Jews were becoming very aware of their being unwelcome in Palestine, as tensions escalated further between them and Arabs. The Haganah, a Jewish militia, had been formed in order to defend the Jews, who now could not depend on the British for protection. The Yishuv leaders did not trust the British anymore, and so had spies bring them back from them and the Arabs. They gradually gathered more important pieces of information each time. By the early 1930’s all enemy activity was known to the Jews in Palestine.
In 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power came the exodus of thousands of Jews looking to leave Europe and come to the Holy Land. By 1936 the Jewish people formed one third of the population in Palestine. As a result, erratic clashes between Jews and Arabs spread all over the region. As more and more Zionists desired to go to their home, Eretz Israel, the Haganah grew bigger and now became a force to be reckoned with. By 1942, the focus was brought away from Palestine and its various confrontations among Arabs and Jews, with WWII fully underway. It was during WWII that many of the Jews who would later form the first Israeli Secret Service learned the basics of intelligence, and even created techniques that were greater in many ways than any method possessed by the great powers (31).
But with the uneasy news of the death camps and the raging Holocaust claiming millions of victims in Europe came a stronger desire from the Yishuv to help all Jews wishing to move to Palestine. The plight for survival made even the most non-Zionist Jews see the necessity for a self-governing state. Fearing that more altercations with Arabs would follow their arrival, the British candidly refused to let any refugees into Palestine, and so gave the Jews another opponent to deal with. The Haganah were quick to respond to this by creating a counterintelligence unit called Rigul Hegdi. Their mission was to expose Jews collaborating with the British, and they were sharp in finding these “dissenters” as they were in their judgement of them. Most people who consorted with the British were taken into the desert and shot in the head, a style of execution later used almost traditionally by the Mossad (Gideon’s Spies, 23). By 1945, with the end of the World War in sight, David Ben-Gurion, then an officer in the Haganah, had predicted that the war they were fighting as a war for their independence. The Bricha, the Hebrew name given to the operation to bring all the holocaust survivors into Palestine, was another step in the Jewish people’s struggle for a state, and brought the Jews closer to their goal. In 1946, Ben-Gurion gave the order to wage an intense guerrilla war against the British and the Arabs, it was clear that for the Jews to gain their sovereignty, they had to expel the British from Palestine. For the Haganah, intelligence was vital to their operations, as they fought a war on both fronts. They would misinform both the British and the Arabs on the size of their forces, confusing them into chasing a ghostly enemy. By May 1948, the British forces left Palestine, their morale broken and weary, the United Nations from then on took the situation into account, and accepted the birth of the State of Israel soon after; the Zionist Jews finally established their autonomous state in the Holy Land. Ben-Gurion and his commanders knew that they should continue to depend on advanced intelligence so as to prevent the Arabs from oppressing Eretz Israel at its birth. Jewish spies were placed in Cairo and Amman, monitoring the Arab forces’ every move. The Israelis attained impressive military victories in the War of Independence through their expertise in gaining information from their enemies’ armies. David Ben-Gurion became Israel’s first prime minister, and immediately organized five intelligence services to function internally and overseas. France and Britain’s security services both agreed to work with the Israelis in setting up their overseas service, and the Office of Strategic Services in the US offered its proficiency to help aid its completion. However, Ben-Gurion’s vision of a totally integrated and unified intelligence organization was destroyed in the rubble of a state fighting to gain its own consistent identity. Ministers and officials all wanted more power and positions, causing quarrels at every stage of discussion. Both the foreign ministry and the defence ministry stated the right to run the overseas operations. In the meantime Arab armies from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon were attacking Israel from all sides. Israel saw its resistance to its assailants as the fight of David versus Goliath, and Ben-Gurion was their messiah. The enemy grew more ruthless, and was even quicker in striking the Israelis than before. For four years the arguing never ceased among officials and ministers, all of them fought to ascertain the dominance of their preferred service over the others. Ben-Gurion listened to every proposal from the ambassador to France’s proposal that intelligence should be operated the way the French Resistance had operated in WWII to the minister in Bucharest’s proposal that it should be run the way the KGB ran their operations. Many sides wanted intelligence to concentrate on military strength and many argued that it should focus on the collection of political and economic information as Ben-Gurion waited patiently and listened. On March 2, 1951, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion sent for the directors of the five intelligence agencies, and told them that he would put all of Israel’s intelligence assembly operations into one new agency called Ha Mossad Le Teum, “The Institute for Coordination” (27). Mossad’s role was to preserve and protect Eretz Israel, and its interests overseas through its prowess in organized intelligence. It was a major weapon in defending the modern Zionist dream, which was concerned with the support and development of the state of Israel. The Mossad recruitment site I recently visited contains a quote from Ben-Gurion saying “For our State, which since its creation does not cease being besieged by its enemy, the information constitutes the first line of defence [... ] we must learn how to analyze what occurs around us”. Israel’s David now had its solution to the world’s Goliath. With an initial budget of twenty thousand pounds to spend on “special missions”, Mossad was to operate under the jurisdiction of the foreign ministry “for all administrative and political issues”. Shin Beth, the internal security agency, Aman the military intelligence agency, air force intelligence and naval intelligence all had senior officers as representatives on Mossad’s staff. Their roles were to inform Mossad of all specific requirements of their clientele. Ben Gurion would be the only man to oversee the function of this new service saying it would work under him and will report to him constantly. Isser Harrel would be the next man to take charge of the Mossad in January of 1952, right after the resignation of Reuven Shiloah following his failure in seeing that one of his agents was a double agent working for the Egyptian Secret Service (Gideon’s Spies 28). Isser Harel wanted to make the Mossad the best at what it did, and he stood at the helm of this agency for eleven years, a feat equalled by no other director after him. Harel’s physical appearance left much to be desired on a first impression, as Gordon Thomas put it so adequately, “He was barely four feet eight inches tall, with jug ears, and he spoke Hebrew with a heavy central European accent”. He made sure the Mossad would run smoothly and properly. As maintained by the Mossad French recruitment site, eight divisions were to comprise the Mossad: the information division, the division of international relations, the division of special operations (Metsada), the psychological warfare division (Loh'ama Psichologit), and the division of research.
Along the way, Mossad had various agreements with the CIA, their American allies’ intelligence organization, sometimes doing joint missions with them. But if they ever did such a partnership, it was only because the CIA’s contribution was vital to the success of any mission, for Mossad did not care for its allies; its only goal was to ensure its country’s welfare. In August 1983, during the war in Beirut, Mossad operatives learnt that an attack was being planned against the US forces, who were there as peacekeepers, stationed in the city. Mossad agents identified a Mercedes truck full of explosives. Mossad should have informed the CIA, according to agreements they had with them. However Mossad never intended on telling their allies of anything, and their orders from senior staff were to watch the truck, but as far as the “yanks” go, they are not there to protect them, and that they can do their own watching. One senior staff member was quoted as saying “we start doing too much for the Yanks and we’ll be shitting on our own doorstep”. The attack happened on October 23, 1983, the truck was brought right through the headquarters of the US Eightth Marine Battalion near Beirut airport, bringing two hundred forty-one marines to their deaths. “They wanted to stick their nose into this Lebanon thing, let them pay the price” was a later reaction from a Mossad senior staff member (By Way of Deception, 321). Mossad’s efficiency as a covert intelligence agency was absolute, with a near hundred percent success rate in carrying out its missions. It played a big hand in the Israeli army’s victories during the Six-Day War in June of 1967. When asked about Mossad’s role in the Six-Day war, Moshe Dayan, then a general in the Israeli army, said “All I can say is [at the end of the Six-Day War] that the role of intelligence had been as important as that of the Air Force or the armoured corps.” (The Israeli Secret Service, 167).
If you were to compare the CIA or the KGB to the Mossad, you’d say that it’s tiny. The CIA’s headquarters about 25,000 employees, while the KGB had around 250,000 worldwide. The almost minute Mossad had 1,200 employees, including the janitors and secretaries. It had 30 to 35 Katsas, or field agents. The essential reason it had so few people working for them is because they had a technique of tapping into unusual resources that no other Intelligence agency possessed: volunteer Jewish helpers, or Sayanim. The loyal worldwide Jewish community would always offer its services to the protectors of Israel, no questions asked, no answers needed. (By Way of Deception, xi)
And so, Victor Ostrovsky, as a former officer of the Mossad, was led to believe time and time again, that they were the David in the unending struggle against the ever-growing Goliath. Mossad sees itself as the protector of the Zionist dream (vii), and Israel shall stay their Holy Land until the return of the messiah.
