Gideon's Spies: Mossad's Secret Warriors

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1999 by Charles Foster

Gordon Thomas. Macmillan. [pounds]16.99. 354 pages. ISBN 0-333-75355-0.

Mossad, Israel's secret intelligence service is, despite a number of highly publicised blunders, by orders of magnitude the best in the world. There are five main reasons for this. First, it has kept faith with the principle that human intelligence is worth more than the intelligence that gadgets can give. Despite a lot of recent investment in electronic surveillance, it continues to view with the contempt of a poet for a typist, the CIA's reliance on massive banks of computers.

Second, its inner core has remained small enough to avoid the stultifying effect of corporate identity. It is a family, if often a warring and dysfunctional one, and human beings work far better in families than in corporations. This is the secret of Mossad's notorious creativity. The KGB or the CIA could never have thought laterally enough to create an operation like the sting on Nezar Hindawi. In 1986 Israel was concerned about Britain's friendliness with Syria and the ease with which Syrian terrorists could use the facilities of the Syrian embassy in London. Hindawi, an Arab, persuaded his pregnant Irish girlfriend to carry a present - actually, unknown to her, a bomb onto an El Al flight from Heathrow to Tel Aviv. He took his instructions from his cousin, Abu. The bomb was handed to her in the departure lounge by a man who vanished immediately. Murphy was arrested moments later. Hindawi sought asylum at the Syrian embassy. He was imprisoned and Mrs Thatcher, previously friendly to the Syrians, closed down the Syrian embassy in London. Abu was a Mossad agent. No Washington committee would have come up with that.

Third, Mossad has displayed a ruthlessness rare even in the murky world of intelligence. It has carried out, through its specialist kidon units, hundreds of assassinations. That ruthlessness is a function of the fourth characteristic - Mossad's single-mindedness. Other intelligence services have played games in playgrounds irrelevant to national survival because they could afford to: usually nothing much more than the prestige of the (generally despised) prime minister of the day has been at stake. This has made those services flabby and corrupt.

It is difficult for the most upright of spies to risk all for a particular national blend of anaemic social democracy. It is difficult even for the most depraved spy not to, if his failure might mean the annihilation of his children. For most nations, intelligence is a luxury. For Israel it is the difference between existence and oblivion. Israel's insecurity has forced Mossad to be too busy for introspection or diversification into fields irrelevant to national survival.

The single-mindedness is a consequence of old-fashioned patriotism which, almost uniquely in Israel, is almost synonymous with self-interest. This will change as Israel feels less threatened. Everything goes downhill when nations and individuals get comfortable.

The fifth characteristic is Mossad's harnessing of Jewish goodwill worldwide generally achieved with sufficient subtlety to avoid nasty local resentment of the native Jews. The result is a record of unparalleled audacity and success. Gordon Thomas has interviewed most of the surviving big players in Israeli intelligence, and writes fast and well. Despite its pace and sensational Sunday-paper readability, his book covers the ground thoroughly and generally accurately.

All the big stories are here: the capture of Eichmann in Buenos Aires; Eli Cohen's infiltration of the top brass of Syria's military; Mossad's theft of the Iraqi MiG; Israel's knowledge of the sexual peccadilloes of individual Egyptian pilots; Mossad's frustration of the 1973 Palestinian attempt to blow Golda Meir's aeroplane out of the sky with rockets as it approached Rome airport; the Entebbe raid; Israel's entanglement in the arms to Iran debacle; and Robert Maxwell's intimate relations with Mossad.

A lot of little and absorbing stories are here too. For a while Mossad fought the Chinese secret service, CSIS, throughout Africa. That covert war was a particularly brutal one, and Thomas details it all: how, for instance, a CSIS team ambushed a Mossad katsa in the Congo, fed him to crocodiles, filmed his last moments, and sent the video to the local Mossad station chief. The Israeli retaliated by personally firing a rocket into the CSIS station building. The book is full of dramas like that.

Mr Thomas sketches the people involved quickly but tellingly, which allows some of the fear, the hope, the tragedy and the exaltation to sweat into the pages. He does not structure the book chronologically, which I thought would irritate me, but didn't, because it proved to be an effective rhetorical device. Attention cannot wander: you will end up knowing a lot more about the Middle East than if he had started at the beginning of the story and gone to the end via the middle.

Occasionally he gives way to temptations which he should have resisted. The book opens with speculation about Mossad's role in the death of the Princess of Wales. The thesis is that Mossad were trying to recruit Henri Paul, the driver of the Princess' car and an employee of the Ritz Hotel in Paris and Paul was so stressed by the attempt that his reaction time when driving was crucially increased. It is interesting as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far, as the conclusions of the French investigation into the crash confirm.