Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Cheryl said she was fully prepared to undergo training.

  For the next two years she found herself in a world which, until then, had only been part of her favorite relaxation, going to the movies. She learned how to draw a gun while sitting in a chair, to memorize as many names as possible as they flashed with increasing speed across a small screen. She was shown how to pack her Beretta inside her pants, on the hip, and how to cut a concealed opening in her skirt or dress for easy access to the handgun.

  From time to time, other recruits in her class left the training school; such departures were never a subject for discussion. She was sent on practice missions—breaking into an occupied hotel room, stealing documents from an office. Her methods were analyzed for hours by her instructors. She was aroused from her bed in the dead of night and dispatched on more exercises: picking up a tourist in a nightclub, then disengaging herself outside his hotel. Every move she made was observed by her tutors.

  She was asked close questions about her sexual experiences. How many men had there been before her husband? Would she sleep with a stranger if her mission demanded? She answered truthfully: There had been no one before her husband; if she was absolutely certain that the success of a mission depended on it, then she would go to bed with a man. It would purely be sex, not love. She learned how to use sex to coerce, seduce, and dominate. She became especially good at that.

  She was taught how to kill by firing a full clip of bullets into a target. She learned about the various sects of Islam and how to create a mishlashim, a dead-letter box. A day was spent perfecting a floater, a strip of microfilm attached to the inside of an envelope. Another was devoted to disguising herself by inserting cotton wadding in her cheeks to subtly alter the shape of her face. She learned to steal cars, pose as a drunk, chat up men.

  One day she was summoned to the office of the head of the training school. He looked her up and down as if he were doing an inspection, checking off each item on a list in his mind. Finally he said she had passed.

  Cheryl Ben-Tov was assigned as a bat leveyha working in Mossad’s Kaisrut department, which liaised with Israeli embassies. Her specific role was to provide cover—as a girlfriend or even as a “wife” for katsas on active service. She worked in a number of European cities, passing herself off as an American citizen. She did not sleep with one of her “lovers” or “husbands.”

  Admoni personally briefed her on the importance of her latest mission: with Vanunu now located, it would be up to her to use her skills to entice him out of Britain. This time her cover would be that of an American tourist traveling alone around Europe after a painful divorce. To give that part of her story credibility, she would make use of details from her own parents’ separation. The final part of her story was to have a “sister” living in Rome. Her brief was to get Vanunu there.

  On Tuesday, September 23, 1986, Cheryl Ben-Tov joined a team of nine Mossad katsas already in London. They were under the command of Mossad’s director of operations, Beni Zeevi, a dour man with the stained teeth of a chain-smoker.

  The katsas were staying in hotels between Oxford Street and the Strand. Two were registered in the Regent Palace. Cheryl Ben-Tov was registered as Cindy Johnson in the Strand Palace, staying in room 320. Zeevi had rented a room at the Mountbatten, close to the one Vanunu occupied, 105.

  He may well have been among the first to observe the mood changes in the technician. Increasingly Vanunu was showing signs of strain. London was an alien environment for someone brought up in the small-town life of Beersheba. And, despite the efforts of his companions, he was lonely and hungry for female companionship, for a woman to sleep with. Mossad’s psychologists had predicted that possibility.

  On Wednesday, September 24, Vanunu insisted that his Sunday Times minders should allow him to go out alone. They reluctantly agreed. However, a reporter discreetly followed him into Leicester Square. There he saw Vanunu begin to talk to a woman. The newspaper would subsequently describe her as “in her mid-twenties, about five feet eight inches, plump, with bleached blond hair, thick lips, a brown trilby-style hat, brown tweed trouser suit, high heels and probably Jewish.”

  After a while they parted. Back in the hotel Vanunu confirmed to his minder he had met “an American girl called Cindy.” He said he planned to meet her again. The reporters were worried. One of them said that Cindy’s appearance in Leicester Square might be too much of a coincidence. Vanunu rejected their concerns. Whatever Cindy had said, it had been enough to make him want to plan to spend more time with her—and not in London, but in her “sister’s” apartment in Rome.

  Beni Zeevi and four other Mossad katsas were passengers on the flight on which Cheryl and Vanunu traveled to Rome. The couple took a taxi to an apartment in the old quarter of the city.

  Waiting inside were three Mossad katsas. They overpowered Vanunu and injected him with a paralyzing drug. Late that night an ambulance arrived and Vanunu was carried on a stretcher out of the building. Neighbors were told by the concerned-looking katsas that a relative had fallen ill. Cheryl climbed into the ambulance, which drove off.

  The ambulance sped out of Rome and down the coast. At a prearranged point a speedboat was waiting, to which Vanunu was transferred. The craft rendezvoused with a freighter anchored off the coast. Vanunu was taken on board. Beni Zeevi and Cheryl traveled with him. Three days later, in the middle of the night, the freighter docked at the port of Haifa.

  Mordechai was soon facing Nahum Admoni’s skilled interrogators. It was the prelude to a swift trial and a life sentence in solitary confinement. Cheryl Ben-Tov disappeared back into her secret world.

  For more than eleven years Mordechai Vanunu remained in solitary confinement in a cell where Israel intended to keep him into the next century. His living conditions were bleak: poor food and an hour’s exercise a day, and he spent his time in prayer and reading. Then, bowing to international pressure, Israel’s government agreed in March 1998 that Vanunu could be moved to less restrictive conditions. However, he has remained an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and the Sunday Times regularly reminds its readers of his plight. Vanunu received no money for the world-shattering scoop he provided the newspaper. In 1998 he was finally released from solitary but, despite renewed appeals by his lawyers, there seemed little prospect of him being released from prison.

  Ten years later, plumper now, her once-styled hair blowing in the Florida sea breeze, Cheryl was back in Orlando, ostensibly on vacation at Walt Disney World with her two young daughters.

  Confronted in April 1997 by a Sunday Times reporter, she did not deny her role in the kidnapping. Her only concern was that publicity would “harm” her “position” in the United States.

  Ari Ben-Menashe fared less well. He had seen many good men come and go, victims of the constant manipulation within the Israeli intelligence community. But he had never thought his day would come.

  In 1989 he was arrested in New York and accused of conspiring “with others” to violate the Arms Export Control Act by attempting to sell C-130 military aircraft to Iran. The planes had originally been sold to Israel.

  During the preliminary court hearing the government of Israel said it had “no knowledge” of Ben-Menashe. He produced a file of references from his superiors in the Israeli intelligence community. The Israeli government said they were forgeries. Ben-Menashe satisfied the court they were not. The Israeli government then said Ben-Menashe was “a low-level translator” employed “within” the Israeli intelligence community. Ben-Menashe countered that the nub of the case against him—the sale of the aircraft—had been sanctioned by the Israeli and the U.S. governments. He spoke of “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of authorized arms deals to Iran.”

  In Tel Aviv there was consternation once more. Rafi Eitan and David Kimche were both questioned about how much Ben-Menashe knew and how much damage he could do. The responses could only have been less than reassuring. Rafi Eitan said that Ari Ben-Menashe was in a position to blow wide o
pen the U.S./Israeli arms-to-Iran network whose tentacles had extended everywhere: down to Central and South America, through London, into Australia, across to Africa, deep into Europe.

  Waiting for trial in the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York, Ben-Menashe was visited by Israeli government lawyers. They offered him a deal: plead guilty in return for a generous financial settlement that would assure him a good life after he came out of prison. Ben-Menashe decided to tell it how it had been. He had started to do so when suddenly, in November 1990, a federal jury acquitted him of all charges.

  A number of his former associates in Israeli intelligence felt that Ben-Menashe had been lucky to escape; they would claim that in his attempts to gain freedom he had used what one Mossad officer called “a scatter-gun approach,” by attacking everyone who threatened his freedom. Kimche echoed the fervent hope of many when he later recalled “all we wanted was for him to disappear from our sight. He had set out to damage us, his country and its safety. The man was, and is, a menace.”

  But Israel had not counted on the revenge Ben-Menashe took. He wrote a book, Profits of War, that he hoped would have the same effect Woodward and Bernstein achieved with their Watergate exposé that had brought down President Richard Nixon. Ben-Menashe’s self-stated intention was clear: “to right the terrible wrongs of the 1980s and help remove from power those who were responsible.”

  In Tel Aviv there were urgent meetings. The question of buying the manuscript and forever locking it away was discussed. It was pointed out that Ben-Menashe had already refused a very large sum—said to be a million dollars—to stay silent; he was unlikely to have changed his mind. The decision was taken that every sayan in New York publishing must be alerted to use every possible means to stop the book appearing. What success they had is debatable, though the manuscript was submitted to several mainstream publishers before being published by Sheridan Square Press, a small New York house.

  Ben-Menashe would describe his book as:

  a tale of government by a cabal—how a handful of people in a few intelligence agencies determined the policies of their governments, secretly ran enormous operations without public accountability, abused power and public trust, lied, manipulated the media and deceived the public. Last, but not least, it is a tale of war—a war run not by generals, but by comfortable men in air-conditioned offices who are indifferent to human suffering.

  Many saw the book as an outrageous act of atonement by its author; others saw it as an exaggerated version of events, with Ari Ben-Menashe at center stage.

  In London, as he had done so many times before, Robert Maxwell hid behind the law, threatening to issue writs against anyone who dared to repeat Ben-Menashe’s allegations about him. No English publisher was prepared to defy the tycoon; no newspaper was ready to use its investigative skills to substantiate Ben Menashe’s claims.

  Robert Maxwell, like Ben-Menashe had once firmly believed, remained convinced he was invincible for one simple reason. He had become a thief for Mossad. The more he had plundered for them, the greater had grown his belief he was indispensable to the service.

  Again, like Ben-Menashe had once said, Maxwell liked to say on his visits to Israel that he too knew where all the bodies were buried. It was a claim that did not go unnoticed in Mossad.

  CHAPTER 10

  A DANGEROUS LIAISON

  Robert Maxwell, who once fired a reporter who had cheated on his expenses, had been secretly stealing the pension funds of his employees to support Mossad. The wholesale thefts mirrored Mossad’s own ruthless cunning and increasing willingness to take high-risk gambles.

  Maxwell had personally removed the money through a series of interlinked financial maneuvers which, years later, would leave fraud investigators awed by his skilled duplicity. Maxwell had given mass-scale swindling a whole new dimension, transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time into the special account Mossad maintained at the Bank of Israel in Tel Aviv. The funds had sometimes been laundered through an account the Israeli embassy in London had with Barclays Bank. Other banks Maxwell used for his fraud, unbeknown to them, included Credit Suisse in Geneva, the bank from which Ben-Menashe had transferred $450 million of ORA profits, with Maxwell’s connivance. Sometimes the stolen pension funds traveled around the world, touching down at Chemical Bank in New York, Australia’s First National Bank, and banks in Hong Kong and Tokyo. Only Robert Maxwell knew the money was purloined and where it was at any given time in its journey. What made matters worse was that he frequently ordered his newspapers to attack “white-collar crime.”

  Victor Ostrovsky, a Canadian-born Israeli who served as a Mossad case officer from 1984 to 1986, was the first to discover what had been happening:

  “Mossad was financing many of its operations in Europe from money stolen from Maxwell’s newspaper pension fund. They got their hands on the funds almost as soon as Maxwell made the purchase of the Mirror Newspaper Group with money lent to him by Mossad, together with expert advice he received from its financial analysts. What was sinister about it, aside from the theft, was that anyone in his news organisation, travelling anywhere in the Middle East, was automatically suspected of working for Israel, and was only one rumor away from the hangman’s noose.”

  On visits to Israel, Maxwell was feted like a head of state; he was a regular guest of honor at government banquets, and was given the finest accommodations. But Mossad had taken the precaution of being prepared should the proverbial “hand that fed it” suddenly withdraw its largesse. Discovering Maxwell had a strong sexual appetite and, because of his massive size, favored oral sex, Mossad arranged that during the tycoon’s visits to Israel he was serviced from one of the stable of prostitutes the service maintained for blackmail purposes. Soon Mossad had acquired a small library of video footage of Maxwell in sexually compromising positions. The bedroom suite of the hotel where he stayed had been rigged with a concealed camera.

  Ostrovsky’s allegations had surfaced in two personal books that still inflame the entire Israeli intelligence community. By Way of Deception and Other Side of Deception tore aside the veil of secrecy about his time in Mossad. He described operational methods and named numerous serving officers, and may well have compromised some of them in a classic exposé by a whistle-blower who believed he had been unfairly treated when he was dismissed from Mossad.

  Ironically, the Israeli government had ignored the advice of Maxwell to say nothing about Ostrovsky’s claims. In a meeting in Tel Aviv with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, the tycoon cited what happened when the Thatcher government tried to halt publication of a book by a former MI5 officer, Peter Wright. His Spycatcher also contained similarly embarrassing details about Britain’s security service. Pursuing its campaign to stop publication, the British government had been finally routed in the Australian courts, where Wright’s prime publisher was based. Spycatcher had become a world best-seller and Britain had looked foolish.

  The same fate had befallen the Israeli government. Pressured by serving and former members of Mossad—Meir Amit and Isser Harel had been particularly vocal in demanding action against Ostrovsky—Shamir ordered his attorney general to take legal action to halt the former katsa’s first book.

  The case also stoked Shamir’s virulent anti-Americanism, rooted in a fixed belief that the United States was partially responsible for the Holocaust. There were claims that he believed that President Roosevelt should have come to an “arrangement”—one of Shamir’s favorite words—with Hitler to replace Britain, then the dominant power in the Middle East, with the Third Reich. In turn, Hitler would have allowed the Jews to travel to Palestine, and the Holocaust would never have happened.

  Nonsensical as the idea was, it had colored Shamir’s views of the United States to the point of near hatred. He had personally authorized, “as a gesture of goodwill” (another favorite phrase of Shamir’s) to pass on to the Soviet Union a portion of the estimated five hundred thousand pages of documents Jonathan Pollard had stolen. Shamir ho
ped this would improve Israel’s relationship with Moscow. The documents included current U.S. intelligence on Soviet air defenses and the CIA’s annual review of the entire Russian capability to make war. One document included satellite photographs, communication intercepts, radar intelligence, and reports from CIA agents in the Soviet Union. When Shamir had been told by Nahum Admoni that the data would almost certainly enable Soviet counterintelligence to discover the spies, he had reportedly shrugged.

  At their meeting to discuss what to do about Ostrovsky, Shamir repeated to Robert Maxwell what he had told others: he would do anything to reduce American influence in the world, and was convinced that Washington had encouraged Ostrovsky to publish his books as an act of retaliation.

  Shamir asked Maxwell to mobilize his powerful media resources to destroy Ostrovsky’s credibility. Maxwell pointed out that before employing him, Mossad would surely have checked his background.

  Nevertheless, Ostrovsky became the object of a smear campaign in the Maxwell media, including the Tel Aviv tabloid Maariv, which Maxwell had bought. He was attacked as a fantasist, a liar, and, unlike Maxwell, not a true friend of Israel.

  Having studied Ostrovsky’s books, senior members of the Israeli intelligence community knew much of what he claimed was true.

  The New York court refused to accept the Israeli government’s argument that Israel’s national security was endangered by Ostrovsky’s revelations. His book became a best-seller.

  Though the first person to publicly identify Robert Maxwell’s links to Mossad, Ostrovsky had by no means revealed the full story. Like so much else, it had its roots firmly entangled in the activities of Shamir’s old and valued friend, Rafi Eitan.