Mossad

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  But the most important tribute to Dagan came a year before, from a foreign source, the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, a newspaper known for its virulent and hostile criticism of Israel. On January 16, 2010, it published an article by the well-known writer Ashraf Abu Al-Haul. “Without Dagan,” Al-Haul wrote, “the Iranian nuclear project would have been completed years ago . . . The Iranians know who was behind the death of the nuclear scientist Masud Ali Mohammadi. Every senior Iranian leader knows that the key word is ‘Dagan.’ Only few people are familiar with the name of the director of the Israeli Mossad. He works quietly, far from the media attention. But in the last seven years he has landed painful blows on the Iranian nuclear project and stopped its advance.

  “The Mossad is responsible for several daring operations in the Middle East,” Al-Haul added, and mentioned some of Dagan’s feats against Syria, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad.

  “All this,” he concluded, “has turned Dagan into the Superman of the State of Israel.”

  There were no supermen around the crib of the Israeli Secret Service when it was born in May 1948, just a handful of veterans of the “Shai,” who had already acquired much experience in espionage and covert operations as the intelligence service of the Haganah, the major military underground of the Jewish community in Palestine. And in their first year, these modest and devoted undercover fighters, the nascent military secret service, were shaken by violence, internal strife, cruelty, and murder in what became known as the Be’eri Affair.

  Chapter Three

  A Hanging in Baghdad

  Isser Be’eri, also known as “Big Isser,” was a tall, gangly man with sparse graying hair. His bushy eyebrows shielded dark, cavernous eye sockets, and a sardonic smile often hovered over his thin lips. Born in Poland, he was reputed to be an ascetic, a modest man of flawless integrity; but his rivals claimed he was a dangerous and fierce megalomaniac. A longtime member of the Haganah, Big Isser was the director of a private construction company in Haifa. He was a loner, silent and unsociable, and lived with his wife and son in a small, windswept house in the coastal village of Bat Galim.

  Shortly before the creation of Israel, Be’eri had been appointed head of the Shai by the commanders of the Haganah. When independence was declared, on May 14, 1948, Israel was attacked from all sides by its neighbors, and Be’eri became the head of the newborn military secret service. Be’eri was active in the left wing of the Labor movement and had excellent political connections. His friends and colleagues praised his devotion to the defense of Israel. The Independence War would go on until April 1949.

  Yet, soon after Be’eri became head of the secret service, strange, blood-curdling events—seemingly unrelated—started to happen.

  A couple of hikers on Mount Carmel made a grisly discovery. In a deep gully at the foot of the mountain they found a half-burned body riddled with bullets. It was identified as a well-known Arab informant of the service, Ali Kassem. His assassins had shot him, and then tried to burn his body.

  Some weeks later, at a secret meeting with Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, Big Isser accused Abba Hushi, an influential leader of Mapai—Ben-Gurion’s party—of being a traitor and a British agent. Ben-Gurion was stunned. Great Britain had been the ruling power in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel; the Haganah carried an underground struggle against its restrictions on the Jewish community. British intelligence had frequently tried to plant their spies inside the Jewish leadership. But Abba Hushi, a pillar of the Jewish community and the charismatic leader of Haifa’s workers—a traitor? It seemed impossible. At first, Israel’s leaders who were in the know indignantly dismissed Be’eri’s accusation. But Be’eri had found two confidential telegrams sent by British intelligence from Haifa’s post office in May 1948. He laid them on Ben-Gurion’s desk—irrefutable evidence of Hushi’s treachery.

  At the same time, Be’eri ordered the arrest of a friend of Hushi’s, Jules Amster. Be’eri had Amster brought to a salt deposit in Atlit, outside Haifa, had him beaten and tortured for seventy-six days, and pressured him to admit that Hushi was a despicable traitor. Amster refused to yield, and was finally released, a broken man. His teeth were gone, his legs were covered with wounds and scars, and he was haunted for years by fear.

  On June 30, 1948, while shopping at a Tel Aviv market, army captain Meir Tubiansky was arrested and brought to Beth Giz, a recently occupied Arab village. It was suspected by military intelligence that Tubiansky, while in Jerusalem, had disclosed top-secret information to a British national, who, in his turn, had passed it to the Arab Legion, Jordan’s army. The Jordanian artillery, acting on that information, had heavily shelled several strategic targets throughout Jerusalem. In a summary court-martial that lasted less than an hour, Tubiansky was accused of being a spy for the Arabs, found guilty, and sentenced to death. A hastily assembled firing squad executed him in front of a group of stunned Israeli soldiers. (Tubiansky would be the only person ever executed in Israel, beside Adolf Eichmann.)

  Inquiries into the deaths and torture led investigators to the perpetrator: Big Isser.

  He had suspected Ali Kassem of being a double agent and had ordered his assassination.

  He framed Abba Hushi. According to several investigators, Big Isser had a personal score to settle with Hushi. He might have succeeded if the main forger in the employ of the service, besieged by guilt, hadn’t confessed to his superiors that he had falsified the telegrams implicating Abba Hushi, under Be’eri’s direct orders.

  And Be’eri had also been the one who had ordered the hasty arrest and the execution of Captain Tubiansky.

  Prime Minister Ben-Gurion acted immediately. Be’eri was tried in a military court, then in a civil one, stripped of his rank, dishonorably discharged from the IDF, and found guilty in the deaths of Ali Kassem and Meir Tubiansky.

  Israel’s leaders were flabbergasted. Be’eri’s methods seemed taken straight from the infamous KGB; his sinister personality, his orders to forge, torture, and murder were a stain on the moral and humane principles on which Israel had been founded.

  The Be’eri affair left a gruesome scar on the secret service and had a profound impact on its evolution. If, in wartime, the civil leaders had recoiled from condemning Be’eri, Israel’s secret service might have assumed a totally different character. It might well have become a KGB-like organization for whom framing, forgery, torture, and murder were routine practices. Instead, in the future, Be’eri’s methods would be forbidden. The secret service placed limits on its own power and based its future operations on legal and moral principles that would guarantee the rights of individuals.

  With the removal of Be’eri, another man stepped onto the center stage of Israel’s shadow world, Be’eri’s polar opposite: Reuven Shiloah.

  Reuven Shiloah, forty, soft-spoken, secretive, was a man of mystery. He had come from a rich culture, possessed a sharp, analytical mind, an in-depth knowledge of the Arab Middle East, its tribal traditions, ruling clans, fleeting alliances, and blood feuds. One of his admirers called him “the queen in Ben-Gurion’s chess game” while he served as political adviser to David Ben-Gurion. Some compared him to the wily Cardinal Richelieu of France; others saw him as a subtle manipulator, a master puppeteer, a man who knew how to pull strings behind the scenes. Shiloah had been active, all his life, in secret missions and undercover work.

  The suave, urbane son of a rabbi, Shiloah had been born in Old Jerusalem. Always formally dressed, the trim, balding young man had set out on a mission to Baghdad, long before the creation of Israel. He had spent three years in Iraq, posing as a journalist and a teacher and studying that country’s politics. During World War II, he negotiated with the British to set up a Jewish Commando Corps to sabotage operations in Nazi-occupied Europe. He helped create two such special Jewish commando units: one was a German battalion equipped with German weapons and uniforms, which undertook daring missions behind enemy lines in Europe; the other was an Arab battalion whose members
spoke Arabic, dressed like Arabs, and were trained for missions deep in Arab territory. He also convinced the British to parachute Jewish volunteers from Palestine into occupied Europe, to organize local Jewish resistance to the Nazis. Shiloah was the first to establish contacts with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), precursor to the CIA. On the eve of Israel’s Independence War, he traveled to the neighboring Arab capitals in secret and brought back a priceless trophy: the Arab armies’ invasion plans.

  Shiloah’s compulsive need to act under a thick cloak of secrecy became a source of myriad legends. His friends used to joke that once he hailed a taxi. “Where to?” the driver asked. Shiloah answered: “It’s a state secret.”

  During the Independence War, Shiloah headed the external political information service. It was one of several quasi-independent intelligence groups created before the birth of Israel. But on December 13, 1949, Ben-Gurion issued an order to establish “an institute (in Hebrew, mossad) to coordinate state intelligence agencies,” to be headed by Reuven Shiloah.

  Yet it took two more years of delays and disputes before the Mossad could be created. One intelligence unit, called the political department, whose members had been gathering intelligence abroad, enjoying generous expense accounts and a glamorous lifestyle, revolted and refused to continue spying for Israel when they heard of the plan to disband their unit and incorporate it into the Mossad. Only after they were reprimanded—and most of them fired—could Shiloah create the Mossad.

  Its title would eventually be changed to the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, and its motto chosen from Proverbs 11:14: “Without stratagems would a people fall, and deliverance is in a wise counsel.”

  But neither the new title nor the motto made the Mossad unique. Shiloah was determined to confer upon it an exceptional feature. The Mossad would not only be the long arm of Israel, but also the long arm of the entire Jewish people. At a meeting of his first recruits, the ramsad declared: “Beside all the functions of a secret service, we have another major task: to protect the Jewish people, wherever they are, and to organize their immigration to Israel.” And indeed, in the years following, the Mossad would secretly help create self-defense units in places where the Jewish communities were in peril: Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, Baghdad, and some South American cities. Young militant Jews were surreptitiously brought to Israel and trained by the army and Mossad, weapons were smuggled into unstable or enemy countries and hidden, local Jews were organized into defense units to create forces able to defend the Jewish community from attacks by a mob or by irregular armed groups—at least until help came from government forces or international organizations.

  In the fifties, the Mossad brought to Israel tens of thousands of imperiled Jews from the Arab countries in the Middle East and Morocco; and years later, in the eighties, it was again the Mossad that organized the rescue of Jews trapped in Khomeini’s Iran and carried out the mass exodus of Ethiopia’s Jews to Israel. But during its first undercover operation in Iraq, disaster struck.

  In the large Baghdad department store Orosdi Bak, on Rashid Street, a young man named Assad was manning a necktie counter. A Palestinian refugee, he had left his home in Acre after the Israeli army had captured that city. Shortly before leaving Israel, he had done a favor for his cousin who had fallen ill, by taking his place as a waiter in a café near the military governor’s compound. For a week, Assad had walked the corridors of the military governor’s building, carrying an ornate brass tray and serving tiny cups of strong Turkish coffee to Israeli army officers. The faces of some of those young officers stayed with him.

  On that day, May 22, 1951, he was observing the customers walking through the store, when he noticed a familiar face. It can’t be, he thought at first; it’s impossible! But he did remember the man he saw—not in summer shirt and pants, like today, but in a khaki uniform. Assad urgently alerted the police. “I’ve seen an Israeli army officer! Right here in Baghdad!”

  The police promptly arrested the European-looking man, who was accompanied by a thin, nondescript, bespectacled Iraqi Jew. His name was Nissim Moshe, and he told the police that he was a mere civil servant at the Jewish Community Center. “I met this tourist yesterday at a concert,” he explained, “and he asked me to show him around the stores.” When they reached headquarters, the two men were separated. The Iraqi detectives brutally interrogated Moshe about the man who had been identified as Israeli. Moshe stuck to his story: he had met the tourist only yesterday, and didn’t know him. In the dark cellars of police headquarters, the interrogators strung up Moshe by his feet and then by his hands, beat him, and threatened to kill him. But their seedy prisoner seemed to know nothing. After a week of torture, the Iraqis decided that Nissim Moshe was a nobody and released him.

  The other prisoner kept repeating he was Iranian, named Ismail Salhun, and he showed his captors his Iranian passport; but they continued torturing him. He didn’t look Iranian, and he didn’t speak a word of Persian. Finally, they set up a confrontation between him and Assad, the Palestinian who had identified him. “My blood froze in my veins when I saw him,” the prisoner said later. He broke down and confessed: he was Yehuda Taggar (Yudke Tadjer), an Israeli, a captain in the IDF. The detectives dragged him to his apartment, broke the furniture, probed the walls, and then discovered a cache of documents—a voluminous file taped to the bottom of a drawer in his desk.

  And the nightmare began. Not only for Taggar, but for the entire Baghdad Jewish community.

  Several clandestine Jewish and Israeli organizations operated in Baghdad, including an illegal emigration unit, a self-defense group, and a few Zionist and youth movements. Some had been created even before the birth of the State of Israel. Around Baghdad, in several caches, weapons and documents were stocked, some within the central Mas’uda Shemtov synagogue. The recent additions to these groups were a few espionage networks, hastily established prior to the creation of the Mossad; compartmentalization was almost nonexistent, and the fall of one could easily bring down all the others. The Iraqi Jews sat on a powder keg: Iraq was the vilest enemy of the young State of Israel, and the only one that had refused to sign an armistice agreement with it. Every member of the secret Jewish networks knew that the Iraqis would show no mercy, and his life would hang on a thread.

  For that reason, Yehuda Taggar had been sent there to detach the espionage network from all the others. A former officer in the Palmach elite forces, Taggar was twenty-seven and sported a rebel forelock and a ready smile. This was his first mission abroad, and prior to his capture he had done his best to isolate the network he led from the other groups, but some of his own men nonetheless still took part in other secret activities; another Israeli with a genuine British passport, Peter Yaniv (Rodney the Hindu), ran a separate network but remained in contact with Taggar.

  Taggar’s communications to Tel Aviv passed through the top commander of all the groups operating in Baghdad: a secretive man whose identity was known to few. His cover name was Zaki Haviv, but he was really Mordechai Ben-Porat, an Iraqi-born Israeli, a former officer during Israel’s Independence War. He had been loath to go back to Baghdad and was on the verge of getting married to a girl he had met in the army, but finally yielded to the pressure of the intelligence community and undertook this perilous mission.

  In the days following Taggar’s arrest, the entire secret organization crumbled. Iraqi special police units arrested scores of Jews. Some broke down under interrogation and led their captors to their hideouts. The Iraqis discovered documents that linked certain Jews to espionage. Under the flagstones of the Shemtov synagogue, the police uncovered a huge cache of weapons, built up over the years, starting after a bloody pogrom in 1941 in which 179 Jews had been slaughtered, 2,118 wounded, and hundreds of women raped. The number of weapons found amazed the Iraqis: 436 grenades, 33 machine pistols, 186 revolvers, 97 machine-gun chargers, 32 commando daggers, and 25,000 cartridges.

  During the ferocious Iraqi interrogation, a name po
pped up more and more frequently: Zaki Haviv, the mysterious top man of the underground. But who was he? And where? Finally, a smart young detective made the connection: Zaki Haviv had to be none other than Nissim Moshe, the self-effacing fellow who had been arrested with Taggar and then released. Scores of agents raided Moshe’s house—but found nobody. A manhunt of epic proportions was conducted throughout Baghdad, but Zaki Haviv had vanished.

  Actually, he was in the one place the police hadn’t dreamt of searching. He was . . . in jail.

  A couple of days after his release from the initial arrest with Taggar, Ben-Porat was awakened by a loud pounding on his door. “Open, police!” the agents were shouting. Ben-Porat thought that was his end. The house had no back exit, and there was no one in Baghdad who could save him now. And he knew, for a man in his position, there could be only one verdict in the Iraqi courts: the gallows. He resigned himself and unlocked the door. Two police officers were outside. “You are under arrest,” one said.

  Ben-Porat feigned surprise. “But what have I done?”

  “Oh, nothing serious,” the cop said, “just an automobile accident. Now, get dressed.”

  Ben-Porat couldn’t believe his ears. He had forgotten all about the accident in which he had been involved some months earlier. He had ignored the court summons, and now was going to face Iraqi justice. The trial was swift, barely an hour. The judge sentenced him to two weeks in jail. And so, while an army of Iraqi agents were on full alert, searching for him, Zaki Haviv was paying his debt to society in a Baghdad jail.