Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  By noon, the hour of the shema prayer, there were close to a thousand reading aloud the ancient words of scripture before the yellow sandstone wall. The rise and fall of their voices had its own soothing cadence.

  Then, with stunning swiftness, missiles—stones, broken bottles, and tins filled with rubble—rained down on them. The assault had been launched by Arabs from vantage points around the Wailing Wall. The first crack of gunfire rattled, a ragged volley of musket shots from Muslim marksmen. Jews fell and were dragged away by their fleeing neighbors. Miraculously, no one was killed, though the injured numbered scores.

  That night the leaders of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, met. They quickly realized that their carefully planned demonstration had lacked one essential: foreknowledge of an Arab onslaught.

  One of those present at the meeting spoke for them all: “We need to remember scripture. From King David onward, our people have depended on good intelligence.”

  Over cups of Turkish coffee and sweet pastries were sown the seeds for what would one day become the most formidable intelligence service in the modern world: Mossad. But its creation was still almost a quarter of a century away. All that the Yishuv leaders could suggest as a first practical step on that warm September night was to pool what money they could spare and call upon their neighbors to do the same. The cash would be used to bribe Arabs who were still tolerant toward Jews and who would provide advance warning of further attacks.

  In the meantime Jews would continue to exert their right to pray at the Wailing Wall. They would not depend on the British for protection, but would be defended by the Haganah, the newly formed Jewish militia. In the months to come a combination of prior warning and the presence of the militia faced down Arab attacks. Relative calm between Arab and Jew was restored for the next five years.

  In that period the Jews continued to secretly expand their intelligence gathering. It had no formal name or leadership. Arabs were recruited on an ad hoc basis: peddlers who worked in Jerusalem’s Arab Quarter and shoeshine boys who burnished the boots of Mandate officers were put on the payroll, along with students from the city’s prestigious Arab Rouda College, teachers, and businessmen. Any Jew could recruit an Arab spy; the only condition was the information was shared. Slowly but surely the Yishuv obtained important information not only about Arabs but about British intentions.

  The coming to power of Hitler in 1933 marked the start of the exodus of German Jews to Palestine. By 1936 over three hundred thousand had made the long journey across Europe; many were destitute by the time they reached the Holy Land. Somehow food and accommodations were found for them by the Yishuv. Within months Jews made up over a third of the population. The Arabs reacted as they had before : from the minarets of a hundred mosques came the cries of the mullahs to drive the Zionists back into the sea.

  In every Arab mafafeth, the meeting house where local Arab councilmen met, came the same raised voices of angry protests: We must stop the Jews from taking our land; we must stop the British giving them arms and training them.

  In turn the Jews protested that the opposite was true, that the British were encouraging the Arabs to steal back land lawfully paid for.

  The British continued to try to placate both sides—and failed. In 1936 sporadic fighting flared into full-scale Arab revolt against both the British and the Jews. The British ruthlessly suppressed the rebellion. But the Jews realized it would only be a matter of time before the Arabs struck with renewed fury.

  Throughout the land young Jews rushed to join the Haganah. They became the core of a formidable secret army: physically hardened, crack shots, and as cunning as the desert foxes in the Negev.

  The network of Arab informers was extended. A Haganah Political Department was set up to spread dissension through disinformation. Men who later became legends in the Israeli intelligence community learned their skills in that formative period before the start of World War II. The Haganah—the word means “defense” in Hebrew—became the best informed of all the forces in the Holy Land.

  World War II brought a renewed uneasy peace to Palestine. Jews and Arabs sensed the grim future they would both face if the Nazis won. The first details of what was happening in the death camps of Europe had reached the Yishuv.

  David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin were among those who attended a meeting in Haifa in 1942. There was consensus that the survivors of the Holocaust must be brought to their spiritual home, Eretz Israel. No one could estimate how many there would be, but everyone agreed the arrival of the refugees would rekindle confrontation with the Arabs—and this time the British would openly side against the Jews. Britain had steadfastly said it would refuse to admit the survivors into Palestine after Hitler was defeated, on the grounds it would create a population imbalance.

  Ben-Gurion’s urging for an upgrade of the Haganah’s intelligence capacity was fully endorsed by the meeting. More informers would be recruited. A counterintelligence unit would be formed to uncover Jews who were collaborating with the British and unearth “Jewish communists and dissenters in our midst.” The new unit was known as Rigul Hegdi and was commanded by a former French foreign legionnaire working under cover as a traveling salesman.

  Soon he was turning up Jewish women who consorted with officers of the Mandate; shopkeepers who traded with the British; café owners who entertained them. In the dead of night the culprits were brought before Haganah drumhead courts-martial; the guilty were either sentenced to be severely beaten or were executed in the Judaean hills by a single bullet in the back of the head. It was a precursor to the ruthlessness Mossad would later display.

  By 1945 the Haganah included a unit responsible for procuring arms. Soon caches of Italian and German weapons captured in North Africa after the defeat of Rommel were being smuggled by Jewish soldiers serving with the Allies across the Egyptian Sinai Desert into Palestine. The arms came by ramshackle trucks and camel caravans and were stored in caves in the Wilderness where the Devil had tried to tempt Jesus. One hiding place was close to where the Dead Sea Scrolls were waiting to be discovered.

  After the defeat of Japan in August 1945 ended the war, Jews who had served in Allied military intelligence units arrived to provide their expertise for the Haganah. The elements were in place to deal with what Ben-Gurion had forecast—“the war for our independence.”

  The trigger point he knew would be the bricha, the Hebrew name for the unprecedented operation to bring the Holocaust survivors from Europe. First they came in the hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. Many still wore their concentration camp garb; each bore a tattoo with a Nazi identification number. They came by road and rail through the Balkans and then across the Mediterranean to the shores of Israel. Every available ship had been bought or rented by Jewish relief agencies in the United States—often at highly inflated prices: tramp steamers, coasters, landing craft from the beaches of Normandy, riverboats, anything that could float was pressed into service. There had not been an evacuation like it since Dunkirk in 1940.

  Waiting for the survivors on the beaches between Haifa and Tel Aviv were some of the very British soldiers who had been ferried back to England from Dunkirk. They were there to carry out their government’s order to keep out the Holocaust survivors. There were ugly clashes, but also times when the soldiers, perhaps remembering their own salvation, had looked the other way as a boatload of refugees struggled ashore.

  Ben-Gurion decided that such acts of compassion were not enough. The time had come for the Mandate to end. That could only be done by force. By 1946, he had united the disparate Jewish underground movements. Fired by the unquenchable spirit of those who had first settled the land, the order was given to launch a guerrilla war against both the British and the Arabs.

  Every Jewish commander knew it was a dangerous gamble: fighting on both fronts would stretch their resources to the very limit. The consequences of failure would be dire. Ben-Gurion ordered a noholds-barred policy. Soon the catalog of atrocities w
as appalling on all sides. Jews were shot on suspicion of collaborating with the Haganah. British soldiers were gunned down and their barracks bombed. Arab villages were set to the torch. It was medieval in its ferocity.

  For the Haganah, intelligence was critical, not least to spread disinformation to give the impression in British and Arab eyes that the Jews had far more men than they actually could muster. The British found themselves chasing a will-o’-the-wisp enemy. Among the mandate forces morale began to crumble.

  Sensing an opening, the United States tried to broker a deal in the spring of 1946 urging Britain to admit into Palestine one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors. The plea was rejected and the bitter fighting continued. Finally, in February 1947, Britain agreed to leave Palestine by May 1948. From then on the United Nations would deal with the problems of what would become the State of Israel.

  Realizing there must still be a decisive conflict with the Arabs to ensure the fledgling nation would not be stifled at birth, Ben-Gurion and his commanders knew they must continue to depend on superior intelligence. Vital data were obtained about Arab morale and military strength. Jewish spies positioned in Cairo and Amman stole the attack plans of the Egyptian and Jordanian armies. When what became known as the War of Independence started, the Israelis achieved spectacular military victories. But it also became clear to Ben-Gurion as the fighting continued that eventual victory must be predicated on a clear division between military and political aspirations. When victory did finally come in 1949, that division had not been properly settled—and that had led to feuding within the Israeli intelligence community over its responsibilities in peacetime.

  Rather than dealing with the situation with his usual incisiveness, Ben-Gurion, as Israel’s first prime minister, set up five intelligence services to operate both internally and abroad. The overseas service modeled itself on Britain’s and France’s security services. Both those services readily agreed to work with the Israelis. Contact was also established with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington through the agency’s head of counterintelligence in Italy, James Jesus Angleton. His bonding with Israel’s fledgling spies would play a crucial role in the eventual bridge building between the two intelligence communities.

  Yet, despite this promising start, Ben-Gurion’s dream of an integrated intelligence organization working in harmony died in the birth pangs of a nation itself struggling for a cohesive identity. Muscle flexing remained the order of the day as his ministers and officials fought for power and positions. At every level there were clashes. Who would coordinate an overall intelligence strategy? Who would evaluate raw data? Who would recruit spies? Who should see their reports first? Who would interpret that information for the country’s political leaders?

  Nowhere was the jockeying more relentless than between the foreign ministry and the defense ministry, both of whom claimed the right to operate abroad. Isser Harel, then a young operative, felt his colleagues “saw intelligence work in a romantic and adventurous light. They pretended to be expert in the ways of the whole world … and sought to behave like fictional international spies enjoying their glory as they lived in the shadow of the fine line between law and licentiousness.”

  Meanwhile people continued to die, killed by Arab terrorists and their bombs and booby traps. The armies of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon still threatened. Behind them, millions more Arabs were ready to raise jihad, holy war. No nation on earth had been born into such a hostile environment as Israel.

  For Ben-Gurion there was an almost messianic feeling about the way his people looked to him to protect them, in the way the great leaders of Israel had always done. But he knew he was no prophet, only a hard-bitten street fighter who had won the War of Independence against an Arab enemy with combined forces more than twenty times those at his disposal. There had not been a greater triumph since the boy shepherd David had killed Goliath and routed the Philistines.

  Yet the enemy had not gone away. It had become cleverer and even more ruthless. It struck like a thief in the night, killing without compunction before vanishing.

  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 co
untry 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.

  Another debacle swiftly followed. The Political Department’s longtime spy in Rome, Theodore Gross, now worked for Mossad under the new setup. In January 1952, Isser Harel, then head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, received “incontrovertible proof” that Gross was a double agent, on the payroll of the Egyptian secret service. Harel decided to fly to Rome, where he persuaded Gross to return with him to Tel Aviv, convincing the traitor that he was about to be given a senior post in Shin Bet. Gross was tried in secret, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He would die in prison.