Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  Largely because of his habit of compartmentalization, laudable among intelligence professionals, Harel told no one else in the defense and security establishment about Joklik’s presence in Israel. Still, the deputy defense minister, Shimon Peres, found out from his sources that Harel was secretly holding a man dubbed “the Austrian scientist.” Peres insisted on meeting Joklik so that his ministry’s top men could question him.

  Harel refused. Peres then complained to Ben-Gurion and threatened to resign. The Old Man, as prime minister, ordered Harel to make Joklik available to the defense ministry.

  In his other role, as defense minister, Ben-Gurion assigned the interrogation task to Binyamin Blumberg, chief of Lakam. Because his staff included scientists, Blumberg would be in a position to judge Harel’s contention that Egypt was close to an ABC-weapons capability that imperiled the existence of Israel. The sense that he had to be judged only made Harel resent Blumberg and Peres more than ever.

  Blumberg’s analysts rejected Joklik’s information on the alleged dangers of the Egyptian missile project. They concluded that the Austrian’s scientific credentials were doubtful.

  Harel, however, still felt certain that Nasser was plotting the destruction of Israel, and the Memuneh still believed in Joklik. In fact, Harel sent the Austrian—now employed as a Mossad agent—on a mission to Switzerland. He was teamed with an Israeli calling himself Yosef Ben-Gal, whose real name was Baruch Presher, and their goal was intimidation. They approached the daughter of Paul Goercke, one of the German scientists still working in Egypt on Nasser’s missile project, and warned of dire consequences if her father did not leave Cairo at once.

  Heidi Goercke’s reaction took the overconfident Israelis by surprise. She informed the Swiss police of the threats she had just received, and they arrested the two Mossad agents outside a hotel in Basel on March 15, 1963.

  Just a few weeks earlier, two Israeli agents had been arrested in Germany, near the home of another of the rocket scientists. The Mossad had been lucky that its warm relations with the BND prompted West German intelligence to arrange the quiet release of the Israelis.

  Joklik and Ben-Gal/Presher were not so fortunate in Switzerland. Joklik did, at least, get to testify in open court that he knew of Egypt’s plans to develop weapons of mass destruction. In addition, one of the prosecutors spoke with empathy about Ben-Gal’s desire to protect his own country from Nasser’s dastardly intentions. Still, the defendants were convicted and sent to prison. They served only two months, but the entire incident cast Israel in an embarrassing light.

  Harel, clearly a man who never gave up, also launched a campaign in the press. Mossad operatives gave briefings to some foreign reporters. Harel also, for the first and probably only time, used Israeli journalists as agents by sending them to Europe to find out whatever they could about the German scientists.

  The articles that appeared caused panic among the Israeli public about the ballistic missile danger from Egypt. Ben-Gurion was furious. He rebuked Harel for leaking to newspapers, and for spoiling good relations with West Germany.

  The prime minister demanded that Harel’s unauthorized crusade come to an end. Harel refused, and he sought backing from other members of the ruling Mapai party, including Foreign Minister Golda Meir and Finance Minister Levi Eshkol. At the time, the political disputes over the Lavon Affair—cover-ups concerning the sloppy sabotage missions in Egypt—were at their peak of ferocity.

  For the first time since 1948, Harel was standing with Ben-Gurion’s opponents. He was still hoping to bypass his mentor’s veto, so he could renew his holy war against the Nazi scientists. In Ben-Gurion’s eyes, however, that was tantamount to treason.

  Amos Manor, who said that as Shin Bet chief he always accepted that he was subordinate to Harel, spoke many years later about the Memuneh’s obsessions: “Our relationship also soured because of the affair of the German scientists. He began to operate contrary to Ben-Gurion’s policy, because The Old Man did not accept his crazy theories. Isser claimed that the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer was playing a double game with Israel, and was presumably helping Nasser to develop atomic weapons. I thought that Adenauer was making every effort to restore Germany to the community of normal nations, and therefore there was no possibility that he would help Nasser attain atomic weapons.”

  Manor continued: “I saw that Isser had lost all sense of proportion. I told him: ‘Ben-Gurion doesn’t understand you, and I don’t understand you either.’”

  The prime minister seemed worried now about all the power he had given to Harel. The issue of the German scientists had torn large holes in the relationship between the two old friends, and flood waters rushed into the breach to sweep away their once-solid trust.

  On March 25, 1963, 10 days after Joklik and Ben-Gal were arrested in Switzerland, Harel submitted a letter of resignation. He hoped that Ben-Gurion would reject the letter and would ask him to remain as Memuneh. He had come to believe the myth that he had created about himself. Harel believed that he was indispensable.

  Ben-Gurion thought otherwise.

  This was the end of an exceedingly busy era. The great crusader had fallen on his own sword.

  Chapter Seven

  A Modern Mossad

  An army messenger handed a slip of paper to Major General Meir Amit.

  “Contact the prime minister’s office in Tel Aviv immediately,” he read, before folding the message neatly and slipping it into the breast pocket of his army uniform. It was March 26, 1963, and Amit was on a tour of military units near the Dead Sea.

  About three hours later, he arrived at David Ben-Gurion’s office—nominally a mere branch of the main bureau in Jerusalem. It was a two-story, stone building, similar to other unimposing houses with porches along the narrow tree-lined streets of the Kirya, Tel Aviv’s military zone.

  Ben-Gurion shook Amit’s hand and then showed him a copy of a letter sent a few hours earlier to Isser Harel. It was the prime minister’s acceptance of the Memuneh’s resignation. Not even pausing to ask Amit if he wanted a new job, Ben-Gurion simply said, “You will be the next head of the Mossad.”

  It was an order. Amit, of course, obeyed.

  The general was surprised by the sudden job offer, although he was among the many who believed that it was time for Harel to go after 12 years of wielding extraordinary power.

  Another surprise, however, was Ben-Gurion’s decision that Amit would not have the same power as Harel. There would never again be a Memuneh in charge of both espionage abroad and counterespionage at home. Responsibility for Shin Bet would go to someone else.

  Amit did, in a different way, begin his new duties by wearing two hats. A year earlier, he had been appointed head of Aman—a very sensible post for a respected military man, and the crowning achievement of a long career in uniform. He kept the Aman job for the rest of 1963, while shifting his focus to modernizing the Mossad.

  Unlike previous intelligence chiefs, he was not born in Europe. He entered the world as Meir Slutzki in 1926 in Tiberias, in British-ruled Palestine. Brought up as a socialist, Slutzki/Amit joined Kibbutz Alonim in the lower Galilee and enlisted in the Haganah underground army, fighting the British and Palestinian Arabs. He was a company commander in the 1948 War of Independence, and after the victory he felt torn between his lifestyle values and his commitment to defending Israel. Instead of returning to the kibbutz, he chose to remain in the army, the new Israel Defense Forces.

  Through the 1950s, Amit commanded infantry and tank units, and he was one of the men who developed the principle of “Follow me!” It became the Israeli army’s trademark—that the IDF officer does not remain in the rear but leads his troops into battle, setting an example of courage. Amit became a good friend of General Moshe Dayan and served as his aide-de-camp in the 1956 Suez campaign. Amit took some time off for a liberal arts education, including a degree in economics from New York’s Columbia University.

  When offered the opportunity to be Aman chief in 1962
, perhaps Amit should have thought twice. Harel did not like him and said it was a mistake to choose a man with no intelligence experience. Furthermore, there was no doubt that Aman lived in the huge shadow cast by the Mossad during Harel’s years as Memuneh.

  Shortly after taking over at Aman headquarters in the Kirya, Amit tried to lessen the hostility and competition between his agency and Harel’s Mossad. But tension between the two agency chiefs only intensified.

  They did not simply have differences of opinion, but two entirely divergent mentalities. Harel was a virtuoso of operations, while Amit specialized in military strategy. Harel happily scurried around Europe for months searching for little Yossele Schumacher or some other quarry, while sleeping on cots and shivering during street surveillance. Amit’s military intelligence officers found the Mossad’s methods laughable, because it yielded so little information on the military capabilities of the Arab countries.

  Senior army commanders, naturally, expected vastly improved productivity when Amit became the Mossad chief. He was one of their own, and it seemed inevitable that efficiency and coordination would be bolstered by his dual roles at the Mossad and Aman. No one before had held those two posts.

  Amit also set a precedent as the highest ranking outsider ever to join the Mossad. A huge negative for him was that most staffers still felt strong allegiance to Harel. At the handover—on the very day that Ben-Gurion sprang his surprise—the fallen Memuneh was “as sour as a lemon,” as Amit later recalled. Harel said a few perfunctory words and then simply stood up and left. Harel’s three secretaries burst into tears. A legend in his own time had just walked away.

  The next day, March 27, a decoded telex message arrived on the new Mossad chief’s desk. It expressed alarm at Harel’s departure and stressed that “every effort must be made to bring him back.” The declaration was signed by the Mossad’s most senior operatives in Europe. They used code names so as to observe security precautions in communications, and Amit had to ask his assistants to ascertain that the letter was from Shmuel Toledano, a veteran of Moroccan and South American Jewish adventures; Paris-based operations chief Yitzhak Shamir; and a few others.

  They had considered a collective resignation, but in the end decided only to send the one harsh telex. Their protest was less severe than the Revolt of the Spies 22 years earlier, when the foreign ministry’s Political Department was reorganized.

  Still, Amit had no sympathy or patience for letter writers and petition signers. He came from a different tradition, where the military chain of command was respected. If a commander falls in battle or departs for any other reason, he can and must be replaced.

  The new Mossad chief shot back a strong response aimed at quelling the discontent. “I do not accept your behavior,” Amit wrote. “I am not accustomed to collective protests.”

  The bad blood within the secret service prompted Amit to order that Harel’s sabotage operations against the German scientists in Egypt be investigated. A special committee of cabinet ministers mounted an inquiry, and Harel was given access to the Mossad’s files before reluctantly testifying before the panel.

  The clash of styles and personalities was never settled. The mutual repulsion between Amit and Harel gained strength with each passing year.

  Huge changes in Israel’s government, ironically, helped reduce tensions. In June 1963, three months after Ben-Gurion forced Harel to quit, the Old Man himself resigned as prime minister. He was tired of the internal power struggles of the Mapai party over the Lavon Affair, which ate away at Ben-Gurion and finally toppled him nine years after the sabotage ring was arrested.

  Ben-Gurion stalked off to found a new, centrist political party, Rafi, with his supporters Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres. Still controlling a majority of Knesset seats, Mapai chose Levi Eshkol as the new prime minister.

  Eshkol showed great interest in intelligence. He was awed by the work of the Mossad. From time to time, he would compliment Amit on the work of his agents. Amit would then make sure that Eshkol, who had been the minister of finance and understood government purse strings, enlarged the Mossad’s budget. This enabled Amit to hire some of his own men and women and accelerate his reform of the secret agency.

  During the nine months he ran both agencies, just a few houses apart in the Kirya, Amit transferred military intelligence’s élite operations arm, Unit 131, from Aman to the Mossad. The move clearly helped Unit 131, which had seen its reputation sullied by the Lavon Affair. It now was integrated with two small operations units in Mossad, and the new entity was code-named Caesarea. Its operatives would be called, in Mossad parlance, lochamim (“combatants” or “warriors”): a morale-boosting name that also made them feel distinct from the men and women working at headquarters.

  Yitzhak Shamir did not like the change and resigned. Within two years, all the senior field operatives who had signed the protest telex to Amit left the Mossad.

  As replacements, Amit installed his own top operatives. He brought several of them from Aman, including Colonel Yosef Yariv, who was made the new operations chief at Caesarea.

  Amit aimed to transform the Mossad into a serious, up-to-date intelligence organization focusing on what he considered its primary task: the collection of military and political data on the Arab states.

  He regarded the Mossad as mainly an information-gathering body that would henceforth eschew show-off operations, which he viewed as a waste of resources. There would probably be no more risky and expensive kidnapping of Nazis, and no international hunts for missing Yosseles. Influenced by the economics and business courses he took in the United States, Amit wished to imitate that country’s corporate mentality and style of management.

  It was Amit who moved the Mossad’s headquarters into new, corporate-style premises, in the Hadar Dafna office building in the center of Tel Aviv—escaping from the modest huts of the Kirya. The agency chief granted himself an American-style office—plush, by Israeli standards of the 1960s, with wood paneling and stylish new furniture. Even from the domestic design point of view, the austere-monkish era of Isser Harel was over. Amit was out to modernize the Mossad, and fresh new quarters were part of the plan.

  Amit also changed the Mossad’s methods of recruitment. Rather than relying on recommendations by friends, along the lines of a British “old-boy network,” he preferred to use more systematic techniques. He made an effort to spot potential candidates, not only in the army, but in universities, in the business world, and among new immigrants.

  Still, there were no Mossad women regularly going out into “the field” to fight for their country. Females were employed almost exclusively in administrative capacities. “A woman cannot gather information in the Arab world,” one of the senior men in the Mossad explained. “The different way in which women are treated in Arab society prevents us from employing women as operatives or case officers. Arab agents wouldn’t accept them. They would see a woman like that and jump out the window.”

  The changes in the agency under Amit did lead to some improvement in opportunities for women, though. The new boss’s demand for proficiency and professionalism gave women a fairer chance to be appointed to run “desks” covering specific regions or subjects. These were women who had slowly made their way up through the ranks, until they were finally made responsible for a single area of expertise.

  Only when a specific mission required women would a female be sent on an overseas assignment, and that was decided after all other avenues were explored and dismissed. For example, when a Caesarea combatant in a dangerous field assignment needed a female companion to improve his cover story, he would be escorted by a Mossad female who was especially trained for the mission.

  There was also a slightly increased use of women in action for purposes of sexual entrapment, but very reluctantly. “It was rarely expected of them to use sex as one of many weapons in the field,” said Hesi Carmel, who was Amit’s chief of staff. “If sexual blackmail or entrapment was to be an integral part of the mission, we
often employed prostitutes, and they could be Israelis or foreigners. We were surprised how some of Israel’s streetwalking law-breakers proved to be surprisingly patriotic, although the secret agency did not tell them any details of the operation or even the identity of the men whom they were ordered to bed.”

  There was less hesitation in sending the men of Mossad abroad to exploit—as part of their official missions—the sexual hunting grounds. Carefully selected, with handsomeness a key attribute, these Israeli operatives are expected to befriend—and usually to become intimate with—an international array of targets. Lovers and pillow talkers can provide much valuable information about the diplomats, airports, and cities of the Arab world and other countries.

  Most of the Mossad structure and characteristics of today were developed during Amit’s years.

  The most important sections of the Mossad were the Collection Department (known as Tsomet—Hebrew for “Junction”), two operational departments (Caesarea being one; the other, founded in 1966, called Keshet—which means “Arc” or “Rainbow,” specializing in surveillance and break-ins), the Research Department, and the Department of Political Action and Liaison (known as Tevel, meaning “Universe,” in charge of contacts with foreign agencies).

  There are also support functions done by the Training, Finance and Manpower, Technology, and Technical Operations departments. The effectiveness of this corporate structure, with its foundations laid during Amit’s time, can be seen in the fact that it barely changed over the next 50 years.

  The Collection, Research, and Political-Liaison departments were organized on both regional and functional bases, and they are highly specialized: to deal only with southeast Asia, or to think about only weapons of mass destruction. The Mossad had a virtual monopoly on the collection of intelligence outside Israel, with the exception of certain military targets—usually not far from Israel’s borders—on which Aman could spy.