The Alex Odeh case, Frogue, and the ADL

IN THIS MORNING'S LA Times (Evidence emerges), we learn that “new information sheds light on the planning and execution of a bomb plot that killed Alex Odeh in Santa Ana in 1985.”

It could be that, after all these years, we may soon find out who killed Alex Odeh.

Denizens of the SOCCCD, does that name ring a bell?

You remember Steven J. Frogue, right?

In March of 1995, Ked Francis, then a reporter for the Irvine Valley College Voice, interviewed then-SOCCCD trustee Frogue. At one point in the interview, Frogue seemed to praise a local Holocaust denial organization, the IHR:

There is a group, right here in Orange County, called the Institute for Historical Review...they have raised questions about some of this stuff. I've looked at some of their publications, kind of strange and definitely new, I've never seen anything like it before. There's somebody that wants to engage in the debate about the Holocaust. In 1984 their headquarters in Torrance was burned to the ground. Maybe that guy was back from his CIA stint. The guy who killed Alex Odeh, I don't know. It was not terribly long after that the FBI reported most of the terrorist actions in the United States in that previous year had been by pro-Israeli groups....

In those days, Frogue seemed obsessed with two organizations: (1) the IVC Academic Senate, to which he attributed various plots and intrigues, and (2) one of the IHR’s fiercest critics, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish civil rights organization (not to be confused with the Jewish Defense League or JDL, a militant organization).

In an article for the Voice ("Trustee calls IVC senate 'intellectual spur posse'," 3/23/95), Francis reported:

Trustee Steven Frogue continued his month-long attack on the Irvine Valley College Academic Senate and the Anti-Defamation League at a Feb. 27 Board of Trustees' meeting, despite attempts by fellow trustees to reign him in.

Frogue labeled the reading of IVC Senate resolutions condemning his conduct as an "intellectual drive-by shooting"…. The IVC resolutions, read by Senate President Peter Morrison, called for Frogue to "cease his interference in the affairs of the faculty" and condemned his Jan. 23 comments criticizing the ADL and questioning the group's role in Professor Richard Prystowsky's course on the Holocaust.

…Members of the Board of Trustees tried various tactics in an unsuccessful attempt to limit Frogue's comments and keep the meeting focused on its agenda.…The trustees' actions did not dissuade Frogue from again attacking the ADL and its supporters as "thought police" and engaging in an extended diatribe focusing on a Jan. 31 ADL letter criticizing his previous comments.

The only forceful opposition to Frogue at the meeting was presented by Trustee Harriet Walther…She called Frogue's comments associating the ADL with espionage "outrageous" and his statements are "similar to those being promulgated by organizations that are Holocaust deniers."

…In an interview with The Voice, Frogue called Walther's comments a "part of the big lie campaign—tell a lie that's so stunning that it leaves people speechless. I never said that...it's just appalling."…In the same interview, Frogue questioned whether groups that deny the Holocaust exist. He also hinted at possible links between an alleged ADL activist Frogue identifies as Tom Gerard and the death of Middle East peace activist Alex Odeh, whom he had mentioned at the Jan. 31 Board meeting….

Late in 1996, LA Times reporter Michael Granberry profiled Frogue (”Studying the Lessons of Steven J. Frogue,” 11/25/96). There, we’re told that, according to Walther, Frogue “made a public statement at [a board] meeting implying that the ADL was responsible for the slaying of a Middle East peace activist named Alex Odeh.”

OK, so Frogue evidently thought that the ADL was involved in Odeh’s death.

Evidently, the FBI thinks otherwise. Now, we may find out the truth.

In this morning’s Times article, we learn that:

Federal and local authorities have uncovered new evidence in the bombing that killed a prominent Arab American civil rights leader in Santa Ana 22 years ago today, in one of the first acts of modern-day terrorism in the United States.

The undisclosed evidence, including statements from a now-deceased informant, is not expected to immediately solve the slaying of Alex Odeh, but law enforcement officials familiar with the long-running investigation said the information provided new details about how the attack on the onetime Western regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee was planned and carried out.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that the evidence developed in recent months by the FBI and Los Angeles Police Department in a Joint Terrorism Task Force could help investigators eventually bring charges in the case.

…Alex Odeh, 41, was killed and seven people were injured Oct. 11, 1985, when a bomb exploded as he opened the door to the committee's Santa Ana office.

The attack occurred 12 hours after Odeh appeared on a local television broadcast and criticized the news media for linking the Palestine Liberation Organization to the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro.

Within days of Odeh's death, the FBI said it believed the militant Jewish Defense League was behind the attack as well as two other bombings months earlier on the East Coast.

The link, authorities said at the time, involved the explosive devices used in all three incidents. The JDL was founded in 1968 by Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn rabbi who moved to Israel in 1970 and founded the Kach Party, which called for forcibly removing all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. He was assassinated in New York in 1990 by an Arab extremist.

After the FBI's comments about the JDL and the Odeh investigation, JDL leader Irv Rubin called the alleged link "absurd, obscene and outrageous" and accused the FBI of slander.

But even as the bureau later softened its public comments linking the JDL to the attack, its investigation continued to center on the possibility that members of the organization knew more than they were admitting about who had planned and carried out the attacks.

Over the years, in fact, the FBI focused on several onetime JDL members in its investigation of Odeh's death.

In 2005, former JDL member Earl Krugel was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for plotting to bomb a Culver City mosque and the field office of U.S. Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista), who is an Arab American. Rubin was also charged in the bomb plot.

As part of a plea agreement, Krugel promised to help federal authorities in the Odeh investigation and was said to have provided the names of several people mentioned by JDL leader Rubin as being involved in the bomb plot.

One source close to the probe told The Times in 2005 that three of the people were former JDL members Keith Fuchs, Andy Green and Robert Manning, all of whom had been publicly identified as possible suspects in the case as far back as 1988.

Fuchs and Green are believed to be living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Manning is serving a life prison term in California for the 1980 letter bomb slaying of Patricia Wilkerson, a Manhattan Beach secretary who was killed when she opened a package intended for her boss, who prosecutors said was having a business dispute with a JDL member.

Less than two months after he was sentenced to prison in Phoenix, Krugel was slain by a fellow prisoner. Former JDL leader Rubin died in November 2002 after leaping from a balcony at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center, where both he and Krugel had been held since their arrest in December 2001. Authorities termed Rubin's death a suicide….

Both Rubin and Krugel attended SOCCCD board meetings to protest Frogue’s proposed “forum” on the Warren Commission, which was to invite four “experts,” two or three of whom were associated with a notorious anti-Semitic organization, Liberty Lobby.

See:
• Night of the Nazi
• Oh, what a night! Nazis and JDL thugs.