Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  The strategies and daring steps of today are rooted in a hidden history. The best way to understand the decisions now being made is to go back as far as 1948 and learn about the motivations and methods of the people inside Israeli intelligence.

  Chapter Two

  Childhood Diseases

  “Dump him!” That was the order from Isser Harel, the undisputed czar of the Israeli intelligence community.

  Several Mossad operatives were sitting in a small office at Sde Dov airfield in northern Tel Aviv near the end of 1954. They were dead tired, having just landed after a four-hour flight in a shaky World War II-era plane. They wanted to go home to their families, but they had a problem. They had just unloaded a corpse, and they did not know what to do with it.

  It was the body of Avner Israel. His life, his death, and his disappearance illustrated how almost everything in the country’s first years had to be improvised. Whether with a traitor or a spycatcher, you made it up as you went along. Still, all through the history of Israeli intelligence, every failure, every improvised solution, and every stroke of luck was a building block in developing a uniquely successful style.

  As for the man whose family name was Israel, he was an immigrant from Bulgaria. In retrospect, his coming from a Communist country should have prompted some attention. Even more troubling should have been the fact that after surviving the Holocaust he moved to British-ruled Palestine for a while, returned to Bulgaria, and then arrived in Israel for good in 1949.

  The immigrant’s son—Moshe Tziper, himself a colorful character in a small rural community in the Galilee—recounted, more than six decades later, that his father had been married to a Christian woman back in the old country but divorced her. In Israel, he served in the navy and then transferred to the air force.

  He was stationed in the north and took part in the first Israeli efforts to develop EW—electronic warfare. This secret work included means of blinding enemies’ technology. Israel seemed talented and was promoted to the rank of captain.

  In 1953 he married another Jewish immigrant from Bulgaria. “That was my mother,” Tziper reminisced with distinctly mixed feelings. “But I know that my father was a philanderer and proved to be a crook.”

  The couple lived in Haifa, where Israel became romantically entangled with a female secretary at the Italian consulate. The romance seemed to drive him mentally over the edge. He converted to Roman Catholicism in a Jerusalem church and married the woman—without bothering with the bureaucratic niceties of divorcing his wife, Matilda. He did change his name to Alexander Ibor.

  Charges filed by the police accused him of pretending to own an apartment—it simply was not his—and selling it for cash to four different buyers. He also posed as a salesman for a foreign refrigerator manufacturer, collected cash deposits from numerous customers, and then disappeared with their money.

  Just before a scheduled court appearance in November 1954, he deserted the military and found shelter among the ultra-Orthodox Jews of the Neturei Karta sect in Jerusalem—ironically, or appropriately, a group opposed to the existence of a secular State of Israel.

  A Christian priest provided him with false identity documents, and then disguised as a priest himself. Israel/Ibor sailed from Haifa to Italy. Matilda at the time was pregnant with their only child, Moshe.

  In Rome, apparently to make some money, he went to the Egyptian embassy and offered to sell Israeli military secrets from his navy and air force work. The Egyptians paid him on the spot. He promised to return with more intelligence, but vanished in an unexpected direction. He bought a ticket on a ship from Spain to South America.

  The Mossad became aware of the blatant betrayal. The agency—very successful at penetrating Arab embassies in Europe—received a tip-off about an Israeli officer “named Ibor or Ibon or Ibi” who was peddling classified material.

  Amos Manor, who under Harel’s authority directed Shin Bet, was quickly made aware of the threat posed by Israel/ Ibor. Manor and Harel decided that there was no way of ignoring the treachery of an Israeli military officer privy to secrets. The turncoat had to be caught.

  Almost instantly, they called in the ace kidnapper of Israeli intelligence, Rafi Eitan. A future spymaster who would employ an American, Jonathan Pollard, as an agent in the 1980s, Eitan was one of the leaders of a combined Mossad-Shin Bet operations department.

  He put together a surveillance and snatch squad and flew to Italy. In the weeks leading up to Christmas 1954, they commenced a search with highly uncertain prospects.

  “Our mission was to find a Bulgarian needle in an Italian haystack,” Eitan recounted more than 50 years later. “We didn’t know his whereabouts.”

  Their assumption was that the traitor would try to fly to Egypt. Harel’s instructions were: Don’t let him get on an airplane. Set up a command post at the airport in Rome. If you see him, grab him physically and injure him if necessary. If all other means fail, shoot him.

  This was a green light to kill an Israeli citizen. It was the first and last time that such an order was given.

  “We needed a miracle,” Eitan recalled, confirming that the search was about to be called off for lack of any results in Italy. All Mossad stations across Europe were instructed to be on alert and to pump all possible agents for any fragment of news about Ibor.

  With the reality that it is as valuable to be lucky as good, there was an unexpected break. The wife of an Israeli secret agent in Vienna who worked for another clandestine agency—Nativ, focused on Jewish immigration—happened to be an ex-Bulgarian. And she happened to have a job at the Israeli embassy in Austria.

  One day, she told her husband that she had just bumped into an old friend from her childhood in Bulgaria. Amazingly, that friend was none other than Avner Israel.

  “Where is he?” the husband asked, calmly as he could. His wife said she would be meeting her childhood friend the next day for lunch.

  The Nativ man relayed the information to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, and new orders were issued to Eitan.

  The snatch expert rapidly conjured up a simple plan. His Shin Bet team rushed to Vienna and took up positions the very next day, near the restaurant where Ibor/Israel was meeting his old friend. Now it was easy to shadow him.

  A few days later, the surveillance target boarded an airplane bound for Paris. Always styling himself a ladies’ man, he could not help noticing the pretty woman sitting next to him. He flirted with her, and she reciprocated.

  This was a classic, but simple, honey trap. She was a member of the Mossad-Shin Bet operation. In the days to come, she helped keep tabs on Ibor.

  Manor himself flew in from Tel Aviv to supervise the surveillance and the capture. Inspired by the army’s uniformed senior officers, who prided themselves on being at the dangerous front lines with their troops, leaders of Israeli intelligence often would choose to be at the scene of a highly risky mission.

  The capture went smoothly. An armed Israeli team surrounded Ibor and forced him to go to a safe house rented by the Mossad. French authorities noticed nothing.

  The turncoat was interrogated and admitted that he had stolen a hundred documents from the air force—about electronic warfare plans and the layout of the Ramat David base in the north—and had offered to sell them to Egypt.

  The orders were to return him home for trial, so the team injected Ibor with a tranquilizer to keep him quiet and stuffed him into a wooden box. An old plane belonging to the Israeli air force was waiting at a small airport near Paris.

  The human box was loaded on board the plane. An anesthesiologist—Dr. Yonah Elian, a trusted volunteer from a hospital in Israel—administered another injection to keep the captive asleep.

  That turned out to be an accidental overdose, fatal in the freezing winds that penetrated the fuselage. Ibor stopped breathing during the flight, and efforts to revive him failed. The captive now was dead. When the plane landed at Tel Aviv’s Sde Dov airfield, the Israeli snatch squad was terrified and did not kn
ow what to do.

  Their calm and experienced commander, Eitan, had remained in Europe for another operation. As he recalled many years later, his underlings waited at the airport for over two hours until Harel surprised them with new instructions: dump the corpse into the Mediterranean.

  A fresh flight crew and a new Shin Bet team arrived, and the rickety plane took off again. Ibor’s body was dropped to a watery grave from high above.

  The original flyers and kidnappers went home, absolutely exhausted “after sleepless nights,” according to Eitan, who added: “Why was Isser’s order obeyed? Because if Isser told you to do something, you did it without asking questions.”

  Israeli intelligence did not bother to tell the man’s wife anything. Her husband had run off with another woman, anyway.

  In 2006, more than half a century after his father vanished, Tziper had a visit from two young intelligence operatives—one from Shin Bet and the other from the Mossad. They told him what seemed, more or less, to be the true story.

  Elian, the young doctor who inadvertently killed Tziper’s father in 1954, was used by the Mossad and Shin Bet again in at least one foreign escapade: the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. There, too, the anesthesiologist administered sedatives by injection. On that South American adventure that would find its place in the lore of great intelligence operations, nothing went wrong. Rafi Eitan was also part of that kidnapping.

  Elian would commit suicide in June 2011 by suffocating himself with a plastic bag. His clandestine, part-time career may not have played a role in that, but with his death at age 88 his secrets were exposed. Israeli news media discovered that the anesthesiologist moonlighted in Mossad missions and that his experiences had been disturbing to him.

  “My father was haunted, all his life, by the tragedy,” his son Danny Elian, also a doctor, told Kol Israel radio—referring to the mishandled kidnapping of the spy in the Israeli military whose own name was Israel.

  The death and dumping occurred barely six years after the State of Israel declared independence as the British ended their three decades of ruling Palestine. Yet, the fate of Ibor is still considered one of the lowest points in the annals of Israeli intelligence.

  “We didn’t kill and we didn’t torture, and we didn’t do anything illegal to Israeli citizens, neither Jews nor Arabs,” Manor said many years later.

  So what about the death of Avner Israel? “Oh,” Manor shrugged. “I am ashamed of this affair. Since then, our intelligence operatives never let even the most dangerous Israeli traitors, who deserved punishment, die in their hands.”

  The Israeli intelligence community blossomed from a spy service called Shai (an acronym for Sherut Yediot, the Hebrew words for “Information Service”). It was the intelligence branch of Haganah, the largest underground organization of the Jewish community in Palestine. The Haganah, and its various units, including the Palmach strike force, battled both the Palestinian Arabs and the British until the latter left on May 14, 1948.

  That June 30, half a dozen men dressed in khaki arrived at Shai’s office in Tel Aviv. It was a unique group, in a unique situation. In the midst of its first war—as the neighboring Arab states had invaded newborn Israel—they grappled with finding ways to satisfy the country’s security and defense requirements while constructing a durable democracy. The men who gathered on that memorably hot, humid day were the founding fathers of the secret agencies that would become the Israeli intelligence community.

  They had vast experience in covert operations: spying, smuggling, and gathering information by all means, however ruthless—spearheading the struggle for Zionist independence. Some had been active with British forces in Europe and North Africa, in the name of defeating the Nazis.

  But when it came to democracy, they had only been observers and never full participants. They had seen the British at work, as intelligence operatives combating the Jewish underground movements in Palestine and as politicians in the Mother of Democracy back in London. And they liked both.

  Their problem, however, was that there was no instant recipe for defending a nation at war without stomping on its democratic values, especially in the Middle East, where Western notions had no natural constituency.

  The commander of Shai, Isser Be’eri, cleared his throat for attention. “I have just come from a meeting with ha-Zaken”—“the Old Man,” he said, a reference to David Ben-Gurion, the charismatic first prime minister of Israel, who was also directing the war as his own defense minister.

  The Shai officers unconsciously sat a bit more erect, as an announcement from the white-haired oracle of Israel appeared forthcoming. At the age of 62, Ben-Gurion was the nation’s elder statesman and guiding light, bar none.

  Ben-Gurion had just finished telling the Shai chief that Israel’s defense would have to include intelligence. Not good intelligence, but great intelligence.

  Shai, the Haganah’s intelligence arm, would digest itself and other pre-state Zionist underground groups to produce several agencies in a community. All of them would initially bear names starting with Shin Mem—the Hebrew initials for Sherut Modi’in (Intelligence Service), followed by a single digit, as in the British style of MI5 and MI6. Formalizing a new structure for the intelligence community would take eight months.

  On February 8, 1949, just before the first general election to the Knesset—Israel’s parliament—and before the signing of armistice agreements with the Arab nations, Ben-Gurion summoned his top advisors and made official this new division of labor for the security agencies. Military and civilian functions would be separated, and the community was meant to be fitting for a modern state that had won its war of independence. Ben-Gurion’s division of labor went as follows:

  Military intelligence: Be’eri had announced in June 1948 that he would henceforth head the dominant agency in the new community, then called the Intelligence Department of the army. Known later as Aman, the acronym for Agaf ha-Modi’in or “Intelligence Wing,” the unit was assigned widespread functions, including collecting information on Arab armies, censoring Israeli newspapers and radio, maintaining security within Israel’s army, and a bit of counterespionage.

  A domestic secret service: Harel, a Shai veteran, would be director of the agency to be called Shabak—an acronym for Sherut ha-Bitachon ha-Klali, or “General Security Service.” Later, its letterhead in English would say “Israel Security Agency,” but it was typically known worldwide by its first two Hebrew initials, Shin Bet.

  Harel was then changing his own name from Isser Halperin. Born in Russia in 1912, he arrived in pre-state Palestine in 1930 and volunteered enthusiastically to be an underground fighter. His specialty in Shai was surveillance of right-wing Jews who rejected the authority of Ben-Gurion and the Haganah. Being the head of Shin Bet suited him well, because he viewed enemies within Israel’s borders as just as dangerous as those outside.

  The agency was initially assigned broad tasks that including catching foreign spies and spying on Israeli citizens deemed suspicious—mainly the Arab minority. Shin Bet was even put in charge of all prisons for a short time, as well as the security of all government buildings, with a special focus on scientific laboratories and arms factories.

  The latter responsibility was transferred a few years later to a security unit within the Ministry of Defense. That unit’s existence was not revealed for more than three decades, when it came to light under the name Lakam, an acronym for Lishka le-Kishrei Mada, the Science Liaison Bureau. It was Lakam, with Eitan as its chief in the mid-1980s, that handled Pollard and caused extreme tension with Israel’s vital ally, America.

  A foreign intelligence service: Espionage outside Israel would be in the hands of the Foreign Ministry’s Political Department. Two years later, in 1951, it would morph into the Mossad, under the leadership of Reuven Shiloah. A secretive man by nature, he set the priorities that became lasting hallmarks of Israeli intelligence. Shiloah decreed that the Mossad would have to plant operativ
es in Arab countries, and that Israeli agencies had a duty to serve as Jewish-Zionist protectors of their people all around the world. Shiloah also insisted on developing modern technology, keeping up with the latest in espionage methods by maintaining ties with friendly agencies in Europe and the United States.

  A clandestine immigration service: Ha-Mossad le-Aliyah Bet, “the Institute for Aliyah B,” would continue its role from before Israel’s independence. Despite the word Mossad in its name, this institute was not part of the fabled foreign espionage agency.

  Aliyah B would, in the early 1950s, be disbanded in a contentious process that saw its functions divided: some for a unit called Bitzur within the new Mossad; and some for a new agency called Nativ. (See Chapter 13.)

  In its first years, the embryonic intelligence community was inept. This included the only occasion in which an Israeli suspect was intentionally put to death, and it happened on the very day that the intelligence community’s outlines were organized: June 30, 1948.

  On the instructions of military intelligence chief Be’eri, Captain Meir Toubiansky was accused of spying for the British and the Jordanians. Without any lawyer or real consideration for his denials, Toubiansky was shot by a firing squad. Three intelligence officers were the prosecutors, the judges, and the executioners.

  It would take a few years until Ben-Gurion acknowledged the injustice, rehabilitated Toubiansky’s reputation, and compensated his family.

  The major ineptitudes of this early period also included an absurd episode in which Israel’s spies went on strike. In what was called the Revolt of the Spies, employees of the Foreign Ministry’s Political Department refused to be shifted to Reuven Shiloah’s new Mossad.