Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

Shiloah, with the prime minister’s full backing, responded by reorganizing intelligence functions to exclude foreign ministry professionals. Special assignments became the sole purview of Aman, which quickly established a secret military unit to plant agents in Arab countries.

  It became clear, however, in less than two years that Shiloah—though brilliant—was not cut out to be an administrator. In September 1952 he was replaced by Harel, who had seemed quite busy with his domestic security duties.

  Harel’s work ethic and rectitude had impressed the prime minister, who believed that he had found the right man for a task still not fully understood. Given responsibility for both Shin Bet at home and the Mossad abroad, Harel became the supreme chief of Israeli intelligence.

  He carried a unique title: the Memuneh, the “One in Charge” of the intelligence community. Although Amos Manor became the titular head of Shin Bet, he bowed to Harel’s seniority.

  In return, the Memuneh displayed boundless loyalty and agreed to undertake almost anything for the government. In truth that included, upon Ben-Gurion’s request, using intelligence agencies as political tools for the ruling Mapai party. While Israel’s founding fathers believed in democracy, they also had the unbreakable habit of identifying their own political interests with those of the state.

  The nation was only beginning its long march away from the clandestine habits of a Jewish underground fighting for independence. Among the vast majority of Israelis, the Mapai party was practically synonymous with the state. Mapai certainly controlled most of its institutions: industrial factories, labor unions, the army hierarchy, and the intelligence community.

  Harel was happy to serve the ruling party, but some of his operatives were reluctant to carry out seemingly strange instructions. One day they would be fighting black-market smugglers; on another they would try to locate and arrest subversives; and then they would join Aman’s military intelligence officers in opening thousands of letters from abroad—hoping to intercept contraband currency.

  In the search for subversion, Ben-Gurion and his Mapai took a simple approach based on the belief that “those who are not with us are against us.” Accordingly, Harel ordered Shin Bet operatives to infiltrate Israel’s other political parties. Many of them did not care for doing that, either.

  Harel was acting more like a Soviet-style secret police, rather than a professional intelligence agency in a democratic state. He spied on right-wing parties and on religious zealots, and he planted microphones in the offices of the leaders of a left-wing party. He interpreted political disagreements—sometimes heated—as subversive and dangerous to the state.

  Manor—who had been in Israel for only a few years and spoke Hebrew with the accent of his native Hungary –adapted more to the values of a free country. He ordered Shin Bet agents to stop spying on political entities, and he destroyed archives of gossip and other information about Ben-Gurion’s opponents.

  It took a while, but Harel went along with making Shin Bet far more professional. The agency became skillful at detecting treason by Israelis, as well as foreign spies planted within Israeli society.

  Harel’s biggest catch came as an unexpected outgrowth of espionage by Israelis inside the largest of the neighboring Arab countries, Egypt. Aman’s actions there were far from glorious and failed to destabilize the land of the pyramids.

  In the summer of 1954, an especially secret part of military intelligence that specialized in sabotage, Unit 131, launched a set of missions in Egypt that Israelis would later call Esek Bish: the Rotten Affair.

  At the heart of it was an effort to create a wedge between the United States, Britain, and France on one side, and Egypt, led by the charismatic President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Israel decided to set off bombs all over Egypt in an attempt to make the country seem like an unstable and unreliable partner for the West. Israel hoped to provoke Britain into re-thinking its decision to withdraw forces from the Suez Canal.

  Unit 131 recruited idealistic Egyptian Jewish students who wanted to help Israel and hoped to move there one day. They were instructed to use home-made bombs to attack American and British institutions in Egypt. Aman called this Operation Susannah. The young Egyptians were inept and, falling like dominos, they were quickly arrested one after another. Israel did not acknowledge responsibility. Two of the students were hanged, and several were given long prison terms.

  Harel, with a keen sense for disloyalty, strongly suspected that the network had been betrayed by Aman’s chief case officer, Avri El-Ad. Harel followed his instincts and determined that El-Ad was hiding out in Germany. The joint Mossad-Shin Bet operations team sprang into action, traveling to El-Ad’s location and luring him back to Israel.

  El-Ad refused to admit he had betrayed the Egyptian Jews, and, indeed, there was no evidence of that. So, in an Israeli court that ordered total secrecy, he was convicted of having unauthorized contacts with Egyptian intelligence, and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

  Another important spy caught by Harel was Ze’ev Avni. He arrived from Switzerland during the War of Independence in 1948 and managed to get a job in the foreign ministry with unbelievable ease.

  In the mid-1950s Avni was assigned to the Israeli embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. There, he inflicted severe damage to national security by harvesting all the codes used by the foreign ministry and giving them to the KGB.

  His employers did not know that Avni was a trained KGB agent, serving his masters in Moscow because of his belief in Communist worldwide fraternity. The Mossad had been ignorant of this, too. In fact, it used Avni occasionally to recruit Yugoslavs and foreigners in Belgrade to do some spying for Israel. Avni then started nudging Mossad chiefs to get him transferred out of the foreign ministry so he could work in espionage full-time.

  Harel, constantly surveying personnel rolls with his finely honed counterespionage instincts, found reasons to doubt Avni and his enthusiasm for working overtime.

  Clearly, the best way to get Avni to Tel Aviv was to pretend to offer him a job in the Mossad. In April 1956, unaware that he was in trouble, Avni flew home and was arrested by Harel’s and Manor’s Shin Bet. Under interrogation, the committed Communist at first refused to cooperate. Shin Bet had no evidence against him, so it needed a confession.

  As a final desperation move, Manor showed the suspect articles about a secret speech by the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. Avni did not know that the original text had been obtained, just a few days earlier, by Manor’s own men in Eastern Europe—an intelligence coup that delighted the CIA. (See Chapter 4.) The speech revealed many of the horrors of Josef Stalin’s dictatorship, enough to unsettle all but the most rabid Marxists.

  In the end, the Khrushchev speech broke Avni. Shin Bet interrogators could not help but be surprised by Avni’s instant disenchantment with Soviet Communism. He confessed everything about his secret career as a KGB agent and named his handlers—a “debriefing” that the Israelis found most useful. Now, Harel knew how the Russians were trying to plant spies in the Jewish state.

  Avni was so cooperative that after being sentenced to 15 years in prison, he was planted in the jail cell of other suspected traitors as an informer for Shin Bet.

  Harel clearly was dealing with highly unusual human beings, both friends and foes. Among his intelligence staffers, he did his best to inspire pride in belonging to an exclusive fraternity. “You are rare creatures in a game reserve,” he remarked to his subordinates.

  Being all too human, they enjoyed the oddly worded praise. They certainly were not in the espionage game for money. The salaries paid to employees of Shin Bet and the Mossad were in line with those paid to ordinary civil servants in Israel—low by Western standards—but the money was approximately doubled for operatives on foreign assignment. The work was demanding and dangerous, and the hours unending. At the very least, Harel could ensure that his operatives saw themselves as a protected species.

  His agents also knew that trips abroad, a rare commodity in those days for Israel
is, were among the fringe benefits of their work. Those who toiled in the support division, not normally in the field, were also eligible to enjoy this benefit. From time to time, technicians, mechanics, and secretaries were sent abroad on missions that did not require any specific skill, such as acting as couriers or for guard duty.

  In return, Harel demanded total loyalty and utter commitment to their assignments. Harel himself set the example: work, not waste. Rather than lodging in expensive hotels or eating at elegant restaurants, he would choose cheaper and more ascetic alternatives—even as he traveled frequently to Europe, the United States and South America.

  The worst sin was to lie. “They train us to lie, to steal, and to cook up schemes against our enemies,” a senior operative in the Mossad explained, “but we may not allow these things to corrupt us. We are duty-bound to see to it that our moral standards remain high.”

  Chapter Three

  Strategic Alliance

  “We are very interested in having a cooperation agreement with you,” David Ben-Gurion said to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. This was in May 1951, in the original CIA headquarters near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. The prime minister happened to be in the United States on a mostly unofficial visit, his first after Israel won its war of independence.

  Ben-Gurion was helping to raise funds for his country by personally endorsing the first sales of Israel Bonds in the United States. He used the visit for strategic purposes, too.

  “The Old Man” met with President Harry Truman, and a secret luncheon was arranged for him with the director of the CIA, General Walter Bedell Smith, and Bedell Smith’s assistant, Allen Dulles. Even before Ben-Gurion left Israel, Reuven Shiloah, then still head of the Mossad, suggested that the prime minister propose intelligence cooperation between the two countries.

  The process begun on that trip to America’s capital would eventually see the United States and Israel inextricably linked in a long series of joint missions, dangerous situations, and policy choices—extending to the challenges of the present day. Enemies of the U.S. and the Jewish state would come to see the two nations, one huge and one tiny, as a single entity. They, in turn, would often fight back together.

  At the start of the 1950s, this seemed to be a highly unlikely notion. Israel, ruled by left-wing parties, was considered a socialist state. The kibbutz, the unique Israeli farm cooperative that enshrined the principle of sharing assets among members according to their needs, was regarded as the embodiment of a Marxist dream. The Soviet Union and its Communist puppet countries were early friends of Israel.

  In addition, some Israeli actions set off alarm bells in Washington. The newborn nation’s operatives were flouting American law while laboring to recruit Arab diplomats on U.S. soil, and the FBI did not like it.

  The chief recruiter was Elyashiv Ben-Horin, who was posted in Israel’s embassy in Washington with an intelligence role for the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry. One of his targets was Jordan’s military attaché, but the Jordanian informed the FBI. Ben-Horin, after pulling out a gun in a restaurant, was expelled from the United States in 1950. The incident was not reported in the press.

  The Israeli military attaché—Colonel Chaim Herzog, who later would be head of Aman and eventually president of Israel—also cut short his stay in Washington. Suspicions had been voiced that he was stealing military technology.

  Shiloah wanted to change that nasty environment by urging Ben-Gurion to abandon Israel’s pro-Soviet orientation and instead form strong ties with America. The Mossad chief’s ultimate aim was to negotiate a defense treaty with Washington, and to have Israel join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As a first step, he suggested secret contacts between the CIA and the Mossad.

  Ben-Gurion and senior government officials did not give Shiloah’s proposal much of a chance of being accepted, but they felt that the effort was worth making. The prime minister was surprised when Bedell Smith and Dulles gladly endorsed the idea.

  This was not the first encounter between the American general and the Old Man. They had met immediately after World War II, when Ben-Gurion visited Holocaust survivors in the displaced persons camps of Germany. Bedell Smith, then a senior officer in the Allied command, accompanied the Zionist leader on his inspection tour.

  The extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust—and seeing hundreds of thousands of refugees who survived—left an indelible impression on many American soldiers who served in Europe during the war. Israel, for its part, was well aware of how to wring the memory of the Holocaust when emotional manipulation appeared necessary. The sympathy and guilt felt by some Western leaders could be useful when the Jewish state requested political and military aid.

  Israeli diplomats stressed, time and again, the necessity of their country being strong, so that there would never be another Holocaust. Coupling that horrible history with requests for military or similar aid bordered on exploitation of the unspeakable crimes of the war era, horrors that remained unique in human history, but it worked. Among those persuaded were Bedell Smith and Dulles. In Washington, Ben-Gurion reached an understanding with the CIA chiefs to begin talks immediately on pressing ahead with cooperation.

  Before that, just when the State of Israel was born, American intelligence had not seemed interested. Moe Berg, a retired baseball player—mostly with the Chicago White Sox—was a Jew who worked in the Office of Special Services, the precursor to the CIA. Berg suggested that he be sent to Israel to launch espionage activities as well as liaison. He argued that his religious identity would make it easy to gain the Israelis’ trust. His bosses, however, turned down the idea. In fact, Berg later felt very connected with Israel, and he arranged for his ashes to be spread over Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus following his death in 1972.

  Even without Berg going to bat, the talks with the CIA launched by Ben-Gurion bore fruit in June 1951. Shiloah was sent to Washington to hammer out the final details of a secret understanding. He held long meetings with Bedell Smith, Dulles, and especially James Jesus Angleton.

  Angleton was an eccentric but up-and-coming CIA executive, a Christian who had been influenced profoundly by the Holocaust. He was the sort of man who doggedly pursued any subject that interested him. Although his duties were mostly focused on counterespionage—catching foreign spies in the United States—he was fascinated by all things Israeli.

  Just after World War II ended, uncovering Fascist spy rings and recruiting informers in Europe, Angleton had found that his best sources of information included Aliyah B agents in Italy who were busy smuggling Jews to the country then called Palestine. One of those agents recalled: “Jim saw in Israel a true ally at a time when belief in a mission had become a rare concept.”

  Naturally, Angleton was very pleased when the CIA and Shiloah reached their cooperation agreement in 1951. It laid the foundation for the exchange of strategic information between the CIA and the Mossad and committed them to report to each other on matters of mutual interest. Israel and the United States pledged not to spy on each other, and to exchange liaison officers who would be stationed at their respective embassies in Washington and Tel Aviv.

  To add flesh to the skeleton agreement, they had to overcome one major obstacle. Angleton had been promoted to the post of counterespionage chief at the CIA, and he was an obsessive opponent of Communism. Despite his admiration for the young Jewish state, he believed that Israel—with its socialist values and its links with the Soviet bloc—could constitute a high security risk.

  Angleton was concerned that the emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe would enable Soviet spies to use Israel as a launching pad into the West.

  “The admixture of European races in Palestine offers a unique opportunity for Soviet penetration into a highly strategic area,” a State Department memorandum declared. The Americans suspected that the Russians were infiltrating Israel’s army.

  Amos Manor, head of Shin Bet, fit the frightening picture drawn by the susp
icious Americans because of his Eastern European origins and meteoric rise after arriving in Israel. The FBI believed he was likely a Soviet plant, and it tried to prevent Manor from visiting the United States on official business.

  Israeli officials tried to soothe the Americans’ fears, pointing out that Shin Bet was already giving close scrutiny to new Jewish arrivals from behind the Iron Curtain.

  What finally persuaded Angleton and the CIA was Israel’s contention that “from the bitter could come the sweet,” in the words of the Bible—that the new immigrants should not be feared; they should be used. After all, the Jews had come from all walks of life and had intimate knowledge of the Soviet military, science, economics, and politics. Israel thoroughly quizzed them and began feeding such data to the United States.

  On the Israeli side, who was in charge of the cooperation with America? Because so much of it involved immigrants arriving in Israel from Eastern Europe, Shin Bet chief Manor was chosen by Ben-Gurion for this task.

  Isser Harel strongly disagreed with that decision, and he further suggested that Israeli intelligence should not cooperate with the Americans. They wanted the unilateral transfer of everything learned by Israeli intelligence, he contended, without a genuine bilateral exchange. Harel even suspected that the CIA might organize a coup in Israel, along the lines of the Agency’s covert operation in 1953 in Guatemala.

  Shiloah, as usual, took a different view. Even after leaving the Mossad and recuperating from a car accident, he was a special adviser to Ben-Gurion on international and regional strategy. Shiloah persuaded the prime minister that for the sake of a broader political alliance with the United States, it was worth paying a price—and providing information to the Americans—until their trust was won.

  The CIA, obviously seeing the Israelis as very junior partners, was very demanding. Manor said: “They told me that I had to collect information about the Soviet bloc and transmit it to them. I didn’t know exactly what to do, but then I had the idea of giving them the material we had gathered about a year earlier, about the efforts of the Eastern bloc to use Israel to bypass an American trade embargo. We edited the material, made the necessary erasures, and informed them that they should never ask us to identify sources.”