan, was told by "a

friend" to set up a yeshiva dedicated to rebuilding the Temple. The friend may have been Rafi Eytan. In late 1978, Dan and seven friends moved into the Muslim Quarter, the first Jews to reside there since 1936.

With the Likud Party of the old Irgun terrorist Menachem Begin in

power, the activities of the yeshiva began to flourish. As stated in 1984 by one of Ateret's U.S. collaborators, Rabbi Marcus of Young Israel in Staten Island, New York: "The government is happy with it, but because

of sensitive politics, the government is probably smiling contentedly, but

not more than that at present."

In fact, it was doing a great deal more than that. The education ministry was funding Ateret by purchasing 200 models of the Temple for schools around the country, to begin a mass organizing campaign for a rebuilt Temple. The ministry of religious affairs was providing a $1,200-a-month subsidy, a subsidy continued to the present day.

Regarding the activities of the yeshiva, Public Relations Director Eli ezer Berkeley states: "Ateret Cohanim is three things: First, it is a yeshiva, a very special one dedicated to learning the laws of the Temple Mountain

and learning the laws of the cohanim, the priests of the Temple, and

the laws relating to the building of the Third Temple. It is also a regular

yeshiva, but with special emphasis on this aspect. It is located in the

Old City itself, right next to Temple Mountain. The second aspect is to bring people in to live in the Old City. We're trying to resettle this area and to make it a Jewish area once again. Jews used to live here,

and have businesses, and we are buying the properties back from the

Arabs. It is basically a resettlement yeshiva, to resettle and make it a

Jewish area once again. So it is those three aspects-learning, living, teaching. We are doing a lot of educational work, setting up a special

museum on the Temple, on the idea of Jerusalem."

The "resettlement" emphasis of Ateret is greatly facilitated by a sister

yeshiva, Birkat Avraham, composed of ex-convicts who have been known to wield lead pipes to terrorize Arabs into moving out, and who shout out their "prayers" early in the morning and late at night. Though Ateret people fiercely deny the connection, the same circles are behind both yeshivas. The violence of Birkat makes the Ateret fanatics seem mod erates, and certainly has its effect on those Arabs in the way of Ateret's

"resettlement" project. Privately, Ateret people will admit that the alleged

vast differences between the pipe-wielding Birkat and themselves are a hoax. As Eliezer Berkeley put it, "The press and everybody else makes

them wear the black hats and we wear the white hats. Abraham Dwek [Birkat's founder] is a fine man. Yes, he knows Mati Dan."

Birkat's work is paying off, in conjunction with the Syrian decimation

of the PLO, which used to provide funds to the Waqf to maintain the

Z

Old City. As Berkeley explained, "When I came to America recently,

I had a briefcase full of properties. All of a sudden, quite a number of properties became available. The reason it was so difficult in the past

was the PLO. The Arabs are much more friendly now. We are giving

them substantial amounts of money." But since the whole plan of re building Solomon's Temple will not work without first getting rid of the Dome of the Rock, the question that Ateret must answer is, how do they plan to deal with that? Said Josef Eldbaum, one of the Ateret members weaving robes for the priesthood, "If the Arabs don't want to leave the Temple Mount, we will ask and then ask again... ask nicely first, then, perhaps, force."

In fact, the force is already well under way, and the assaults on the Temple Mount from 1983 on, including plans to blow up the Dome with dynamite, are plotted by personnel and forces virtually indistinguishable from Ateret itself. A good case in point was the number-two defendant

in the 1984 trials for attempted murder and plotting to blow up the Dome. He related that his inspiration for the plot on the Temple Mount,

came while attending prayers at Ateret. And of course, the backers of

Ateret at the highest levels are indistinguishable from the deployers of

the terrorist "underground."

As Meir Indor, spokesman for the Committee for the Prisoners, stated bitterly, the "underground" activists were told by high government of

ficials and ranking military figures, to go ahead with their activities: "By

law we can't do a thing," these officials said, "our hands are tied. But as

private citizens you can teach them a lesson."

One of the 1984 defendants related how he was personally present

when "some of the greatest figures in Israel told us to go ahead and do it." And who were those "greatest figures"? The two names that surfaced prominently at the time, were Ariel Sharon and his sidekick, "Dirty Rafi"

Eytan, the former adviser to the prime minister's office on Terror Against Terror, and a creator and deployer of Irgun assassination teams since the

1940s. In fact, one of Eytan's closest personal associates was among those

charged in 1984.

In response to a question regarding Sharon and Eytan backing Ateret,

Berkeley replied, "Both of those people know about us and are very supportive," while Bar Shalom added, "Yuval Ne'eman is also on our team. He is well aware of all aspects of what we are doing. And Ariel Sharon is also very close to us, very much in favor of all our organizational

work."

The "spiritual head" of Ateret is Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, an active duty officer of Israel's domestic intelligence service, the Shabak. The founder, Mati Dan, is not only a Shabak officer, but also a close personal associate of Rafi Eytan. The lawyer for Ateret, Eitan Geva, has a long association with Shabak as well, and specializes in land deals. Another of the lawyers associated with Ateret, Shlomo Toussia-Cohen, was not only the lead lawyer for the terrorist underground, but is the lawyer for Abraham Dwek,

the founder of Birkat Avraham.

By the laws of the yeshiva, all the "students" must be army veterans, and as their New York lawyer, Bernard Hoenig, reports, go about armed at all times, but "quietly." Not surprisingly, Rabbi Aviner was one of the leading figures in the "Settlers Defense Fund," set up to raise money for those convicted of trying to blow up the Dome. And according to Israel Harel, the head of Gush Emunim, "Rabbi Aviner is the spiritual

leader of the Gush Emunim." Harel also offers to moneyed supporters to

set up a private meeting with Ariel Sharon, at Sharon's farm, to raise

money for the Gush terrorists.

In document Eir-Rapporten : Moskva sitt hemmelige våpen (sider 49-56)