Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  After the establishment of the state, Isser Harel recruited Harari to the Shin Bet and then the Mossad, where he rose rapidly before being assigned to investigate Caesarea’s operations. What he found was a unit in very bad shape, with a hodgepodge of personnel (former members of 188 Mifratz and the Birds, the operational unit of the Shin Bet, among others), a fuzzy combat doctrine, and undefined goals.

  Caesarea’s string of failures led Harari to the conclusion that Caesarea must be rebuilt from the bottom up, with its objectives, tasks, and personnel redefined. After several months of work, he submitted his doctrine to the heads of the Mossad: “In my view of the world, I believe that any country that wants to live must have a Caesarea of its own, a clandestine, compartmentalized, and elite body that will be able to carry out, beyond the country’s borders, the things that no other agency in the country is able to do. It is a unique tool our leadership can use to operate against the country’s enemies.”

  Harari set Caesarea’s primary objectives as targeted killings, sabotage, collecting intel in hostile “target” countries, and special ops, like smuggling abductees across borders.

  Most of the Mifratz field operatives that Harari investigated were former members of the extremist anti-British underground groups who’d been recruited by Isser Harel and commanded by Yitzhak Shamir. Harari found them to be extremely tough, with a lot of experience in combat and covert ops, ready to pull the trigger when the moment came. In other ways, however, Harari found them to be very weak: “They always failed in the getaway stage. I ordered that in planning an operation, the same weight be given to the goal and the getaway, and if there’s no way of getting out in one piece, don’t execute.”

  Harari ordered the establishment of a “targets committee,” which would make in-depth studies to decide who’d be on the hit list, and ruled that slayings should never be carried out in close contact, with knives or other “cold” weapons.

  The field personnel in the two operational divisions, Caesarea and Colossus, disliked being called operatives, which sounded bland and perfunctory, lacking the appropriate heroic inflection. (Worse was “agent,” an almost derisive term reserved for foreign nationals who’d been recruited to betray their own countries on Israel’s behalf.) Rather, they considered themselves warriors (lohamim), dedicated to defending and preserving their young nation.

  Warriors though they both might have been, there was an essential difference between the personnel of the two divisions. A Colossus spy arrested in a “base country”—one with full diplomatic relations with Israel, like France or Italy—might risk imprisonment. In a “target country,” like Syria or Egypt, a Caesarea warrior would likely be subjected to horrific torture and interrogation and then executed. The exposure and capture of a Caesarea operative is perceived as a national disaster in Israel. This is why Harari insisted on iron discipline and zero errors.

  And indeed, from the time that Harari rebuilt Caesarea, very few significant errors have occurred. In the entire history of the division, Eli Cohen is the only operative to have been caught and executed.

  “This phenomenal record,” says “Ethan,” who was a top officer of the unit for many years, “was achieved mainly thanks to Harari’s innovations and, above all, waterproof cover stories.”

  The recruitment process was also a key factor in their success. “The main weapon of a Caesarea operative is the ability to work under deep cover,” Ethan explained. “This weapon has to be built in. All the rest, we can teach them.”

  The Mossad was given access to Israel’s population database, which Caesarea’s selection experts scoured for certain types of people. For Harari, the natural place to look first for his personnel was among those serving, or those who had formerly served, in combat roles in the Israel Defense Forces. But this was just the start of the screening process. After the downfall of Eli Cohen and the exposure of the Mossad’s use of Jews from Arab countries as spies, he decided to rely mainly upon people who could pose as gentiles from Western countries.

  The perfect candidate was of European appearance, one who could pass as a tourist or businessman from a country whose citizens were welcomed in the Arab world. One pool of possible recruits consisted of the children of Israeli scholars or members of the Israeli diplomatic corps who had spent considerable time overseas because of their parents’ jobs. But most of Caesarea’s recruits were immigrants who’d lived in their native countries until adulthood (in very rare cases, Caesarea will recruit a Jew still living outside Israel), because they offered an obvious advantage: They did not need to be trained to play the role of a non-Israeli.

  On the other hand, former training chief Kfir explained, there was a corresponding complication with such recruits. All aspirants undergo a thorough security check by Shin Bet, of course. But if an immigrant has not been properly distilled by Israeli society—if he or she hasn’t served in the IDF, hasn’t developed a network of long-term friends, doesn’t have relatives in the country—it’s much more difficult to ascertain their loyalty to both Israel and the Mossad. It’s even possible that they’re already spies for another country. Consequently, the background checks following the initial polygraph tests for Caesarea recruits, already the most stringent in the Mossad, were made even tougher, with the investigators sometimes traveling abroad to scrutinize a candidate’s past. A massive effort was invested in the recruitment of each candidate.

  Once prospects were identified, they received calls from persons who identified themselves as “government employees” and suggested a meeting in a café, where they described in a very general manner what it was all about. Others received a somewhat cryptic letter from the prime minister’s office or the Defense Ministry, with more or less the following language: “We offer you a chance to take part in an operation involving varied and unique activities, which will confront you with exciting challenges and give you an opportunity to contend with them while reaching your full potential and personal satisfaction.” In addition to this direct approach, the Mossad has long run ambiguous want ads in Israeli newspapers referring to a “state organization” seeking candidates for “challenging work.”

  From those pools of potential recruits, the Mossad began winnowing down the group through a variety of tests, until they were left with only those psychologically fit for the job. The screening process for all operational jobs in the Mossad was and still is conducted by Mossad recruitment officers and psychologists. Harari insisted that the psychologists themselves undergo an exhausting training program, including the horrific “prisoner exercise,” so they would realize what qualities were demanded from an operative and be better able to screen the candidates.

  Finding candidate operatives with all the desired characteristics was, and is, a very difficult challenge. In the Mossad, they note with pride that the acceptance rate is 0.1 percent. Moti Kfir put it this way: “The desired warrior has to be a Zionist. He needs to identify with Israel and its objectives. Above all, he has to have a balance of contrary characteristics. He needs initiative without being aggressive. Brave but not fearless. Outgoing but reticent. They must be willing to take huge risks, but without putting the mission and the organization in jeopardy and without this turning into a death wish. They need to be able to live a life of lies and deception while transmitting reliable reports and not hiding anything from their commanders. They need to employ personal charm without creating personal connections.”

  And then there is always the question of motivation: Why would a man or woman want one of the most dangerous jobs in the world? “There are two groups of warriors,” Kfir said. “One comes from the positive direction, people who are coming to something. The second group comes from the negative direction, people who are getting away from something. The ones from the positive direction don’t have a problem making a living, and they don’t have wives who don’t understand them. They are people who come to serve Zionism and seek to satisfy their spirit of a
dventure; they want to see the world, to play because they like the game. The ones from the negative direction—they’re people who are running away from something, who don’t like their homes, who haven’t been successful in a civilian career. They are people who are trying to create a better life for themselves.”

  The Mossad takes both kinds of warriors, the positive and the negative. Their reasons for leaving their old life matter less than the ability to function in complete isolation in an enemy country, under an entirely different identity. “You are both a soldier and a general,” says Kfir. “It’s a heavy emotional and intellectual burden.”

  Hoping to find a way to obviate or at least mitigate that burden, Harari also initiated one other particularly ambitious recruitment program. “I heard that the KGB used to identify orphans, who wouldn’t have any restrictive commitments, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, took them under its wing, and trained them under the best possible conditions to be operatives functioning under cover. I thought it was a good idea.” He got Caesarea’s psychologist to find a fourteen-year-old Israeli boy without parents, and Caesarea took him under its wing, without his knowing who was now taking care of him. A psychologist and two tutors kept constant tabs on him, and he was given an excellent education, enrichment classes in art and culture, and time for sports and leisure. “We told him we wanted him to serve the nation when he grew up,” says Harari.

  All of the grooming and tuition was a success. The boy became a soldier and then a talented young officer, highly cultured and capable of functioning under cover as a foreigner. But the project as a whole failed. “It became clear to me that it may work in a totalitarian country like Russia, but not in Israel. The Israeli Jew doesn’t have that kind of perseverance, and very soon he wanted a girlfriend, a civilian career, and a good salary. He would likely have aspirations in very different directions than what the intelligence world could offer. We had no alternative but to just let him go his own way.”

  Other recruitment policies proved more successful. For practical operational reasons, the Mossad actually became an early pioneer in gender equality. “It is a huge advantage having a woman on the team during an operation,” says Ethan. “A team made up of members of both sexes…always provides for a better cover story and reduces suspicions.”

  If recruits manage to make it past the initial screening stage, they then begin the “operatives course.” Most Caesarea cadets never visit Mossad headquarters during their training and have no contact with other trainees. They are exposed to as little information as possible so that they will have little to reveal if they are captured and tortured. During training, their home base is one of several apartments in Tel Aviv, so that they won’t be exposed to regular Mossad employees who come to work at headquarters every day.

  Cadets undergo training in a host of spycraft fields—encrypted Morse code transmission (until technological developments rendered that mode of communication obsolete), surveillance, losing tails, weaponry, and hand-to-hand combat. They also study the geography, politics, and history of the Arab countries.

  Skills are honed in a series of practice missions, almost entirely on Israeli soil, and are usually mundane: slipping a listening device into a telephone in a bank lobby, recovering innocuous documents, breaking into homes or businesses just to prove a recruit has the skill.

  The creation of an elaborate cover story goes well beyond a fake name. The recruit is expected to learn an entirely new, fictitious biography: where he was born and raised, who his parents were, the social, cultural, and economic background in which he was raised, his hobbies, and so forth. A passport issued by a friendly base country—or forged by the Mossad—will allow the warrior to travel freely, even to countries that don’t admit Israelis. The counterfeit profession, meanwhile, typically is one that requires frequent international travel and lots of time spent working alone, without partners, offices, or regular hours. A newspaper reporter or photographer, for example, or a screenwriter doing research for a movie script both work well, because neither requires much explanation.

  The cover story, molded over time, distances the recruit from his true self and endows him with a new life in a new country that arouses no suspicion. Next, recruits practice creating second-level covers specific to individual situations. A warrior needs to be able to plausibly account for why he was in a particular place at a particular time—lingering outside a government ministry, for instance, monitoring how many people come and go—if pestered by a curious police officer. In order to be believable, that explanation needs to be given quickly, calmly, and with as little detail as possible; offering too much information can arouse suspicion as easily as no explanation at all.

  Trainers will ratchet up the pressure by simulating arrest and brutal interrogation. A Caesarea warrior code-named Kurtz said that this is the toughest part of the course. “They sent us in pairs to Jerusalem to shadow foreign diplomats. It seemed like a simple assignment—just to follow them and report, without establishing contact,” he said. “We were equipped with foreign passports, and our instructions were that under no circumstances were we to reveal to anyone who we really were. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, three police cars pull up and a few other thugs in civilian clothes jump us, knock us down, handcuff us, and throw us into the wagon.

  “They took us to the Shin Bet interrogation facility in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem. We spent three and a half horrible days there, without sleep, handcuffed, blindfolded. For part of the time, we were handcuffed to a chair with our arms behind us in a position that tensed our entire bodies; part of the time, they chained us to the ceiling, forcing us to stand on tiptoe. During the interrogations, policemen and Shin Bet agents beat us and spit on us. I heard that they even urinated on one guy. The goal was to see who would break and who would survive with his counterfeit cover.” Kurtz did not break. If he had, he likely would have been cut from the program.

  Upon completion of the course, successful cadets qualify as operatives and begin going on missions in target countries.

  Harari introduced iron discipline into Caesarea and demanded absolute obedience. Anyone who didn’t follow the path he laid down found himself immediately on the outside. The division’s offices, on the eleventh floor of 2 Kaplan Street, Tel Aviv, were run quietly and with exemplary order. “Mike brought a European atmosphere with him to Caesarea,” said Ethan. “The speech, the finesse, the manners, the way of behavior. His office was always clean and tidy, tip-top, and so was he, in his behavior and dress. He was always well groomed, clean-shaven, with the scent of his favorite French Macassar cologne following him around wherever he went. This was important, because he got the whole unit accustomed to working in the atmosphere of the countries from which we ostensibly came.”

  “Good intelligence and a strong Caesarea cost money,” Harari told Amit. He demanded bigger and bigger budgets, which he spent on training personnel and on the formation of more and more operational frameworks and networks. Harari’s people opened hundreds of commercial firms in innumerable spheres and countries, which would serve the Mossad for many years after his departure. Most of them did not have an immediate use, but Harari had the foresight to see, for example, that it would one day be advantageous for Caesarea to control a shipping company in a Middle Eastern country. Sure enough, there came a time when the unit needed a civilian shipping vessel to provide cover for a Mossad team in the waters off Yemen. The Mossad unit loaded packages of meat onto a vessel, shipping it from place to place while secretly carrying out their espionage mission.

  In 1967, Harari’s changes began producing noticeable results, and Caesarea operatives in target countries were transmitting valuable information back to Israel on a daily basis, mostly related to Israel’s main adversaries at the time: Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq.

  The Mossad, AMAN, and the government justifiably allotted many resources to preparations for the next military confrontation with the Ara
b states, which indeed ended up coming that June.

  However, Israeli intelligence failed to spot the next major challenge: the millions of Palestinians ready to fight for the return of their motherland. A wave of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis and other Jews would soon sweep through the Middle East and Europe.

  “We were not ready for this new menace,” said Harari.

  BETWEEN 600,000 AND 750,000 Palestinians either fled or were driven out of the territory upon which the State of Israel was established and which it conquered during the war of 1948–49. The Arabs vowed to destroy the newborn state, and the Israeli leadership believed that if their precarious, vulnerable country was to have any chance of surviving, there had to be as few Arabs as possible within its borders. This was the rationale, however morally questionable, behind both the expulsions and the blanket refusal to allow any refugees to return—ever.

  Refugees were settled into Gaza (a 141-square-mile strip formed along the southwest coast of Mandatory Palestine as a result of the 1948–49 war, controlled by Egypt until 1967 and by Israel since), the West Bank (the name given by Jordan to the 2,270-square-mile territory it controlled after the 1948 war in formerly Mandatory Palestine; Israel captured this territory in 1967), and other ramshackle camps in neighboring Arab countries, where the ruling regimes blustered that they eventually would wipe the Zionists from the map and return the Palestinians to their homeland. But that was mostly lip service. In reality, those regimes imposed harsh conditions of their own on the unfortunate refugees, who often had no rights, no significant control of their lives, no prospects for higher education or worthy employment. Living conditions were poor, and so were public health and even food security. The refugees who poured into the Gaza Strip during the 1948–49 war more than tripled the area’s population. From about 70,000 inhabitants in 1945, the number rose to about 245,000 in 1950. By 1967, there were 356,000 inhabitants, and by 2015, there were 1,710,000. The refugees had become stateless people, cast out of their own country and unwanted by any other. But they and the permanent Palestinian residents of the villages and cities in the West Bank and Gaza still considered themselves a people. In the squalid camps, young militants organized themselves into nationalist movements, driven by pride of self and hatred of Israel.