Every Spy a Prince

By Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman. Houghton Mifflin. 466 pp. List: $24.95.

Reviewed by Russell Warren Howe

Each country's intelligence service is the "mirror of the society it serves." The British see intelligence as a game, with the lottery of birth deciding which side you're on. America sees spying as "big business" and is more interested in electronics than in battles of wits. Israel's secret services, like the country itself, were the creation of humorless Russians and Poles. So Mossad and Shin Bet, like the Cheka and OGPU, are "primarily a tool for preserving the regime." That involves plenty of torture and murder at home and abroad, and more mischief than analysis.

So say the authors of this book, which is also appearing in London under their preferred tide, The Imperfect Spies, which better sets the theme.

Significantly, Mossad sees its best achievements as the kidnapping by 23 people of an old Nazi called Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, and the seizure of remote Entebbe airport in 1972, an intelligence challenge about on a par with Britain's police operation in Anguilla in 1964. But the agency failed to notice the buildup of forces that led to the Ramadan War of 1973, or to Iraq's attack on Iran in 1980 or on Kuwait a decade later, and it was taken by surprise by the intifada.

Raviv and Melman, Israeli journalists with impeccable sources, offer above all a gallery of characters going back to the legendary Russian, Isser Harel, and the diminutive Pole who plotted the successful murders of Count Bernadotte and Lord Moyne-Yitzhak Shamir. From the start, the authors show, Israel's secret services ran rogue operations, stealing money from the Swiss accounts of Hitler's victims, bombing a synagogue in Baghdad during prayers in 1951 to scare Jewish Iraqis into moving into tent villages in Israel, and bombing British and American offices in Cairo in 1954 (the "Lavon affair") to discredit the Nasser regime.

Using American funds provided for other purposes, the Mossad bribed its way across Africa and Latin America. The authors assert that the late dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceaucescu—who edged Sadat toward Jerusalem and Camp David—received about $30 million from the agency.

Israel's spies exploited Kurdish and Christian minorities in the Arab world. Elsewhere, they threw in their lot with established power, however autocratic: Iran (where they trained the SAVAK secret police in interrogation methods), Zaire, Chad and other African countries, Singapore, Sri Lanka (where they helped the Sinhalese go after Tamils), South Korea, South Africa (where Israel aided the birth of nuclear weapons), and Argentina (supplying arms during the Falklands War). They helped Morocco capture and kill an opposition leader, Mehdi Ben Barka, in Paris. In Beirut, they murdered Palestinians and blew up MEA Caravelles at the airport. During the 1967 war, they protected the disinformation communications which brought Jordan into the conflict by directing the attack on the US SPY ship Liberty, an action in which 34 Americans were killed and 171 wounded.

Misinformation has always been a Mossad trademark. The most prominent victim was the United States.

At Lillehammer, Norway, in 1973, a Mossad team murdered Ahmed Boushiki, a Moroccan waiter, in front of his pregnant Norwegian wife, after mistaking him for a Palestinian leader of the Black September terrorist group. The woman responsible for that, Sylvia Raphael, a South African, got her come-uppance in Limassol, Cyprus, a decade later, along with two colleagues all killed by a Palestinian hit team. (This revenge, related by espionage writer Donald McCormick and others, is not mentioned in the Raviv-Melman book—presumably a result of the Israeli censorship of the work of which they complain in their prologue.)

There were some genuine Mossad achievements, such as the theft of hundreds of thousands of French Mirage- 1 blueprints in Switzerland, leading to the building of Israel's Kfir fighter.

And, of course, the agency recruited moles, although it was its offshoot, Lakem, that hired the notorious Jonathan Pollard of US naval intelligence.

Misinformation has always been a Mossad trademark. The most prominent victim was the US, thanks to an agreement negotiated by CIA Assistant Director James Jesus Angleton that Israel and America would not spy on each other. The Mossad always ignored the pact in America, but until the agreement was nullified by Admiral Stansfield Turner a generation later, when he was Jimmy Carter's CIA director, the CIA apparently relied on Mossad data. After Angleton died, a memorial to him was erected in Jerusalem.

From the start, the authors show, Israel's secret services ran rogue operations.

Another victim was Britain. But as the authors note, on June 17, 1988, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had been a decided fan of Israel's, ordered all Mossad "diplomats" out of Britain. She had been angered by a succession of capers, die attempted "export" (in a crate) of a former Nigerian minister, a pseudo-Syrian "attempted bombing" of an El Al plane at Heathrow (which led to a break in relations with Damascus before the deceit was discovered), the Falklands arms sale, and the removal of the anti-nuclear Israeli pacifist Mordechai Vanunu from London by a Mossad swallow from Florida. (Like the Russians, say the authors, the Israelis employ female spooks mostly as swallows.)

Old spooks, it's said, never die: They just get into mischief. Raviv and Melman tell the stories of many "formers," including the Palestinian-born Mike Harari, who brokered the purchase of Manuel Noriega's two Haifa villas and got the general's children into Jewish schools. Then, there's Lt. Col. Yair Klein, the German Israeli who taught the bodyguards of Colombian drug barons how to kill Washington's DEA agents. David Kiniche, unmistakably English, Al Schwimmer, an American immigrant to Israel, and Yaakov Nimrodi, who came from Iraq, all had tastes in yachts and beachside villas. They teamed up with then-rich Adnan Khashoggi of Saudi Arabia and made the Middle East their playground.

Palestinian-born Amiram Nir teamed up with Oliver North—whom cartoonists have portrayed as a double for the gap-toothed boy on the cover of Mad magazine—and took a naive Reagan administration into Iranscam. Nir later died mysteriously in the crash of a chartered aircraft in Mexico.

Raviv and Melman believe Israel's intelligence agencies have fallen victim to their own greed, violence, racism and arrogance. They quote a "senior Shin Bet operative" as saying: "We let the urine rise to our heads. "

This book is must reading for citizens of countries to which Israel is hostile, and cautionary reading for citizens of any countries for which Israel professes friendship.

Russell Warren Howe is a Washington-based freelance journalist who writes regularly for newspapers in the US and abroad.