Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Finally, on March 2, 1951, he summoned the heads of the five intelligence agencies to his office. He told them that he intended to place Israel’s intelligence-gathering activities abroad in a new agency called Ha Mossad le Teum, “the Institute for Coordination.” It would have an initial budget of twenty thousand Israeli pounds, of which five thousand pounds would be spent on “special missions, but only with my prior approval.” The new agency would draw its personnel from the existing intelligence agencies. In everyday usage the new agency would be called only Mossad.

Mossad “for all administrative and political purposes” would come under the jurisdiction of the foreign ministry. However, it would have on its staff senior officers representing the other organizations within the Israeli intelligence community: Shin Bet, internal security; Aman, military intelligence; air force intelligence; and naval intelligence. The functions of the officers would be to keep Mossad informed of the specific requirements of their “clients.” In the event of disagreement over any request, the matter would be referred to the prime minister’s office.

In his usual blunt way Ben-Gurion spelled it out. “You will give Mossad your shopping list. Mossad will then go and get the goods. It is not your business to know where they shopped or what they paid for the goods.”

Ben-Gurion would act as a one-man oversight committee for the new service. In a memo to its first chief, Reuven Shiloah, the prime minister ordered “Mossad will work under me, will operate according to my instructions and will report to me constantly.”

The ground rules had been set.

Twenty-eight eventful years after those Jews had sat through the Jerusalem night in September 1929 discussing the vital importance of intelligence to ward off further Arab attacks, their descendants had an intelligence service that would become more formidable than any other in the world.

The birth of Mossad, like that of Israel, was anything but smooth. The service had taken over a spy ring in Iraq that had been operating for some years under the control of the Israel Defense Forces’ Political Department. The prime function of the ring was to penetrate the upper echelons of the Iraqi military and run a clandestine immigration network to bring Iraqi Jews out of the country to Israel.

In May 1951, just nine weeks after Ben-Gurion signed the order creating Mossad, Iraqi security agents in Baghdad swooped down on the ring. Two Israeli agents were arrested, along with dozens of Iraqi Jews and Arabs who had been bribed to run the escape network, which extended across the Middle East. Twenty-eight people were charged with espionage. Both agents were condemned to death, seventeen were given life sentences, and the others were freed “as an example of the fairness of Iraqi justice.”

Both Mossad agents were subsequently released from an Iraqi jail, where they had been severely tortured, in exchange for a substantial sum of money paid into the Swiss bank account of the Iraqi minister of the interior.

Another debacle swiftly followed. The Political Department’s longtime spy in Rome, Theodore Gross, now worked for Mossad under the new setup. In January 1952, Isser Harel, then head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, received “incontrovertible proof” that Gross was a double agent, on the payroll of the Egyptian secret service. Harel decided to fly to Rome, where he persuaded Gross to return with him to Tel Aviv, convincing the traitor that he was about to be given a senior post in Shin Bet. Gross was tried in secret, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He would die in prison.

A crestfallen Reuven Shiloah resigned, a broken man. He was replaced by Harel, who would remain Mossad’s chief for eleven years, a tenure never equaled.

Senior staff who welcomed him to Mossad headquarters on that September morning in 1952 could hardly have been impressed with Harel’s physical appearance. He was barely four feet eight inches tall, with jug ears, and he spoke Hebrew with a heavy central European accent; his family had emigrated from Latvia in 1930. His clothes looked as if he had slept in them.

His first words to the assembled staff were: “The past is over. There will be no more mistakes. We will go forward together. We talk to no one except ourselves.”

That same day he gave an example of what he meant. After lunch he summoned his driver. When the man asked where they were going, he was told the destination was a secret; dismissing the driver, Harel set off by himself at the wheel of the car. He returned with a box of bagels for the staff. But the point had been made. He would ask the questions.

That was the defining moment that endeared Harel to his demoralized staff. He set about energizing them with his own example. He traveled secretly to hostile Arab countries to personally organize Mossad networks. He interviewed every person who wanted to join the service. He looked for those who, like him, had a kibbutz background.

“People like that know our enemy,” he told a senior aide who questioned the policy. “The kibbutzniks live close to the Arabs. They have learned not only to think like them—but think faster.”

Harel’s patience was as legendary as his bursts of anger; his loyalty to his staff became equally renowned. All those outside his closed circle were looked upon with suspicion as “unprincipled opportunists.” He had no dealings with persons he saw as “bigots masquerading as nationalists, particularly in religion.” Increasingly he showed an open dislike for Orthodox Jews.

There were a number of them in Ben-Gurion’s government and they quickly came to resent Isser Harel, then tried to find a way to remove him. But the wily Mossad chief made sure he remained close to another kibbutznik, the prime minister.

It helped that Mossad’s record now spoke for itself. Harel’s agents had contributed to the success of the Sinai skirmishes against the Egyptians. He had spies in place in every Arab capital, providing a steady stream of priceless information. Another coup came when he traveled to Washington in 1954 to meet Allen Dulles, who had just taken over the CIA. Harel presented the veteran spymaster with a dagger bearing the engraved word of the psalmist: “the Guardian of Israel neither slumbers or sleeps.”

Dulles replied: “You can count on me to stay awake with you.”

Those words created a partnership between Mossad and the CIA. Dulles arranged for Mossad to have state-of-the-art equipment: listening and tracking devices, remote-operated cameras, and a range of gadgets that Harel admitted he never knew existed. The two men also formed the first intelligence “back channel” between their services, through which they could communicate by secure phone in the case of any emergency. The channel effectively bypassed the normal diplomatic route, to the chagrin of both the State Department and the Israeli foreign ministry. It did nothing to improve Harel’s standing in diplomatic circles.

In 1961 Harel masterminded the operation to bring to Israel thousands of Moroccan Jews. A year later the tireless Mossad chief was in southern Sudan assisting pro-Israeli rebels against the regime. That same year he also helped King Haile Selassie of Ethiopia crush an attempted coup: the monarch had been a longtime ally of Israel.

But at home the Orthodox Jews in the cabinet were becoming more vociferous, complaining that Isser Harel had become insufferably autocratic and increasingly indifferent to their religious sensibilities, and that he was a man with his own agenda, perhaps even an aspiration to the highest political office in the land. Ben-Gurion’s well-tuned political antenna was up, and relations between him and Harel cooled. Where before he had given Harel a virtual free hand, he now began to demand to be briefed on the smallest details of an operation. Harel resented the tight leash but said nothing. The whispering campaign against him intensified.