Documents Show How Israeli Methods Were Presented to US Police as a Model

At the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in June 2018, Michael Oren spoke from a podium to a gathering of American police officers, firefighters, and emergency managers. Oren, previously named Michael Bornstein, was serving as a member of the Israeli Knesset after renouncing his U.S. citizenship. “We are defending the same civilization, the same values, the same beliefs. We are you, you are us,” Oren told the group, who had made the trip from the Washington, D.C., area.

“We are fighting for the same cause,” Oren said as he and other Americans stood inside a hotel that was the target of a Zionist terrorist bombing in 1946.

The backdrop behind Oren featured the logo of the Advanced Security Training Institute (ASTI). The Brooklyn-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit hosted the event to honor 25 first responders from Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia who were attending an eight-day training in Israel, according to documents obtained by Prism through public records requests.

Training programs ASTI ran in Israel “use the Israeli experience as a laboratory” to teach American police, according to an internal intelligence division memorandum by the Austin Police Department, which sent some of its members to the sessions. A trove of documents Prism reviewed as part of a multi-part investigative series into the nonprofit shows how Israeli methods for law enforcement and intelligence gathering were presented to U.S. police as a model.

ASTI’s Israeli American founder Yisroel Stefansky also once proposed to bring that laboratory directly to a city in Washington state, offering to train local police on how to operate informant networks to surveil Americans based on “proven [Israeli] intelligence doctrine.” The proposal was not implemented.

Stefansky did not respond to numerous requests for an interview or an email detailing Prism’s findings. Oren declined to comment.

While other police training programs run by the Anti-Defamation League, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Jewish Institute for National Security in America, and the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange have been widely reported, ASTI’s programs have largely operated outside of public scrutiny.

Over two years, Prism submitted dozens of public records requests to agencies across the U.S., aiming to uncover the scope of ASTI training, and received thousands of pages of documents. Prism traced law enforcement training programs as far back as 2005 across Washington state to Colorado, Texas, and Washington, D.C. The documents map out how a series of little-known police training entities, including ASTI, have crossed paths with law enforcement agencies across the country.

This is the third report in Prism’s series “The ASTI Files,” primarily based on these public records.

Prism uncovered documents from ASTI training programs in Israel from as recently as 2019. After Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023, ASTI proposed training programs in Seattle, Dallas, and San Francisco, according to public records. Seattle and San Francisco police departments told Prism that they did not engage in any training with ASTI. Dallas did not respond to a request for comment.

ASTI is active on X and maintains a website where it advertises its programs. However, the scope of its current partnerships with police across the country is unclear.

Seattle Gay News previously reported that ASTI’s X account regularly liked anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-immigrant content. Prism’s investigation has also revealed that the organization’s training included materials that advocates and experts interviewed by Prism viewed as anti-Muslim.

Multiple Agencies As Participants

ASTI has given lectures to American emergency personnel about topics such as the “Muslim Mindset,” the importance of monitoring social media, specialized surveillance tactics, understanding crowd behavior, and hands-on weapons training. Some of these lectures took place at what Haaretz has called an “anti-terror fantasy camp” named Caliber 3, inside the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

At Caliber 3, learning objectives from older trainings run by another one of Stefansky’s companies, Proactive Global Security (PGS), included “shooting from a moving vehicle,” close quarters battle tactics, and “stopping a suspicious car,” according to public records.

When Prism reached out to Caliber 3 for comment, the training academy said, “We only engage with journalists who can demonstrate a commitment to factual, unbiased reporting and who are willing to adhere to our media guidelines.” It did not respond to a follow-up request for its media guidelines.

ASTI and PGS training junkets to Israel have met with Israeli military tank commanders, attended demonstrations and tours at various military and “intelligence sensitive” sites, and met with unnamed veterans of the Israeli state intelligence services, according to documents. Old PGS training videos claim that its instructors also train the Israeli military.

One person who attended an interdisciplinary law enforcement, fire, and emergency management training with Stefansky in Israel and requested anonymity to discuss the trip told Prism that “clearly, he had relationships with aspects of all of the Israeli government, across the different disciplines in order to have the briefings that we got and the demonstrations that we got.”

“We were under the impression he was a private business owner making these training opportunities available, and he was leveraging somehow the relationships that he had to do that,” they added.

Prism has identified at least 65 different agencies and private corporations that have attended PGS and ASTI trainings, including the U.S. Army, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, state police from across the U.S., and local police from Seattle, Denver, Austin, and New York, among others, according to ASTI documents.

Former FBI agent Terry Albury told Prism that ASTI training and its nexus to “major cities with significant populations of people,” may be strategic.

“The energy in those areas is infectious too, in terms of challenging the empire, challenging the machine, speaking out against war and militarism and all of these issues, whether it’s the Occupy movement, it’s the Black Lives Matter era, Seattle showed up, Austin showed up,” said Albury, who was sentenced to prison in 2018 for leaking FBI documents to The Intercept relating to the bureau’s targeting of vulnerable communities.

ASTI’s reachouts to larger cities suggested to Albury that in some of these places, “more progressive values are taking foot and bearing fruit” and that Israel may feel a pressing need to devote resources to promote their own interests. For instance, the Israeli government recently announced a 200 million shekel investment to strengthen “the connection to the State of Israel among the younger generation” in North America. The Jewish Federation of North America plans to implement the Israeli program in the U.S.

The activities and the sensitive relationships with law enforcement also raised counterintelligence concerns for Albury.

According to documents reviewed by Prism, one of PGS’ instructors included Mordecai Dzikansky, who was the first Tel Aviv field office detective for the New York City Police Department (NYPD). At the NYPD, Dzikansky investigated the 1990 murder of ultraright religious extremist Meir Kahane and later volunteered to serve in the Israeli military while still employed with the police department.

Dzikansky fell under suspicion of the FBI and the NYPD for allegedly being “used by Israeli intelligence officials to influence thinking in New York” after 9/11, according to Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman’s book “Enemies Within.” Dzikansky would on occasion “get his colleagues to do favors for the Israelis, such as conducting surveillance in New York at their request,” the book states, citing interviews with NYPD and FBI officials and corroborating NYPD documents.

Appuzo and Goldman did not respond to a request from Prism to view those documents, and the NYPD denied Prism’s Freedom of Information Law request for its investigation into Dzikansky, which remains sealed. The FBI denied Prism’s Freedom of Information Act request for Dzikansky’s FBI file, though he is deceased, and the agency’s New York Division declined to comment. The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.

After retiring from the NYPD in 2008, Dzikansky joined Stefansky in an ephemeral for-profit venture called Intelligence3, according to an archived webpage, and later with PGS as an instructor, according to public records. Intelligence 3 was doing business as a company owned by former Washington state Sen. Joseph Zarelli.

“Yisroel had a unique perspective on terrorism,” Zarelli told Prism. “When the U.S. suffered its attack on 9/11, there was this need to try to understand more what the enemy looked like and how to change policing to address that.”

Stefansky appears to have leveraged the fear of terrorism to sell his services to American police. “Its [sic] now happened in Europe NEXT comes America. … Time to send they [sic] guys to Israel,” he wrote in an email to a police chief in Washington state after the 2015 deadly attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in France.

“This country has always been afraid,” Albury said of the U.S. “I think the Israelis capitalize on that fear.”

But what exactly has ASTI been teaching American police officers in Israel? According to a 2018 grant request by Austin police to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, officers turned to ASTI to learn “‘battle proven’ methods and doctrines.”

Intelligence Training

ASTI instructors include former officials of the Israel Security Agency, also known as Shabak or Shin Bet, according to biographies included in public records.

In January 2014, Stefansky offered a briefing with Shin Bet veterans at the King County Emergency Operations Center in Renton, Washington, according to emails obtained by Prism. Stefansky also met directly with Tacoma police, offering to provide a lecture titled “Understanding Terrorism Risks mindset and how to stay head [sic] of the threat.”

King County Office of Emergency Management’s Public Information Officer Sheri Badger told Prism that different agencies host events at its facilities and that this event was not hosted by the department.

One month after the 2014 meeting in Tacoma, Stefansky proposed an “intelligence program” that he and a former Shin Bet officer could “build up” for the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) and the Tacoma Police Department in Washington state.

The proposal was called “Methodical Intelligence Coverage” (MIC), designed “to cover a population or targets defined as a criminal/security risk by a network of intelligence sources,” including targets such as “demonstrations.”

The timing of the Israeli proposal came amid a lawsuit alleging that an undercover U.S. Army intelligence agent had infiltrated a group of anti-war activists in Washington state. Activists alleged that the infiltration deprived them of their First Amendment rights and violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits military personnel from enforcing civilian law. The lawsuit was later dismissed.

Prism previously reported that the PCSO detective who received intelligence from the undercover Army operative at the center of the case previously attended human-source intelligence training in Israel hosted by the ministry of public security, which Stefansky also attended.

Carly Cappetto, a spokesperson for PCSO, told Prism that the MIC program was never implemented, but details of the proposal reveal that it would have placed Israeli nationals with direct ties to the Israeli intelligence services inside American municipal law enforcement agencies to implement an Israeli human-source intelligence framework for American police.

Drew Hendricks, one of the activists who helped reveal the identity of the U.S. Army officer, told Prism that he believed multiple suspected law enforcement spies transiently lived with or had access to activists. The core damage these spies do within communities is to erode trust between friends and peers, Hendricks wrote on his website.

A Counterinsurgency Mentality

In 2019, ASTI training objectives included to examine “proactive intelligence techniques to identify terror and criminal threats” and to “evaluate the strategies and tactics learned during the course and how they can be applied to the threats faced in their own communities.”

ASTI trainees learned about “identifying, developing, and running [human] sources” in 2017. A bullet point list in the trip notes include “Motives: money, ideology, personal issues, extortion,” and that “if the case officers doesn’t [sic] find the hidden motive, then the recruitment will not succeed.”

ASTI training notes also state that Israeli interrogators “rely heavily on confessions.” However, the notes don’t include details about Israeli methods of extracting confessions, which human rights organizations have said amount to “torture and ill-treatment” and can include electric shocks, blackmail, and torture.

The U.S. government also used torture in the field at CIA black sites and detention camps such as Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and welcomed information gleaned from Israeli interrogations. In Chicago, entire new community networks have been established to heal and support victims of police torture.

University of Chicago sociology professor Julian Go is the author of “Policing Empires,” which details the feedback loops that occur between military tactics used abroad and their eventual adoption into policing on America’s city streets. Go told Prism that he sees a counterinsurgency mentality within the ASTI training materials.

“This mentality that we’re constantly under siege at any moment, anyone could be a threat and so you have to adopt this militarized attitude,” Go said. “The fact that [ASTI instructors] come from this kind of military security background tracks perfectly well with the anti-Muslim stereotypes that they’re projecting, because as a system, they have long depended upon constructing these kinds of stereotypes of the enemy.”

Who Attended the Trainings?

Multiple ASTI and PGS trainees occupy and have occupied top police command and intelligence positions across the U.S.

Austin police lieutenants wrote a rousing recommendation after a 2017 ASTI trip. “Security and intelligence specialists accompanied us on our travels and provided historical, geographic, and ideological context throughout the trip,” read a “letter of support” signed by six lieutenants. “Although the trip was not a personal or religious vacation, the ASTI staff still took time to explain the religious and historical background of each site we visited and traveled through.”

Austin police did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2018, members of the Austin police returned to Israel to train with ASTI again, including a visit to an Israeli military camp in the occupied Golan Heights.

Seattle police detective and Joint Terrorism Task Force Officer Rik Hall also attended PGS training in 2014. At the time, Hall was recognized as an expert in the “Criminal Anarchist movement” and had “attended training regarding anarchism as well as working cases involving persons who use tactics, clothing and methods consistent with black bloc anarchism,” according to an affidavit Hall authored in 2012. Hall was also involved in surveilling the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, according to Real Change.

Hall, who has since left the department, did not respond to a request for comment.

Prior to a Denver Urban Area Security Initiative conference featuring Stefansky and Dzikansky in 2010, a group of Denver-area police officers and emergency managers traveled to Israel for training with PGS. One of those officials was Adams County Sheriff Chief Shane Heiter, who now runs Colorado’s Flatrock law enforcement training compound.

Heiter did not respond to requests for comment.

The Israeli training of American law enforcement has attracted significant public attention and criticism, in one case even leading the Bellevue Police Department in Washington state to withdraw from an ASTI trip in 2018, according to emails obtained by Prism. However, even some attendees questioned the ultimate substantive value of ASTI training altogether.

“While Americans can take away some direct lessons learned, some of the lessons learned do not have direct application without first looking at [U.S. constitutional] Amendment rights,” then-Santa Clara County Fire Department Battalion Chief Douglas Young wrote in a synopsis after his trip.

Counterintelligence

A PCSO deputy wrote in 2014 that the feedback he received from staff’s last visit for training in Israel was that “the information they provided was of little if any value.”

Still, the Israeli training builds on the relationships and exposure between American law enforcement and former Israeli intelligence operatives.

In 2013, PGS propositioned the Seattle Police Department to partner “in establishing the foundational relationships necessary to develop a regional response plan, which includes coordination between the public and private sector.” In 2014, Stefansky sent a similar letter to a Dallas police assistant chief, proposing to “be a partner in developing a regional response plan for your jurisdiction.”

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the top FBI agent in the Mobile Field Office in Alabama said in a recorded video message that ASTI had sent him 1,000 N95 surgical masks as a gift. In that same video, the mayor of Mobile said that in 2019, Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s son, was in town “working with our first responders, with the FBI, trying to understand what we were doing and also encouraging us to come over there and learn some of the strategies and tactics that they have.”

In response to questions from Prism, FBI Mobile Division Acting Public Affairs Specialist Tammy Williams declined to comment.

In a May 2022 radio interview, host Aaron Fruh said that Stefansky was traveling to the U.S. “with folks from the Shin Bet security helping our FBI and police force around the country deal with terrorism.” In the U.S., Stefansky met with a contingent from the city of Seattle, bringing two veteran Shin Bet officers with him, according to a flyer, an email, and other records obtained through public records requests. Social media posts show that ASTI instructors then traveled to New York and Cleveland to attend a national Homeland Security conference that summer.

“The collaboration between the FBI, Mossad, and Shin Bet is significant,” Albury, the former FBI agent, told Prism. “There are joint trainings, deployments of several months or longer to learn Arabic and counterterrorism tactics. It’s quite common, which then results in the FBI coming back with this view and understanding of terrorism from a very distorted perspective.”

The FBI Seattle Division declined to confirm to Prism whether Stefansky met with the agency.

“The FBI has conversations with individuals for a variety of reasons on a daily basis,” FBI Seattle Public Affairs Specialist Amy Alexander told Prism in an email.

In a 2011 speech to El Shaddai Ministries, Stefansky said, “Washington state is considered, in the eyes of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, as one of the most hostile states for the state of Israel.”

That same year, in Washington state, the Pierce County sheriff ordered a Washington State Regional Intelligence Group to “put its ear to the ground” prior to a visit Stefansky was coordinating for an Israeli minister. After contact with Stefansky, local law enforcement began collecting intelligence to support the security interests of the Israeli delegation, according to emails exchanged between PCSO officers. Stefansky was the Israeli “protection detail point of contact,” according to a Puyallup police operations plan for the event obtained through a public records request. “The only concern expressed by [the minister’s] security detail is for political protest to erupt outside the event,” the plan states.

“No protesters,” Stefansky wrote to a PCSO sergeant at the time.

Albury told Prism, “It’s my belief and understanding that in terms of your example, the Israelis are actively recruiting law enforcement professionals in the U.S. to do their bidding, to normalize their presence, to further the Israeli narrative and to position themselves in such a way so that others can be targeted and developed to expand this intelligence collection activity.”

Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.