Ronald Payne - Mossad: Israels Most Secret Service

Mossad: Israels Most Secret Service

Ronald Payne

Copyright Ronald Payne 1990

The right of Ronald Payne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

First published in the United Kingdom in 1990 by Bantam Press.

This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

Table of Contents

Part One The Spyocracy

Chapter One The Institute

Of all the worlds intelligence services, the most intriguing is Mossad. Its full title the Institute for Intelligence and Special Services sets the tone. The CIA is an agency and calls itself the company; the British SIS is a service and calls itself the firm. Mossad is an institute, academic and scientific, combined with the firepower backup of special services. Clever man-tough man is the game it is best fitted to play.

The fact that Mossad operates on behalf of a country surrounded by avowed enemy states in which every citizen is conscious of the continual threat of war makes it a secret service quite unlike any other. Even inside Israels disputed borders there is now constant hostility from the Arab population in the occupied territories, and life is no longer normal in the sense in which that word is used in European countries. In addition, the long shadow of the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews perished going, as the younger generation in Israel is constantly reminded, like lambs to the slaughter touches every family in the new homeland. Pride in being Jewish and determination to prove that never again will they let their defences down has its effect upon everybody in the service, from the youngest recruit to the most experienced veteran. For such reasons, the men and women of the Israeli intelligence community are more dedicated than their equally patriotic colleagues who work in the same line of business in other countries on behalf of the CIA, KGB or MI6. The external threat to Israel is much more tangible, much more apparent than that to the superpowers. In 1953 the acting head of Israeli intelligence issued an order of the day to mark the foundation of the service: For our state which since its creation has been under siege by its enemies intelligence constitutes the first line of defence. Located as we are in the heart of the Middle East with its upheavals and shocks, we must learn well how to recognize what is going on around us.

In the world of secrets where they discuss the rise and fall of intelligence services, Mossad, and Aman military intelligence, enjoy an enviable reputation for devotion and efficiency. The best intelligence service in the world, was the judgement of the CIA in a report upon them. To their friends and there were many their exploits seemed admirable. Enemies feared the aura of success that grew around Mossad.

Did they not rescue persecuted Jews trapped in hostile lands in Iraq, Morocco and Ethiopia; bring to justice murderers and torturers like Adolf Eichmann; and rescue airline hostages in famous assaults when all seemed lost? The long-range rescue of hijacked passengers aboard an Air France flight taken to Entebbe remains a classic example of operational anti-terrorist daring and efficiency. The skill of Mossad agents became legendary as they fought against the forces of terrorism throughout the world, and supplied a fund of information enabling security forces in the West to ward off many perils.

Many of them did not live to tell the tale. Some were murdered in lonely alleys; some were blown to pieces by bombs; others were publicly hanged in the main squares of Damascus, Baghdad or Cairo. There were those who did not return from desperate missions, and their fate will never be known. It was to commemorate the lives and deaths of many such heroes that their families banded together to demand a public memorial to them. Bowing before such poignant pressure, a former head of Mossad took over as chairman of the organizing committee which raised $2 million to build a dignified shrine. Constructed of monumental angular blocks of sandstone, it stands at the Centre for Special Studies in Herzliyah, north of Tel Aviv. Suitably enough, the building was conceived as a kind of labyrinth with five alcoves, each representing a period in the history of Israels intelligence operations. The idea of such a maze, explained a veteran of the service, was to create the impression of an interminable search of changing direction. Complexity and infinity are at the core of intelligence-gathering. On the walls have been engraved with pride the names of 360 of the fallen who were members of all three branches of the intelligence community, Mossad, Aman and Shin Beth, the counter-espionage service.

The first agent to lose his life in the service of the new state was Jacob Bokai, a Syrian-born Jew executed in August 1949 after being arrested as he entered Jordan disguised as an Arab refugee. A painter named Shalom Dani died of natural causes in 1963; his name is inscribed on the roll of honour for his crucial skills as the man who forged the documents for the Mossad team which snatched Eichmann in Latin America. One secret revealed by the memorial was the name of Yacov Bar Simantov, a diplomat murdered outside his home in Paris. The fact that he is remembered in the memorial confirmed posthumously, and for the first time, that he was a Mossad agent. Some of the names recorded, like that of Eli Cohen, a master-spy finally caught and executed in Damascus, are famous. For secret agents the price of fame is exposure and death, for only then are their exploits revealed. The deeds of many of those commemorated here must remain secret for ever, except to their colleagues, and sometimes to their relations. Former intelligence officers who act as curators say that the work of some of their dead colleagues remains so confidential that their names may not be recorded. Even in death their clandestinity is preserved. It is entirely in keeping with the brave and sentimental ways of Israelis and of Mossad that it should become possibly the only secret service in the world to have its own public memorial.

The CIA may have greater technical resources; the KGB is no doubt bigger and more methodical; but no intelligence service is more feared than Mossad. The popular view of its activities in the outside world is of an efficient, cunning and dreadnought secret service. I have been struck by the fact that, whenever it was mentioned that I was writing a book about Mossad, the question asked most frequently by those without knowledge of such things was, Isnt that a dangerous thing to do?

It is true that on occasion Mossad does not shrink from borrowing terrorist methods from its Middle Eastern enemies, which in any case were familiar to some of its original agents who had carried out assassination and kidnap raids in the battles for Israeli independence. After the Munich massacre of 5 September 1972 they conducted a long hunt across the world for twelve suspects and killed them, one after the other. Operatives broke many laws, and their interrogations were fierce, prolonged and scientific. But other agents went out into hostile countries to rescue fellow Jews in danger of persecution simply because they were Jews. Nor should it be forgotten that, because of Israels peculiar diplomatic problems, intelligence officers were forced to act in the role of clandestine diplomats in Africa and Asia. In Arab countries which, out of friendship for the Palestinians, refused to recognize the state of Israel, Mossad performed the complicated tasks of hidden diplomacy without benefit of immunity.

Mossad agents have helped to win wars; they have overthrown Arab regimes; and they have irritated European governments and the US administration by flouting the accepted rules of international behaviour. Using underhand tricks they procured uranium for Israels atomic bomb, and bombed and raided in Iraq and France to delay the moment they dreaded when an enemy Arab state might acquire its own atomic bomb. Agents dramatically spirited away from Cherbourg the gunboats under construction for Israel in France when the French refused to deliver them as a mark of their disapproval of Israels policy.