Gideon's Spies

It would later be suggested in some reports that a car had been left for them in a nearby side street and Pierre had driven the team to a predetermined pick-up point in the south of Syria for an Israeli air force helicopter to collect them. Eyewitnesses would claim they saw a helicopter flying out to sea. Another report said they had left Damascus airport on night flights to Europe. But nobody would ever know.

On the Friday, February 15, following his assassination, Mughniyeh was buried at a huge Hezbollah funeral in Beirut from where he had first launched his terrorist activities. His mother, Um-Imad, sat amid a sea of black chadors, a somber old woman who wailed that her son had planned to visit her on what had turned out to be the day after he had died.

A few days later, she received an envelope. Inside was a copy of one of the pictures taken of Mughniyeh’s face when he had undergone his successful plastic surgery. He had been her third son to die in a Mossad car bombing.

CHAPTER 30 A PERSONAL NOTE

Any account of a secret intelligence service is the real expression of a nation’s subconscious, the history of the nation it serves. For any nation, the first line of defense is knowledge. Nowhere is this truism more apt than in the State of Israel and its relationship with Mossad.

This book is an updated edition of the one I first published eleven years ago. At the time, it was generously described by Meir Amit, a former director-general of Mossad, as an account which “tells it like it was—and like it is.” While other critics have praised the book in similar terms, the truth is that no work about an intelligence service can ever hope to unravel the full story of its activities. How close I came, the reader can judge; the one certainty is that no non-Israeli writer has ever been permitted to come so close. Mossad understandably guards its secrets jealously and with whom it shares some of them. I learned more than I ever expected in the two-and-a-half years I originally spent working with, not for, Mossad to research, write, narrate, and produce the only film the service has allowed to be made of its activities. Called The Spying Machine, the documentary was shown on Britain’s Channel-4 network and elsewhere in the world. It, too, received generous praise.

Since then I have maintained a close professional relationship with the spies of Israel and other services. Though some of them have become friends, my work is far from that of the embedded journalists who have become too often sycophants of wars since the September 11 attacks. The spies I have had the privilege to know are also far removed from the Bond image. They believe that unpleasant facts about their work should be faced, and that they are readily cast in the mold of Thomas Beckett, in a world where lies spin faster and faster.

As with the original edition, much of the subsequent updating has remained until now beyond the public domain. In part I was lucky in having my late father-in-law as an officer in MI6 during the Cold War; that connection made it easy to break down the understandable wariness the intelligence world has of outsiders asking questions, the more so when the answers are not always easy to present fairly. At times though, that reticence opened some doors as agents and their controllers saw the opportunity to explain themselves. Among those I spoke to were William Casey, the CIA director; Meir Amit, the director-general of Mossad; Rafi Eitan, its celebrated director of operations; and Marcus Wolff, a former head of Stasi, the East German intelligence service. The names of others, who still serve, will have to remain anonymous. But to them, in particular, I express genuine gratitude; without their help it would have been impossible to update this account of Mossad.

The time frame of some of their recollections falls somewhere between recent history and fading memory. But what was so remarkable, and rewarding, was how time and again an interviewee would go to great trouble to check his personal recall with official records and a wide variety of private material. In the beginning I had wondered what motivated them to provide such cooperation. One day, as I was walking through Rafi Eitan’s garden in a break between filming his recollections, he suddenly turned to me and said: “I don’t want anything for my help except the guarantee you will present only the facts. And if you can convey the most important fact of all, that intelligence has changed dramatically in the past twenty years with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Communism, I will be satisfied.” He had paused, looked at me and smiled, flexing his hands. “You fail to do that and I won’t be happy.”