Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Spies of No Country —Behind Enemy Lines at the Birth of the Israeli Secret Service by Matti Friedman. Submitted by Will Chabun

 


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

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