by Dan Raviv
Tzur told oral historians: “A committee of two was set up, in the days leading to the war, to connect a few wires.” This was a big bomb, not ready to be fit into a missile or even dropped from an airplane.
Around the same time, the commander of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit, Lt. Colonel Dov Tamari, was summoned to headquarters for a meeting with a general. Tamari was ordered to prepare a team of Sayeret soldiers to fly by helicopter into the Sinai. They would be carrying “a thing,” which the general did not specify.
The mission sketched out would have the troops place Israel’s first nuclear bomb and some kind of detonation mechanism on a high peak—probably for maximal psychological effect choosing Mount Sinai, where the Bible says Moses received the Ten Commandments. If Egypt’s army, already massing in the Sinai, were to cross into Israel and threaten Tel Aviv or other major cities, the Israelis would shock the invaders by turning the mountain into little more than rubble under a mushroom cloud.
The plan was dropped, in large part because Israel won the June 1967 war so easily.
In fact, even as Israel secretly built nuclear weapons, it did not test any of them until 1979. Scientists and engineers did not feel the need to conduct a test explosion, largely because Blumberg’s Lakam obtained from “assets” in France the full results of French nuclear tests. The Israelis were able to use the measurements and observations to calculate the quantities, components, and bomb structure that would yield a viable nuclear device that could be stored and transported safely.
As technology advanced, Israel was able to test its nuclear bombs, in a sense, by using computer simulations—the method generally used by the United States to examine and update its huge arsenal.
In September 1979, according to American government scientists whose monitoring equipment detected a flash and electromagnetic signals emitted by a nuclear explosion, Israel did conduct a test—over the Atlantic Ocean, just west of South Africa. Israeli officials stubbornly refused ever to confirm publicly that they worked with South Africa’s all-white regime on the test; but Blumberg’s Lakam would have been in charge of providing secure transport for an Israeli bomb to a South African naval base, arranging for IAEC members to be present, and taking steps to prevent public knowledge of the test.
Nuclear cooperation was the zenith of the secret military ties between two unlikely bedfellows: Israel, the homeland for Jews who suffered anti-Semitism and racism, working together with a government based on white supremacist apartheid. The unholy alliance prompted worldwide condemnation. Israel justified the policy as a national-security necessity.
When the 1979 test took place, Israel already had missiles with nuclear warheads. These were Jericho ground-to-ground missiles, an Israeli product based on models sold by France in the late 1950s.
Yet, the precise art of fitting a nuclear warhead onto a Jericho came from the United States. Lakam’s agents and Israeli air force personnel on training trips to America managed to obtain or steal details of the warhead structure for the U.S.-made medium-range Pershing 2 missile. The Israelis used that as a model.
Lakam tried, on occasion, to expand its horizons. Thus, Blumberg gathered a few nuclear scientists in the mid-1970s to form his own research department. He asked them to study India’s nuclear program, using almost entirely open sources. The report had some interesting observations about proliferation and about weapons development by a nation with widespread poverty, but nothing that would affect Israeli decision making.
The Lakam research department did not last long, largely because other Israeli intelligence agencies felt that it was wasting resources by writing reports on topics already well covered.
Lakam, for the few who knew its true business, could not really escape the fact that its main mission was to be a theft contractor for all of the Israeli government’s military, technical, and science requirements.
Blumberg would object to the label, but he was Israel’s master thief. Israel’s perception of its own needs constantly prompted planning for getting things done through secrecy and deception, and nowhere was this truer than in the nuclear program.
Based on a prevailing sentiment that never expired, Israel took what it felt it needed whenever purchase or negotiation failed to do the trick. Lakam’s acquisitive business flourished, bordering on the illegal or even crossing that border.
As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, Binyamin Blumberg was still secretive about the work he had done for Israel’s security. Old and poor, alone in his fourth-floor walk-up near Tel Aviv’s City Hall, he wondered how he had been abandoned. His health deteriorated as he reached his late 80s, and he rarely left his austere apartment, but it was apparent that he used to be a handsome, tall man.
The name on his building’s mailbox said Vered, and the people who knew him as Blumberg—who had worked with him on Israel’s most sensitive and secretive projects—hardly ever got in touch any more. Perhaps on major Jewish holidays, a few might call and ask him how he was doing. Yet the monkish bureaucrat always kept his private life to himself. He rarely had friends over to his home and hardly ever socialized.
When occasionally invited to his old headquarters at the defense ministry for a courtesy briefing or to fete a new senior official, he rarely uttered a word. His name—whether Vered or Blumberg—hardly ever appeared in the hyperactive Israeli newspapers, let alone the international media.
He did grant one interview, in 2012, in which he complained about his poverty and stunningly declared: “I regret that I sacrificed my life for the security of the state.”
Blumberg also revealed that, in his heyday, he used to keep a cyanide pill handy. If he were captured by an enemy and was likely to be interrogated, he took his job and the attendant secrets so seriously that he would have committed suicide. After all, for nearly three decades, he was playing a key role in the Jewish state’s most covert project: building up its technological, scientific, military, and nuclear power.
His colleagues insisted that Blumberg seemed ordinary in every way; or, to borrow an Austrian novel’s title, he appeared to be A Man Without Qualities. Yet, Blumberg had grasped in his hands unprecedented power. He stood at the junction of all the crucial decisions that shaped Israel’s defense doctrine and capabilities.
What did he lack in his old age? More than anything else, Blumberg/Vered would have liked some recognition: respect from Israeli officials in acknowledgement of his contributions. Yet, a man who kept himself silent and invisible throughout his career should not have been surprised when no one noticed him.
Chapter Twelve
Surprises of War and Peace
The Yom Kippur War stands as one of the most famous surprise attacks in history. Israelis were sleeping or praying, and apparently unprepared to defend their nation, on the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Yet, there were many reasons why Israel should not have been caught unawares when the Egyptian and Syrian armies commenced shelling and advancing on the afternoon of October 6, 1973.
Those reasons took the form of agents—authentic gems of human intelligence (humint)—in both Egypt and Syria.
Three of the agents were particularly good: a foreign diplomat in Cairo who was secretly an Israeli, an Egyptian seaport worker, and a close advisor to Egypt’s president. In addition, there was an Arab monarch who shared his impressions and information with Israel.
All of them were assets—with excellent access to innermost Arab secrets—recruited and run by the devoted case officers of Mossad’s Tsomet and Caesarea departments. Yet, the spies and their Israeli handlers were almost totally ignored at headquarters in Tel Aviv.
These were cardinal errors, which Israel’s intelligence community would take great care to avoid repeating after 1973—in the Lebanon wars of 1982 and 2006, the many uprisings and violent incidents in between, and the confrontation against Iran, which required that excellent intelligence be processed promptly and diligently.
Before that fateful Yom Kippur, there was top-notch espionage work
that provided warnings of war, but they simply were not heeded. The clues and facts that were gathered stood no chance in the face of three complacent figures who ran the country in those days: Prime Minister Golda Meir; Defense Minister Moshe Dayan; and the Aman commander, Eli Zeira.
General Zeira was born in 1928 in Haifa and, naturally, fought in the 1948 War of Independence. He stayed in the military and, among other experiences, gained an impressive understanding of the United States by taking courses at army schools in America.
After joining military intelligence, Zeira spent some time as commander of a secretive combat unit known as Mem-Mem (the Hebrew initials for Mivtza’im Meyuchadim, meaning “Special Operations”). Later, he was posted to Washington as the Israeli intelligence attaché. Zeira was brought back home to take the top job at Aman when General Aharon Yariv retired in 1972.
The most formative experience Zeira had was probably his two-year run as bureau chief for Dayan when he was chief of staff of the IDF. Dayan, in effect, tutored Zeira in the dark arts of despising fellow officers, manipulating politicians, and exercising his natural arrogance.
By the autumn of 1973, Zeira had probably earned the right to feel confident. His agency, after all, had made possible the triumph of the Six-Day War six years earlier; and Aman seemed to be a good, solid organization, thanks to upgrades by Meir Amit and Yariv.
Zeira, time and again, clashed personally and professionally with the Mossad director, Zvi Zamir. They were, after all, worlds apart. Zeira was outgoing and handsome, proudly wearing the red beret of the IDF paratroopers. Zamir was soft spoken, looking like a lanky European intellectual obsessively burrowed in files about his war against Palestinian terrorists.
Lacking a significant research department in the Mossad, Zamir—like the rest of Israel’s leadership—depended on Aman to assess the capabilities and intentions of the neighboring enemy countries. In the early 1970s, the National Intelligence Estimate authored by Zeira declared that Arab armies would not attack Israel because they were incapable of doing so.
That was the key statement—the memorably grand error of the decade for Israel.
If Zamir strongly disagreed with Zeira’s optimistic analysis, the Mossad chief did not bother to confront him. He would be depending on reports from the field, funneled through the case officers in his Tsomet department, which ran agents in Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. The Mossad’s human sources were “warning agents,” whose main purpose in undercover life was to provide Israel with early alerts of danger on the horizon.
The Mossad had drawn lessons from the arrests of Wolfgang Lotz and Eli Cohen (in Egypt and Syria, respectively) by limiting the demands made of secret agents in dangerous places. They all could be asked for information of great potential value, but that could divert them from their main mission and expose them to unnecessary risks.
Each of the three agents who did issue warnings in the weeks before Yom Kippur in 1973 had a fascinating personal history.
A., an Israeli man whose family insists he not be identified, was born in a South American country where he was highly active in a Zionist youth movement. Carried away by pride when Israel scored its stunning six-day victory in 1967, he migrated to the Jewish state.
After a while, he was spotted by recruiters for the Caesarea (operations) department, who took an interest in Israelis who had lived abroad and possessed foreign passports and a knack for learning new things. A. was offered a job in his adopted nation’s intelligence service and, as a newly minted patriot, he readily agreed.
“Serving in the Mossad was a big honor for him,” one of his controllers recalled. He was clearly willing to take on a notably dangerous assignment: living, under a false identity, in an enemy country. His destination would be Egypt.
He underwent an intensive course to learn the crafts needed to be an intelligence officer. That was the usual stuff taught to dozens of Israelis as they prepared to vanish into enemy lands. Unusual in his case was the cover story.
Thanks to especially warm relations with a small nation, the leader of which was a true friend of Israel, the Mossad arranged that A. would go to Egypt as a diplomat of that country. Only the country’s leader and three of his top officials were privy to the secret.
Before A. left Israel, the head of Caesarea, Mike Harari, tried unsuccessfully to persuade A.’s girlfriend to marry him and tag along on the adventure in Cairo. A married couple was considered safer—far less likely to be harassed or blackmailed—than a 30-year-old bachelor. Even worse, when Wolfgang Lotz went to Egypt without his wife, he ended up marrying a second woman.
A. was very successful, from the Mossad’s point of view. He quickly became a prominent member of the diplomatic circuit in Cairo, hosting parties and mingling with the Egyptian elites, including army officers.
He sent his information and observations in coded messages to Tel Aviv, using a transmitter hidden in the posh villa he rented in one of Cairo’s most prestigious neighborhoods. Some reports were sent in the mail to post office boxes rented by the Mossad in Europe.
When circumstances permitted, he traveled to European capitals for face-to-face meetings with his controllers, because then he could freely add details and respond to questions. He used some of those trips to fly to Israel for brief visits with his girlfriend.
Mossad headquarters began to realize that the fears about sending a bachelor were materializing. Several women in Cairo, notably the daughter of a European diplomat, were attracted by A., and he went out on dates with some of them.
His loneliness manifested itself in personal messages that he transmitted—along with his official espionage reports—asking that “birthday wishes” to his friends and regards to his girlfriend be passed along by the Mossad communications desk. His handlers, including Harari, found that to be excessive and reprimanded him; but they also grew increasingly concerned about his state of mind.
Still unable to persuade A.’s girlfriend to join him in Egypt, Harari decided—for the sake of the important mission—to “marry him off.” The Israeli spy was instructed to fly to Europe on “vacation,” where he would meet a pretty young woman and bring her to Cairo. Harari sent a female combatant, whose first initial was M., to meet A., and they were “married” in Europe by virtue of documents she brought with her from the Mossad’s forgers.
Before their flight to Egypt, they lavished a lot of Israeli government cash on new furniture, bed linens, and tableware—just as any newlyweds might do.
Now the Mossad had two spies in Cairo. A. and M. worked in concert and helped each other achieve more than one person could. In the months leading to the October 1973 war, A. was able to photograph the military build-up from Cairo all the way to the Suez Canal.
A. reported that Egypt was preparing for war. Military intelligence analysts in Tel Aviv were not moved by his reports. They were sticking to their conclusion that Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat was not ready for a new war.
A. and M. would remain in Cairo during the war and had the strange experience of seeing the entire city rejoicing at setbacks for Israeli troops. This, frankly, was frustrating for two Jews in the middle of a crowded Arab country, however well trained they might have been to act dispassionate.
They stayed in Egypt for another two years. The Caesarea department decided in 1976 to remove the “couple,” after consulting with the Mossad chief who took over in 1974, General Yitzhak Hofi. A. was offered a new job as an instructor at the Midrasha, as he would have many experiences to share with up-and-coming Mossad field personnel. But he declined and decided to leave the agency.
M., meantime, had actually fallen in love with A. and wanted to marry him. Harari, in a cruel manner, told her that even if A. were willing, the Mossad would not allow that to happen. “You were sent on a specific mission,” Harari told her, “which now comes to an end—not to falling in love.”
A. was not interested in marrying her. A series of quarrels ensued, and M. telephoned him several times, yelling at him and insist
ing that some of the household assets were hers.
A. instead married his longtime sweetheart, who had loyally waited for seven years. They had an ostensibly normal life, including two children. But his espionage years were bothering him. The Mossad’s “rehabilitation” effort, routinely offered to operatives who returned home after a long mission, seemed to have failed.
He was haunted by the secret life he had lived. A. could not help but be suspicious of everyone as a potential attacker or assassin.
On the other hand, in business, he genuinely was cheated by partners when trying to set up a plastics company. That failure depressed him. An even more scarring tragedy occurred when A.’s car struck and killed a pedestrian.
He asked the Mossad to help him with the obvious legal complications, but the agency refused to do anything for the former undercover employee. Feeling disappointed and bitter, A. left his wife and children and abruptly moved to his original homeland.
He did some odd jobs there, living hand to mouth. His life story was reminiscent of that of Wolfgang Lotz, who also became a lost soul after his secret years in Egypt. But in this case, the story had an even sadder ending. Sitting in a city park one day, A. committed suicide.
In his tale is further proof that very rarely did any spy who worked under deep cover return home as a happy, well-adjusted person.
During the months before the 1973 war, the observations transmitted by A. and M. from Cairo were helpful but not sufficient.
Israeli intelligence needed more specific information on the structure of the Egyptian army and its order of battle. The Mossad and Aman liked to have the names of unit commanders and information on their habits and weaknesses. The names and sizes of brigades and details of their equipment would also be highly valued.