Gordon Thomas: Gideon's Spies

In response to my remark that he appeared to have been a pair of safe hands in a number of posts, Casey sipped more water and mumbled he “didn’t want to get into the personal side of things.”

He put the paper back into his pocket and sat, watchful and waiting for my first question: what could he tell me about Bill Buckley, who, almost two years earlier to the day—on Friday, March 16, 1984—had been kidnapped in Beirut and was now dead. I wanted to know what efforts the CIA had made to try to save Bill’s life. I had spent time in the Middle East, including Israel, trying to piece together the background.

“You speak to Admoni or any of his people?” Casey interrupted.

In 1982, Nahum Admoni had become head of Mossad. On Tel Aviv’s embassy cocktail circuit, he had a hard-nosed reputation. Casey characterized Admoni as “a Jew who’d want to win a pissing contest on a rainy night in Gdansk.” More certain, Admoni had been born in Jerusalem in 1929, the son of middle-class Polish immigrants. Educated at the city’s Rehavia Gymnasium, he developed linguistic skills that had earned him a lieutenant’s stripes as an intelligence officer in the 1948 War of Independence.

“Admoni can listen in half a dozen languages,” was Casey’s judgment.

Later, Admoni had studied international relations at Berkeley and taught the subject at the Mossad training school on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. He’d also worked undercover in Ethiopia, in Paris, and in Washington, where Admoni had linked closely with Casey’s predecessors, Richard Helms and William Colby. These postings had helped hone Admoni into a soft-spoken intelligence bureaucrat who, when he became Mossad’s chief, in Casey’s words, “ran a tight ship. Socially gregarious, he has as keen an eye for women as for what’s best for Israel.”

Casey’s thumbnail sketch was of an operative who, he said, had “climbed through the ranks because of his skills at avoiding his superiors’ ‘corns.’”

His next words came in the same mumbling undertone.

“Nobody can surprise like someone you took to be friendly disposed. By the time we realized Admoni was going to do nothing, Bill Buckley was dead. Remember what it was like at the time over there? There had been the massacre of almost a thousand Palestinians in those two Beirut refugee camps. The Lebanese Christian forces did the killings; the Jews looked on in a kind of reversal of the Bible. Fact is, Admoni was in bed with that thug, Gemayel.”

Bashir Gemayel was head of the Phalangists and later became president of Lebanon.

“We ran Gemayel as well, but I never trusted the bastard. And Admoni worked with Gemayel all the time Buckley was being tortured. We had no idea where exactly in Beirut Bill was held. We asked Admoni to find out. He said no problem. We waited and waited. Sent our best men to Tel Aviv to work with Mossad. We said money was not a problem. Admoni kept saying okay, understood.”

Casey sipped more water, locked in his own time capsule. His next words came out flat, like a jury foreman handing down a verdict.

“Next thing Admoni was selling us a bill of goods that the PLO were behind the kidnapping. We knew the Israelis were always ready to blame Yasser Arafat for anything, and our people did not buy at first. But Admoni was very plausible. He made a good case. By the time we figured it wasn’t Arafat, it was long over for Buckley. What we didn’t know was that Mossad had also been playing real dirty pool—supplying the Hezbollah with arms to kill the Christians while at the same time giving the Christians more guns to kill the Palestinians.”

Casey’s less-than-full glimpse of what the CIA now believed had happened to Bill Buckley—that Mossad had deliberately done nothing to save him in the hope the PLO could be blamed, so frustrating Arafat’s hopes of gaining sympathy in Washington—provided a chilling insight into the relationship between two intelligence services supposedly friendly with each other.

Casey had shown there was another side to the ties between the United States and Israel other than fund-raising and other manifestations of American-Jewish solidarity that has turned the Jewish state into a regional superpower out of a fear of the Arab enemy.

Before we parted, Casey had a final thought: “A nation creates the intelligence community it needs. America relies on technical expertise because we are concerned to discover, rather than secretly rule. The Israelis operate differently. Mossad, in particular, equates its actions with the country’s survival.”

This attitude has long made Mossad immune to close scrutiny. But, in two years of research for this book, a series of mistakes—scandals in some cases—has forced the service into Israel’s public consciousness. Questions have been asked, and, if the answers are rarely volunteered, gaps have begun to appear in the protective body armor Mossad has worn against that outside world.

I spoke to more than a hundred persons either directly employed by, or working indirectly for, Israeli and other intelligence services. The interviews were spread over two and a half years. Many of the key people in Mossad agreed to be taped. Those recordings run to eighty hours and are transcribed to some 5,800 pages. There are also some fifteen foolscap notebooks filled with contemporaneous notes. This material will, as with previous books of mine, find their place in the research section of a university library. Several of those I spoke to urged I should focus on recent events; the past should only be used to illustrate events that are relevant to Mossad’s role at the cutting edge of the current frontiers of espionage and intelligence gathering. Many interviews were with participants who had not been questioned before; often no amount of probing could produce a comfortingly simple explanation for the way they or others behaved. Many were surprisingly frank, though not all agreed to be fully identified. In the case of serving Mossad personnel, they are prevented by Israeli law from voluntarily allowing their names to be published. Some of the non-Israeli sources asked, and received, a guarantee of anonymity.

On the organization charts newspapers try to piece together and publish, many sources remain among the empty spaces. They still take their anonymity seriously and some wish to be known in these pages by an alias or only a first name: it does not make their testimony less valid. Their personal motives for breaking silence may be many: a need to secure their own place in history; a desire to justify their actions ; the anecdotage of old men; even perhaps expiation. The same can be said for those who agreed to be identified.

Perhaps the best motive of all that drove them to break silence was a real and genuine fear that an organization they had served with pride was increasingly endangered from within—and that the only way to save it was to reveal what it had achieved in the past and what it is doing today. To understand both requires knowing how and why it was created.

Since dawn, the faithful had come to the most sacred wall in the world, the only remaining relic of Herod the Great’s Second Temple in Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall. The young and the old, the lean and the fat, the bearded and the halding: all had made their way through the narrow streets or from outside the city walls.

Office clerks walked alongside shepherds from the hills beyond Jerusalem; newly bar mitzvahed youths proudly marched with men in the winter of their years. Teachers from the city’s religious shuls were shoulder to shoulder with shopkeepers who had made the journey from a distance away, from Haifa, Tel Aviv, and the villages around the Sea of Galilee.

Uniformly dressed in black, each carried a prayer book and stood before the towering wall to recite portions of scripture.