To them all he would be the memune, which roughly translates from Hebrew as “first among equals.” With the title came unfettered access to the prime minister of the day and the annual ritual of presenting his budget for the Israeli cabinet to rubber-stamp.
Long before the Six Day War he had established Mossad’s ability to strike mortal terror into Israel’s enemies, penetrating their ranks, vacuuming up their secrets, and killing them with chilling efficiency. He had soon made Mossad mythic in stature.
Much of that success came from the rules he laid down for selecting katsas, the field agents who, ultimately, were at the cutting edge of Mossad’s success. He fully understood the deep and complex motives that allowed them, upon selection, to shake his hand, the gesture that acknowledged they were now his to command as he wished.
While much else had changed in Mossad, Meir Amit knew on that March morning in 1997 that his recruiting criteria had remained intact:
No katsa is accepted into Mossad who is primarily motivated by money. The overly zealous Zionist has no place in this work. It gets in the way of a clear understanding of what the job is all about. It is one that calls for calm, clear, farsighted judgment and a balanced outlook. People want to join Mossad for all kinds of reasons. There is the so-called glamour. Some like the idea of adventure. Some think joining will enhance their status, small people who want to be big. A few want the secret power they believe being in Mossad would give them. None of these are acceptable reasons for joining.
And always, always, you must ensure your man in the field knows he has your total support. That you will look out for his family, make sure his kids are happy. At the same time you must protect him. If his wife starts to wonder if he has another woman reassure her he has not. If he has, don’t tell her. If she goes off the rails, bring her back on the straight and narrow. Don’t tell her husband. You want nothing to distract him. The job of a good spymaster is to treat his people as family. Make them feel he is always there for them, day, night, no matter what the time. This is how you buy loyalty, make your katsa do what you want. And in the end what you want is important.
Each katsa underwent three years of intensive training, including being subjected to severe physical violence under interrogation. He, or she, became proficient in the use of Mossad’s weapon of choice—the .22-caliber Beretta.
The first katsas stationed outside the Arab countries were in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany. In the United States there were permanent katsas in New York and Washington. The New York katsa had special responsibility for penetrating all UN diplomatic missions and the city’s many ethnic groups. The Washington katsa had a similar job, with the additional responsibility of “monitoring” the White House.
Other katsas operated in areas of current tensions, returning home when a mission ended.
Meir Amit had also considerably expanded the organization to include a Collections Department responsible for intelligence-gathering operations abroad and a Political Action and Liaison Department, working with so-called friendly foreign intelligence services, mostly the CIA and Britain’s MI6. The Research Department had fifteen sections or “desks” targeting Arab states. The United States, Canada, Latin America, Britain, Europe, and the Soviet Union all had their separate desks. This infrastructure would, over the years, expand to include China, South Africa, and the Vatican. But essentially Mossad would remain the same small organization.
A day did not pass without the arrival of a fresh sheaf of news stories from overseas stations. These were circulated throughout the drab gray high-rise building on King Saul Boulevard. In Meir Amit’s view, “If it made someone walk a little taller, that was no bad thing. And, of course, it made our enemies that more fearful.”
Mossad’s katsas were coldly efficient and cunning beyond belief—and prepared to fight fire with fire. Operatives incited disturbances designed to create mutual distrust among Arab states, planted black counterpropaganda, and recruited informers, implementing Meir Amit’s philosophy: “Divided, we rule.” In all they did, his men set new standards for cold-blooded professionalism, moving like thieves in the night leaving a trail of death and destruction. No one was safe from their retaliation.
A mission completed they returned to be debriefed in Meir Amit’s corner-window office overlooking the broad thoroughfare named after Israel’s Old Testament warlord. From his office he personally ran two spies whose bravery would remain without equal in the annals of Mossad. Recalling their contributions, his voice became tentative, the occasional smile one of apologetic self-protection, as he began by recounting biographical details.
Eli Cohen was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on December 16, 1924. Like his parents, he was a devout Orthodox Jew. In December 1956 he was among Jews expelled from Egypt after the Suez crisis. He arrived in Haifa and felt himself a stranger in his new land. In 1957 he was recruited into Israeli military counterintelligence, but his work as an analyst bored him. He began to inquire how he could join Mossad, but was rejected. Meir Amit recalled, “We heard that our rejection had deeply offended Eli Cohen. He resigned from the army and married an Iraqi woman named Nadia.”
For two years Cohen led an uneventful life as a filing clerk in a Tel Aviv insurance office. Unknown to him, his background had surfaced in a trawl through Mossad’s “reject files” by Meir Amit, who was looking for a “certain kind of agent for a very special job.” Finding no one suitable in the “active” files, he had gone to the “rejects.” Cohen seemed the only possibility. He was put under surveillance. The weekly reports by Mossad’s recruiting office described his fastidious habits and devotion to his wife and young family. He was hardworking, quick on the uptake, and worked well under pressure. Finally he was told that Mossad had decided he was “suitable” after all.
Eli began an intensive six-month course at the Mossad training school. Sabotage experts taught him how to make explosives and time bombs from the simplest of ingredients. He learned unarmed combat and became a first-class marksman and an accomplished burglar. He discovered the mysteries of encoding and decoding, how to work a radio set, use invisible inks, and hide messages. He constantly impressed his instructors with his skills. His phenomenal memory came from memorizing tracts of the Torah as a young man. His graduate report stated he had every quality needed by a katsa. Still Meir Amit hesitated.
“I asked myself a hundred times: can Eli do what I want? I always showed him, of course, my confidence was always in place. I never wanted him for a moment to think he would always be one step from the trapdoor which would send him to kingdom come. Yet some of the very best brains in Mossad put everything they knew into him. Finally I decided to run with Eli.”
Meir Amit spent weeks creating a cover story for his protégé. They would sit together, studying street maps and photographs of Buenos Aires so that Cohen’s new background and name, Kamil Amin Taabes, became totally familiar. The Mossad chief saw how quickly
“Eli learned the language of an exporter-importer to Syria. He memorized the difference between waybills and freight certificates, contracts and guarantees, everything he would need to know. He was like a chameleon, absorbing everything. Before my very eye, Eli Cohen faded and Taabes took over, the Syrian who had never given up a longing to go home to Damascus. Every day Eli became more confident, more certain and keen to prove he could carry off the role. He was like a world champion marathon runner, trained to peak at the start of the race. But he could be running his for years. We had done all we could to show him how to pace his new life, to live the life. The rest was up to him. We all knew that. There was no big good-bye or send-off. He just slipped out of Israel, the way all my spies went.”
In the Syrian capital, Cohen quickly established himself in the business community and developed a circle of high-level friends. These included Maazi Zahreddin, nephew of Syria’s president.
Zahreddin was a boastful man, eager to show how invincible Syria was. Cohen played to that. In no time he was being given a guided to
ur of Syria’s Golan Heights fortifications. He saw the deep concrete bunkers housing the long-range artillery sent by Russia. He was even permitted to take photographs. Within hours of two hundred T-54 Russian tanks arriving in Syria, Cohen had informed Tel Aviv. He even obtained a complete blueprint of Syria’s strategy to cut off northern Israel. The information was priceless.
While Cohen continued to confirm Meir Amit’s belief that one field agent was worth a division of soldiers, he eventually began to become reckless. Cohen had always been a soccer fan. The day after a visiting team beat Israel in Tel Aviv, he broke the strict “Business only” rule about transmissions. He radioed his operator: “It is about time we learned to be victorious on the soccer field.”
Other unauthorized messages were translated: “Please send my wife an anniversary greeting,” or “Happy Birthday to my daughter.”
Meir Amit was privately furious. But he understood enough of the pressures on the agent to hope Cohen’s behavior was “no more than a temporary aberration often found in the best of agents. I tried to get inside his head. Was he desperate and this his way of showing it by dropping his guard? I tried to think like him, knowing I’d rewritten his life. I had to try and weigh a hundred factors. But in the end the only important one was: could Eli still do his job?”
Meir Amit decided that Cohen could.
On a January night in 1965, Eli Cohen waited in his Damascus bedroom ready to transmit. As he tuned his receiver to go, Syrian intelligence officers burst into the apartment. Cohen had been caught by one of the most advanced mobile detection units in the world—supplied by the Russians.
Under interrogation he was forced to send a message to Mossad. The Syrians failed to notice the subtle change of speed and rhythm in the radio transmission. In Tel Aviv, Meir Amit received news Eli had been captured. Two days later, Syria confirmed his capture.
“It was like losing one of your family. You ask yourself the questions you always ask when an agent is lost: Could we have saved him? How was he betrayed? By his own carelessness? By someone close to him? Was he burned-out and we didn’t realize it? Did he have some kind of death wish? That, too, happens. Or was it just bad luck? You ask, and go on asking. You never get the answer for certain. But asking can be a way to cope.”
At no stage did the Syrians succeed in breaking Eli Cohen—despite the torture he endured before being sentenced to death.
Meir Amit devoted almost all his time trying to save Eli Cohen. While Nadia Cohen launched a worldwide publicity campaign for her husband’s life—she approached the pope, the Queen of England, prime ministers, and presidents—Amit worked more secretly. He traveled to Europe to see the heads of French and German intelligence. They could do nothing. He made informal approaches to the Soviet Union. He fought on right until, on May 18, 1965, shortly after 2:00 A.M., a convoy drove out of El Maza Prison in Damascus. In one of the trucks was Eli Cohen.
With him was the eighty-year-old chief rabbi of Syria, Nissim Andabo. Overcome by what was to happen, the rabbi wept openly. Eli Cohen calmed the old man. The convoy reached El Marga Square in the center of Damascus. There Eli recited the Vidui, the Hebrew prayer of a man about to face death: “Almighty God forgive me for all my sins and transgressions.”
At 3:35 A.M., watched by thousands of Syrians and in the full glare of television lights, Eli stood on the gallows.
In Tel Aviv, Nadia Cohen watched her husband die and tried to kill herself. She was taken to a hospital and her life was saved.
Next day, in a small private ceremony in his office, Meir Amit paid tribute to Eli Cohen. Then he went back to the business of running his second prized agent.
Wolfgang Lotz, a German Jew, had arrived in Palestine shortly after Hitler came to power. In 1963 Meir Amit had selected him from a shortlist of candidates for a spying mission to Egypt. While Lotz underwent the same rigorous training as Cohen, once more, Meir Amit thought carefully about his agent’s cover. Amit decided to make him a riding instructor, an East German refugee who had served in the Afrika Korps in World War II and had returned to Egypt to open an equestrian academy. The job would readily give him access to Cairo’s high society, which was built around the city’s riding fraternity.
Soon Lotz had developed a circle of clients that included the deputy head of Egyptian military intelligence and the chief of security for the Suez Canal zone. Emulating Cohen, Lotz persuaded his newfound friends to show off Egypt’s formidable defenses: its rocket launchpads in Sinai and on the Negev frontier. Lotz also obtained a complete list of Nazi scientists living in Cairo who were working in Egypt’s rocket and arms programs. Soon they were systematically executed by Mossad agents.
After two years under cover, Lotz was finally arrested and convicted. The Egyptians, sensing he was too valuable to kill, kept him alive in anticipation he could be traded for Egyptian soldiers captured in a future war with Israel. Once again, Meir Amit was deeply concerned over Lotz’s capture.
Meir Amit wrote to Egypt’s then president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, asking him to exchange Lotz and his wife in return for Egyptian POWs Israel had captured. Nasser refused. Amit applied psychological pressure.
“I let the Egyptian prisoners know they were all being held because Nasser refused to hand over two Israelis. We allowed them to write home. Their letters made their feelings very clear.”
Meir Amit wrote to Nasser again saying Israel would publicly give him all the credit for recovering his POWs and would keep quiet about the return of Lotz and his wife. Nasser still did not agree. So Amit took the matter to the United Nations commander responsible for keeping the peace in the Sinai. The officer flew to Cairo and obtained the assurance that Lotz and his wife would be set free “at some future date.”
Meir Amit “understood the coded language. A month later Lotz and his wife left Cairo in complete secrecy for Geneva. A few hours later they were back in my office.”
Meir Amit recognized his katsas would need support in the field. He created the sayanim, volunteer Jewish helpers. Each sayan was an example of the historical cohesiveness of the world Jewish community. Regardless of allegiance to his or her country, in the final analysis a sayan would recognize a greater loyalty: the mystical one to Israel, and a need to help protect it from its enemies.
Sayanim fulfilled many functions. A car sayan, running a rental agency, provided a katsa with a vehicle without the usual documentation. A letting agency sayan offered accommodation. A bank sayan might unlock funds outside normal hours. A sayan physician would give medical assistance—treating a bullet wound for example—without informing the authorities. Sayanim only received expenses for their services.
Between them they collected technical data and all kinds of “overt” intelligence: a rumor at a cocktail party, an item on the radio, a paragraph in a newspaper, a half-finished story at a dinner party. They provided leads for katsas. Without its sayanim Mossad could not operate.
Again, Meir Amit’s legacy would remain, though vastly expanded. In 1998 there were over four thousand sayanim in Britain, almost four times as many in the United States; while Meir Amit had operated on a tight budget, Mossad, to maintain its worldwide operations, now spent several hundred million dollars a month maintaining its “assets,” paying the expenses of sayanim, running safe houses, providing logistics and covering operational costs. He had left them one other reminder of his time as their chief: a language of their own. Its report writing system was known as Naka; “daylight” was the highest form of alert; a kidon was a member of Mossad’s assassination team; a neviot was a specialist in surveillance; yaholomin was the unit that handled communications to katsas; safanim was the one that targeted the PLO; a balder was a courier; a slick was a secure place for documents; teuds were forgeries.
On that March morning in 1997, as he drove to keep a rendezvous with the past, Meir Amit knew so much had changed in Mossad. Pressured by political demands, most notably from Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, Mossad had become dangerously isolated from the
foreign intelligence services Meir Amit had so carefully courted. It was one thing to live by the credo “Israel first, last, and always. Always.” It was quite another, as he put it, to be caught “going through the pockets of your friends.” The key word was “caught,” he added with another bleak smile.
An example had been Mossad’s increased penetration of the United States through economic, scientific, and technological espionage. A special unit, code-named Al, Hebrew for “above,” prowled through California’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 for high-tech secrets. In a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA had identified Israel as one of six foreign countries with “a government-directed, orchestrated, clandestine effort to collect U.S. economic secrets.”
The president of Germany’s internal intelligence organization, the Bundesamt Fur Verfassungschatz (BFD), had recently warned his department heads that Mossad remained a prime threat to steal the republic’s latest computer secrets. A similar caution was issued by France’s Direction Générale de la Sécurité Exterieure (DGSE) after a Mossad agent had been spotted near the Satellite Imagery Interpretative Center at Creil. Israel had long tried to increase its capability in space to match its nuclear capability on earth. Britain’s counterespionage service, MI5, included in its briefing to newly elected prime minister Tony Blair details of Mossad’s efforts to obtain sensitive scientific and defense data in the United Kingdom.
Meir Amit did not object, as such, to these adventures, only that they often appeared to have been carried out with a lack of planning and disregard for long-term consequences.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 8