Rise and kill first
THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY guards its secrets jealously. Its near-total opacity is protected by a complex array of laws and protocols, strict military censorship, and the intimidation, interrogation, and prosecution of journalists and their sources, as well as a natural solidarity and loyalty among the espionage agencies’ personnel.
All glimpses behind the scenes have, to this day, been partial at best.
How then, it might reasonably be asked, to write a book about one of the most secretive organizations on earth?
Efforts to persuade the Israeli defense establishment to cooperate with the research for this project went nowhere. Requests to the intelligence community that it comply with the law by transferring its historical documents to the State Archive and allowing publication of materials fifty years old or more were met with stony silence. A petition to the Supreme Court for an order forcing compliance with the law was dragged out over years, with the complicity of the court, and ended with nothing but an amendment to the law itself: The secrecy provisions were extended from fifty to seventy years, longer than the history of the state.
The defense establishment did not merely sit with folded arms. As early as 2010, before the contract for this book was even signed, a special meeting was held in the Mossad’s operations division, Caesarea, to discuss ways of disrupting my research. Letters were written to all former Mossad employees warning them against giving interviews, and individual conversations were held with certain ex-staffers who were considered the most problematic. Later in 2011, the chief of the General Staff of the IDF, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, asked the Shin Bet to take aggressive steps against the author, claiming that I had perpetrated “aggravated espionage” by having in my possession classified secrets and “using classified material in order to disparage me [Ashkenazi] personally.” Since then, several actions have been taken by various bodies to stop publication of the book, or at least large parts of it.
The military censor requires the Israeli media to add the words “according to foreign publications” whenever it mentions secret actions attributed to Israeli intelligence, primarily targeted assassinations. This is to make it clear that the existence of the publication does not constitute official acknowledgment of Israel’s responsibility. In this sense, then, this book must be taken as a “foreign publication” whose contents do not have any official Israeli confirmation.
