Gideon's Spies

For four long years the rivalry, squabbling, and sniping had gone on at all those meetings Ben-Gurion had chaired to try and resolve matters among the intelligence community. A promising foreign ministry plan to use a French diplomat as a spy in Cairo had been thwarted by the defense ministry. It wanted its own man for the job. The young officer, with no real experience of intelligence work, was caught in weeks by Egyptian security officers. Israeli agents in Europe were discovered to be working in the rampant black market to finance their work because there was an insufficient official budget to pay for their spying activities. Attempts to recruit the moderate Druze forces in Lebanon had ended when rival Israeli intelligence agencies disagreed on how they could be used. Often grandiose schemes were wrecked by mutual suspicion. Naked ambition was everywhere.

Powerful men of the day—Israel’s foreign minister, the army chief of staff, and ambassadors—all fought to establish the supremacy of their favorite service over the others. One wanted the focus to be on the collection of economic and political information. Another thought intelligence should concentrate purely on the military strength of the enemy. The ambassador to France insisted intelligence should be run the way the French Resistance had operated in World War II, with every Jew in the land being mobilized. The ambassador to Washington wanted his spies protected by diplomatic cover and “integrated in the routine work of the embassy, so as to place them above suspicion.” The Israeli minister to Bucharest wanted his spies to work along the lines of the KGB—and to be as ruthless. Israel’s minister in Buenos Aires demanded that agents concentrate on the role of the Catholic church in helping Nazis to settle in Argentina. Ben-Gurion had patiently listened to every proposal.

Finally, on March 2, 1951, he summoned the heads of the five intelligence agencies to his office. He told them that he intended to place Israel’s intelligence-gathering activities abroad in a new agency called Ha Mossad le Teum, “the Institute for Coordination.” It would have an initial budget of twenty thousand Israeli pounds, of which five thousand pounds would be spent on “special missions, but only with my prior approval.” The new agency would draw its personnel from the existing intelligence agencies. In everyday usage the new agency would be called only Mossad.

Mossad “for all administrative and political purposes” would come under the jurisdiction of the foreign ministry. However, it would have on its staff senior officers representing the other organizations within the Israeli intelligence community: Shin Bet, internal security; Aman, military intelligence; air force intelligence; and naval intelligence. The functions of the officers would be to keep Mossad informed of the specific requirements of their “clients.” In the event of disagreement over any request, the matter would be referred to the prime minister’s office.

In his usual blunt way Ben-Gurion spelled it out. “You will give Mossad your shopping list. Mossad will then go and get the goods. It is not your business to know where they shopped or what they paid for the goods.”

Ben-Gurion would act as a one-man oversight committee for the new service. In a memo to its first chief, Reuven Shiloah, the prime minister ordered “Mossad will work under me, will operate according to my instructions and will report to me constantly.”

The ground rules had been set.

Twenty-eight eventful years after those Jews had sat through the Jerusalem night in September 1929 discussing the vital importance of intelligence to ward off further Arab attacks, their descendants had an intelligence service that would become more formidable than any other in the world.

The birth of Mossad, like that of Israel, was anything but smooth. The service had taken over a spy ring in Iraq that had been operating for some years under the control of the Israel Defense Forces’ Political Department. The prime function of the ring was to penetrate the upper echelons of the Iraqi military and run a clandestine immigration network to bring Iraqi Jews out of the country to Israel.

In May 1951, just nine weeks after Ben-Gurion signed the order creating Mossad, Iraqi security agents in Baghdad swooped down on the ring. Two Israeli agents were arrested, along with dozens of Iraqi Jews and Arabs who had been bribed to run the escape network, which extended across the Middle East. Twenty-eight people were charged with espionage. Both agents were condemned to death, seventeen were given life sentences, and the others were freed “as an example of the fairness of Iraqi justice.”

Both Mossad agents were subsequently released from an Iraqi jail, where they had been severely tortured, in exchange for a substantial sum of money paid into the Swiss bank account of the Iraqi minister of the interior.