Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  A strange coalition of bedfellows took action to counter Egyptian President Nasser’s incursion: Saudi Arabia’s royal military, the Mossad, and the British MI6, with additional support from a private security firm led by Colonel David Stirling, a legend from fighting the Germans in North Africa in World War II. Stirling created the potent and feared SAS, Britain’s Special Air Service commandos.

  This coalition helped the Yemen’s monarchists. The British trained them, the Saudis sent foot soldiers, and Mossad agents coordinated drops of ammunition by the Israeli air force.

  Israel did not really care who ruled either South Yemen or North Yemen. Israel’s interest was to make the Egyptian Army bleed in the treacherous terrain of Yemen, keeping Nasser at bay and busy, far away from the Israeli border.

  The Mossad’s globetrotting extended into Southeast Asia, when Amit’s assistant, Hesi Carmel, was sent to be the Mossad station chief in one of the small countries of that region. From that base, he had the sensitive task of forging secret relations with the largest Muslim nation on earth—Indonesia. Officially, Jakarta was hostile toward Israel. This was expressed in part by Indonesia being the birthplace in 1955 of the Non-Aligned Movement, which refused to be part of the Western or Soviet blocs but was unfriendly toward Israel.

  In secret, however, Indonesia agreed to buy weapons from the Jewish state, and its military was trained by Israeli experts. The connection could be useful for Israel in many ways, certainly including the cash input from the arms and training contracts. This was yet another fruit of the Mossad’s alternative diplomacy.

  Especially in the immediate vicinity of the Middle East, the fundamental principle that guided these hectic activities was this: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That dictum, put into practice again and again by Israel, was supplemented by Mossad founder Reuven Shiloah’s “peripheral” notion: that Israel should make friends with non-Arab minorities, with Muslim non-Arab states, and even with moderate pro-Western Arab leaders.

  As a prime example, Jordan’s King Hussein agreed to meet Israeli prime ministers, foreign ministers, and generals. The first encounters were at the home of Emanuel Herbert, a prestigious Harley Street physician in London who was the king’s Jewish doctor and a good friend of the Israelis, too.

  After 1967, the meetings would take place closer to home, at secret spots near the long Israeli-Jordanian border. One of the main goals, from Israel’s point of view, was to keep Jordan out of the Nasser camp.

  To achieve a nearly complete encirclement of Egypt, the Mossad managed to gain access to another Muslim country: the North African kingdom of Morocco. The Mossad thus had good information along a strategic coastline and in part of the Sahara Desert. In exchange, Israeli intelligence officers trained the Moroccan secret police.

  The relationship led to unexpected dilemmas. The Moroccans demanded that the Mossad help them hunt for Mehdi Ben Barka, a charismatic opposition leader who tried to stir up a revolution in his country and was forced into exile in Switzerland. The head of the secret police, General Mohammed Oufkir, then explicitly asked Amit to have Ben Barka killed.

  The Mossad chief hesitated. He knew that rejecting the request might imperil a very valuable relationship. Yet, he also knew that it would be wrong, on many levels, to turn his Caesarea operatives into a mercenary force—Murder Incorporated, Mafia-style—in the service of a foreign regime.

  Amit consulted with Eshkol, and they decided on a compromise. The Mossad would give non-lethal assistance, helping the Moroccans locate Ben Barka and persuading him to come to Paris—but that would be all.

  Mossad operatives, posing as a film crew, found the Moroccan dissident in October 1965 and invited him to meet them in a fashionable café on the Left Bank. General Oufkir was waiting there, with a team that included Moroccan agents and French mercenaries.

  Oufkir’s men spirited away Ben Barka and tortured him in a villa. He was then either shot or stabbed, reportedly by Oufkir himself. A senior Mossad man based in Paris was apparently nearby, maintaining contact out of some strange sense of courtesy.

  The corpse was never found, but over the years a few details of the murder emerged. In Israel, military censorship prevented anything about the Mossad being mentioned in the press, but people close to Israeli intelligence whispered about an unusual lethal mission that was beyond the Mossad’s control.

  Unluckily for Amit, Harel had returned to government service as a special advisor to Eshkol, and this gave the ex-Memuneh an opportunity to blame his successor for the Morocco misjudgment: a terrible idea that was hatched behind the prime minister’s back. Eshkol and Amit knew the truth, however: that both of them had decided to give Morocco’s Oufkir the help he was demanding.

  They together quashed Harel’s attacks on Amit, underlining that if this became an open, international scandal like the fiasco in Cairo—the Lavon Affair, a decade earlier—it would cause damage to Israel and specifically to Eshkol’s government.

  Yet the Mossad and Israel did not escape unpunished. Furious and proud, President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the large and important Mossad station in Paris be shut down.

  Again and again through Israel’s history, its operatives learned that partnerships with foreigners could be tactically useful, but that it would be a reckless abandonment of Israel’s principles and sovereignty to depend mostly on others. Self-reliance, in crises large and small, would be a hallmark of the intelligence community.

  Chapter Eight

  Spying War on the Horizon

  “I knew that as head of Aman and then the Mossad, history would judge me based on two metrics,” said Meir Amit, almost half a century after his heyday in the 1960s. “One would be the prevention of war, and the second on providing the best intelligence, analysis, and understanding of our enemies’ capabilities and intentions.”

  Amit and his Aman and Mossad people worked simultaneously on both fronts. Supported by the dovish Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, a higher priority was often placed on preventing war. Amit optimistically believed that if he could just establish contact with Egypt’s top echelon—and above all with its belligerent President Gamal Nasser—some basis for compromise could be found.

  Amit sought channels—or, to use an intelligence term, “levers”—that could be manipulated to help achieve the goal of reaching the Egyptian leadership. Surprisingly, he found them in Otto Skorzeny, a Nazi war hero.

  Surely this was a sensational double standard, gilded in hypocrisy. Israel was born from the ashes of the Holocaust, and its intelligence operatives were in hot pursuit of Nazi war criminals. Yet, at the same time, Israeli espionage agencies never missed an opportunity to use Nazis when finding them valuable for a mission—as Harel and Amit did with Skorzeny.

  During World War II, he had proudly worn the uniform of the Waffen SS—the Nazi Party’s most loyal soldiers. Marred but also somehow glorified by having a stereotypical scar on his face, Skorzeny proved to be more than just a true believer. He was also a charismatic, creative, and clever warrior.

  In Italy, he rose to Nazi fame after commanding a daring rescue mission in July 1943 that freed the deposed dictator Benito Mussolini from captivity. Three months later, Skorzeny commanded the failed Long Jump operation intended to assassinate the Big Three leaders—Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt—during their summit meeting in Tehran.

  A year later, he was in charge of an ambitious deception plan, in which he disguised more than a hundred German soldiers in captured American and British uniforms and sent them in captured jeeps to infiltrate Allied lines. This was a violation of internationally recognized rules of war, and Skorzeny later was put on trial as a “war criminal.” The tribunal in Dachau found him not guilty, however, after a British Special Forces officer testified that he also had dressed his own men as the enemy—in German uniforms and insignia.

  Skorzeny was next held in a de-Nazification camp, but he escaped in 1948: first to France, and then Spain. He was soon back in the shadowy wor
ld of conspiracies and excitement.

  He set up an engineering company, which served as a front for smuggling his ex-SS comrades to South America by providing them with false documents. In this capacity, Skorzeny was the Spanish coordinator of a route known as the Rat Lines, believed to be part of an organization of former Nazi officers calling itself Odessa.

  That was not the only thrill in Skorzeny’s new life. He also reestablished relations with General Gehlen, the Nazi spymaster who was now heading West Germany’s BND spy agency. Gehlen had a knack for playing many sides: the darling of the newborn CIA, cooperating with the Mossad, but also occasionally helping Arab regimes.

  After the revolution in Egypt that toppled King Farouk in 1952 and eventually brought Colonel Nasser to power, Gehlen sent some German professionals to help the new government in Cairo. Among them was the ex-SS colonel from Spain, Skorzeny, who was assigned to train Nasser’s bodyguards.

  German aid to Egypt was coordinated by the CIA’s Archibald Roosevelt Jr., a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and a renowned linguist who served as an intelligence officer in many countries under diplomatic cover. Known as Archie, he truly had a long love affair with the Arab world. With disgust, he wrote that Israelis viewed Arabs as “alien, threatening, hateful, and inferior … a people with whom they have nothing in common.” He maintained that that explained what he considered the failures of Israeli intelligence.

  American Arabists, including some in the CIA and the State Department, hoped in vain that Nasser would become a friend of America. The CIA certainly turned a blind eye to Skorzeny’s Nazi past.

  His activities and contacts in Egypt certainly did not go unnoticed by the Mossad. One day in the summer of 1962, when Skorzeny was at his office in Madrid, he had a visit from two mysterious men—one short, the other tall and solidly built, both in their late 30s. They introduced themselves as businessmen from a European country but soon revealed their true identity: representatives of the Israeli government.

  This was three months after Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel. Senior Nazis in hideouts all over the world lived in fear that the “long arm” of the Israelis—the new and vengeful Jews—would reach out and grab them at any moment. As bold and adventurous as Skorzeny was, he is said to have thought to himself for a quick second: They found me. This is the end.

  But this pair of Israelis did not come to kill him. They were out to seal a deal. The Mossad had found Skorzeny via his former second wife, who ran a metals trading business in Spain with a Jewish partner. The partner happened to be a sayan for the Mossad, and he persuaded Skorzeny’s ex to facilitate a series of meetings.

  After hearing that Skorzeny—when promised immunity from prosecution or assassination—would be willing to help Israel, intelligence chiefs sent the two operatives to Madrid. The short man was Rafi Eitan, the kidnapping expert who had become a multi-purpose all-rounder for the joint operations department of Shin Bet and the Mossad. The tall guy was Avraham Ahituv, who years later would be head of Shin Bet.

  They were a bit surprised that Skorzeny did not ask for money. The ex-SS officer instead made an unexpected, self-aggrandizing request: that the Mossad help arrange for his memoirs to be published in Israel. The Israeli secret agents agreed.

  Did the Nazi war hero know that, in exchange for a book deal, he might be fingering a group of former colleagues for assassination? In any event, within a few weeks, Skorzeny honored his side of the bargain. He contacted a former Waffen SS subordinate, who now was the security officer for the Germans, working in Egypt’s secret weapons programs. The security officer treated the message from Skorzeny as an order from his commander and promptly sent back a list of German scientists, engineers, and technicians in Egypt.

  This was a sudden bonanza for Isser Harel’s collection of obsessions. The Memuneh sincerely believed that the Germans were helping Egypt to pursue what the Nazis did not accomplish: finishing off the Jewish race.

  However, there were conflicting arguments made by military intelligence men under Amit’s command. They felt that Harel was crying wolf, that Egypt was far from threatening Israel with missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Six months later, Harel was out of office, and Amit became the undisputed czar of the Israeli intelligence community.

  One of the strongest traits of intelligence work is the phenomenal institutional memory: the seemingly minor, marginal details that are stored and never forgotten. Thus, a few years later, when Amit was exploring the possibility of peace with Egypt, he again thought of Skorzeny.

  Once an intelligence asset, always an asset. Skorzeny was asked to facilitate a meeting between Amit and a senior Egyptian intelligence officer. The ex-Nazi delivered yet again. He arranged a meeting in Paris in 1966 with Mahmoud Khalil, a colonel in Egypt’s air force intelligence who was in charge of a secret program to develop an indigenous Egyptian fighter plane with armaments. The program eventually failed, but Khalil remained a close confidant of the defense minister, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amr—the number-two man in Nasser’s regime.

  At the meeting in Paris, Amit offered to travel secretly to Cairo to meet Amr. “My plan was to reduce the tension between the two countries and prevent us from slipping into a war,” Amit recalled many years later. “I wanted to offer a package deal to the Egyptian leadership: Israel and world Jewry would provide Egypt with financial support. In return, Egypt would ease the Arab economic boycott on Israel and allow the free movement of goods via the Suez Canal to Israel.”

  The meeting took place in good spirits, and Amit got the impression that his offer to visit Cairo might be welcome in the Egyptian capital. It certainly was clear that Khalil was acting on higher orders, not meeting on his own with Israel’s intelligence chief.

  Yet, when Amit returned home, he found that the indefatigable Harel had plotted behind his back. The ex-Memuneh convinced Prime Minister Eshkol not to allow Amit to go to Cairo, as it might be a trap. Harel painted a picture of a Mossad chief being arrested, tortured, and forced to spill state secrets to the enemy.

  Angry, disappointed, and somewhat desperate, Amit felt that a great opportunity for lessening tension was being lost. Yet, he had no choice but to focus solely on the other high-priority task of the intelligence community: preparing his nation and its military for another round of hostilities with its Arab neighbors. An increasing rate of border clashes in the first half of the 1960s made a war seem inevitable.

  Under Amit’s prior command, Aman had begun to expand and refocus itself with high professionalism. The organization was tightly run, as might be expected from a military body.

  Aman was comprised of four departments. One of them, Collection, was responsible for gathering information by two classic methods: humint, based on running networks of agents and informers outside the borders of Israel; and sigint, excelling at the interception of signals, such as military radio exchanges and telephone calls inside Arab countries.

  The second department was known as Mem-Mem, the Hebrew initials for Mivtza’im Meyuchadim (Special Operations). It directed the army’s finest commando force. Military officials always cloaked its missions in secrecy, even as Israelis took part in secretive border crossings. Soldiers went behind enemy lines to plant electronic bugs, or perhaps to kidnap or assassinate Israel’s enemies.

  Listening devices and transmitters were designed by the third major department of Aman: the Technological Directorate, which was nicknamed “the Toy Factory.” The designers there produced silencers for guns, luggage with concealed compartments and hidden cameras, and innovative communications gear.

  The fourth department—where all intelligence gathered was brought together—was a research team known as Production. This was the largest unit, and by early in the 21st century almost 5,000 of the 9,000 men and women in Aman worked in this department. Its central task was to classify, store, and analyze all the information that Aman collected.

  Once a year, the director of the agency would use the data to write the National In
telligence Estimate. This small book—officially aimed at the prime minister, the defense minister, and the army chief of staff—often contained some bold predictions. The Aman commander’s task was to review developments in the neighboring Middle East countries, blend in military, political, and economic analysis, and add all that up to yield the outlook for war or peace.

  The agency adopted the name IDI, Israel Defense Intelligence, for its relationships with foreign countries—foremost among them the United States. Israel shifted its purchasing patterns in the 1960s so as to acquire the vast majority of its military hardware from America. First, there was a deal in 1962 for anti-aircraft Hawk missiles, and later for some warplanes: Skyhawks and, later, F-4 Phantom fighters.

  That was the overt face of the growing military ties between the two countries. There was also a covert aspect: the growing trade in intelligence equipment. Aman began buying state-of-the-art systems from such manufacturers as Texas Instruments. This was the start of a new era of Israel-U.S. military and strategic cooperation.

  Israel’s intelligence community was among the first to introduce computers, though large and clunky, in the early 1950s. As links with the United States intensified, Amit and his successor at Aman, Major-General Aharon Yariv, wanted their agency’s small high technology Unit 848 (later re-numbered 8200) to be modeled on America’s stunningly powerful but clandestine National Security Agency. For many years, some of the staffers at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, were said to have joked that their employer’s initials stood for No Such Agency. That kind of secrecy sounded terrific to Aman.

  The designation 848 or 8200 had no particular meaning. In fact, the original eavesdropping unit in the 1948-49 War of Independence was a small team known as Intelligence Service Number 2. It came up with ways to plug in to Arab telephone lines and to glean important information on the movement of fighters in the field.