My Amazon Review of Matti Friedman's "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel"

On the Job Tradecraft

 

Journalist Matti Friedman has written an important book on the adventures of four Israeli spies in the service of pre-state and post-state Israel from early 1948 to mid-1949. At the start Gamliel, Isaac, Havakuk and Yakuba were operating under the orders of the Arab Section of the Palmach, Israel’s special ops force. They were all Mizrahi Jews from the Levant and were fluent in Arabic which enabled them to pass in the Arab section of Haifa and in Beirut. What we witness is a very real example of on-the-job training in spy craft.

 

They were recruited by the Palmach to engage in sabotage, and to gather information on arms movements, Arab militias, and public opinion. They never knew they would be able to return safely and were under the constant threat of exposure. Remember at the outset there was no country to go home to and when the Israeli state was proclaimed it was not clear it would survive the onslaught of the Arab armies.

 

One highlight for me was an attack on Hitler’s yacht which was owned by a Lebanese businessman. It was being refitted as a warship in Beirut harbor. The Beirut team assisted an Israeli frogman whose mission was to blow up the ship in the harbor. Although the yacht did not sink, it was sufficiently damaged to prevent it from becoming a warship.

 

Friedman highlights the Ashkenazi prejudice against Misrahi Jews, a prejudice though less than before, exists to this day. He also highlights the fact the spies realized early on the Palestinian problem was not going to go away.

 

Along the way we get a sense of the boredom and loneliness the spies felt every day which was punctuated by short bursts of intense fear. He also notes that they developed relationships with Arab women. After all they were all in their early 20’s. Friedman has brought his keen journalistic eye into the very early days of Israel’s spy agency, the Mossad. It is well worth the read.

 For the full Amazon URL see: On the Job Tradecraft (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Ronen Bergman's "Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations"

Clausewitzian Realism in Service of the State

Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman has written a well-researched and readable book on Israel’s secret war of targeted assassinations against its most feared enemies ranging from Iran to Hamas to Hezbollah. In fact as I write this review there is a front page New York Times story (8/7/18) on the assassination of a Syrian rocket scientist on the streets of Damascus that was attributed to the Mossad which remains pound for pound the best foreign security agency in the world. He starts in the pre-state era and goes through 2015 and covers the three main organs of state security: Mossad (external), Shin Bet (internal) and AMAN (military). He covers their great successes and their failures. Unfortunately he is way too much of a critic for my taste.

Bergman begins his book by quoting from Talmud: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” That in a nutshell is the major lesson of his book because a small state surrounded by enemies has to act preemptively if it is to survive. The state has to be a Clausewitzian realist who understands to paraphrase Clausewitz “assassination is the continuation of politics by other means.”

Perhaps the clearest example of realism is when the Mossad hires former Waffen-SS Lieutenant Colonel and Hitler favorite Otto Skorzeny to disrupt an Egyptian missile program in the early 1960s. At that time Nasser recruited World War II German rocket scientists to develop missiles to attack Israel. The operation was a success. Just think about this, Israel hiring a Nazi leader to defeat its current Egyptian enemy.

There are many stories like this with hits taking place in Europe, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Each and every one had to be personally approved by the prime minister. Of course thing often went awry, most notably during the 1982 Lebanon War. It is a high risk business where the lives of the agents are at great risk and the mission can fail if civilians are killed. However, unlike their opponents, the Israeli’s agonized over the potential for collateral damage and actually called off operations because of undue risk to non-targets.

Bergman’s main source for more recent events appears to be former Mossad head Meir Dagan who ran the operation from 2003-2012. Dagan died in 2015 and was a harsh critic of Netanyahu, especially with respect to his Iran policy. Bergman too dislikes Netanyahu but he more kind to Sharon and Begin. I did not like Bergman using his pejorative term “right wing” to describe the Likud faction. I would have used center-right. After all he never called the Labor Party “left wing.”

Despite my criticisms Bergman has written a terrific book. There is much to learn about Israeli tradecraft and how their decision making process worked. And when one reads about operational failures, the critic has to sit in the shoes of the decision makers at the time the decision was made. In the spy business it is easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. Bergman ends his book by noting that we can’t confuse tactical success with strategic success. Israel’s strategic dilemma hasn’t much changed since the aftermath of the 1967 war. It has yet to reach a long term settlement with the Palestinians and still faces a very hostile Iran.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1PFY89UKBK8SG/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv