Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services 0802111599, 9780802111593

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ISRAEL'S SECRET WARS A History of Israel ’s Intelligence Services

Ian Black and Benny Morris

■ Grove Weidenfeld NEW

YORK

Copyright © 1991 by Ian Black and Benny Morris All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by Grove Weidenfeld A division of Grove Press, Inc. 841 Broadway New York, NY 10003-4793 First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd, London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Black, Ian, 1953Israel's secret wars: a history of Israel’s intelligence services/ Ian Black and Benny Morris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8021-1159-9: $24.95 1. Intelligence services—Israel. 2. Secret service—Israel. 3. Military intelligence—Israel. 4. Israel. Mosad le-modi in tafkidim meyuhadim. 5. Israel. Sherut ha-bitahon ha-kelali. 6. Jewish-Arab relations—1949- 7. Israel-Arab conflicts. I. Morris, Benny, 1948- n. Title. UB251.I78B55 1991 355.3'432'095694—dc20 90-49373 CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper First American Edition 1991

10 987654321

Contents

Authors' Note vi Acknowledgements Introduction ix Map xviii-xix 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

vii

Origins: 1936-46 1 The Test of Battle: 1947-9 35 Birth Pangs: 1948-51 71 Prom War to War: 1949-56 98 Enemies Within: 1948-67 134 Great Leaps Forward: 1956-67 168 Six Days in June: 1967 206 Palestinian Challenges: 1967-73 236 Mehdal: 1973 282 Interregnum with Peace: 1974-80 322 The Lebanese Quagmire: 1978-85 361 Occupational Hazards: 1984-7 400 Intifada: 1987-90 451

Conclusion 498 Glossary 505 Notes 509 Sources 566 Index 575

Authors' Note

Many people, especially those involved in the Haganah, the Jewish Agency or the Zionist establishment, Hebraized their names (sometimes first names as well as surnames) during the mandatory period and in the early years after independence in 1948. The practice followed throughout this book has been to give first the original name with the new one in brackets and then to use just the new name. Thus Reuven Zaslani (Shiloah) later becomes Reuven Shiloah, Moshe Shertok (Sharett) becomes Moshe Sharett.

Acknowledgements

In writing this book, we have tried to use as much original documentation as possible and have invariably indicated the source of our information (broadly document, interview, book or newspaper). Large parts of the narrative are based on inter­ views with former Israeli intelligence personnel from all three services. A surprisingly large number were willing to speak, although only a tiny handful agreed to be identified. Many were prevented by law from allowing their names to be pub­ lished and expressed frustration that this was so. Some non­ Israeli sources preferred anonymity. We have also drawn heavily on Israeli and foreign news­ papers, journals and books - but always carefully separating the wheat from the chaff. Throughout we have made strenuous efforts at verification from two or more independent sources. The bulk of the book has been read over by retired intelligence officers, although any errors of fact or interpretation that may have crept in are, of course, our own. We have been handicapped by the irritating but unavoidable fact that whatever we wrote would ultimately have to pass through the sieve of Israeli military censorship. But the censors treated our finished product with far greater liberalism than we had expected or than anyone could have enjoyed only a few years ago. Surprisingly little had to be deleted from the original, finished manuscript (and this only after all possible appeal procedures had been exhausted). Far too many people have helped with this project to be

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mentioned by name. Many of those who can be have been credited in the notes at the end of the book; some of those whose assistance was priceless still cannot be publicly thanked. This is one of the unfortunate occupational hazards of being involved in, and writing about, intelligence.

Introduction

Just off Israel’s Mediterranean coastal highway, a few miles north of Tel Aviv, a cluster of unremarkable grey-white concrete buildings can be made out through a line of dusty eucalyptus trees that runs roughly parallel to the main road. Turn left after the busy Glilot junction, past the soldiers waiting for lifts, and there, hidden in the centre of the cluster, yet clearly signposted for all the world to see, lies a fine public memorial to over 400 Israelis who died while serving in their country’s intelligence services. The monument, fittingly enough perhaps, is built in the form of a maze, an interlocking complex of smooth stone walls engraved with the names of the fallen, and by each name is the date of death. It is divided into five chronological sections, beginning in November 1947 - when the United Nations voted to partition British-ruled Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states - and ending (so far) in February 1989. The section covering the last fifteen years is entitled ‘the beginnings of peace’ but it still lists more than 200 names. More blank walls, backing on to a grassy outdoor amphitheatre, are available for future use. The monument should be a spycatcher’s dream. But the hand of official secrecy lies heavily even on the dead. Names and dates yes, but there are no ranks, no units, no places, no hints of the circumstances in which these unknown soldiers lost their lives. Some died naturally after long years in the shadows, yet most of these are still as anonymous as the many others who fell on active service.

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A few of their stories have been told, though most are covered in a heavy patina of heroic myth. There, from the early days, is Ya’akov Buqa’i, executed in Jordan in 1949 after filtering in disguise through the ceasefire lines together with hundreds of released Arab prisoners of war. There are Max Binnet and Moshe Marzuk, who died in Egyptian prison in the mid-1950s after the exposure of the famous Israeli sabotage network at the centre of the Lavon Affair. There are Eli Cohen, the legendary spy who penetrated the highest echelons of the Syrian government and was hanged, live on television, in Damascus in 1965; Baruch Cohen, the Mossad agent-runner shot dead in Madrid by a Palestinian gunman in 1973: Moshe Golan, a Shin Bet security service officer murdered by a West Bank informer in a safe house inside Israel in 1980; Ya’akov Barsimantov, a Mossad man assassinated in Paris weeks before the invasion of Lebanon in 1982; and Victor Rejwan, a Shin Bet man killed in a shoot-out with Muslim militants in Gaza just before the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in 1987. A little knowledge and imagination can help with the majority of names that are still unknown to the wider pub­ lic. A cluster of men killed in June 1967 and a larger number who died between October and December 1973 are the losses of army field intelligence units during the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars. Another group who died on the same day in November 1983 comprised Shin Bet agents blown up by a Shi’ite Muslim suicide bomber in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre. But most of the names remain mysterious, impenet­ rable and unyielding as tombstones. Only the breakdown of the total fatalities (available until mid-1988) reflects the different roles - and degree of exposure to mortal danger - of the three separate services that make up Israel’s intelligence community: army intelligence, 261; the Shin Bet, eighty: the Mossad, sixtyfive. Israel has many war memorials. Different military units - the paratroops, the air force and the tank corps - have all erected monuments to the men and women they have lost in five full­

INTRODUCTION

xi

scale conventional wars (six if the 1968-70 ‘war of attrition’ on the Suez Canal is counted) and four decades of cross-border incursions and anti-guerrilla operations. The memorial to the fallen of the intelligence community at Glilot was erected in 1984 as a result of pressure from bereaved families, who felt that the contribution of their relations to national security had not been given adequate public recognition. A few of the 415 men and women whose names are engraved on its walls are still buried in unmarked graves or under assumed names in the Arab countries where they operated. The monument is as unique as it is bizarre, a taut compromise between the harsh demands of official secrecy and the need for recognition for those whose loved ones lived and died in anonymity. There is probably nowhere else on earth that, proportionate to its size and population, produces, analyses or consumes as much intelligence as Israel, a country of 4 million people that has been in a state of war for every moment of its forty-three-year existence and sees its future depending, perhaps more than ever before, on the need to ‘know’ its enemies, predict their intentions and frustrate their plans. Intelligence is an expanding business. The British writer Phillip Knightley has calculated that in the mid-1980s over a million people, spending £17,500 million annually, were engaged worldwide in what he irreverently reminded spy buffs was called ‘the second oldest profession'.1 Serious study of the subject is growing too. In the academic world intelligence is starting to receive attention as the ‘missing dimension’ without which politics, war, diplomacy, terrorism and international relations cannot be properly understood.2 The United States, with a unique though often threatened tradition of relative openness in such matters, has taken the lead in the field. But there has been impressive progress else­ where. In Britain historians like Christopher Andrew have shown that hard work and imaginative research methods can circumvent some of the more absurd restrictions of official secrecy, clumsy ‘weeding’ and censorship in the name of national security. Learned journals, symposia and multi­

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disciplinary international conferences are proliferating like the intelligence and security bureaucracies themselves. Exposure has brought with it more public interest. The British government’s prolonged attempts to ban Spycatcher, the sensa­ tional memoirs of the former MI5 officer Peter Wright, were bound to fail in the end. Israel ignored this lesson, and in 1990 tried and also failed to halt publication - in the United States and Canada - of an embarrassing book about the Mossad by Victor Ostrovsky, a disgruntled former officer. Democratic societies can­ not consistently withstand pressures for some measure of account­ ability and control of their secret services. This is especially true when intelligence efforts are directed against a country’s own citizens, not at foreign armies, spies or terrorists. But unlike Israel, neither the United States nor Britain is at war. Yet even Israel is not immune from the trend towards more exposure. Several recent security and espionage scandals have badly tarnished the halo of its secret services, although, as is the case with intelligence organizations everywhere, mistakes have become public knowledge far more quickly than successes. The Lavon Affair of the 1950s and 1960s, the intelligence failure that preceded the surprise Egyptian-Syrian assault of October 1973, the bungled killing of an innocent man in Lillehammer, Norway, in the Mossad’s shadowy war against Palestinian terrorism and the 1984-6 Shin Bet scandals over the killing of prisoners and torture of suspects have all been documented far more completely than the impressive number of successes notched up by Israel. Success is a problem too. Like other intelligence communities in other democratic societies, Israel’s has become adept at cultivating selective links with journalists who are grateful for whatever snippets of secret information are released from the nether world. Israel has its equivalents of Nigel West and Chapman Pincher, two British writers who for years had a virtual monopoly of writing about their country’s secret services on the basis of unattributable interviews. And Israel’s stringent laws of military censorship and non-release of almost all intelli­ gence material in government archives combine to ensure that

INTRODUCTION

xiii

exposure generally remains limited. That is why Victor Ostrovsky’s damaging claims in his book, By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer, came as such a grievous blow. Thus any serious study of the subject is bound to be difficult. It is not necessary to subscribe to the rigid view that an event is true only if it is somehow documented to acknowledge that the existence of hard, written evidence is the exception rather than the rule in the field of intelligence and security. A substantial amount of original documentation is available - if one knows how and where to look - for the period up to about 1958; this material can provide remarkable insights into matters that were never intended to be made public, and, perhaps, should never have been committed to paper. Secret reports on officially sanctioned assassinations and kid­ nappings survive from the chaotic period before the outbreak of the 1948 war. A declassified file of Mossad cable traffic detailing communications between Baghdad and Tel Aviv gives a fascinat­ ing glimpse of the nuts and bolts of clandestine operations, of the rising panic when an agent is blown and may be talking under torture; a mass of more mundane yet often thrilling material gives a sense of the scale and character of routine intelligence gathering. Records of interrogations of captured Palestinian infiltrators show how Israel built up a picture of its enemy. Foreign Ministry material reveals diplomats choosing to ignore intelligence facts when they contradicted the official propaganda line. From the end of the 1950s contemporary documents are sporadic, non-existent or, in most cases, simply unavailable. Other historical evidence can be partial or unreliable: personal memoirs tend to suffer from self-censorship and a natural human tendency to be self-serving. Old men forget; but younger ones can have surprising lapses of memory as well - official censorship often demands it. Yet if the obstacles to the study of Israeli intelligence are considerable, there are very powerful incentives. One is the glaring lack of balanced, factual work on the subject whereas

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ISRAEL’S SECRET WARS

the profusion of fictional or sensationalist ‘factional’ accounts and countless miles of newsprint suggest that interest in it is strong and growing. John le Carre’s bold excursion to the Middle East in The Little Drummer Girl remains the best literary treatment of Israeli intelligence and its continuing war against the Palestinians. Agents of Innocence, a gripping story by the American author David Ignatius, touches on the subject too. But these successful novels - and several recent, less well-known Hebrew works that have not been translated into other languages - are exceptions. The Arab-Zionist conflict has produced few memor­ able paperback heroes: many purportedly ‘documentary’ works owe far more to fantasy than reality. Operation Uranium Ship,3 for example, is billed as a ‘true’ account of how, in 1968, a team of Israeli agents hijacked a ship full of uranium for use in the country’s clandestine nuclear programme. The book’s dustjacket reveals tantalizingly that the team included: A handsome, sophisticated, ruthless Israeli super-agent... a beautiful young woman with exquisite sexual skills ... a wire-thin, lethally efficient professional killer ... a grizzled sea-captain pressed into perilous service ... a mechanical genius who performed miracles with anything made of metal... and others ... from the top levels of Israel’s scientific and espionage elite to the outmost limits of her worldwide network of operatives.

The real world would be hard put to compete with such superlatives, yet if the truth is not actually stranger than fiction, it is certainly more complex. Secret agents have con­ trollers, and controllers have department heads, just as intelli­ gence chiefs are responsible to ministers, who in turn have diplomacy, budgets, public opinion and elections to think about. One of the recurrent themes of the history of Israeli intelligence is how politicians keep intruding into the secret world, making demands, exercising control and then ducking responsibility when things go wrong. The fundamental question about the Lavon

INTRODUCTION

XV

Affair, which clouded the horizons of the Israeli intelligence community and intermittently rocked its political life for almost two decades, was ‘Who gave the order?’ The same deceptively simple question applied equally well to the scandal that erupted in 1986 over the Shin Bet’s killing of Arab prisoners and to the recruitment and running of Jonathan Pollard, the AmericanJewish spy for Israel whose capture and exposure briefly shook the cosy web of US-Israeli intelligence liaison and exchange. Another incentive to studying Israeli intelligence is that it really matters. The conflict between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbours remains in some ways as bitter and insoluble today as it was in 1948, when independent Israel fought its way into the world out of the ruins of the British Mandate and the disarray of the Palestinians and the Arab governments which supported them. When intelligence fails, both in its primary mode as a device intended to provide early warning of enemy strength and inten­ tions, and in its secondary one as a supplier of raw information and considered assessments on the basis of which policies, strategies and tactics can be constructed, the results can be catastrophic. The bitter lessons of the October 1973 war, when much of the blame for the initial disaster was laid at the door of military intelligence, and of the grandiose and wrong-headed design that led to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon have not been forgotten. Yet for all its importance, intelligence does not exist in a vacuum; the advice of secret servants can be - and often is - ignored by the politicians. For it is they, not the spymasters, who must make policy. The importance of accurate and reliable military and political intelligence has not been diminished by the considerable pro­ gress that there has been towards Israeli-Arab coexistence. The Sadat initiative in 1977 and the subsequent peace treaty with Egypt, the de facto peace with Jordan and the slackening of the PLO’s ‘armed struggle’ in the wake of the Lebanon war do not mean that Israeli intelligence can rest on its laurels. Yehoshafat Harkabi, the brilliant, and now outspokenly ‘dovish’, former head of military intelligence, has argued

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persuasively that a sea change has taken place in Arab attitudes towards Israel and that the onus is now on the Jewish state to take up the challenge. ‘Knowing your enemy’, Harkabi and others have insisted, must include knowing how to see that that enemy may be in the process of becoming a non-belligerant. But the conflict, with its periodic outbreaks of full-scale war­ fare and tense, prolonged respites in between, continues. The political and human tragedy of the Palestinians has still not been resolved: without such a resolution, the conflict can only deepen or at best stagnate. Israel’s intelligence services are still in the eye of the struggle - military intelligence, with its sensors focused on Syrian and Iraqi armaments and intentions: the Shin Bet as the cutting edge of Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: and the Mossad as the executive arm in the savage battle of terrorism and counter-terrorism in the Middle East and Europe. The Shin Bet’s response to the Palestinian uprising - the intifada - in the occupied territories and the Mossad’s assassination of Abu Jihad, the senior PLO military leader, in April 1988 have served as reminders of the centrality of these services. Israel’s controversial kidnapping of a militant Lebanese Shi’ite leader, Sheikh Obeid, in July 1989 to obtain a bargaining chip in negotiations to free its soldiers held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon provided another of many examples of daring based on precise intelligence and a hard-headed view of its foes. Powerful Arab states like Syria and Iraq continue to pose a military threat to Israel’s hold on the occupied territories if not to Israel itself. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 turned the region upside down, breaking old alliances and forming new ones, creating previously unimagined uncertainties and dangers for the future. On different fronts, in the Middle East and beyond, the war goes on. Israel’s intelligence community has come a long way since its origins in the amateurish and improvised information-gathering begun by a handful of dedicated volunteers working for the Haganah militia in British-ruled Palestine of the 1930s. Today, IDF Intelligence Branch (Aman), the Mossad and the Shin Bet

INTRODUCTION

xvii

together employ thousands of people and spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on defending Israel from its enemies, acquiring their secrets and penetrating their ranks. Neither are its friends immune. Whether the awesome reputa­ tion of Israeli intelligence is wholly deserved remains moot. It is clear, however, that in many Arab countries there is still a strong belief that Israel has a long and dangerous arm, con­ trolled by a subtle and cunning mind.4 Too much is at stake in the Middle East conflict for the intelligence activity at the centre of it to be left solely to its anonymous practitioners. Israel’s Secret Wars treats intelligence with the seriousness it deserves and tries to take spies, secret agents, terrorism and security out of the realm of popular fiction, deliberate leaks and excessive official secrecy and place them firmly where they belong - in the context of history, politics and international relations, and in the real, con­ temporary world.

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