Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

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Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 9

by Gordon Thomas


  The same applied to how LAP’s psychologists conducted their campaigns. In his days the department had built up a global network of media contacts and used them with great skill. A terrorist incident in Europe would produce a call to a news organization contact with “background” that was of sufficient interest to be worked into the story, giving it the spin LAP wanted. The unit also created information for press attachés at Israeli embassies to pass on to a journalist over a drink or dinner, when a “secret” could be quietly shared and a reputation discreetly tarnished.

  While the essence of that black propaganda still remained, there was a crucial difference: the choice of a target or victim. It appeared to Meir Amit that the decision was too often predicated on political requirements : a need to divert attention from some self-serving diplomatic maneuver Israel planned to make in the Middle East, or to regain its fluctuating popularity, especially in the United States.

  When Trans World Airlines Flight 800 crashed off the southeastern coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 people on board, LAP began a campaign to suggest the tragedy was masterminded by Iran or Iraq, both Israel’s bêtes noires. Thousands of media stories quickly perpetuated the fiction. Almost a year later, after expending some five hundred thousand dollars and ten thousand work hours, the FBI’s chief investigator, James K. Kallstrom, ruled out a terrorist bomb or any evidence of a forensic crime. Privately he told colleagues, “If there was a way to nail those bastards in Tel Aviv for time wasting, I sure would like to see it happen. We had to check every item they slipped into the media.”

  LAP struck again after the bombing of the Atlanta Olympic Games. The fiction was spread that the bomb had “all the signs” of being manufactured by somebody who had learned his skills from the bomb makers of Lebanon’s Bekáa Valley. The story took off—and LAP brought the specter of terrorism home to an understandably fearful American public. The only suspect was a hapless security guard at the Games—a man who manifestly had no connection with international terrorism—and when he was cleared, the story died.

  Again, Meir Amit understood the importance of reminding the world about terrorism. But the warning “needed to be copper-fastened, something I always insisted upon.” The admission was followed by a shrug, as if some inner fire blanket had doused his spark of irritation. Long ago he had learned to hide his feelings and to be vague about details ; for years his strength had been in concealment.

  In his mind the downward spiral of Mossad had begun when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv in November 1995. Shortly before Rabin was gunned down by a Jewish extremist—a further sign of the deepening malaise Meir Amit saw in Israeli society—Mossad’s then director general, Shabtai Shavit, had warned Rabin’s staff that there might be an attempt on his life. According to one staffer the possibility was ignored as being too vague “to constitute a definite threat.”

  Under Meir Amit’s command Mossad still had no mandate to operate within Israel, any more than the CIA could do so within the United States. Yet, despite his criticisms, Meir Amit liked to say that Mossad had shared the destiny of Israel. Under his tenure the impact of what it did had often reverberated around the world. Much of that he put down to loyalty, a quality that now seemed to have become passé. People still did their work—as dangerous and dirty as it had always been—but they wondered if they would be held accountable not only to some superior, but to some political figure in the background. That interference could account for the paranoia that regularly surfaced and challenged the concept that Israel is a true democracy.

  Beside the highway between the resort of Herzliyya and Tel Aviv is a compound bristling with antennae. This is Mossad’s training school. Among the first things a new political officer, a spy, at a foreign embassy in Tel Aviv learns is the location of the dun-colored building. Yet, for an Israeli publication to reveal its existence is still to run the risk of prosecution. In 1996 there was a furious debate within the country’s intelligence community about what to do when a Tel Aviv newspaper published the name of Mossad’s latest director general, the austere Danny Yatom. There was talk of arresting the offending reporter and his editor. In the end nothing happened when Mossad realized Yatom’s name had by then been published worldwide.

  Meir Amit was firmly against such exposure: “Naming a serving chief is serious. Spying is a secret business and not a pleasant one. No matter what someone has done, you have to protect him or her from outsiders. You can deal as harshly as you think fit with him or her inside the organization. But to the outside world he or she must remain untouchable and, better yet, unaccountable and unknown.”

  In his tenure as director general his code name had been Ram. The word had a satisfying Old Testament ring for a boy raised in the unquenchable spirit of the early pioneers at a time when the whole of Arab Palestine was in revolt against both the British Mandate and the Jews. From boyhood he had trained his body hard. Physically slight, Meir Amit became strong and fit, sustained by a belief that this was his land. Eretz Israel, the land of Israel. It did not matter that the rest of the world still called it Palestine until 1947, when the United Nations proposed its partition.

  The birth of a nation, Israel, was followed by its near annihilation as Arab armies tried to reclaim the land. Six thousand Jews died; no one would ever be certain how many Arabs fell. The sight of so many bodies all but completed the maturing of Meir Amit. What deepened the process was the arrival of the survivors of the Nazi death camps, each bearing a hideous blue tattoo branded into his or her flesh. “The sight was a reminder of the depth of human depravity.” From others the words would sound inadequately banal; Meir Amit gave them dignity.

  His military career was the biography of a soldier destined for the top: a company commander in the 1948 War of Independence; two years later a brigade commander under Moshe Dayan; then, within five years, army chief of operations, the second-ranking officer of the Israel Defense Forces. An accident—the partial failure of his parachute to open—ended his military career. The Israeli government paid for him to go to Columbia University, where he took a master’s degree in business administration. He returned to Israel without a job.

  Moshe Dayan proposed Meir Amit should become chief of military intelligence. Despite initial opposition, mostly on the reasonable grounds that he had no intelligence experience, he was appointed: “The one advantage I had was that I had been a battlefield commander and knew the importance of good intelligence to the fighting soldiers.” On March 25, 1963, he took over Mossad from Isser Harel. His achievements had become so many they needed a shorthand of their own: the man who introduced Mossad’s policy of assassinating its enemies; who set up a secret working relationship with the KGB at the very time millions of Jews were being persecuted; who refined the role of women and the use of sexual entrapment in intelligence work; who approved the penetration of King Hussein’s palace shortly before the Hashemite ruler became a CIA spy in the Arab world.

  The techniques he created to achieve all that remain in use. But no outsider will ever learn how he first developed them. His jaw muscles tightening, all he would say was: “There are secrets and there are my secrets.”

  When the time had come when he felt Mossad could benefit from a new hand at the helm, he had departed with no fuss, called his staff together and reminded them that if ever they found being a Jew and working for Mossad created a problem between their personal ethics and the demands of the state, they should resign at once. Then, after a round of handshakes, he was gone.

  But no incoming chief of Mossad failed to call upon him for coffee in his office on Jabotinsky Street, in Tel Aviv’s pleasant suburb of Ramat Gan. On those occasions, Meir Amit’s office door remained firmly closed and the phone switched off.

  “My mother always said a trust broken is a friend lost,” he explained in English, smiling an old man’s wily smile.

  Outside his immediate family—a small tribe of children, grandchildren, cousins, kith and
kin stretching over generations—few really know Meir Amit. He would have it no other way.

  On that March morning in 1997, behind his car wheel, Meir Amit looked surprisingly young, closer to sixty than his actual age of seventy-five. The physique that once enabled him to complete a stress test at an Olympian pace had softened; there was a hint of a belly beneath the well-cut blue blazer. Yet his eyes were still sharp enough to startle and impossible to fathom or penetrate as he drove toward an avenue of eucalyptus trees.

  How many times he had made this journey even he could no longer count. But each visit reminded him of an old truth: “that to survive as a Jew still means defending yourself to the death.”

  The same reminder was on the faces of the soldiers waiting for rides under the trees outside the boot camp at Glilot, north of Tel Aviv. There was a swagger about them, even an insolence; they were doing their compulsory service in the Israel Defense Forces and imbued with the belief they served in the finest army on earth.

  Few gave Meir Amit a second glance. To them he was another of the old men who came to remember at a war memorial close to where they waited. Israel is a land of such memorials—over 1,500 in all—raised to the paratroops, the pilots, the tank drivers, and the infantry. The monuments commemorate the dead of five full-scale conventional wars and close to fifty years of cross-border incursions and antiguerrilla operations. Yet, in a nation that venerates its fallen warriors in a manner not seen since the Romans occupied this land, there is no other monument in Israel, indeed the world, like the one Meir Amit helped to create.

  It stands just within the perimeter of the boot camp and consists of several concrete-walled buildings and a mass of sandstone walls assembled in the shape of a human brain. Meir Amit chose that shape because “intelligence is all about the mind, not some bronzed figure striking a heroic pose.”

  The memorial commemorates so far 557 men and women of Israel’s intelligence community, 71 of whom served in the Mossad.

  They died in every corner of the world: in the deserts of Iraq, the-mountains of Iran, the jungles of South and Central America, the bush of Africa, the streets of Europe. Each, in his or her own way, tried to live by Mossad’s motto, “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.”

  Meir Amit knew many personally; some he had sent to their deaths on missions he conceded were beyond the “cutting edge of acceptable danger, but that is the regrettable unavoidability of this work. One person’s death must always be weighed against our nation’s security. It has always been so.”

  The smooth sandstone walls are engraved only with names and the date of death. There are no other clues to the circumstances in which someone died: a public hanging, the fate of all convicted Jewish spies in Arab countries; a murderer’s knife thrust in an alley that had no name; the merciful release after months of prison torture. No one will ever know. Even Meir Amit could often only suspect, and he kept those dark thoughts for himself.

  The brain-shaped memorial is only part of the memorial complex. Within the concrete buildings is the File Room, holding the personal biographies of the dead agents. Each person’s early life and military service are carefully documented; the final secret mission is not. Each agent has his or her memorial day commemorated in a small synagogue.

  Beyond the synagogue is an amphitheater where on Intelligence Day families gather to remember their dead. Sometimes Meir Amit addresses them. Afterward they visit the memorial’s museum, filled with artifacts: a transmitter in the base of a flatiron; a microphone in a coffeepot; invisible ink in a perfume bottle; the actual tape recorder that secretly recorded the critical conversation between King Hussein of Jordan and President Nasser of Egypt, the precursor to the Six Day War.

  Meir Amit had burnished the stories of the men who used the equipment to the brightness of heroic myth. He would point out the disguise Ya’a Boqa’i wore when he slipped in and out of Jordan until he was captured and executed in Amman in 1949, and the crystal radio Max Binnet and Moshe Marzuk used to run Mossad’s most successful network in Egypt before they died painful, lingering deaths in a Cairo prison.

  To Meir Amit, they were all “my Gideonites.” Gideon was the Old Testament hero who saved Israel against superior enemy forces because he had better intelligence.

  Finally, it was time for him to go to the maze, accompanied by the museum’s curator. They paused before each engraved name, gave imperceptible little head bows, then moved on. Abruptly it was over. No more dead to respectfully acknowledge—only ample space for more names on the sand-colored tombstone.

  For a moment Meir Amit was again lost in reverie. In whispered Hebrew the old Mossad chief said to the curator: “Whatever happens, we must ensure this place lives on.”

  Apropos of nothing that had gone before, Meir Amit added that on his office wall in Damascus, President Hafez al-Assad of Syria only has one picture, a large photograph of the site of Saladin’s victory against the Crusaders in 1187. It had led to the Arab reconquest of Jerusalem.

  For Meir Amit, Assad’s fondness for the photograph “has a significance for Israel. He sees us the same way Saladin did—someone to be eventually vanquished. There are many who share that aspiration. Some even purport to be our friends. We have to be especially watchful of them … .”

  He stopped, said his good-bye to the curator, and walked back to his car as if he had already said too much; as if what he had said would further energize the whispers beginning to circulate within the Israeli intelligence community. Another crisis in the nowadays uneasy alliance between Mossad and U.S. intelligence was about to surface—with potentially devastating effects for Israel.

  Already caught up in the brewing scandal was one of the most colorful and ruthless operatives who had once served under Meir Amit, a man who had already secured his place in history as the capturer of Adolf Eichmann, yet still liked to play with fire.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE SPY IN THE IRON MASK

  Wealthy residents in the exclusive suburb of Afeka in the north of Tel Aviv were used to seeing Rafael “Rafi” Eitan, a squat, barrel-chested elderly man, myopic and almost totally deaf in his right ear since fighting in Israel’s War of Independence, return home with pieces of discarded lavatory piping, used bicycle chains, and other assorted metal junk. Wearing a pair of chain-store trousers and shirt, his face covered with a welder’s guard, he fashioned the scrap into surreal sculptures with an acetylene torch.

  Some neighbors wondered if it was a means of momentary escape from what he had done. They knew he had killed for his country, not in open battle, but in secret encounters that were part of the ceaseless undercover war Israel waged against the state’s enemies. No neighbor knew exactly how many Rafi Eitan had killed, sometimes with his stubby, powerful hands. All he had told them was: “Whenever I killed I needed to see their eyes, the white of their eyes. Then I was very calm, very focused, thinking only of what I had to do. Then I did it. That was it.” Accompanying the words was an endearing smile some strong men use when seeking the approval of the weak.

  Rafi Eitan had for almost a quarter of a century been Mossad’s hands-on deputy director of operations. Not for him a life behind a desk reading reports and sending others to do his bidding. At every opportunity he had gone into the field, traveling the world, jaw thrust forward, driven by a philosophy that he had reduced to one pithy sentence : “If you are not part of the answer, then you are part of the problem.”

  There had been no one like him for cold-blooded ruthlessness, cunning, an ability to improvise at ferocious speed, an inborn skill at outwitting even the best-laid plan and tirelessly tracking down a quarry. All those qualities had come together in the one operation that had given him lasting fame—the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who epitomized the full horror of Hitler’s Final Solution.

  To his neighbors on Shay Street, Rafi Eitan was a revered figure, the man who had avenged their dead relatives, the onetime guerrilla who had been given the opportunity to remind the world that no l
iving Nazi was safe. They never tired of being invited into his house and listening again to him describe an operation that is still unrivaled in its daring. Surrounded by expensive objets d’art, Rafi Eitan would fold his muscular arms, tilt his square block of a head to one side, and for a moment remain silent, allowing his listeners to carry themselves back in their mind’s eye to that time when, against all odds, Israel had been born. Then, in a powerful voice, an actor’s voice playing all the parts, missing nothing, he began to tell his trusted friends how he had set about capturing Adolf Eichmann. First he set the scene for one of the most dramatic kidnapping stories of all time.

  After World War II, tracking down Nazi war criminals was initially done by Holocaust survivors. They called themselves Nokmin, “Avengers.” They didn’t bother with legal trials. They just executed any Nazis they found. Rafi Eitan did not know of a single case where they killed the wrong person. Officially in Israel there was little interest in pursuing war criminals. It was a matter of priorities. As a nation Israel was clinging on by its fingertips, still surrounded by hostile Arab states. It was one day at a time. The country was almost broke. There was no spare cash for resolving the evil of the past.

  In 1957, Mossad received the electrifying news that Eichmann had been seen in Argentina. Rafi Eitan, already a rising star in Mossad as a result of astute forays against the Arabs, was selected to capture Eichmann and bring him to Israel to stand trial.

  He was told the outcome would have a number of significant benefits. It would be an act of divine justice for his people. It would remind the world of the death camps and the need to make sure they never happened again. It would place Mossad at the forefront of the global intelligence community. No other service had dared to attempt such an operation. The risks were equally great. He would be working thousands of miles from home, traveling on forged documentation, relying entirely on his own resources and working in a hostile environment. Argentina was a haven for Nazis. The Mossad team could end up in prison there or even be killed.

 

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