If you are looking for amazing tales of Israel’s highly
professional Mossad secret intelligence agency, then you will be
disappointed.
This book actually is about the origins of the Mossad, before it
was anything but sophisticated.
Let us go back to 1941, when our side was losing the Second World War.
German troops were in the western suburbs of Moscow and fighting a
back-and-forth battle with British Empire troops in the North African desert. By
the end of the year, Japan had entered the war, capturing huge chunks of
territory in the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Burma and threatening India.
Serious people feared the Germans would thrust south from the Black Sea
and meet the Japanese in India.
Britain’s Special Operations Executive, fearing the worst, began
organizing “stay behind” squads that would gather intelligence and commit
sabotage in case Palestine was occupied. Having no love for the Nazis, young
Jews – many of whom spoke fluent German -- there signed up.
Fast forward to 1947, when the Second World War was barely over and
those European Jews who had survived the Nazis and their holocaust were trying
desperately to get to a safe place. Palestine filled the bill as Jews had lived
there since antiquity. But there were also many Muslims (who naturally were
less than interested in sharing their barren land with outsiders) and the whole
place had been run under a mandate given to Britain by the League of Nations after
the collapse of the rickety Ottoman Empire in 1918.
Drained by the vast cost of the Second World War and the financial and
human price of keeping Arabs and Jews from killing each other, the British in
mid 1947 announced their intention to leave the troubled territory in several
months. The new United Nations then decided to partition Palestine between Arabs
and Jews. No details. Run along and make nice, chaps.
There then followed a period when Palestine essentially had no
government but much hostility between Arabs and Jews, the luckless British
stuck in the middle. (If you watch the recent Australian TV series A Place
To Call Home, you know that the core of its story is the prickly, sometimes
violent, relationship between the wife of a Jewish physician jailed and
tortured by the Nazis, and the widow of a British diplomat murdered by Jewish
terrorists in Palestine.)
Soon the armies of five Arab states mobilized to attack Israel. Against
them were several Jewish armed groups, ranging from the Palmach (made up of
hardline socialists) to the Haganah, whose members drew their inspiration from
the US and western Europe.
It was in this period that Jewish resistance leaders (including those
trained by the SOE five years earlier) decided they needed not only a ragtag
army but a ragtag intelligence service to discern the mood and intentions of
the Arabs around them.
Jewish (remember
that the state of Israel did not exist yet – hence the name of this book) resistance
leaders had one advantage. The Jewish population in Palestine, then as now, was
a mix of people from Europe and also from the Arab world. For centuries, there
had been substantial Jewish communities in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq –
Friedman says Baghdad was one-third Jewish in the early 1940s. These Jews could
speak Arabic and local dialects and were familiar, sometimes very familiar,
with Arab cultural practices. And by 1947, these same people were facing
violent pressure to leave the Arab world. They provided a ready-made pool of
recruits for the young intelligence service under the name “the Arab Section”.
Their training was
minimal, their communication systems stunningly crude -- no more than letters,
sometimes even written in code and mailed from places like Beirut. One recruit
foolishly talked about his assignment with his stepmother – who quickly told
everybody in their village. Another, a man of considerable talent as a spy, was
able to extract a promise from his controller that he wouldn’t have to kill
anybody. The Arab’s Section’s “headquarters” was a corner of a shack near Tel
Aviv.
Author Friedman,
got onto this story through a retired Mossad agent who said the section’s last
member might be willing to talk about his adventures. He was indeed – and
Friedman was able to find written and oral histories left by the spy’s
colleagues in the section. He also found information in declassified files and
in two histories of the Mossad written in Hebrew, but never circulated beyond
Israel.
The author makes
the points that casualties among these agents were quite high and there is no empirical
way of assessing their effectiveness. (Friedman figures the high point of the
Beirut agents’ work was getting a bomb aboard Hitler’s former yacht, being
converted in Beirut into a warship. Their bomb went off late – so late that all
manner of other, non-Jewish groups and factions were blamed for the blast.)
Assessing their
contribution, Friedman says, “they were one of the ‘seeds’ of the Mossad. They
were the ‘school’ that came up with Israeli intelligence doctrine – not by
learning it from someone, but by trial and error.”
-Will Chabun
