Mix NSA, a cyber data center and sales scam, and you get a conspiracy theory

Israeli peddlers posing as art students are going door-to-door in suburban Salt Lake City asking questions about the massive data center the National Security Agency plans to build nearby, according to a report last month by the local television station.

The Army Corps of Engineers, working on behalf of NSA, awarded a $1.2 billion contract on Sept. 24 to a consortium of construction companies to build a data center at Camp Williams, a Utah National Guard base near Salt Lake City, as part of the government's program to better protect its computer networks from attacks.

Kerry Cole, a sergeant with the police department in Saratoga Springs, Utah, a town of 16,000 people located seven miles south of state-owned Camp Williams, said residents complained last month about Israelis who said they were students and were soliciting neighborhoods selling art to pay for their education, an activity illegal without a license.

Cole said he interviewed four students and their manager -- all of whom had Israeli passports -- and determined they were not students, but salespeople. "The manager admitted this was a scam," he said in an August police department blotter.

A Salt Lake City ABC-TV affiliate reported on the sales scam in a Sept. 29 article headlined "Door-to-Door Spies in Utah County?" It added bulletins and blogs from the Church of Latter Day Saints, which warned the supposed students were spies. "Part of their mission here is to gain information on the new NSA installation coming to our area," the station reported one church bulletin said.

Cole said he knew nothing about any link to the NSA data center, adding he had reported the incident to federal immigration officials, "who did not seem too concerned." This past weekend, the Jerusalem Post in Israel picked up the ABC story and asked in a headline, "Are Mossad Agents Selling Paintings in Utah?" Mossad is Israel's intelligence agency.

This is not the first time Israelis posing as art students have been linked to spying. Salon reported in May 2002 that "young Israelis claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale had been attempting to penetrate [Drug Enforcement Administration] offices for over a year. . . . The Israelis had also attempted to penetrate the offices of other law enforcement and Department of Defense agencies. Strangest of all, the 'students' had visited the homes of numerous DEA officers and other senior federal officials."

The Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, which handles media queries for the Western United States, did not respond to a query from Nextgov about the activities of the art students in Salt Lake City; NSA declined to comment and suggested Nextgov contact the FBI and the Utah State Police.