Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  The coordinated attacks on Israel’s forces did, indeed, begin at 2:05 that day. The results were misery, blood, and an unaccustomed retreat.

  The four-hour difference between the actual H-hour and the guess based on Marwan’s tip was enough to cause a deep division within Israeli intelligence.

  The Aman commander, Eli Zeira, accused the principal Egyptian source—not naming him at the time—of misleading his Israeli handlers by telling them of the October 6 attack plan so late. Zeira and other intelligence officers in an emerging anti-Marwan camp further charged that the Egyptian let the Israelis think that the attack would come at dusk, and thus the 2:05 surprise was worse than it might have been with an accurate warning.

  Almost twenty years after the war, Zeira made a point of meeting foreign journalists and researchers and telling them that Nasser’s son-in-law had been a double agent who deceived Israel. Many who met with Zeira were shocked that he was exposing the Egyptian. His obvious goal was to cleanse himself and Aman from responsibility for failing to act on a series of intelligence warnings in the weeks before Yom Kippur.

  Instead of studying and adequately considering the observations sent in by sources so painstakingly planted by Israeli intelligence over the years, Zeira—at a meeting as late as October 3 with senior officials—had dismissed the notion of an Egypt attack with two laconic words: “low probability.”

  In the years after the 1973 war, Zeira also sought to blame his rival, Zamir, for the intelligence failure. After all, it was the Mossad that was running Ashraf Marwan.

  The debate was renewed in 2007, when Marwan was found dead in London. He had plunged from the balcony of his elegant apartment, and some witnesses thought they had seen other men on the balcony looking down after the Egyptian fell. There was no reason to think that he would have committed suicide, at age 63. A manuscript he was believed to be writing—his tell-all memoir—vanished on the day of his death.

  Were the Egyptians homicidally angry at him? Perhaps they learned of his disloyalty only because Zeira had named him? There was certainly no public sign of anger, as Marwan’s funeral in Cairo was attended by very senior Egyptian officials. They all spoke of the marvelous services rendered clandestinely by Marwan over the years.

  Did the Mossad conclude that he was a double-crosser, and Israeli assassins settled a score by throwing him off his balcony? Myth-makers in Egypt and Europe propagated such tales, but most intelligence officials in Israel showed no sign of feeling they were betrayed by Marwan.

  The strongest clues might be in his chosen career: as a high-level weapons dealer, buying and selling on behalf of various Arab governments. He might have made some murderous enemies over the years, and Egyptian sources said they suspected that Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was angry over a deal and ordered Marwan’s murder.

  In Mossad headquarters, however, analysts reached the conclusion that Egyptian intelligence probably killed him to avenge his betrayal. It was supposed to look like suicide, and British police simply left this in a file full of unsolved cold cases.

  The Mossad analysts, with great bluntness, believed that Zeira’s big mouth led to the demise of the best agent they ever had in Egypt. Never in the annals of Israeli intelligence had the identity of an agent been deliberately revealed, and by no less than the chief of military intelligence. Some officials called for Zeira to be prosecuted, and Israeli legal authorities said for several years that they were investigating the matter.

  In the Yom Kippur War, IDF foot soldiers and tank crews had to pay with life and limb for the mistakes made by their country’s intelligence services and political leaders. Israelis lost ground on the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967, and on the eastern side of the Suez Canal in Sinai.

  Dayan, one of the heroes of the 1967 war, panicked. On the third day of the 1973 war, he muttered darkly about the possible destruction of “the Third Temple” of Israel. Jewish history tells of a first holy temple in Jerusalem that was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC, and a second temple that was demolished by the Romans in 70 AD. The third temple was the contemporary State of Israel, and Dayan rated its chances of survival as very low.

  There was talk among Israeli generals and political leaders of using “unconventional” weapons. Serious consideration was given that week, for the first time, to the possible use of Israel’s nuclear bombs as a last act of almost suicidal defense. On Dayan’s orders, Jericho missiles and special bomb racks on Phantom aircraft were prepared for the possible launch of atomic weapons.

  The defense minister’s despair weighed heavily on Meir’s spirit. She seemed to be considering suicide, as her secretary and confidante Lou Kaddar recalled: “I never saw her so gray, her face as in mourning. She told me, ‘Dayan wants us to discuss terms of surrender.’ I thought that a woman such as she would never want to live in such circumstances. So I prepared it for both of us. I went to see a doctor, a friend of mine who would agree to give me the necessary pills so that she and I—we both would go.”

  Meir pulled herself together; and with her army chief of staff, Lieutenant General David (Dado) Elazar, who was strong as a rock, she directed the counterattacks that eventually helped Israel to stop the Egyptian advance and to defeat the Syrians. The short-term damage from the 20-day war represented an extremely heavy price for Israel: 2,700 soldiers killed—equivalent, by proportion of population, to 170,000 dead Americans. In a nation of just over three million people, the loss was traumatic.

  The long-term damage was that the entire State of Israel lost confidence in its once legendary intelligence community. It was not just a feeling. It was in writing. Prime Minister Meir reluctantly commissioned an official inquiry into the Yom Kippur War and the Mechdal, or “Neglect”—the instantly coined euphemism for the intelligence blunder that made the war a near-total surprise.

  The commission, led by the chief justice of Israel’s supreme court, Shimon Agranat, cleared Meir and Dayan of “direct responsibility” for the Mechdal. It criticized senior IDF generals and scathingly destroyed the careers of Aman commander Zeira and three of his assistants.

  They were instantly replaced, and Major General Shlomo Gazit became the head of military intelligence. He created a small new unit within Aman named the Revision Department—which staff members dubbed the Devil’s Advocate Department. They were tasked with questioning and doubting the assumptions and consensus beliefs of other intelligence analysts. The unit’s top officer was given the unusual right to send his reports directly to the prime minister and a key parliamentary committee.

  Meir and Dayan technically survived the Agranat Commission’s findings, but they could not take the heat of sharp public criticism. In April 1974, they both resigned.

  Yitzhak Rabin became Israel’s new leader. As the army chief of staff in the 1967 war and then ambassador to Washington, Rabin was no stranger to intelligence reports. In fact, he constantly asked Aman and the Mossad for extremely detailed raw data and seemed to worry that something important may have been missed.

  He did have his pick as head of the Mossad. Zvi Zamir felt absolutely fine about retiring in 1974, after five years marked by the Munich Olympics massacre, a new tactic of fighting back with assassinations, and the humiliation of not doing enough to warn before the Yom Kippur War.

  The new Mossad director was Yitzhak (Haka) Hofi, a major general whom Rabin knew and trusted.

  One notable emergency that suddenly erupted was handled with great skill and good fortune. On June 27, 1976, a mixed band of Arab and German hijackers took over an Air France Airbus 300 flying from Athens to Paris. Because the flight had originated in Tel Aviv, many Israelis and Jews were among the 248 passengers.

  The hijackers, announcing that they were with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, forced the plane to fly to Entebbe airport in Uganda, where the mercurial, violent, and reputedly cannibalistic dictator—Idi Amin—sided with the pirates.

  Chillingly, Jewish and Israeli passengers were separated
from the others. The non-Jews were released. In Paris, they were questioned by French and Israeli intelligence officers who learned as much as possible about the hijackers and where the remaining hostages were being held.

  The Mossad quickly explored options for taking action, even at that great distance from Israel. Invisible relationships in neighboring Kenya helped with reconnaissance efforts, and a Mossad operative was able to fly a private Kenyan plane over Entebbe to photograph the layout of the buildings and runways there. Thanks to David Kimche and other “alternative diplomats” who had advanced Israel’s cause in Africa, Nairobi was consistently a center of cooperation for projects both overt and covert.

  Uniformed commandos of Sayeret Matkal executed the rescue mission on July 4 with stunning speed and courage. Large transport planes landed in near silence, Israeli soldiers and vehicles that rolled out of them gave the impression that they were Ugandans as they approached the terminal, and the assault itself resulted in a quick gun battle that left all seven hijackers dead. At least 30 of Idi Amin’s soldiers were also killed.

  Entebbe was a glorious success, but there were casualties on the Israeli side: Four hostages lost their lives, as did the commander of the operation. He was Yoni Netanyahu, the younger brother of the future prime minister who himself would serve in the Sayeret unit.

  Israelis never felt better than that evening, when military transport planes delivered the rescued hostages to Tel Aviv. The world admired what Israel was able to accomplish, and that it had the courage not to surrender to hijackers.

  Yitzhak Hofi would lead the Mossad until 1982, but Rabin was long gone by then. In the election of May 1977, Israeli voters rejected the Labor Party, which had led the country since independence. The right-wing Likud bloc won the election, and the new prime minister was Menachem Begin.

  Begin was a completely new figure: a member of the right-wing pre-state underground movements opposed to David Ben-Gurion, never an army general, an ideologue who could barely tolerate Israel having friendly relations with ex-Nazis in West Germany, and a man seemingly opposed to any concessions to Arabs.

  At the Mossad, Hofi offered to resign. So did the Shin Bet chief, Avraham Ahituv. But Begin told them to stay. He liked the job they were doing. In fact, he loved hearing a lot of details of intelligence work, as it reminded him of his days in the militant Irgun underground.

  Begin was out to change history, and he was going to use Israeli intelligence to do it. To defy his critics, who branded him a warmonger, Begin was determined to be a great peacemaker. One step was to make Dayan, a Labor stalwart, his foreign minister. Another step was to send Hofi on a secret mission to Morocco.

  That North African country was, for an Arab nation, fairly friendly to Israel. King Hassan, when asked by Hofi to arrange a meeting for him with senior Egyptians, was only too happy to oblige.

  Two senior officials from Egypt flew to Morocco in the summer of 1977, showing that Sadat—after restoring some of his nation’s pride during the 1973 war—was ready for a transformation. Hofi and the Egyptians, with a minimum of disagreement or drama, spoke of their sincere desire to end the long conflict between their countries.

  Dayan had a follow-up meeting in Morocco with a senior aide to Sadat, and they agreed that future meetings should not be in secret.

  President Sadat, delighted by developments, went on CBS television to tell Walter Cronkite that if he were invited by Begin, he would go to Jerusalem and address the Knesset—Israel’s parliament—to show that he wanted no more war. Begin immediately told CBS that he was inviting Sadat.

  History was made—no, shattered—on Saturday night, November 19, 1977, when Egypt’s president stepped out of his official jet at Ben-Gurion Airport, near Tel Aviv.

  Within 17 months, Begin and Sadat were signing a peace treaty on the White House lawn, with President Jimmy Carter—who had worked very hard to mediate the deal—as the smiling godfather.

  The truth is that Israel’s intelligence community was again taken by surprise. It did not predict that the election of a hard-line prime minister in Israel would provoke a peace offer from the country’s biggest enemy.

  Even when contacts began, intelligence analysts were skeptical about Sadat’s sincerity. They had misread him before the 1973 war, and they now misread him again.

  A lasting lesson for the Mossad, Aman, and smart political leaders in Israel was to be open to the possibility of genuine surprises. For a country as small as Israel, with many enemies all around, many unknowns could constitute dangerous threats; but others might offer pleasant opportunities.

  Israeli leaders tended to emphasize the negative possibilities, often because they contended that their country was too small to permit errors. In light of the Holocaust—and Begin often invoked its memory—prime ministers felt that it was their job to protect the entire Jewish people from calamities.

  That sense of duty, though always weighed against the realities of domestic and international politics, continued to be a powerful factor in determining what Israel and its intelligence community would do.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jewish Intelligence

  “This was my finest hour” was a phrase used often by almost every head of the Mossad, reflecting back on the exciting times of his professional career. More than any other achievement, they spoke of the help they were able to give to fellow Jews.

  “Of all the operations and activities that I was responsible for, the strongest and most exciting experiences were saving our Jewish brethren from countries of oppression and bringing them over here,” Zvi Zamir reminisced. “It was a great humane deed.”

  The intelligence community—which, from the beginning, included units devoted to facilitating immigration to Israel—executed clever and often dangerous operations to get people out of Iran, Syria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen, the Soviet Union, and other far-flung Jewish communities that were hopelessly isolated. That was after an initial flurry of immigration from Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, and other Arab countries where Jews were made to feel unwelcome by anti-Jewish and anti-Israel governments.

  The whole notion of “Jewish intelligence,” intent on ensuring the safety and success of millions of Jews around the world, was a self-appointed mission. The individual communities only rarely requested assistance. Israeli envoys came to them, helped them, and generally got them out. Many moved to Israel, but others chose to go to America, Europe, or Australia. The main intent was to get them to safety.

  The founding fathers of the Jewish state—and its intelligence community—believed that those projects were an almost mystical calling: important steps toward reversing the ancient exile that had turned a once-united people into a Diaspora.

  These were highly sensitive missions, however. Jews scattered around the world were not Israeli citizens. Their home countries could object very strongly to interference in the lives of their nationals. The Jews receiving uninvited aid could suffer from a kind of split personality—as well as accusations of dual loyalty hurled by the non-Jewish majorities all around them.

  As unique and touchy as it was, Jewish intelligence seemed natural. Israel calls itself the Jewish homeland, and it has a Law of Return that grants automatic citizenship to any Jew who reaches its soil and asks for it.

  Israel also had a powerful strategic motive. Immigration represented a chance rapidly to make the new state stronger and, in population terms, bigger. If more people meant greater national security, the intelligence community was sure to be involved.

  The launching pad for action in this sphere was the pre-state clandestine agency that focused on illegal immigration, ha-Mossad le-Aliyah Bet, “the Institute for Aliyah B.” Its original work focused on sneaking Jews into British-ruled Palestine. Similar work continued and even expanded after Israel was born in 1948.

  While 6,000 Israelis, mostly young, were losing their lives on the battlefields of the 1948-49 War of Independence, the secret operatives of Aliyah B were setting up bogus companies to arrange flights
for Jews out of Iraq and Yemen—two of the Arab countries whose armies had invaded the newborn Israel. The agent in charge of this network of clandestine travel was Shlomo Hillel, who would rise in the next three decades to be a cabinet minister and speaker of the Knesset.

  Posing as fictitious British businessman Richard Armstrong, Hillel chartered airplanes from an obscure American airline to extract, in 1949, almost every single one of the 50,000 Jews of Yemen. This operation, code-named “Magic Carpet,” was relatively easy.

  For the Iraqi operation, Hillel/Armstrong had help from a sayan, a British Jew working in the aviation industry. They made sure to give a maintenance contract to the Iraqi prime minister’s son, and things went remarkably smoothly after that indirect bribe—known in the Middle East as baksheesh, and a truly quotidian expense for Israeli intelligence.

  The Shah of Iran, ruler of the neighboring country, was happy to cooperate by facilitating travel arrangements. From May 1950 to January 1952, Hillel’s exit route managed to bring nearly 150,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel by air. The direct flights were known as “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah,” named for the two Jewish leaders who led their people back to the Holy Land from exile in Iraq—then called Mesopotamia—23 centuries earlier.

  Thanks to the secret agents of Aliyah B, the population of Israel nearly doubled—to more than one million Jews—in the first four years after independence.

  Aliyah B was an economic empire and an operational masterpiece. No nation has had anything like it: a huge organization involved in the global conveyance of Israel’s most important asset, people. Built around a massive undercover travel agency, Aliyah B owned over 60 ships and airplanes and countless cars and trucks. Their movements were well coordinated by a worldwide network of quasi-legal radio transmitters.