Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 4 THE SPY IN THE IRON MASK

Wealthy residents in the exclusive suburb of Afeka in the north of Tel Aviv were used to seeing Rafael “Rafi” Eitan, a squat, barrel-chested elderly man, myopic and almost totally deaf in his right ear since fighting in Israel’s War of Independence, return home with pieces of discarded lavatory piping, used bicycle chains, and other assorted metal junk. Wearing a pair of chain-store trousers and shirt, his face covered with a welder’s guard, he fashioned the scrap into surreal sculptures with an acetylene torch.

Some neighbors wondered if it was a means of momentary escape from what he had done. They knew he had killed for his country, not in open battle, but in secret encounters that were part of the ceaseless undercover war Israel waged against the state’s enemies. No neighbor knew exactly how many Rafi Eitan had killed, sometimes with his stubby, powerful hands. All he had told them was: “Whenever I killed I needed to see their eyes, the white of their eyes. Then I was very calm, very focused, thinking only of what I had to do. Then I did it. That was it.” Accompanying the words was an endearing smile some strong men use when seeking the approval of the weak.

Rafi Eitan had for almost a quarter of a century been Mossad’s hands-on deputy director of operations. Not for him a life behind a desk reading reports and sending others to do his bidding. At every opportunity he had gone into the field, traveling the world, jaw thrust forward, driven by a philosophy that he had reduced to one pithy sentence: “If you are not part of the answer, then you are part of the problem.”

There had been no one like him for cold-blooded ruthlessness, cunning, an ability to improvise at ferocious speed, an inborn skill at outwitting even the best-laid plan and tirelessly tracking down a quarry. All those qualities had come together in the one operation that had given him lasting fame — the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who epitomized the full horror of Hitler’s Final Solution.

To his neighbors on Shay Street, Rafi Eitan was a revered figure, the man who had avenged their dead relatives, the onetime guerrilla who had been given the opportunity to remind the world that no living Nazi was safe. They never tired of being invited into his house and listening again to him describe an operation that is still unrivaled in its daring. Surrounded by expensive objets d’art, Rafi Eitan would fold his muscular arms, tilt his square block of a head to one side, and for a moment remain silent, allowing his listeners to carry themselves back in their mind’s eye to that time when, against all odds, Israel had been born. Then, in a powerful voice, an actor’s voice playing all the parts, missing nothing, he began to tell his trusted friends how he had set about capturing Adolf Eichmann. First he set the scene for one of the most dramatic kidnapping stories of all time.

After World War II, tracking down Nazi war criminals was initially done by Holocaust survivors. They called themselves Nokmin, “Avengers.” They didn’t bother with legal trials. They just executed any Nazis they found. Rafi Eitan did not know of a single case where they killed the wrong person. Officially in Israel there was little interest in pursuing war criminals. It was a matter of priorities. As a nation Israel was clinging on by its fingertips, still surrounded by hostile Arab states. It was one day at a time. The country was almost broke. There was no spare cash for resolving the evil of the past.

In 1957, Mossad received the electrifying news that Eichmann had been seen in Argentina. Rafi Eitan, already a rising star in Mossad as a result of astute forays against the Arabs, was selected to capture Eichmann and bring him to Israel to stand trial.

He was told the outcome would have a number of significant benefits. It would be an act of divine justice for his people. It would remind the world of the death camps and the need to make sure they never happened again. It would place Mossad at the forefront of the global intelligence community. No other service had dared to attempt such an operation. The risks were equally great. He would be working thousands of miles from home, traveling on forged documentation, relying entirely on his own resources and working in a hostile environment. Argentina was a haven for Nazis. The Mossad team could end up in prison there or even be killed.

For two long years, Rafi Eitan patiently waited while the first tentative sighting was confirmed — that the man living in a middle-class suburb of Buenos Aires under the name of Ricardo Klement was Adolf Eichmann.

When the go order finally came, Rafi Eitan became “ice-cold.” He had done all his thinking of what could go wrong. The political, diplomatic, and, for him, the professional repercussions would be enormous. He had also wondered what would happen when, having captured Eichmann, the Argentinian police intervened. “I decided I would strangle Eichmann with my own bare hands. If I was caught, I would argue to the court it had been the biblical eye for an eye.”

El Al, the national airline, had specially purchased from the Mossad slush fund a Britannia aircraft for the long flight to Argentina. Rafi Eitan remarked:

“We just sent someone to England to buy one. He handed over the money and we had our plane. Officially the flight to Argentina was to carry an Israeli delegation to attend Argentina’s one hundred fiftieth independence day celebrations. None of the delegates knew why we were going with them or that we had constructed a cell in the back of the aircraft to hold Eichmann.”

Rafi Eitan and his team arrived in Buenos Aires on May Day 1960. They moved into one of seven safe houses a Mossad advance man had rented. One had been given the Hebrew code name Maoz, or “Stronghold.” The apartment would act as the base for the operation. Another safe house was designated Tira, or “Palace,” and was intended as a holding place for Eichmann after his capture. The other houses were in case Eichmann had to be moved under the pressure of an expected police hunt. A dozen cars had also been leased for the operation.

With everything in place, Rafi Eitan’s manner became settled and determined. Any doubts of failure had lifted; the prospect of action had replaced the tension of waiting. For three days he and the team conducted a discreet surveillance on how Adolf Eichmann, who had once been chauffeured everywhere in a Mercedes limousine, now traveled by bus and alighted on the corner of Garibaldi Street in a suburb on the outskirts of the city, as punctual as he had once been in signing the consignment orders for the death camps.

On the night of May 10, 1960, Rafi Eitan chose for the snatch a driver and two others to subdue Eichmann once he was in the car. One of the men had been trained to overpower a target on the street. Rafi Eitan would sit beside the driver, “ready to help in any way I could.”

The operation was set for the following evening. At 8:00 P.M. on May 11, the team’s car drove into Garibaldi Street.

There was no tension. Everyone was long past that. No one spoke. There was nothing to say. Rafi Eitan looked at his watch: 8:03. They drove up and down the empty street. 8:04. Several buses came and went. At 8:05, another bus came. They saw Eichmann alight. To Rafi Eitan, “he looked a little tired, perhaps how he looked after another day of sending my people to the death camps.

“The street was still empty. Behind me I heard our specialist snatchman open the car door. We drove up just behind Eichmann. He was walking quite quickly, as if he wanted to get home for his dinner. I could hear the specialist breathing steadily, the way he had been taught to do in training. He had got the snatch down to twelve seconds. Out of the door, grab him around the neck, drag him back into the car. Out, grab, back.”

The car came alongside Eichmann. He half turned, gave a puzzled look at the sight of the specialist coming out of the car. Then the man tripped on a loose shoelace, almost stumbling to the ground. For a moment Rafi Eitan was too stunned to move. He had come halfway across the world to catch the man who had been instrumental in sending six million Jews to their deaths and they were just about to lose him because a shoelace had not been properly tied. Eichmann was starting to walk quickly away. Rafi Eitan leaped from the car.

“I grabbed him by the neck with such force I could see his eyes bulge. A little tighter and I would have choked him to death. The specialist was on his feet holding open the door. I tossed Eichmann onto the backseat. The specialist jumped in, sitting half on top of Eichmann. The whole thing didn’t last more than five seconds.”

From the front seat Rafi Eitan could smell Eichmann’s sour breath as he struggled for air. The specialist worked his jaw up and down. Eichmann grew calmer. He even managed to ask what was the meaning of this outrage.

No one spoke to him. In silence they reached their safe house about three miles away. Rafi Eitan motioned Eichmann to strip naked. He then checked his physical measurements against those from an SS file he had obtained. He was not surprised to see that Eichmann had somehow removed his SS tattoo. But his other measurements all matched the file — the size of his head, the distance from elbow to wrist, from knee to ankle. He had Eichmann chained to a bed. For ten hours he was left in complete silence. Rafi Eitan “wanted to encourage a feeling of hopelessness. Just before dawn, Eichmann was at his lowest mental state. I asked him his name. He gave a Spanish one. I said, no, no, no, your German name. He gave his German alias — the one he had used to flee Germany. I said again, no, no, no, your real name, your SS name. He stretched on the bed as if he wanted to stand to attention and said, loud and clear, ‘Adolf Eichmann.’ I didn’t ask him anything else. I had no need to.”

For the next seven days Eichmann and his captors remained closeted in the house. Still no one spoke to Eichmann. He ate, bathed, and went to the lavatory in complete silence. For Rafi Eitan:

“Keeping silent was more than an operational necessity. We did not want to show Eichmann how nervous we all were. That would have given him hope. And hope makes a desperate person dangerous. I needed him to be as helpless as my own people were when he had sent them in trainloads to the death camps.”

The decision on how to move him from the safe house to the El Al plane waiting to fly the delegation home was filled with its own black humor. First Eichmann was dressed in the spare El Al flight suit Rafi Eitan had brought from Israel. Then he was induced to drink a bottle of whiskey, leaving him in a drunken stupor.

Rafi Eitan and his team dressed in their own flight suits and liberally sprinkled themselves with whiskey. Thrusting a flight hat on Eichmann’s head, and squashing him into the backseat of the car, Rafi Eitan drove to the military air base where the Britannia was waiting, engines running.

At the base gate Argentinian soldiers flagged down the car. In the back Eichmann was snoring. Rafi Eitan recalled:

“The car reeked like a distillery. That was the moment we all earned our Mossad Oscars! We played the drunken Jews who couldn’t handle strong Argentinian liquor. The guards were amused and never gave Eichmann a second look.”

At five minutes past midnight on May 21, 1960, the Britannia took off with Adolf Eichmann still snoring in his cell in the back of the plane.

After a lengthy trial, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity. On the day of his execution, May 31, 1962, Rafi Eitan was in the execution chamber at Ramla Prison: “Eichmann looked at me and said, ‘Your time will come to follow me, Jew,’ and I replied, ‘But not today, Adolf, not today.’ Next moment the trap opened. Eichmann gave a little choking sound. There was the smell of his bowel moving, then just the sound of the stretched rope. A very satisfying sound.”

A special oven had been built to cremate the body. Within hours the ashes were scattered out at sea over a wide area. Ben-Gurion had ordered there must be no trace left to encourage sympathizers to turn Eichmann into a Nazi cult figure. Israel wanted him expunged from the face of the earth. Afterward the oven was dismantled and would never be used again. That evening Rafi Eitan stood on the shore and looked out to sea, feeling totally at peace, “knowing I had finished my assignment. That is always a good feeling.”

As Mossad’s deputy operations chief, Rafi Eitan’s rolling gait continued to take him across Europe to find and execute Arab terrorists. To do so he used remote-controlled bombs; Mossad’s handgun of choice, the Beretta; and where silence was essential, his own bare hands to either garrote a victim with steel wire or deliver a lethal rabbit punch. Always he killed without compunction.

When he returned home he stood for hours at his open-air furnace, wreathed in sparks, totally consumed with bending metal to his will. Then he would be off again, on journeys that often required several plane changes before he reached his final destination. For each journey he chose a different nationality and identity, built around the vast number of stolen or perfectly forged passports Mossad had patiently acquired.

In between killing, his other skill was recruiting more sayanim. He had a routine that played upon the Jewish love for their homeland.

“I would tell them that for two thousand years our people dreamed. That for two thousand years we Jews had prayed for deliverance. In song, in prose, in their hearts, we had kept alive the dream — and the dream kept us alive. Now it had happened. Then I add: to make sure it continues we need people like you.”

In cafés along the Paris boulevards, in restaurants on the banks of the Rhine, in Madrid, Brussels, and London’s Golders Green he would repeat the poignant words. More often than not, his vision of what it meant to be a Jew today would gain another sayan. To those who hesitated, he deftly mixed the personal and the political, retelling stories of his time in the Haganah with affectionate stories about Ben-Gurion and other leaders. The last resistance would melt away.

Soon he had over a hundred men and women across Europe to do his bidding: lawyers, dentists, schoolteachers, doctors, tailors, shopkeepers, housewives, secretaries. One group he particularly cherished: German Jews who had returned to the land of their Holocaust; Rafi Eitan called them his “survivor spies.”

Toiling at the coal-face of Mossad operations, Rafi Eitan was careful to distance himself from the politicking that continued to bedevil the Israeli intelligence community. He knew what was going on, of course, the maneuvering by Aman, military intelligence, and Shin Bet to whittle away some of Mossad’s supreme authority. He had heard about the cabals that formed and re-formed, and the “eyes only” reports they sent to the prime minister’s office. But under Meir Amit, Mossad had remained rock steady, brushing aside any attempts to undo its prime position.

Then, one day Meir Amit was no longer in command; his brisk stride down the corridors was gone, along with his piercing gaze and the smile that never seemed to reach his lips. Following his departure, colleagues had urged Rafi Eitan to allow them to lobby for him to become Amit’s replacement, pointing out that he had the qualifications and commanded loyalty and popularity within Mossad. But before Rafi Eitan could decide, the post went to a Labor Party nominee, the colorless and pedantic Zvi Zamir. Rafi Eitan resigned. He had no quarrel with the new Mossad chief; he simply felt that Mossad would no longer be a place where he would feel “comfortable.” Under Meir Amit his brief had been to roam virtually unfettered; he felt that Zamir would do “things only by the book. That was not for me.”

Rafi Eitan set himself up as a private consultant, offering his skills to companies who had to beef up their security or to a wealthy individual who needed to have his staff trained on how to protect him against a terrorist attack. But the work soon paled. After a year Rafi Eitan let it be known he was ready to step back into the fast lane of intelligence work.

When Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister in 1974, he appointed the aggressive, hands-on Yitzhak Hofi to run Mossad and made him answerable to the hawkish Ariel Sharon, who was Rabin’s adviser on security affairs. Sharon promptly made Rafi Eitan his personal assistant. Hofi found himself working closely with a man who shared his own cutthroat attitude toward intelligence operations.

Three years later, in another reshuffle of government, a new prime minister, Menachem Begin, named Rafi Eitan as his personal adviser on terrorism. Eitan’s first act was to organize the assassination of the Palestinian responsible for planning the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of eleven Israeli athletes. Their actual killers were already dead, each one executed by Mossad.

The first to die had been standing in the lobby of his Rome apartment building when he was shot eleven times at close range — a bullet for each murdered athlete. When the next terrorist to die answered a telephone call in his Paris apartment, his head was blown off by a small bomb planted in the receiver and triggered by remote control. Another terrorist was asleep in a hotel room in Nicosia when it was wrecked by a similar bomb. To create panic among the remaining members of the Black September group who had killed the athletes, Mossad Arab sayanim arranged for their obituaries to appear in local Arab newspapers. Their families received flowers and condolence cards shortly before each was killed.

Rafi Eitan set about finding and killing their leader, Ali Hassan Salameh, known throughout the Arab world as the “Red Prince.” Since Munich he had flitted from one Arab capital to another, advising terror groups on strategy. Time and again when Rafi Eitan had been set to strike, the Red Prince had moved on. But finally he had settled among the bomb makers of Beirut. Rafi Eitan knew the city well. Nevertheless, he decided to refresh his memory. Posing as a Greek businessman he traveled there. In the next few days he had discovered Salameh’s precise whereabouts and movements.

Rafi Eitan returned to Tel Aviv and made his plans. Three Mossad agents who could pass for Arabs crossed into Lebanon and entered the city. One rented a car. The second wired a series of bombs into its chassis, roof, and door panels. The third agent parked the car along the route the Red Prince traveled to his office every morning. Using precise timings Rafi Eitan had provided, the car was set to explode as Salameh passed. It did, blowing him to pieces.

Rafi Eitan had shown he was once more a player in the Israeli intelligence community. But Prime Minister Menachem Begin decided that Rafi Eitan was too valuable to risk on further such adventures. He told his adviser that from now on he must remain in the office and keep a low profile. Recently, John le Carré had used Eitan as a model for the central character who tracks down terrorists in his thriller The Little Drummer Girl.

But lending credibility to a novelist’s imagination did little to settle Rafi Eitan’s perpetual restlessness. He wanted to be where the action was, not stuck behind a desk or attending an endless round of planning meetings. He began to badger Prime Minister Begin to give him something else to do.

After some hesitation — for Rafi Eitan was an excellent adviser on counterterrorism — Begin appointed Rafi Eitan to one of the most sensitive posts in the intelligence community, one that would stretch him intellectually and satisfy his craving for a hands-on job. He was made director of the Bureau of Scientific Liaison, known by its Hebrew acronym, LAKAM.

Created in 1960, it had operated as the defense ministry’s spy unit to obtain scientific data “by all means possible.” In principle that had meant stealing or bribing people to provide material. From the beginning LAKAM had been hampered by the hostility of Mossad, who saw the unit as the proverbial “new kid on the block.” Both Isser Harel and Meir Amit had tried to have LAKAM either closed down or absorbed into Mossad. But Shimon Peres, Israel’s deputy defense minister, had stubbornly insisted that the defense ministry needed its own collecting agency. Slowly and laboriously, LAKAM had gone about its business, setting up offices in New York, Washington, Boston, and Los Angeles, all key centers for cutting-edge science. Every week LAKAM staff dutifully shipped boxes of technical journals back to Israel, knowing the FBI was keeping an eye on their activities.

This surveillance increased after 1968, when one of the engineers building the French Mirage IIIC fighter aircraft was discovered to have stolen over two hundred thousand blueprints. He received a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence — having given LAKAM the data to build its own Mirage replicas. Since then LAKAM had enjoyed little other success.

For Rafi Eitan, the memory of the Mirage coup was the deciding factor. What had been achieved before could be achieved again. He would take a now virtually moribund LAKAM and turn it into a force to be reckoned with.

Working out of cramped offices in a Tel Aviv backwater, he told his new staff, awed at now being commanded by such a legendary figure, that what he knew about science he could place in a test tube and still leave plenty of space. But, he added, he was a fast learner.

He immersed himself in the world of science, looking for potential areas to target. He left his home before dawn and often returned close to midnight with bundles of technical papers and read into the small hours; there was little time to relax by sculpting scrap metal. In between the huge amounts of data he absorbed, he reestablished contact with his old service. Mossad now had a new director, Nahum Admoni. Like Rafi Eitan, Admoni had a deep-seated suspicion of U.S. intentions in the Middle East. Outwardly, Washington continued to show an open commitment to Israel, and the CIA had kept open the back-channel contact Isser Harel and Allen Dulles had instigated. But Admoni complained that the information from that source was of little importance.

The Mossad chief was also concerned about reports from Mossad’s own katsas and well-placed sayanim in Washington. They had discovered discreet meetings between high-ranking State Department officials and Arab leaders close to Yasser Arafat who had discussed ways to pressure Israel to be more accommodating over Palestinian demands. Admoni told Rafi Eitan he now felt he could no longer regard the United States as “a foul weather friend.”

This attitude was reinforced in an incident that would shock American belief in its inviolability more than anything since the Vietnam War.

In August 1983, Mossad agents discovered an attack was being planned against the U.S. forces in Beirut, there as UN peacekeepers. The agents had identified a Mercedes truck that would contain half a ton of explosive. Under back-channel arrangements, Mossad should have passed on the information to the CIA. But at a meeting at Mossad headquarters overlooking King Saul Boulevard, staff were informed they were to “make sure our people watch the truck. As far as the Yanks go, we are not here to protect them. They can do their own watching. We start doing too much for the Yanks and we’ll be shitting on our own doorstep.”

On October 23, 1983, monitored closely by Mossad agents, the truck was driven at full speed into the headquarters of the U.S. Eighth Marine Battalion situated near Beirut Airport. Two hundred forty-one marines died.

The reaction in the upper echelons of Mossad, according to a former officer, Victor Ostrovsky, was, “They wanted to stick their nose into this Lebanon thing, let them pay the price.”

That attitude had further encouraged Rafi Eitan to think seriously about targeting the United States. Its scientific community was the most advanced in the world, its military technology without equal. For LAKAM to get its hands on even some of that data would be a tremendous coup. The first hurdle to overcome would be the hardest: finding an informer sufficiently well placed to provide the material.

Using the list of U.S. sayanim he had helped compile during his time with Mossad, he put out the word that he was interested in hearing of anyone in the United States who had a scientific background and was known to be pro-Israeli. For months it produced nothing.

Then, in April 1984, Aviem Sella, a colonel in the Israeli air force who was on a sabbatical to study computer science at New York University, went to a party given by a wealthy Jewish gynecologist on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Sella was a minor celebrity among the city’s Jewish community as the pilot who had led an air attack three years before that had destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor.

At the party was a diffident young man with a shy smile who seemed ill at ease among the small set of doctors, lawyers, and bankers. He told Sella his name was Jonathan Pollard and that the only reason he had come was to meet him. Embarrassed by such obvious adulation, Sella made polite small talk and was about to move on when Pollard revealed he was not only a committed Zionist, but worked for U.S. naval intelligence. In no time the astute Sella had learned that Pollard was stationed at the Anti-Terrorist Alert Center in one of the navy’s most secret establishments at Suitland, Maryland. Pollard’s duties included monitoring all classified material on global terrorist activities. So important was the work that he had the highest possible U.S. intelligence community security clearance.

Sella could not believe what he was hearing, especially when Pollard began to give specific details about incidents where the U.S. intelligence community was not cooperating with its Israeli counterpart. Sella began to wonder if Pollard was part of a sting operation by the FBI to try to recruit an Israeli.

Yet there was something about the intense Pollard that rang true. That night Sella called Tel Aviv and spoke to his air force intelligence commander. The officer switched the call to the Israeli air force chief of staff. Sella was ordered to develop his contact with Pollard.

They began to meet: at the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza; in a coffee shop on Forty-eighth Street; in Central Park. Each time Pollard handed over secret documents to confirm the truth of what he said. Sella couriered the material to Tel Aviv, enjoying the frisson of being caught up in an important intelligence operation. He was therefore understandably stunned to be told that Mossad knew all about Pollard, who had actually offered to spy for them two years previously and had been rejected as “unstable.” A Mossad katsa in New York had also described Pollard as “lonely … with an unrealistic view about Israel.”

Unwilling to relinquish his role in an operation certainly more exciting than sitting before a classroom computer keyboard, Sella looked around for a way to keep matters alive. During his time in New York he had come to know the science attaché at the Israeli consulate in the city. His name was Yosef Yagur. He was Rafi Eitan’s head of all LAKAM operations in the United States.

Sella invited Yagur to dinner with Pollard. Over the meal Pollard repeated that Israel was being denied information to defend itself against Arab terrorists because the United States did not wish to upset its relations with Arab oil producers.

That night, using a secure consulate phone, Yagur telephoned Rafi Eitan. It was in the early hours in Tel Aviv but Eitan was still at work in his study. It was almost dawn when he put down the phone. He was exultant: he had his informer.

For the next three months Yagur and Sella assiduously cultivated Pollard and his future wife, Anne Henderson. They took them to expensive restaurants, Broadway shows, first-night films. Pollard continued to hand over important documentation. Rafi Eitan could only marvel at how good the material was. He decided it was time to meet the source.

In November 1984, Sella and Yagur invited Pollard and Henderson to accompany them on an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris. Yagur told Pollard the vacation was “a small reward for all you are doing for Israel.” They all flew first-class and were met by a chauffeured car and driven to the Bristol Hotel. Waiting for them was Rafi Eitan.

By the end of the night Rafi Eitan had finalized all the practical arrangements for Pollard to continue his treachery. No longer would matters continue in their free-and-easy way. Sella would fade from the picture, his role over. Yagur would become Pollard’s official handler. A proper delivery system was worked out for documents to be handed over. Pollard would deliver them to the apartment of Irit Erb, a mousyhaired secretary at the Washington embassy. A high-speed Xerox had been installed in her kitchen to copy the material. Pollard’s visits would be spaced between those to a number of designated car washes. While Pollard’s car was being cleaned, he would hand over documents to Yagur, whose own car would be undergoing a similar process. Concealed beneath the dash was a battery-operated copier. Both Erb’s apartment and the car-wash facilities were close to Washington’s National Airport, making it easier for Yagur to fly back and forth to New York. From the consulate he transmitted the material by secure fax to Tel Aviv.

Rafi Eitan returned to Tel Aviv to await results. They exceeded his wildest expectations: details of Russian arms deliveries to Syria and other Arab states, including the precise location of SS-21 and SA-5 missiles; maps and satellite photographs of Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian arsenals, including chemical and biological manufacturing plants.

Rafi Eitan quickly obtained a clear picture of U.S. intelligence-gathering methods, not only in the Middle East, but in South Africa. Pollard had provided reports from CIA operatives which provided a blueprint for the entire U.S. intelligence network within the country. One document contained a detailed account of how South Africa had managed to detonate a nuclear device on September 14, 1979, in the southern end of the Indian Ocean. The Pretoria government had steadfastly denied it had become a nuclear power. Rafi Eitan arranged for Mossad to pass over copies of all material relating to South Africa to Pretoria, virtually destroying the CIA network. Twelve operatives were forced to hurriedly leave the country.

During the next eleven months, Jonathan Pollard continued to asset-strip U.S. intelligence. Over one thousand highly classified documents, 360 cubic feet of paper, were transmitted to Israel. There Rafi Eitan devoured them before passing over the material to Mossad. The data enabled Nahum Admoni to brief Shimon Peres’s coalition government on how to respond to Washington’s Middle East policies in a manner previously impossible. One note taker at the Sunday cabinet meetings in Jerusalem claimed that “listening to Admoni was the next best thing to sitting in the Oval Office. We not only knew what was the very latest thinking in Washington on all matters of concern to us, but we had sufficient time to respond before making a decision.”

Pollard had become a crucial factor in the mysteries of Israeli policymaking and the intricacies of choosing options. Rafi Eitan authorized an Israeli passport for Pollard in the name of Danny Cohen, as well as a generous monthly stipend. In return he asked Pollard to provide details about the electronic eavesdropping activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Israel and the bugging methods used against the Israeli embassy in Washington and its other diplomatic stations within the United States.

Before Pollard could supply the information he was arrested, on November 21, 1985, outside the Israeli embassy in Washington. Hours later Yagur, Sella, and the embassy secretary in Washington had all caught an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv before the FBI could stop them. In Israel they disappeared into the protective arms of a grateful intelligence community. Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment and his wife to five years.

In 1999, Pollard could draw comfort from the tireless way powerful Jewish groups lobbied for his release. The Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations, a consortium of over fifty groups, had launched a sustained campaign to have him set free on the grounds that he had not committed high treason against the United States “because Israel was then and remains today a close ally.” Equally influential Jewish religious groups such as the Reform Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the Orthodox Union, lent support. The Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who had been Pollard’s attorney, said there was nothing to show the spy had actually compromised “the nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities or betrayed worldwide intelligence data.”

Alarmed at what they realized was a skilled public relations campaign orchestrated from Israel, the U.S. intelligence community took an unusual step. They moved out of the shadows into the public domain, setting out the facts of Pollard’s treachery. It was both a bold and dangerous decision. It would not only cast a light on sensitive material but also mobilize the evermore powerful Jewish lobby to attack them. They had seen what it had done to others in the frenetic atmosphere of Washington. A reputation could be discreetly tarnished over a late drink at an embassy between acts at the Kennedy Center or over a quiet Georgetown dinner.

Those intelligence men feared that Clinton—“in one of his quixotic moments,” a senior CIA officer told me — would free Pollard before he left office if that would ensure Israel entered into a peace settlement and give Clinton a last foreign policy success. The CIA’s director at the time of writing, George Tenet, had warned the president “that Pollard’s release will demoralize the intelligence community,” Clinton was reported to have merely said: “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

In Tel Aviv, Rafi Eitan has closely followed every move, telling friends that “should the day come when Jonathan makes it to Israel, I’d be happy to have a cup of coffee with him.”

Meantime Eitan continued to rejoice at the success of another operation he had also mounted against the United States. It led to Israel’s becoming the first nuclear power in the Middle East.