Spies Against Armageddon

Prepare, in the chapters ahead, to learn what Israel’s intelligence agencies—led by the Mossad—are doing, day and night, to protect their own country and, by extension, Western nations. From an Israeli point of view, it is an unceasing, secret war. And the Israelis feel they have no choice but to win every time.

Crisis Day is coming. Iran may try to rush toward construction of nuclear bombs; Muslim terrorists could again attack America—or both calamities might occur. The president of the United States would surely ask: What do the Israelis say? What do they know? What are they up to that they may
not
be telling us? And what can the Mossad do?

Just as the Statue of Liberty and McDonald’s became snappy synonyms for America, “Mossad” has become an internationally recognized Israeli brand name. More importantly, with the Middle East almost constantly on the edge of upheaval, the Jewish state’s foreign espionage agency is a player in some of the biggest, though hidden, dramas of our time.

Is the Mossad really so good at what it does? Yes, as we document in this book—especially considering Israel’s lilliputian size—it is stunningly effective. Yet, the pages to come will show that in more than 60 years, Israeli intelligence has made its share of mistakes. It succeeds or fails due mostly to the quality of its people: They are excellent. They are motivated. But they are human and, thus, fallible.

The agency’s full name is
HaMossad l’Modi’in u’l’Tafkidim Meyuchadim,
Hebrew for The Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks. It has a few thousand employees, and in the past decade it has gone slightly public with a website.

Mossad.gov.il discloses that its staff has an official motto: “Where there is no counsel, the people fall; but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.”

The noun “counsel” is in the translation chosen by the Mossad for its English-language internet page, but that fails to capture the flavor of the Hebrew word
takhbulot
in the Book of Proverbs, chapter 11, verse 14. It can also be translated as “deception,” “trickery,” “stratagem,” or even “wise direction,” but always is aimed at confounding the intentions of one’s opponents.

The motto that the Mossad finds inspiring thus adds up to this: Without tricky plans, Israel would fall; but when there is plenty of information, Israel finds salvation.

A former Mossad director, Efraim Halevy, told us that an even more apt motto might be: “Everything is do-able.” That attitude encapsulates the spirit of the Mossad.

The agency’s reputation for decisive action and hyperactivity has inevitably led to a mystique: that it is all-powerful, all-knowing, ruthless, and capable of penetrating every corner of the world.

Israel may not have intentionally created the image, but surely takes advantage of it. When feats, some of them seemingly unbelievable, are ascribed to the Mossad by the international press and politicians, Israel’s spymasters say nothing.

This policy of ambiguity magnifies the mystique, which in turn helps sow fear among Israel’s enemies. The nation does not admit to having nuclear weapons, although a nearly complete history of how it achieved that status—and how the atomic ambiguity is preserved—will be found in these pages.

There is a misconception, however. The Mossad is just one part of the Israeli intelligence community, which includes other agencies that are no less important: the domestic Shin Bet and the military Aman.

These are the big three, and in fact Aman—military intelligence—has the greatest financial and human resources and contributes the most to Israel’s national security.

This book will also reveal two smaller, specialized parts of Israel’s clandestine defense. One, which can be termed “Jewish intelligence,” helps Jews exercise Israel’s legislated Right of Return to their people’s ancient homeland—where they are granted instant citizenship—and also protects them when they get into trouble outside Israel.

The other small unit, which was launched officially for “science liaison” and was nominally disbanded after Jonathan Pollard was caught spying in the United States in 1985, has been responsible for building and protecting Israel’s most important deterrent capability: secret, nuclear, and officially unconfirmed.

Like the country’s nuclear ambiguity, the Mossad has chosen to remain mostly masked—leaving others to distort and misattribute many mysterious events. The distortions may be traced to glorification of the spy agency, hostility toward Israel, or mere speculation. As imaginations run amok, charlatans publish what they will: that when British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell fell off his yacht, the Mossad drowned him; that Israeli intelligence caused the car crash that killed Princess Diana; that Mossad operatives are primarily artists of assassination; that every Israeli arrested for drug dealing is serving the Mossad; and, most absurdly, that the Mossad orchestrated 9/11.

This book intends to shed light on the true nature of the Israeli intelligence community, viewing its development—from the beginning until today—through the prism of the country’s unique history.

The Jewish state has been at war from the moment David Ben-Gurion declared statehood in 1948. And Israeli leaders still consider themselves to be at war every day.

Yet, being “at war” differs entirely from the 1948 War of Independence. It is also not the lightning-quick six-day victory of 1967. And the intelligence community wants to ensure that there is no repeat of Yom Kippur in 1973, when a surprise attack by Arab militaries could have been thwarted had Israel listened to astoundingly well-placed agents in Egypt.

This is an even more hazardous era, in which war brings the lethal crash of incoming missiles that may have nuclear or chemical warheads, fired by enemies who also make their own technological advances.

One of the major roles of intelligence, therefore, is to avoid all-out war.

The goal now is to win—or, thinking of Iran, to distract and delay the enemy’s most dangerous plans—without committing large numbers of troops and planes, and without putting a major part of the Israeli population at risk from attacks by hostile neighbors’ forces.

This book will reveal more than Israel has ever been willing to declare publicly about assassinations as a tool, about its flattening in 2007 of a nuclear reactor in Syria, and about the sabotage and murders aimed at choking Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The original mission of intelligence in the Middle East’s eternal, complex chess game focused on preparing for the next war. Now, Israel’s spymasters continually wage war by stealth, sabotage, disinformation, and killing.

The soldiers, pilots, and sailors of the Israel Defense Forces, meantime, work closely in league with the country’s intelligence agencies. The chapters to come will show how the modern, highly adaptive IDF does not limit itself to deploying soldiers with guns. Special-operations fighters, not necessarily uniformed, go on daring missions inside enemy countries. These military men and women are also spies, no less than are Mossad operatives.

Israel increasingly takes full advantage of its cutting-edge drone aircraft, eavesdropping systems, and spy-in-the-sky satellites that have become a vital part of the tiny nation’s ever-widening defense network.

The entire intelligence community—not only the Mossad—reflects the Israeli condition: a small country, vastly at variance from its neighbors in religion, culture, and values; with neighbors who do not accept its right to exist, or at best are willing to coexist reluctantly.

Israeli intelligence thus developed a style that is bold, willing to take risks, and aspires to be innovative at all times. It has to get along with less, and it compensates for quantity deficiencies by developing qualitative excellence.

“The human factor is the biggest and most crucial for our society and our security services,” said the late Meir Amit, who directed both the Mossad and Aman in the 1960s.

His observation remains valid today. The Mossad’s “success and fulfillment of its complex tasks depend on the quality of the people who serve it, form its core, and are its driving force,” the agency’s current director, Tamir Pardo, writes on its website. He hopes that his employees are “only the finest and most suitable people,” who see their work as a “contribution to the fortification of the State of Israel’s security.” To that they “dedicate their skills and talents, determination and persistence and values.”

Several Israelis now serving as Mossad operatives have said that their main motivation is protecting their country and their families. They also tend to be the type of competitive people who want to excel at absolutely everything they do.

The Mossad website invites job applications from “people who are creative and fans of challenges, who look for interesting things and different and special work—a role that is interesting, unconventional, and dynamic,” starting with a year of training.

Candidates should have “good teamwork ability, curiosity and openness to learning, high learning capabilities, creativity and thinking outside the box, foreign language capabilities at a high level, and a willingness to work irregular hours and to take frequent trips abroad.”

A troubling fact for Israel, with the wartime mentality it has never shaken off, is the inherent contradiction between democracy and clandestine defense.

Israel—long before other Western societies faced the issue in the post-9/11 era—struggled to find a balance. Is it absurd to have a secret subculture protecting a nation’s freedom? The cohabitation has been far from smooth.

For many years, Shin Bet security operatives lied in court and were willing to sacrifice democratic values on the altar of fighting terrorism. Most Israelis did not raise objections. They preferred to sleep at night, vaguely knowing that they were being protected.

Abuses were, to Israel’s credit, exposed and dealt with by the courts, an active news media, and the desire by some in the public for transparency.

An additional dissonance exists. Even if intelligence personnel adhere to Israeli laws and values, their work routinely involves violating the sovereignty and legal systems of other nations—to the point of killing individual enemies in foreign capitals.

The heart of the issue, now familiar to the United States and other countries, is how to honor and strengthen our freedoms while combating hostile forces seeking to crush our values.

The intelligence communities in democratic societies have to cope with a no-win situation. The “good guys” have to respect the law, at least at home, while terrorists take advantage of a system they totally abhor: suing their interrogators, tying up courts in lengthy trials, and even demanding that judges release them from prison on human-rights grounds. These are liberties that they, in their countries of origin, would not think of granting to anyone.

Since the start in 1948, Israeli leaders have adopted as a guiding principle the sense that they have their backs against the wall. Their country is so small—and, especially in its pre-1967 borders, so narrow—that some analysts speak of calamities that could lead to the nation’s destruction. A few nuclear bombs going off in the center of Israel would kill most of its population.

Armageddon, in Christian lore, is said to be the site of a final battle between good and evil. While the location is reputed to be a hill near Megiddo, in the Valley of Jezreel in northern Israel, Jews do not expect or seek an apocalyptic event. Yet, Israel’s intelligence community—time and again—has had the task of waging secret war aimed at pulling its country back from the brink of an awful situation. Making mistakes in the current campaign against Iran’s nuclear program could be highly destructive.

Twenty-two years ago, we wrote
Every Spy a Prince
, a history of Israeli intelligence that considered some of these issues. Since then, much has happened and many key figures and governments have been removed from the scene—some peacefully, and many violently. Egypt, since signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, had become a mainstay for stability in the region, but the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 shook all Middle East foundations to the core. Many Arab countries continue to quaver.

With the passage of time, as Israel’s challenges changed, we obtained more access than before. Documents, once locked away, have become available; more people involved in these dramas became willing to talk; and agencies and officials, so clandestine that they could not legally be named, have stepped into the light. We have managed to interview most of the chiefs of the agencies and many top operatives.

Our mission is to shed new light on historical events. We intend to put into perspective the challenges that continue to emerge from a troubled and strategic region, once again on the verge of a major crisis that could affect us all.

Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman

June 2012

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