A crestfallen Reuven Shiloah resigned, a broken man. He was replaced by Harel, who would remain Mossad’s chief for eleven years, a tenure never equaled.
Senior staff who welcomed him to Mossad headquarters on that September morning in 1952 could hardly have been impressed with Harel’s physical appearance. He was barely four feet eight inches tall, with jug ears, and he spoke Hebrew with a heavy central European accent; his family had emigrated from Latvia in 1930. His clothes looked as if he had slept in them.
His first words to the assembled staff were: “The past is over. There will be no more mistakes. We will go forward together. We talk to no one except ourselves.”
That same day he gave an example of what he meant. After lunch he summoned his driver. When the man asked where they were going, he was told the destination was a secret; dismissing the driver, Harel set off by himself at the wheel of the car. He returned with a box of bagels for the staff. But the point had been made. He would ask the questions.
That was the defining moment that endeared Harel to his demoralized staff. He set about energizing them with his own example. He traveled secretly to hostile Arab countries to personally organize Mossad networks. He interviewed every person who wanted to join the service. He looked for those who, like him, had a kibbutz background.
“People like that know our enemy,” he told a senior aide who questioned the policy. “The kibbutzniks live close to the Arabs. They have learned not only to think like them—but think faster.”
Harel’s patience was as legendary as his bursts of anger; his loyalty to his staff became equally renowned. All those outside his closed circle were looked upon with suspicion as “unprincipled opportunists.” He had no dealings with persons he saw as “bigots masquerading as nationalists, particularly in religion.” Increasingly he showed an open dislike for Orthodox Jews.
There were a number of them in Ben-Gurion’s government and they quickly came to resent Isser Harel, then tried to find a way to remove him. But the wily Mossad chief made sure he remained close to another kibbutznik, the prime minister.
It helped that Mossad’s record now spoke for itself. Harel’s agents had contributed to the success of the Sinai skirmishes against the Egyptians. He had spies in place in every Arab capital, providing a steady stream of priceless information. Another coup came when he traveled to Washington in 1954 to meet Allen Dulles, who had just taken over the CIA. Harel presented the veteran spymaster with a dagger bearing the engraved word of the psalmist: “the Guardian of Israel neither slumbers or sleeps.”
Dulles replied: “You can count on me to stay awake with you.”
Those words created a partnership between Mossad and the CIA. Dulles arranged for Mossad to have state-of-the-art equipment: listening and tracking devices, remote-operated cameras, and a range of gadgets that Harel admitted he never knew existed. The two men also formed the first intelligence “back channel” between their services, through which they could communicate by secure phone in the case of any emergency. The channel effectively bypassed the normal diplomatic route, to the chagrin of both the State Department and the Israeli foreign ministry. It did nothing to improve Harel’s standing in diplomatic circles.
In 1961 Harel masterminded the operation to bring to Israel thousands of Moroccan Jews. A year later the tireless Mossad chief was in southern Sudan assisting pro-Israeli rebels against the regime. That same year he also helped King Haile Selassie of Ethiopia crush an attempted coup: the monarch had been a longtime ally of Israel.
But at home the Orthodox Jews in the cabinet were becoming more vociferous, complaining that Isser Harel had become insufferably autocratic and increasingly indifferent to their religious sensibilities, and that he was a man with his own agenda, perhaps even an aspiration to the highest political office in the land. Ben-Gurion’s well-tuned political antenna was up, and relations between him and Harel cooled. Where before he had given Harel a virtual free hand, he now began to demand to be briefed on the smallest details of an operation. Harel resented the tight leash but said nothing. The whispering campaign against him intensified.
In February 1962, the innuendos coalesced over the fate of an eight-year-old boy, Joselle Schumacher. Two years before, the child had been kidnapped from his parents by an ultra-Orthodox sect.
The boy’s maternal grandfather, Nahman Shtarkes, was a member of the sect Neturei Karta, the “Guardians of the Walls of Jerusalem.” He was suspected of complicity in the kidnapping. Already there had been a huge police hunt for Joselle that had produced no clue as to his whereabouts. Nahman had been briefly imprisoned when he had refused to cooperate with the investigation. Orthodox Jews had turned the old man into a martyr; thousands had paraded with banners proclaiming Ben-Gurion to be no different from the Nazis, imprisoning an old man. Nahman had been released on “health grounds.” The protests had continued.
Ben-Gurion’s political advisers warned that the matter could lose him the next election. Worse, in the event of another war with the Arabs, some Orthodox groups could actually support them. The embattled prime minister had sent for Harel and ordered Mossad to find the boy. Harel argued it was not a task for the service. In his later words:
“The atmosphere turned to ice. He repeated he was giving me an order. I said I needed at least to read the police file. The prime minister said I had an hour.”
The file was large but, as he read it, something stirred deep in Isser Harel—the right of parents to bring up their child without being pressured by extreme religious belief.
Joselle had been born in March 1953 to Arthur and Ida Schumacher. Due to family financial difficulties, Joselle had been sent to live with his grandfather in Jerusalem. The child found himself in a religious enclave, spiritually isolated from the rest of the city. Increasingly Nahman inducted his grandson into the sect’s ways. When Joselle’s parents visited, Nahman angrily criticized them for what he saw as their own wayward religious attitudes.
The old man belonged to a generation whose faith helped them survive the Holocaust. Nahman’s daughter and son-in-law felt their prime role was to create a life for themselves in the young nation. All too often prayer had to take second place.
Tired of Nahman’s constant criticism, Joselle’s parents said they wanted him back. Nahman objected, arguing that to move him would disrupt Joselle’s instruction into a prayer life that would serve him as an adult. There were more angry exchanges. Then, the next time they visited Jerusalem, Joselle had disappeared.
Both Orthodox and secular Jews had seized upon the incident to give full vent to an issue that continued to divide the nation, and was exemplified by Ben-Gurion’s Labor Party only being able to survive in office by cobbling together various religious factions in the Knesset. In turn, those groups had obtained further concessions for the strict laws of Orthodoxy. But always they wanted more. Liberal Jews demanded that Joselle must be returned to his family.
Having read the file, Isser Harel told Ben-Gurion he would mobilize Mossad’s resources. He put together a team, forty agents strong, to locate Joselle. Many of them were openly opposed to what they saw as a misuse of their skills.
He silenced their criticism with a short speech:
“Although we will be operating outside our normal type of target, this is still a very important case. It is important because of its social and religious background. It is important because the prestige and authority of our government are at stake. It is important because of the human issues which the case involves.”
In the first weeks of the investigation the team soon discovered how formidable the investigation would be.
A future head of Shin Bet, then a Mossad agent, grew the curly sidelocks of the ultra-Orthodox and tried to penetrate their ranks. He failed. Another Mossad agent was ordered to maintain surveillance on a Jewish school. He was spotted within days. A third agent tried to infiltrate a group of Hasidic mourners traveling to Jerusalem to bury a relative within the walls of the city. He was quickly unmasked
when he failed to utter the right prayers.
Those failures only made Harel more determined. He told his team he was certain the child was no longer in Israel but somewhere in Europe or even farther afield. Harel moved his operations headquarters to a Mossad safe house in Paris. From there he sent men into every Orthodox community in Italy, Austria, France, and Britain. When that produced nothing, he sent the agents to South America and the United States.
The investigation continued to be enlivened with bizarre episodes. Ten Mossad agents joined a Saturday-morning service at a synagogue in the London suburb of Hendon. The furious congregation called the police to arrest the “religious impostors” after their false beards came unstuck during scuffles. The agents were quietly released after the Israeli ambassador intervened with the Home Office. A venerated Orthodox rabbi was invited to Paris on the pretext that a member of a wealthy family wished him to officiate at a circumcision. He was met at the airport by two men dressed in the severe black coats and hats of Orthodox Jews. They were Mossad agents. Their report had an element of black comedy.
“He was taken to a Pigalle brothel, having no idea what it was. Two prostitutes who had been paid by us suddenly appeared and were all over the rabbi. We took Polaroid photographs and showed them to him and said we would send them to his congregation unless he revealed where the boy was. The rabbi finally convinced us he had no idea and we destroyed the photographs in front of him.”
Another rabbi, Shai Freyer, surfaced in Isser Harel’s ever-expanding search through the world of Orthodox Jewry. The rabbi was picked up by Mossad agents as he traveled between Paris and Geneva. When they became convinced, after rigorous questioning, that once more this was another dead end, Harel ordered Freyer to be held a prisoner in a Mossad safe house in Switzerland until the search ended. He feared the rabbi would alert the Orthodox community.
Another promising lead appeared. She was Madeleine Frei, the daughter of an aristocratic French family and a heroine of the French Resistance in World War II. Madeleine had saved a large number of Jewish children from deportation to the Nazi death camps. After the war she had converted to Judaism.
Checks revealed she was a regular visitor to Israel, spending her time with members of the Neturei Karta sect, and on several occasions she had met Joselle’s grandfather. Her last visit to Israel had been around the time of the boy’s abduction. Madeleine had not returned to Israel since then.
In August 1962, Mossad agents tracked her to the outskirts of Paris. When they introduced themselves, she physically attacked them. One of the agents summoned Isser Harel.
He explained to Madeleine “the great wrong” done to Joselle’s parents. They had the moral right to bring up their son as they wished. No parents should be denied that right. Madeleine still insisted she knew nothing about Joselle. Harel saw his own men believed her.
He asked for Madeleine’s passport. Beneath her photograph was one of her daughter. He asked an agent to bring him a photograph of Joselle. The facial structures of the children in both photographs were almost identical. Harel called Tel Aviv. Within a couple of hours:
“I had everything I needed to know, from details of her love life during her student days to her decision to join the Orthodox movement after renouncing her Catholic faith. I went back to Madeleine and told her, as if I knew everything, that she had dyed Joselle’s hair to disguise him and smuggled the boy out of Israel. She flatly denied it. I said she must understand that the future of the country she loved was in grave danger, that in the streets of Jerusalem people she loved were throwing stones at each other. Still she refused to admit anything. I said the boy had a mother who loved him as much as she loved all those children she had helped in World War Two.”
The reminder worked. Suddenly Madeleine began to explain how she had traveled by sea to Haifa, a tourist come to see Israel. On the boat she made friends with a family of new immigrants who had a child about the age of Joselle. She had led the little girl down the gangplank at Haifa, and the immigration officer had taken the child as Madeleine’s own. He made a note of this in his records. A week later, under the very noses of Israeli police, she had boarded a flight to Zurich with her “daughter.” Madeleine had even persuaded Joselle to dress in girl’s clothing and have his hair dyed.
For a while Joselle had lived in an Orthodox school in Switzerland where Rabbi Shai Freyer was a teacher. Following his detention, Madeleine flew with Joselle to New York, placing him with a family who were members of the Neturei Karta sect. Harel only had one more question for her: “Will you give me the name and address of the family?”
For a long moment there was silence before Madeleine calmly said: “He is living at 126 Penn Street, Brooklyn, New York. He is known as Yankale Gertner.”
For the first time since their encounter, Harel smiled. “Thank you, Madeleine. I would like to congratulate you by offering you a job with Mossad. Your kind of talent could serve Israel well.”
Madeleine refused.
Mossad agents flew to New York. Waiting for them was a team of FBI agents, authorized to cooperate by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He had received a personal request from Ben-Gurion to do so. The agents traveled to the apartment house at 126 Penn Street. Mrs. Gertner opened the door. The agents rushed past her. Inside, her husband was praying. Beside him was a pale-faced boy with a yarmulke on his head and dark side-curls framing his face.
“Hello Joselle. We have come to take you home,” one of the Mossad men said gently.
Eight months had passed since Mossad had begun its search. Close to a million U.S. dollars had been spent on the operation.
The safe return of Joselle did nothing to bridge the religious divide within the country. Successive governments would continue to totter and fall at the whim of small ultra-Orthodox groups elected to the Knesset.
Successful though he had been in finding the boy, Isser Harel returned to Israel to face a powerful new critic, General Meir Amit, the newly appointed chief of Aman, military intelligence. Just as Harel had connived against his predecessor, he now found himself on the receiving end of Amit’s barbed criticisms over the operation to rescue Joselle.
Amit, a formidable field commander, had become close to Ben-Gurion in the ever-shifting political sands of Israel. He told the prime minister that Harel had “wasted resources,” that the whole rescue operation had been the sign of an intelligence chief who had been too long in the job. Forgetting that he had ordered Harel to mount the operation, Ben-Gurion agreed. On March 25, 1963, bruised by many weeks of intensive sniping, Isser Harel, at the age of fifty, resigned. Grown men were close to tears as he shook their hands and walked out of Mossad headquarters. Everyone knew it was the end of an era.
Hours later a tall, spare man with the hawkish good looks of the actor he could once have been strode briskly through its doors: Meir Amit had taken over. No one needed to be told that radical changes were about to happen.
Fifteen minutes after settling himself behind his desk, Mossad’s new chief summoned his department heads. They stood in a group before him while he silently eyeballed them. Then, in the brisk voice that had launched countless battleground attacks, he spoke.
There would be no more operations to recover lost children. No undue political interference. He would protect each one of them from external criticism, but nothing could save their jobs if they failed him. He would fight for more money from the defense budget for the latest equipment and backup resources. But that was not a signal to forget the one asset he placed above all others: humint, the art of human intelligence gathering. He wanted that to be Mossad’s greatest skill.
His staff found they were working for a man who saw their work as beyond day-to-day operations, but bearing results in years to come. The acquisition of military technology fell into that category.
Shortly after Meir Amit took command, a man who gave his name as “Salman” had walked into the Israeli embassy in Paris with an astounding proposition. For one million U.S. dollars in
cash he could guarantee to provide what was then the world’s most secret combat aircraft, the Russian MiG-21. Salman had concluded his astounding offer to an Israeli diplomat with a bizarre request. “Send someone to Baghdad, call this number, and ask for Joseph. And have our million dollars ready.”
The diplomat sent his report to the resident katsa in the embassy. He had been one of those who had survived the purging that followed Meir Amit’s appointment. The katsa sent the report to Tel Aviv, together with the phone number Salman had provided.
For days Meir Amit weighed and considered. Salman could be a confidence trickster or a fantasist, or even part of an Iraqi plot to try to entrap a Mossad agent. There was a very real risk that other katsas working under deep cover in Iraq would be compromised. But the prospect of getting hold of a MiG-21 was irresistible.
Its fuel capacity, altitude, speed, armaments, and turnaround servicing time had made it the Arab world’s premier frontline fighter aircraft. Israel’s air force chiefs would cheerfully have given many millions of dollars for just a glimpse of the MiG’s blueprint, let alone for the actual plane. Meir Amit “went to bed thinking of it. I woke up thinking of it. I thought of it in the shower, over dinner. I thought about it every spare moment I had. Keeping up with an enemy’s advanced weapons system is a priority with any intelligence service. Actually getting your hands on it almost never happens.”
The first step was to send an agent to Baghdad. Meir Amit created an alias for him, as English as the name in his passport, George Bacon: “No one would think a Jew would have a name like that.” Bacon would travel to Baghdad as the sales manager of a London-based company selling hospital X-ray equipment.
He arrived in Baghdad on an Iraqi Airways flight with several sample boxes of equipment and demonstrated how well he had absorbed his brief by selling several items to hospitals. At the beginning of his second week, Bacon made the call to the number Salman had provided. Bacon’s reports to Mossad contained vivid descriptions.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 6
