Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 2 BEFORE THE BEGINNING

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.

Down the centuries, Jews had done that. But this Friday Sabbath in September 1929 was different. Rabbis had urged as many men as possible to be united in public prayer and to show their determination to their right to do so. It was intended not only as an expression of their faith, but also as a visible symbol of their Zionism — and a reminder to the Arab population, who vastly outnumbered them, that they would not be cowed.

For months there had been persistent rumors that the Muslim population were once more becoming increasingly angry over what they saw as Zionist expansion. These fears had started with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and its commitment to a formal Jewish homeland in Palestine. To Arabs who lived there and could trace their ancestry back to the Prophet, this was an outrage. Land that they had farmed for many centuries would be threatened, perhaps even taken from them by the Zionists and their British protectors, who had arrived at the end of the Great War to place Palestine under a Mandate. The British had ruled as they did in other parts of the empire, trying to please both sides. It was a recipe for disaster. Tensions between Jews and Arabs had increased. There had been skirmishes and bloodletting, often over where the Jews wanted to build their synagogues and religious shuls. But the Jews were stubbornly determined to exercise their “prayer rights” at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. For them it was part of the core of their faith.

By noon, the hour of the shema prayer, there were close to a thousand reading aloud the ancient words of scripture before the yellow sandstone wall. The rise and fall of their voices had its own soothing cadence.

Then, with stunning swiftness, missiles — stones, broken bottles, and tins filled with rubble — rained down on them. The assault had been launched by Arabs from vantage points around the Wailing Wall. The first crack of gunfire rattled, a ragged volley of musket shots from Muslim marksmen. Jews fell and were dragged away by their fleeing neighbors. Miraculously, no one was killed, though the injured numbered scores.

That night the leaders of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, met. They quickly realized that their carefully planned demonstration had lacked one essential: foreknowledge of an Arab onslaught.

One of those present at the meeting spoke for them all: “We need to remember scripture. From King David onward, our people have depended on good intelligence.”

Over cups of Turkish coffee and sweet pastries were sown the seeds for what would one day become the most formidable intelligence service in the modern world: Mossad. But its creation was still almost a quarter of a century away. All that the Yishuv leaders could suggest as a first practical step on that warm September night was to pool what money they could spare and call upon their neighbors to do the same. The cash would be used to bribe Arabs who were still tolerant toward Jews and who would provide advance warning of further attacks.

In the meantime Jews would continue to exert their right to pray at the Wailing Wall. They would not depend on the British for protection, but would be defended by the Haganah, the newly formed Jewish militia. In the months to come a combination of prior warning and the presence of the militia faced down Arab attacks. Relative calm between Arab and Jew was restored for the next five years.

In that period the Jews continued to secretly expand their intelligence gathering. It had no formal name or leadership. Arabs were recruited on an ad hoc basis: peddlers who worked in Jerusalem’s Arab Quarter and shoeshine boys who burnished the boots of Mandate officers were put on the payroll, along with students from the city’s prestigious Arab Rouda College, teachers, and businessmen. Any Jew could recruit an Arab spy; the only condition was the information was shared. Slowly but surely the Yishuv obtained important information not only about Arabs but about British intentions.

The coming to power of Hitler in 1933 marked the start of the exodus of German Jews to Palestine. By 1936 over three hundred thousand had made the long journey across Europe; many were destitute by the time they reached the Holy Land. Somehow food and accommodations were found for them by the Yishuv. Within months Jews made up over a third of the population. The Arabs reacted as they had before: from the minarets of a hundred mosques came the cries of the mullahs to drive the Zionists back into the sea.

In every Arab mafafeth, the meeting house where local Arab councilmen met, came the same raised voices of angry protests: We must stop the Jews from taking our land; we must stop the British giving them arms and training them.

In turn the Jews protested that the opposite was true, that the British were encouraging the Arabs to steal back land lawfully paid for.

The British continued to try to placate both sides — and failed. In 1936 sporadic fighting flared into full-scale Arab revolt against both the British and the Jews. The British ruthlessly suppressed the rebellion. But the Jews realized it would only be a matter of time before the Arabs struck with renewed fury.

Throughout the land young Jews rushed to join the Haganah. They became the core of a formidable secret army: physically hardened, crack shots, and as cunning as the desert foxes in the Negev.

The network of Arab informers was extended. A Haganah Political Department was set up to spread dissension through disinformation. Men who later became legends in the Israeli intelligence community learned their skills in that formative period before the start of World War II. The Haganah — the word means “defense” in Hebrew — became the best informed of all the forces in the Holy Land.

World War II brought a renewed uneasy peace to Palestine. Jews and Arabs sensed the grim future they would both face if the Nazis won. The first details of what was happening in the death camps of Europe had reached the Yishuv.

David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin were among those who attended a meeting in Haifa in 1942. There was consensus that the survivors of the Holocaust must be brought to their spiritual home, Eretz Israel. No one could estimate how many there would be, but everyone agreed the arrival of the refugees would rekindle confrontation with the Arabs — and this time the British would openly side against the Jews. Britain had steadfastly said it would refuse to admit the survivors into Palestine after Hitler was defeated, on the grounds it would create a population imbalance.

Ben-Gurion’s urging for an upgrade of the Haganah’s intelligence capacity was fully endorsed by the meeting. More informers would be recruited. A counterintelligence unit would be formed to uncover Jews who were collaborating with the British and unearth “Jewish communists and dissenters in our midst.” The new unit was known as Rigul Hegdi and was commanded by a former French foreign legionnaire working under cover as a traveling salesman.

Soon he was turning up Jewish women who consorted with officers of the Mandate; shopkeepers who traded with the British; café owners who entertained them. In the dead of night the culprits were brought before Haganah drumhead courts-martial; the guilty were either sentenced to be severely beaten or were executed in the Judaean hills by a single bullet in the back of the head. It was a precursor to the ruthlessness Mossad would later display.

By 1945 the Haganah included a unit responsible for procuring arms. Soon caches of Italian and German weapons captured in North Africa after the defeat of Rommel were being smuggled by Jewish soldiers serving with the Allies across the Egyptian Sinai Desert into Palestine. The arms came by ramshackle trucks and camel caravans and were stored in caves in the Wilderness where the Devil had tried to tempt Jesus. One hiding place was close to where the Dead Sea Scrolls were waiting to be discovered.

After the defeat of Japan in August 1945 ended the war, Jews who had served in Allied military intelligence units arrived to provide their expertise for the Haganah. The elements were in place to deal with what Ben-Gurion had forecast—“the war for our independence.”

The trigger point he knew would be the bricha, the Hebrew name for the unprecedented operation to bring the Holocaust survivors from Europe. First they came in the hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. Many still wore their concentration camp garb; each bore a tattoo with a Nazi identification number. They came by road and rail through the Balkans and then across the Mediterranean to the shores of Israel. Every available ship had been bought or rented by Jewish relief agencies in the United States — often at highly inflated prices: tramp steamers, coasters, landing craft from the beaches of Normandy, riverboats, anything that could float was pressed into service. There had not been an evacuation like it since Dunkirk in 1940.

Waiting for the survivors on the beaches between Haifa and Tel Aviv were some of the very British soldiers who had been ferried back to England from Dunkirk. They were there to carry out their government’s order to keep out the Holocaust survivors. There were ugly clashes, but also times when the soldiers, perhaps remembering their own salvation, had looked the other way as a boatload of refugees struggled ashore.

Ben-Gurion decided that such acts of compassion were not enough. The time had come for the Mandate to end. That could only be done by force. By 1946, he had united the disparate Jewish underground movements. Fired by the unquenchable spirit of those who had first settled the land, the order was given to launch a guerrilla war against both the British and the Arabs.

Every Jewish commander knew it was a dangerous gamble: fighting on both fronts would stretch their resources to the very limit. The consequences of failure would be dire. Ben-Gurion ordered a noholds-barred policy. Soon the catalog of atrocities was appalling on all sides. Jews were shot on suspicion of collaborating with the Haganah. British soldiers were gunned down and their barracks bombed. Arab villages were set to the torch. It was medieval in its ferocity.

For the Haganah, intelligence was critical, not least to spread disinformation to give the impression in British and Arab eyes that the Jews had far more men than they actually could muster. The British found themselves chasing a will-o’-the-wisp enemy. Among the mandate forces morale began to crumble.

Sensing an opening, the United States tried to broker a deal in the spring of 1946 urging Britain to admit into Palestine one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors. The plea was rejected and the bitter fighting continued. Finally, in February 1947, Britain agreed to leave Palestine by May 1948. From then on the United Nations would deal with the problems of what would become the State of Israel.

Realizing there must still be a decisive conflict with the Arabs to ensure the fledgling nation would not be stifled at birth, Ben-Gurion and his commanders knew they must continue to depend on superior intelligence. Vital data were obtained about Arab morale and military strength. Jewish spies positioned in Cairo and Amman stole the attack plans of the Egyptian and Jordanian armies. When what became known as the War of Independence started, the Israelis achieved spectacular military victories. But it also became clear to Ben-Gurion as the fighting continued that eventual victory must be predicated on a clear division between military and political aspirations. When victory did finally come in 1949, that division had not been properly settled — and that had led to feuding within the Israeli intelligence community over its responsibilities in peacetime.

Rather than dealing with the situation with his usual incisiveness, Ben-Gurion, as Israel’s first prime minister, set up five intelligence services to operate both internally and abroad. The overseas service modeled itself on Britain’s and France’s security services. Both those services readily agreed to work with the Israelis. Contact was also established with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington through the agency’s head of counterintelligence in Italy, James Jesus Angleton. His bonding with Israel’s fledgling spies would play a crucial role in the eventual bridge building between the two intelligence communities.

Yet, despite this promising start, Ben-Gurion’s dream of an integrated intelligence organization working in harmony died in the birth pangs of a nation itself struggling for a cohesive identity. Muscle flexing remained the order of the day as his ministers and officials fought for power and positions. At every level there were clashes. Who would coordinate an overall intelligence strategy? Who would evaluate raw data? Who would recruit spies? Who should see their reports first? Who would interpret that information for the country’s political leaders?

Nowhere was the jockeying more relentless than between the foreign ministry and the defense ministry, both of whom claimed the right to operate abroad. Isser Harel, then a young operative, felt his colleagues “saw intelligence work in a romantic and adventurous light. They pretended to be expert in the ways of the whole world … and sought to behave like fictional international spies enjoying their glory as they lived in the shadow of the fine line between law and licentiousness.”

Meanwhile people continued to die, killed by Arab terrorists and their bombs and booby traps. The armies of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon still threatened. Behind them, millions more Arabs were ready to raise jihad, holy war. No nation on earth had been born into such a hostile environment as Israel.

For Ben-Gurion there was an almost messianic feeling about the way his people looked to him to protect them, in the way the great leaders of Israel had always done. But he knew he was no prophet, only a hard-bitten street fighter who had won the War of Independence against an Arab enemy with combined forces more than twenty times those at his disposal. There had not been a greater triumph since the boy shepherd David had killed Goliath and routed the Philistines.

Yet the enemy had not gone away. It had become cleverer and even more ruthless. It struck like a thief in the night, killing without compunction before vanishing.

For four long years the rivalry, squabbling, and sniping had gone on at all those meetings Ben-Gurion had chaired to try and resolve matters among the intelligence community. A promising foreign ministry plan to use a French diplomat as a spy in Cairo had been thwarted by the defense ministry. It wanted its own man for the job. The young officer, with no real experience of intelligence work, was caught in weeks by Egyptian security officers. Israeli agents in Europe were discovered to be working in the rampant black market to finance their work because there was an insufficient official budget to pay for their spying activities. Attempts to recruit the moderate Druze forces in Lebanon had ended when rival Israeli intelligence agencies disagreed on how they could be used. Often grandiose schemes were wrecked by mutual suspicion. Naked ambition was everywhere.

Powerful men of the day — Israel’s foreign minister, the army chief of staff, and ambassadors — all fought to establish the supremacy of their favorite service over the others. One wanted the focus to be on the collection of economic and political information. Another thought intelligence should concentrate purely on the military strength of the enemy. The ambassador to France insisted intelligence should be run the way the French Resistance had operated in World War II, with every Jew in the land being mobilized. The ambassador to Washington wanted his spies protected by diplomatic cover and “integrated in the routine work of the embassy, so as to place them above suspicion.” The Israeli minister to Bucharest wanted his spies to work along the lines of the KGB — and to be as ruthless. Israel’s minister in Buenos Aires demanded that agents concentrate on the role of the Catholic church in helping Nazis to settle in Argentina. Ben-Gurion had patiently listened to every proposal.

Finally, on March 2, 1951, he summoned the heads of the five intelligence agencies to his office. He told them that he intended to place Israel’s intelligence-gathering activities abroad in a new agency called Ha Mossad le Teum, “the Institute for Coordination.” It would have an initial budget of twenty thousand Israeli pounds, of which five thousand pounds would be spent on “special missions, but only with my prior approval.” The new agency would draw its personnel from the existing intelligence agencies. In everyday usage the new agency would be called only Mossad.

Mossad “for all administrative and political purposes” would come under the jurisdiction of the foreign ministry. However, it would have on its staff senior officers representing the other organizations within the Israeli intelligence community: Shin Bet, internal security; Aman, military intelligence; air force intelligence; and naval intelligence. The functions of the officers would be to keep Mossad informed of the specific requirements of their “clients.” In the event of disagreement over any request, the matter would be referred to the prime minister’s office.

In his usual blunt way Ben-Gurion spelled it out. “You will give Mossad your shopping list. Mossad will then go and get the goods. It is not your business to know where they shopped or what they paid for the goods.”

Ben-Gurion would act as a one-man oversight committee for the new service. In a memo to its first chief, Reuven Shiloah, the prime minister ordered “Mossad will work under me, will operate according to my instructions and will report to me constantly.”

The ground rules had been set.

Twenty-eight eventful years after those Jews had sat through the Jerusalem night in September 1929 discussing the vital importance of intelligence to ward off further Arab attacks, their descendants had an intelligence service that would become more formidable than any other in the world.

The birth of Mossad, like that of Israel, was anything but smooth. The service had taken over a spy ring in Iraq that had been operating for some years under the control of the Israel Defense Forces’ Political Department. The prime function of the ring was to penetrate the upper echelons of the Iraqi military and run a clandestine immigration network to bring Iraqi Jews out of the country to Israel.

In May 1951, just nine weeks after Ben-Gurion signed the order creating Mossad, Iraqi security agents in Baghdad swooped down on the ring. Two Israeli agents were arrested, along with dozens of Iraqi Jews and Arabs who had been bribed to run the escape network, which extended across the Middle East. Twenty-eight people were charged with espionage. Both agents were condemned to death, seventeen were given life sentences, and the others were freed “as an example of the fairness of Iraqi justice.”

Both Mossad agents were subsequently released from an Iraqi jail, where they had been severely tortured, in exchange for a substantial sum of money paid into the Swiss bank account of the Iraqi minister of the interior.

Another debacle swiftly followed. The Political Department’s longtime spy in Rome, Theodore Gross, now worked for Mossad under the new setup. In January 1952, Isser Harel, then head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, received “incontrovertible proof” that Gross was a double agent, on the payroll of the Egyptian secret service. Harel decided to fly to Rome, where he persuaded Gross to return with him to Tel Aviv, convincing the traitor that he was about to be given a senior post in Shin Bet. Gross was tried in secret, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He would die in prison.

A crestfallen Reuven Shiloah resigned, a broken man. He was replaced by Harel, who would remain Mossad’s chief for eleven years, a tenure never equaled.

Senior staff who welcomed him to Mossad headquarters on that September morning in 1952 could hardly have been impressed with Harel’s physical appearance. He was barely four feet eight inches tall, with jug ears, and he spoke Hebrew with a heavy central European accent; his family had emigrated from Latvia in 1930. His clothes looked as if he had slept in them.

His first words to the assembled staff were: “The past is over. There will be no more mistakes. We will go forward together. We talk to no one except ourselves.”

That same day he gave an example of what he meant. After lunch he summoned his driver. When the man asked where they were going, he was told the destination was a secret; dismissing the driver, Harel set off by himself at the wheel of the car. He returned with a box of bagels for the staff. But the point had been made. He would ask the questions.

That was the defining moment that endeared Harel to his demoralized staff. He set about energizing them with his own example. He traveled secretly to hostile Arab countries to personally organize Mossad networks. He interviewed every person who wanted to join the service. He looked for those who, like him, had a kibbutz background.

“People like that know our enemy,” he told a senior aide who questioned the policy. “The kibbutzniks live close to the Arabs. They have learned not only to think like them — but think faster.”

Harel’s patience was as legendary as his bursts of anger; his loyalty to his staff became equally renowned. All those outside his closed circle were looked upon with suspicion as “unprincipled opportunists.” He had no dealings with persons he saw as “bigots masquerading as nationalists, particularly in religion.” Increasingly he showed an open dislike for Orthodox Jews.

There were a number of them in Ben-Gurion’s government and they quickly came to resent Isser Harel, then tried to find a way to remove him. But the wily Mossad chief made sure he remained close to another kibbutznik, the prime minister.

It helped that Mossad’s record now spoke for itself. Harel’s agents had contributed to the success of the Sinai skirmishes against the Egyptians. He had spies in place in every Arab capital, providing a steady stream of priceless information. Another coup came when he traveled to Washington in 1954 to meet Allen Dulles, who had just taken over the CIA. Harel presented the veteran spymaster with a dagger bearing the engraved word of the psalmist: “the Guardian of Israel neither slumbers or sleeps.”

Dulles replied: “You can count on me to stay awake with you.”

Those words created a partnership between Mossad and the CIA. Dulles arranged for Mossad to have state-of-the-art equipment: listening and tracking devices, remote-operated cameras, and a range of gadgets that Harel admitted he never knew existed. The two men also formed the first intelligence “back channel” between their services, through which they could communicate by secure phone in the case of any emergency. The channel effectively bypassed the normal diplomatic route, to the chagrin of both the State Department and the Israeli foreign ministry. It did nothing to improve Harel’s standing in diplomatic circles.

In 1961 Harel masterminded the operation to bring to Israel thousands of Moroccan Jews. A year later the tireless Mossad chief was in southern Sudan assisting pro-Israeli rebels against the regime. That same year he also helped King Haile Selassie of Ethiopia crush an attempted coup: the monarch had been a longtime ally of Israel.

But at home the Orthodox Jews in the cabinet were becoming more vociferous, complaining that Isser Harel had become insufferably autocratic and increasingly indifferent to their religious sensibilities, and that he was a man with his own agenda, perhaps even an aspiration to the highest political office in the land. Ben-Gurion’s well-tuned political antenna was up, and relations between him and Harel cooled. Where before he had given Harel a virtual free hand, he now began to demand to be briefed on the smallest details of an operation. Harel resented the tight leash but said nothing. The whispering campaign against him intensified.

In February 1962, the innuendos coalesced over the fate of an eight-year-old boy, Joselle Schumacher. Two years before, the child had been kidnapped from his parents by an ultra-Orthodox sect.

The boy’s maternal grandfather, Nahman Shtarkes, was a member of the sect Neturei Karta, the “Guardians of the Walls of Jerusalem.” He was suspected of complicity in the kidnapping. Already there had been a huge police hunt for Joselle that had produced no clue as to his whereabouts. Nahman had been briefly imprisoned when he had refused to cooperate with the investigation. Orthodox Jews had turned the old man into a martyr; thousands had paraded with banners proclaiming Ben-Gurion to be no different from the Nazis, imprisoning an old man. Nahman had been released on “health grounds.” The protests had continued.

Ben-Gurion’s political advisers warned that the matter could lose him the next election. Worse, in the event of another war with the Arabs, some Orthodox groups could actually support them. The embattled prime minister had sent for Harel and ordered Mossad to find the boy. Harel argued it was not a task for the service. In his later words:

“The atmosphere turned to ice. He repeated he was giving me an order. I said I needed at least to read the police file. The prime minister said I had an hour.”

The file was large but, as he read it, something stirred deep in Isser Harel — the right of parents to bring up their child without being pressured by extreme religious belief.

Joselle had been born in March 1953 to Arthur and Ida Schumacher. Due to family financial difficulties, Joselle had been sent to live with his grandfather in Jerusalem. The child found himself in a religious enclave, spiritually isolated from the rest of the city. Increasingly Nahman inducted his grandson into the sect’s ways. When Joselle’s parents visited, Nahman angrily criticized them for what he saw as their own wayward religious attitudes.

The old man belonged to a generation whose faith helped them survive the Holocaust. Nahman’s daughter and son-in-law felt their prime role was to create a life for themselves in the young nation. All too often prayer had to take second place.

Tired of Nahman’s constant criticism, Joselle’s parents said they wanted him back. Nahman objected, arguing that to move him would disrupt Joselle’s instruction into a prayer life that would serve him as an adult. There were more angry exchanges. Then, the next time they visited Jerusalem, Joselle had disappeared.

Both Orthodox and secular Jews had seized upon the incident to give full vent to an issue that continued to divide the nation, and was exemplified by Ben-Gurion’s Labor Party only being able to survive in office by cobbling together various religious factions in the Knesset. In turn, those groups had obtained further concessions for the strict laws of Orthodoxy. But always they wanted more. Liberal Jews demanded that Joselle must be returned to his family.

Having read the file, Isser Harel told Ben-Gurion he would mobilize Mossad’s resources. He put together a team, forty agents strong, to locate Joselle. Many of them were openly opposed to what they saw as a misuse of their skills.

He silenced their criticism with a short speech:

“Although we will be operating outside our normal type of target, this is still a very important case. It is important because of its social and religious background. It is important because the prestige and authority of our government are at stake. It is important because of the human issues which the case involves.”

In the first weeks of the investigation the team soon discovered how formidable the investigation would be.

A future head of Shin Bet, then a Mossad agent, grew the curly sidelocks of the ultra-Orthodox and tried to penetrate their ranks. He failed. Another Mossad agent was ordered to maintain surveillance on a Jewish school. He was spotted within days. A third agent tried to infiltrate a group of Hasidic mourners traveling to Jerusalem to bury a relative within the walls of the city. He was quickly unmasked when he failed to utter the right prayers.

Those failures only made Harel more determined. He told his team he was certain the child was no longer in Israel but somewhere in Europe or even farther afield. Harel moved his operations headquarters to a Mossad safe house in Paris. From there he sent men into every Orthodox community in Italy, Austria, France, and Britain. When that produced nothing, he sent the agents to South America and the United States.

The investigation continued to be enlivened with bizarre episodes. Ten Mossad agents joined a Saturday-morning service at a synagogue in the London suburb of Hendon. The furious congregation called the police to arrest the “religious impostors” after their false beards came unstuck during scuffles. The agents were quietly released after the Israeli ambassador intervened with the Home Office. A venerated Orthodox rabbi was invited to Paris on the pretext that a member of a wealthy family wished him to officiate at a circumcision. He was met at the airport by two men dressed in the severe black coats and hats of Orthodox Jews. They were Mossad agents. Their report had an element of black comedy.

“He was taken to a Pigalle brothel, having no idea what it was. Two prostitutes who had been paid by us suddenly appeared and were all over the rabbi. We took Polaroid photographs and showed them to him and said we would send them to his congregation unless he revealed where the boy was. The rabbi finally convinced us he had no idea and we destroyed the photographs in front of him.”

Another rabbi, Shai Freyer, surfaced in Isser Harel’s ever-expanding search through the world of Orthodox Jewry. The rabbi was picked up by Mossad agents as he traveled between Paris and Geneva. When they became convinced, after rigorous questioning, that once more this was another dead end, Harel ordered Freyer to be held a prisoner in a Mossad safe house in Switzerland until the search ended. He feared the rabbi would alert the Orthodox community.

Another promising lead appeared. She was Madeleine Frei, the daughter of an aristocratic French family and a heroine of the French Resistance in World War II. Madeleine had saved a large number of Jewish children from deportation to the Nazi death camps. After the war she had converted to Judaism.

Checks revealed she was a regular visitor to Israel, spending her time with members of the Neturei Karta sect, and on several occasions she had met Joselle’s grandfather. Her last visit to Israel had been around the time of the boy’s abduction. Madeleine had not returned to Israel since then.

In August 1962, Mossad agents tracked her to the outskirts of Paris. When they introduced themselves, she physically attacked them. One of the agents summoned Isser Harel.

He explained to Madeleine “the great wrong” done to Joselle’s parents. They had the moral right to bring up their son as they wished. No parents should be denied that right. Madeleine still insisted she knew nothing about Joselle. Harel saw his own men believed her.

He asked for Madeleine’s passport. Beneath her photograph was one of her daughter. He asked an agent to bring him a photograph of Joselle. The facial structures of the children in both photographs were almost identical. Harel called Tel Aviv. Within a couple of hours:

“I had everything I needed to know, from details of her love life during her student days to her decision to join the Orthodox movement after renouncing her Catholic faith. I went back to Madeleine and told her, as if I knew everything, that she had dyed Joselle’s hair to disguise him and smuggled the boy out of Israel. She flatly denied it. I said she must understand that the future of the country she loved was in grave danger, that in the streets of Jerusalem people she loved were throwing stones at each other. Still she refused to admit anything. I said the boy had a mother who loved him as much as she loved all those children she had helped in World War Two.”

The reminder worked. Suddenly Madeleine began to explain how she had traveled by sea to Haifa, a tourist come to see Israel. On the boat she made friends with a family of new immigrants who had a child about the age of Joselle. She had led the little girl down the gangplank at Haifa, and the immigration officer had taken the child as Madeleine’s own. He made a note of this in his records. A week later, under the very noses of Israeli police, she had boarded a flight to Zurich with her “daughter.” Madeleine had even persuaded Joselle to dress in girl’s clothing and have his hair dyed.

For a while Joselle had lived in an Orthodox school in Switzerland where Rabbi Shai Freyer was a teacher. Following his detention, Madeleine flew with Joselle to New York, placing him with a family who were members of the Neturei Karta sect. Harel only had one more question for her: “Will you give me the name and address of the family?”

For a long moment there was silence before Madeleine calmly said: “He is living at 126 Penn Street, Brooklyn, New York. He is known as Yankale Gertner.”

For the first time since their encounter, Harel smiled. “Thank you, Madeleine. I would like to congratulate you by offering you a job with Mossad. Your kind of talent could serve Israel well.”

Madeleine refused.

Mossad agents flew to New York. Waiting for them was a team of FBI agents, authorized to cooperate by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He had received a personal request from Ben-Gurion to do so. The agents traveled to the apartment house at 126 Penn Street. Mrs. Gertner opened the door. The agents rushed past her. Inside, her husband was praying. Beside him was a pale-faced boy with a yarmulke on his head and dark side-curls framing his face.

“Hello Joselle. We have come to take you home,” one of the Mossad men said gently.

Eight months had passed since Mossad had begun its search. Close to a million U.S. dollars had been spent on the operation.

The safe return of Joselle did nothing to bridge the religious divide within the country. Successive governments would continue to totter and fall at the whim of small ultra-Orthodox groups elected to the Knesset.

Successful though he had been in finding the boy, Isser Harel returned to Israel to face a powerful new critic, General Meir Amit, the newly appointed chief of Aman, military intelligence. Just as Harel had connived against his predecessor, he now found himself on the receiving end of Amit’s barbed criticisms over the operation to rescue Joselle.

Amit, a formidable field commander, had become close to Ben-Gurion in the ever-shifting political sands of Israel. He told the prime minister that Harel had “wasted resources,” that the whole rescue operation had been the sign of an intelligence chief who had been too long in the job. Forgetting that he had ordered Harel to mount the operation, Ben-Gurion agreed. On March 25, 1963, bruised by many weeks of intensive sniping, Isser Harel, at the age of fifty, resigned. Grown men were close to tears as he shook their hands and walked out of Mossad headquarters. Everyone knew it was the end of an era.

Hours later a tall, spare man with the hawkish good looks of the actor he could once have been strode briskly through its doors: Meir Amit had taken over. No one needed to be told that radical changes were about to happen.

Fifteen minutes after settling himself behind his desk, Mossad’s new chief summoned his department heads. They stood in a group before him while he silently eyeballed them. Then, in the brisk voice that had launched countless battleground attacks, he spoke.

There would be no more operations to recover lost children. No undue political interference. He would protect each one of them from external criticism, but nothing could save their jobs if they failed him. He would fight for more money from the defense budget for the latest equipment and backup resources. But that was not a signal to forget the one asset he placed above all others: humint, the art of human intelligence gathering. He wanted that to be Mossad’s greatest skill.

His staff found they were working for a man who saw their work as beyond day-to-day operations, but bearing results in years to come. The acquisition of military technology fell into that category.

Shortly after Meir Amit took command, a man who gave his name as “Salman” had walked into the Israeli embassy in Paris with an astounding proposition. For one million U.S. dollars in cash he could guarantee to provide what was then the world’s most secret combat aircraft, the Russian MiG-21. Salman had concluded his astounding offer to an Israeli diplomat with a bizarre request. “Send someone to Baghdad, call this number, and ask for Joseph. And have our million dollars ready.”

The diplomat sent his report to the resident katsa in the embassy. He had been one of those who had survived the purging that followed Meir Amit’s appointment. The katsa sent the report to Tel Aviv, together with the phone number Salman had provided.

For days Meir Amit weighed and considered. Salman could be a confidence trickster or a fantasist, or even part of an Iraqi plot to try to entrap a Mossad agent. There was a very real risk that other katsas working under deep cover in Iraq would be compromised. But the prospect of getting hold of a MiG-21 was irresistible.

Its fuel capacity, altitude, speed, armaments, and turnaround servicing time had made it the Arab world’s premier frontline fighter aircraft. Israel’s air force chiefs would cheerfully have given many millions of dollars for just a glimpse of the MiG’s blueprint, let alone for the actual plane. Meir Amit “went to bed thinking of it. I woke up thinking of it. I thought of it in the shower, over dinner. I thought about it every spare moment I had. Keeping up with an enemy’s advanced weapons system is a priority with any intelligence service. Actually getting your hands on it almost never happens.”

The first step was to send an agent to Baghdad. Meir Amit created an alias for him, as English as the name in his passport, George Bacon: “No one would think a Jew would have a name like that.” Bacon would travel to Baghdad as the sales manager of a London-based company selling hospital X-ray equipment.

He arrived in Baghdad on an Iraqi Airways flight with several sample boxes of equipment and demonstrated how well he had absorbed his brief by selling several items to hospitals. At the beginning of his second week, Bacon made the call to the number Salman had provided. Bacon’s reports to Mossad contained vivid descriptions.

“I used a pay phone in the hotel lobby. The risk the phone was tapped was smaller than making the call from my room. The number was answered at once. A voice asked in Farsi who was speaking. I replied in English, apologizing I must have the wrong number. The voice then asked, also in English, who was speaking. I said I was a friend of Joseph’s. Was there someone there by that name? I was told to wait. I thought maybe they were tracing the call, that this was a trap after all. Then a very cultured voice was on the line saying he was Joseph and that he was glad I had called. He then asked if I knew Paris. I thought: Contact!”

Bacon found himself agreeing to a meeting in a Baghdad coffeehouse the following noon. At the appointed hour, a man smilingly introduced himself as Joseph. His face was deeply etched, his hair white. The agent’s later report once more captured the surreal atmosphere of the moment:

“Joseph said how very pleased he was to see me, as if I was some long-awaited relative. He then started to talk about the weather and how the quality of service had dropped in cafés like this one. I thought, here I am in the middle of a hostile country whose security service would surely kill me if they had the chance, listening to an old man’s ramblings. I decided whoever he was, whatever his connection was with Salman in Paris, Joseph was certainly not an Iraqi counterintelligence officer. That calmed me. I told him my friends were very interested in the merchandise his friend had mentioned. He replied, ‘Salman is my nephew who lives in Paris. He is a waiter at a café. All the good waiters have left here.’ Joseph then leaned across the table and said, ‘You have come about the MiG? I can arrange it for you. But it will cost one million dollars.’ Just like that.”

Bacon sensed that perhaps, after all, Joseph was more than he appeared. There was a quiet certainty about him. But as he began to question him, the old man shook his head. “Not here. People could be listening.”

They arranged to meet again the following day on a park bench along the Euphrates River, which flowed through the city. That night Bacon slept very little wondering if, after all, he was being slowly hooked, if not by Iraqi intelligence, then by some very clever con men who were using Joseph as a front.

The next day’s meeting revealed a little more of Joseph’s background and motives.

He came from a poor Iraqi Jewish family. As a boy he had been employed as a servant by a rich Marionite Christian family in Baghdad. Then, after thirty years of loyal service, he had been abruptly dismissed, wrongly accused of stealing food. He found himself, on his fiftieth birthday, cast out into the streets. Too old to find other work, he existed on a modest pension. He had also decided to seek out his Jewish roots. He discussed his quest with his widowed sister, Manu, whose son, Munir, was a pilot in the Iraqi air force. Manu admitted she too had a strong desire to go to Israel. But how could they possibly do that? Even to mention the idea was to risk imprisonment in Iraq. To leave anyone behind would guarantee the authorities would punish them severely, perhaps even kill them. And where would the money come from? She had sighed and said it was all an impossible dream.

But in Joseph’s mind the idea took hold. Over dinner Munir had often told how his commander boasted that Israel would pay a fortune for one of the MiGs he flew, “perhaps even a million U.S. dollars, Uncle Joseph.”

The sum had focused Joseph. He could bribe officials, organize an escape route. With that money he could somehow move the entire family out of Iraq. The more he thought about it, the more feasible it became. Munir loved his mother; he would do anything for her — even stealing his plane for a million dollars. And there would be no need for Joseph to have to organize the family’s escape. He would let the Israelis do that. Everyone knew they were clever at such things. That was why he had sent Salman to the embassy.

“And now you are here, my friend!” Joseph beamed at Bacon.

“What about Munir? Does he know any of this?”

“Oh, yes. He has agreed to steal the MiG. But he wants half the money down now, then the balance delivered just before he does so.”

Bacon was astounded. Everything he had heard sounded both genuine and feasible. But first he had to report to Meir Amit.

In Tel Aviv, the Mossad chief listened for an entire afternoon while Bacon reported every detail.

“Where does Joseph want to be paid?” Meir Amit finally asked.

“Into a Swiss bank. Joseph has a cousin who needs urgent medical treatment not available in Baghdad. The Iraqi authorities will give him permission to go to Switzerland. When he arrives, he expects to have the money already deposited by us.”

“A resourceful man, your Joseph,” Meir Amit commented wryly. “Once the money is in that account, we’ll never get it back.”

He put one more question to Bacon. “Why do you trust Joseph?”

Bacon replied. “I trust him because it is the only choice.”

Meir Amit authorized half a million U.S. dollars should be deposited in the main branch of Credit Suisse in Geneva. He was gambling more than money. He knew he could not survive if Joseph turned out to be the brilliant fraud some Mossad officers still believed he was.

The time had come to brief Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and his chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin. Both men green-lighted the operation. Meir Amit had not told them he had taken one more step — withdrawing the entire Mossad network from Iraq.

“If the mission failed, I didn’t want anyone’s head on the block except my own. I set up five teams. The first team was the communications link between Baghdad and me. They would break radio silence only if there was a crisis. Otherwise I didn’t want to hear from them. The second team was to be in Baghdad without anyone knowing. Not Bacon, not the first team, no one. They were there to get Bacon out of the country if there was trouble, and Joseph, too, if possible. The third team was to keep an eye on the family. The fourth team was to liaise with the Kurds who would help in the last stages of getting the family out. Israel was supplying them with arms. The fifth team was to liaise with Washington and Turkey. For the MiG to be flown out of Iraq, it would have to fly over Turkish air space to reach us. Washington, who had bases in northern Turkey, would have to persuade the Turks to cooperate by saying the MiG was going to end up in the United States. I now knew that the Iraqis feared the possibility of a pilot defecting to the West, so they kept fuel tanks only half-full. That was something we could do nothing about.”

There were still other problems. Joseph had decided that not only his immediate family but distant cousins should have the opportunity of escaping from the harsh Iraqi regime. In all he wanted forty-three persons to be airlifted to safety.

Meir Amit agreed — only to face a new worry. From Baghdad, Bacon sent a coded message that Munir was having second thoughts. The Mossad chief “sensed what was happening. Munir was first and foremost an Iraqi. Iraq had been good to him. Betraying his country to Israel did not sit well. We were the enemy. All his life he had been taught that. I decided the only way was to convince him the MiG would go straight to America. So I flew to Washington and saw Richard Helms, then DCI [director of the Central Intelligence Agency]. He listened and said no problem. He was always very good like that. He arranged for the U.S. military attaché in Baghdad to meet Munir. The attaché confirmed the plane would be handed over to the United States. He gave Munir a lot of talk about helping America catch up with the Russians. Munir bought it and agreed to go ahead.”

The operation now took on a pace of its own. Joseph’s relative received his Iraqi exit permit and flew to Geneva. From there he sent a postcard: “The hospital facilities are excellent. I am assured of a total recovery.” The message was the signal that the second five hundred thousand dollars had been deposited.

Reassured, Joseph told Bacon the family were ready. On the night before Munir would make his flight, Joseph led them in a convoy of vehicles north, to the cool of the mountains. Iraqi checkpoints did not trouble them; residents moved every summer away from the stifling heat of Baghdad. In the foothills Kurds waited with the Israeli liaison team. They led the family deep into the mountains, where Turkish air force helicopters were waiting. Flying below radar, they crossed back into Turkey.

An Israeli agent made a call to Munir telling him his sister had safely delivered a baby girl. Another coded signal had been safely transmitted.

Next morning, August 15, 1966, at sunup, Munir took off for a practice mission. Clear of the airfield he kicked in the MiG’s afterburners and was over the border with Turkey before other Iraqi pilots could be instructed to shoot him down. Escorted by U.S. Air Force Phantoms, Munir landed at a Turkish air base, refueled, and took off again. Through his headphones he heard the message, in plain talk this time. “All your family are safe and on the way to join you.”

An hour later the MiG touched down at a military air base in northern Israel.

Mossad had become a serious player on the world stage. Within the Israeli intelligence community the way matters were conducted in the future would be known as “BA”—before Amit — or “AM”—after Meir.