Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

After the defeat of Japan in August 1945 ended the war, Jews who had served in Allied military intelligence units arrived to provide their expertise for the Haganah. The elements were in place to deal with what Ben-Gurion had forecast—“the war for our independence.”

The trigger point he knew would be the bricha, the Hebrew name for the unprecedented operation to bring the Holocaust survivors from Europe. First they came in the hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. Many still wore their concentration camp garb; each bore a tattoo with a Nazi identification number. They came by road and rail through the Balkans and then across the Mediterranean to the shores of Israel. Every available ship had been bought or rented by Jewish relief agencies in the United States—often at highly inflated prices: tramp steamers, coasters, landing craft from the beaches of Normandy, riverboats, anything that could float was pressed into service. There had not been an evacuation like it since Dunkirk in 1940.

Waiting for the survivors on the beaches between Haifa and Tel Aviv were some of the very British soldiers who had been ferried back to England from Dunkirk. They were there to carry out their government’s order to keep out the Holocaust survivors. There were ugly clashes, but also times when the soldiers, perhaps remembering their own salvation, had looked the other way as a boatload of refugees struggled ashore.

Ben-Gurion decided that such acts of compassion were not enough. The time had come for the Mandate to end. That could only be done by force. By 1946, he had united the disparate Jewish underground movements. Fired by the unquenchable spirit of those who had first settled the land, the order was given to launch a guerrilla war against both the British and the Arabs.

Every Jewish commander knew it was a dangerous gamble: fighting on both fronts would stretch their resources to the very limit. The consequences of failure would be dire. Ben-Gurion ordered a noholds-barred policy. Soon the catalog of atrocities was appalling on all sides. Jews were shot on suspicion of collaborating with the Haganah. British soldiers were gunned down and their barracks bombed. Arab villages were set to the torch. It was medieval in its ferocity.

For the Haganah, intelligence was critical, not least to spread disinformation to give the impression in British and Arab eyes that the Jews had far more men than they actually could muster. The British found themselves chasing a will-o’-the-wisp enemy. Among the mandate forces morale began to crumble.

Sensing an opening, the United States tried to broker a deal in the spring of 1946 urging Britain to admit into Palestine one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors. The plea was rejected and the bitter fighting continued. Finally, in February 1947, Britain agreed to leave Palestine by May 1948. From then on the United Nations would deal with the problems of what would become the State of Israel.

Realizing there must still be a decisive conflict with the Arabs to ensure the fledgling nation would not be stifled at birth, Ben-Gurion and his commanders knew they must continue to depend on superior intelligence. Vital data were obtained about Arab morale and military strength. Jewish spies positioned in Cairo and Amman stole the attack plans of the Egyptian and Jordanian armies. When what became known as the War of Independence started, the Israelis achieved spectacular military victories. But it also became clear to Ben-Gurion as the fighting continued that eventual victory must be predicated on a clear division between military and political aspirations. When victory did finally come in 1949, that division had not been properly settled—and that had led to feuding within the Israeli intelligence community over its responsibilities in peacetime.

Rather than dealing with the situation with his usual incisiveness, Ben-Gurion, as Israel’s first prime minister, set up five intelligence services to operate both internally and abroad. The overseas service modeled itself on Britain’s and France’s security services. Both those services readily agreed to work with the Israelis. Contact was also established with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington through the agency’s head of counterintelligence in Italy, James Jesus Angleton. His bonding with Israel’s fledgling spies would play a crucial role in the eventual bridge building between the two intelligence communities.

Yet, despite this promising start, Ben-Gurion’s dream of an integrated intelligence organization working in harmony died in the birth pangs of a nation itself struggling for a cohesive identity. Muscle flexing remained the order of the day as his ministers and officials fought for power and positions. At every level there were clashes. Who would coordinate an overall intelligence strategy? Who would evaluate raw data? Who would recruit spies? Who should see their reports first? Who would interpret that information for the country’s political leaders?

Nowhere was the jockeying more relentless than between the foreign ministry and the defense ministry, both of whom claimed the right to operate abroad. Isser Harel, then a young operative, felt his colleagues “saw intelligence work in a romantic and adventurous light. They pretended to be expert in the ways of the whole world… and sought to behave like fictional international spies enjoying their glory as they lived in the shadow of the fine line between law and licentiousness.”

Meanwhile people continued to die, killed by Arab terrorists and their bombs and booby traps. The armies of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon still threatened. Behind them, millions more Arabs were ready to raise jihad, holy war. No nation on earth had been born into such a hostile environment as Israel.

For Ben-Gurion there was an almost messianic feeling about the way his people looked to him to protect them, in the way the great leaders of Israel had always done. But he knew he was no prophet, only a hard-bitten street fighter who had won the War of Independence against an Arab enemy with combined forces more than twenty times those at his disposal. There had not been a greater triumph since the boy shepherd David had killed Goliath and routed the Philistines.

Yet the enemy had not gone away. It had become cleverer and even more ruthless. It struck like a thief in the night, killing without compunction before vanishing.

For four long years the rivalry, squabbling, and sniping had gone on at all those meetings Ben-Gurion had chaired to try and resolve matters among the intelligence community. A promising foreign ministry plan to use a French diplomat as a spy in Cairo had been thwarted by the defense ministry. It wanted its own man for the job. The young officer, with no real experience of intelligence work, was caught in weeks by Egyptian security officers. Israeli agents in Europe were discovered to be working in the rampant black market to finance their work because there was an insufficient official budget to pay for their spying activities. Attempts to recruit the moderate Druze forces in Lebanon had ended when rival Israeli intelligence agencies disagreed on how they could be used. Often grandiose schemes were wrecked by mutual suspicion. Naked ambition was everywhere.

Powerful men of the day—Israel’s foreign minister, the army chief of staff, and ambassadors—all fought to establish the supremacy of their favorite service over the others. One wanted the focus to be on the collection of economic and political information. Another thought intelligence should concentrate purely on the military strength of the enemy. The ambassador to France insisted intelligence should be run the way the French Resistance had operated in World War II, with every Jew in the land being mobilized. The ambassador to Washington wanted his spies protected by diplomatic cover and “integrated in the routine work of the embassy, so as to place them above suspicion.” The Israeli minister to Bucharest wanted his spies to work along the lines of the KGB—and to be as ruthless. Israel’s minister in Buenos Aires demanded that agents concentrate on the role of the Catholic church in helping Nazis to settle in Argentina. Ben-Gurion had patiently listened to every proposal.