Gideon's Spies

Casey’s less-than-full glimpse of what the CIA now believed had happened to Bill Buckley—that Mossad had deliberately done nothing to save him in the hope the PLO could be blamed, so frustrating Arafat’s hopes of gaining sympathy in Washington—provided a chilling insight into the relationship between two intelligence services supposedly friendly with each other.

Casey had shown there was another side to the ties between the United States and Israel other than fund-raising and other manifestations of American-Jewish solidarity that has turned the Jewish state into a regional superpower out of a fear of the Arab enemy.

Before we parted, Casey had a final thought: “A nation creates the intelligence community it needs. America relies on technical expertise because we are concerned to discover, rather than secretly rule. The Israelis operate differently. Mossad, in particular, equates its actions with the country’s survival.”

This attitude has long made Mossad immune to close scrutiny. But, in two years of research for this book, a series of mistakes—scandals in some cases—has forced the service into Israel’s public consciousness. Questions have been asked, and, if the answers are rarely volunteered, gaps have begun to appear in the protective body armor Mossad has worn against that outside world.

I spoke to more than a hundred persons either directly employed by, or working indirectly for, Israeli and other intelligence services. The interviews were spread over two and a half years. Many of the key people in Mossad agreed to be taped. Those recordings run to eighty hours and are transcribed to some 5,800 pages. There are also some fifteen foolscap notebooks filled with contemporaneous notes. This material will, as with previous books of mine, find their place in the research section of a university library. Several of those I spoke to urged I should focus on recent events; the past should only be used to illustrate events that are relevant to Mossad’s role at the cutting edge of the current frontiers of espionage and intelligence gathering. Many interviews were with participants who had not been questioned before; often no amount of probing could produce a comfortingly simple explanation for the way they or others behaved. Many were surprisingly frank, though not all agreed to be fully identified. In the case of serving Mossad personnel, they are prevented by Israeli law from voluntarily allowing their names to be published. Some of the non-Israeli sources asked, and received, a guarantee of anonymity.

On the organization charts newspapers try to piece together and publish, many sources remain among the empty spaces. They still take their anonymity seriously and some wish to be known in these pages by an alias or only a first name: it does not make their testimony less valid. Their personal motives for breaking silence may be many: a need to secure their own place in history; a desire to justify their actions ; the anecdotage of old men; even perhaps expiation. The same can be said for those who agreed to be identified.

Perhaps the best motive of all that drove them to break silence was a real and genuine fear that an organization they had served with pride was increasingly endangered from within—and that the only way to save it was to reveal what it had achieved in the past and what it is doing today. To understand both requires knowing how and why it was created.

CHAPTER 2 BEFORE THE BEGINNING

Since dawn, the faithful had come to the most sacred wall in the world, the only remaining relic of Herod the Great’s Second Temple in Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall. The young and the old, the lean and the fat, the bearded and the halding: all had made their way through the narrow streets or from outside the city walls.

Office clerks walked alongside shepherds from the hills beyond Jerusalem; newly bar mitzvahed youths proudly marched with men in the winter of their years. Teachers from the city’s religious shuls were shoulder to shoulder with shopkeepers who had made the journey from a distance away, from Haifa, Tel Aviv, and the villages around the Sea of Galilee.

Uniformly dressed in black, each carried a prayer book and stood before the towering wall to recite portions of scripture.

Down the centuries, Jews had done that. But this Friday Sabbath in September 1929 was different. Rabbis had urged as many men as possible to be united in public prayer and to show their determination to their right to do so. It was intended not only as an expression of their faith, but also as a visible symbol of their Zionism—and a reminder to the Arab population, who vastly outnumbered them, that they would not be cowed.