Spies Against Armageddon (9 page)

Angleton was even able to counter or distort information from other sources that was liable to harm Israel. When the U.S. military attaché in Tel Aviv sent a report in October 1956 that Israel was planning to attack Egypt, Angleton told his boss that the information was not accurate. Intentionally or not, Israel’s great friend in Washington helped to maintain the smoke screen that cloaked the preparations for the Suez invasion.

Cooperation between the CIA and Shin Bet extended from the Eastern bloc to the Western Hemisphere. Nir Baruch, a Bulgarian-born Israeli operative, played his part. First, he joined the Jewish immigration agency Nativ and served as its emissary, under diplomatic cover, in Sofia, Bulgaria. Later, he would join Shin Bet, and in 1961 he was assigned—again, listed as a diplomat—to the Israeli embassy in Havana, Cuba, as deputy chief of mission.

“Manor told me that my main task would be to collect information which would be conveyed to the CIA,” he recalled half a century later. “You could say I was an authorized Israeli spy for the CIA.” Baruch revealed that he had done the same thing in Bulgaria earlier, photographing military bases; he knew that Manor was giving the photos to the United States.

Baruch arrived in Havana two weeks before the ill-fated, CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion aimed at toppling Fidel Castro, “so I didn’t have enough proper time to fulfill my mission. But after the invasion, I started my secret work. I filmed missile sites. I reported about Russians who arrived on the island. I sent my reports directly to the Mossad representatives working at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. They handed it over to Angleton and his people. At a certain stage, the CIA supplied me with a better code machine to speed up my reports. Every few months, I would travel to Washington to meet with Angleton and his assistants. I would brief them in more detail and then return to Cuba.

“A few times, the Americans asked me to serve as a courier and meet one of their agents in Cuba, but I refused. I thought that that was too risky. One of my sources was an aide to Castro, and I convinced Angleton it would be a pity to put my relationship with the aide at risk.

“What impressed me more than anything was Angleton’s capacity for drinking. He drank and drank for hours, then would rest on the bed in the hotel room where we met, and after a few minutes he would get up fresh. Of course, I reported all this to Amos Manor.”

Manor, as a frequent eyewitness, already knew.

Angleton became truly captivated by the magic of Israeli intelligence, and in Washington he zealously insisted on being the sole handler of the account. Angleton was furious when others in the agency tried to make contact with the Israelis without his knowledge.

“Angleton had one major responsibility other than counterintelligence—Israel—which he traditionally handled in the same totally compartmented fashion as counterintelligence,” according to a later CIA director.

Israelis who worked with Angleton admitted that he had an unusual or even “kooky” personality, but they appreciated him for shattering the American wall of suspicion about Israel while paving the way for vital strategic cooperation.

In November 1987, a year after Angleton died, Israel dedicated a memorial corner to its valued American friend. Within sight of the luxurious King David Hotel, where he loved to stay during his dozens of visits to Jerusalem, an inscription on a large stone was carved in Hebrew, English, and Arabic: “In memory of a dear friend, James (Jim) Angleton.” It was unveiled at a gathering attended by present and former heads of the Israeli intelligence community.

By investing energy into improving bilateral relations with American and other Western security agencies, Israeli intelligence was also enhancing Israel’s posture as an important and unignorable ally in the Middle East. The country was young and tiny, but it could be highly useful as the West pursued its interests in the region: ensuring the flow of oil, supporting conservative regimes, and blocking the pan-Arab nationalism led by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The Israeli who noticed this helpful reality more than anyone else was the Mossad chief, Reuven Shiloah. He could see that Britain and France wanted to remain relevant in a post-colonial Middle East, and America was trying to establish its own toehold.

To make Israel more valuable, Shiloah launched an almost inconceivable form of outreach. He found that secret contacts could, astonishingly, be established in Arab countries that were officially hostile. The logistical details were difficult, including late-night border crossings and coded communications, but back-channel links with Israel’s neighbors could be built—even before Israel was officially born.

As Ben-Gurion’s top clandestine diplomat, Shiloah took part in meetings with King Abdullah and other top officials of Transjordan. They reached a tacit understanding whereby the Palestinian state envisioned by the United Nations partition vote of 1947 was aborted well before birth. This, too, was a fateful moment that resulted from intelligence work: an unspoken conspiracy that played out during the war of 1948. Israel overran some of the majority-Arab parts of Palestine after the British left, and Abdullah’s army seized the West Bank of the Jordan River—annexing the land and renaming his kingdom Jordan. There was no serious attempt by Transjordan, unlike Egypt and the other Arab countries, to destroy Israel.

King Abdullah became not only an “agent of influence” for Israel in the Arab world—an intelligence catchphrase to describe a person in a foreign country whose political goals fit your own country’s—but a paid agent. His Jewish liaisons paid him thousands of dollars for his services. Only Abdullah’s assassination by a fellow Muslim in July 1951 prevented his signing a peace treaty with Israel.

In Syria, the army chief of staff, Colonel Hosni Zaim, seized power in March 1949 and offered peace to Israel. Events overtook his seemingly pacific generosity, and no treaty was signed. Only decades later was it revealed that Zaim had been on the payroll of American, French, and even Israeli intelligence agencies. CIA officers actually helped him plot his coup. Israel had other contacts, often based on bribery, within the Egyptian and Iraqi leadership.

Shiloah realized, however, that the ability of Israeli operatives to gain access to Arab leaders could not change the basic political and strategic facts of Middle Eastern life: that Israel’s immediate neighbors (known as the “inner circle”) would continue to hate the State of Israel and to perpetuate a state of war.

Shiloah also knew there were other geographic and ethnic factors in the region. The inner circle was surrounded by an outer circle, which he called “the periphery” of non-Arab nations; and the Arab states themselves had religious and ethnic minorities. Friendships could be formed with the peripheral nations and with the minority groups.

Any force that opposed or fought Arab nationalism was considered to be a potential ally of Israel: the Maronite minority in Lebanon, the Druze in Syria, the Kurds in Iraq, and the Christians in southern Sudan, who all suffered under the yoke of the Muslim majorities in their countries. Iran and Turkey were always proud to point out that, although Muslim, they were not Arabs.

Thus was born a complex and covert side of Israeli foreign policy, and the Mossad was in charge. This, too, would be a lasting and unique feature of Israeli intelligence. No one, not even an American president, could ever assume that Israel was entirely cut off from anyone. Presidents discovered, in fact, that the Mossad had contacts and assets seemingly everywhere. Even Israeli prime ministers were sometimes surprised.

One of the most significant connections that Shiloah launched was with the Kurds, a stateless people who lived mostly in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. The Mossad chief had been in Iraq’s Kurdish villages in the 1930s, when he worked for the Jewish Agency in Baghdad, with a cover as a teacher and part-time journalist.

These mountain people were constantly struggling to obtain autonomy, and their most active and direct aid from the Mossad came in the 1960s when Israeli military advisers trained Kurdish guerrillas. The United States and the Shah of Iran supported the project.

Israel benefited from the fact that one of its major enemies—the Iraqi army, which had invaded the newborn Jewish state in 1948—was tied down in a guerrilla conflict. Also, Israel enjoyed the Kurdish fighters’ help in smuggling the remnants of the Jewish community from Iraq into Iran, from where they were airlifted to Israel.

The Shah, as leader of a Moslem nation, never established formal diplomatic relations with Israel. But the monarch respected Israel’s struggle against its large Arab neighbors, and he supplied oil to Israel and had Iran’s national airline fly Jewish refugees to Tel Aviv.

Senior Israeli officials made unannounced visits to Tehran, and a trade office served as an unofficial embassy. The Israeli goal was to encourage the Shah’s anti-Arab leanings, and he was easily fed information meant to stoke his suspicions.

Decades later, the opposite held: Israelis would maintain quiet contacts with Arab countries and would try to heighten their suspicions about Iran.

With the blessings of the United States and Britain, the Israeli-Iranian alliance was extended to include another important non-Arab Muslim nation: Turkey.

In June 1958, Turkish and Israeli intelligence officials met. Ben-Gurion entrusted this project to Shiloah, even though the Mossad’s first chief had left the agency six years earlier. The talks led to an unannounced visit to Ankara by Ben-Gurion in August, so that he could meet his Turkish counterpart. When journalists noticed an El Al plane at the Turkish capital’s airport, the explanation given was: “engine problems that forced an emergency landing.”

The concrete result was a formal, but top-secret, agreement for comprehensive cooperation between the Mossad and the Turkish National Security Service, the TNSS. The Mossad agreed on a similar pact, around the same time, with Iran’s notorious Savak.

At the end of 1958, the three secret agencies established a formal cooperation network called Trident, which held semiannual gatherings of all three espionage chiefs.

The Mossad found that a plethora of unacknowledged international contacts often required it to play innkeeper, and the agency set up a “guest house” at a highway intersection north of Tel Aviv. Helicopters could land there. Cars could arrive or depart, day or night, without anyone paying any attention; just in case, official press censorship would guarantee no publicity for visits by important but anonymous foreigners.

Within a few years, the area around that guest house—a large, government-owned plot of land—became a training ground for Mossad operatives. Additional buildings were erected, and they formed the core of an academy teaching all the skills of espionage. The Mossad called it the
Midrasha
, a Hebrew word for the kind of intensive religious school where Orthodox Jews ponder the Bible, the Talmud, and other texts that were articles of faith.

The Mossad’s secular and secretive Midrasha set high standards and passed them, spy to spy, analyst to analyst, generation to generation, to ensure continued excellence for the agency.

The Mossad would eventually move its entire headquarters to the academy site. This gave the Mossad an entire campus with more space and certainly more seclusion, compared with the two previous sites in Tel Aviv: the original huts in Ben-Gurion’s defense compound, the Kirya; and then an American-style office building named Hadar Dafna in a highly trafficked business district.

When censorship prevented any individual or map from identifying the Mossad’s location, government officials and journalists would simply speak of “the Midrasha.” Some of the privileged few who had been inside the high-security campus described it as surprisingly tastefully designed. It included a sculpture garden, featuring the work of Israel’s best known artists. This reflected the Mossad’s self-image as a hotbed of creativity. Quite a few of its best staff members were painters or sculptors in their spare time, and when Israelis sought to excel at “the art of espionage,” part of the formula was to permit creativity to flourish.

Mossad men and women frequently had some outlandish theories or plans to propose, but they were encouraged to give them voice. Accomplishing the impossible would often have to start with unorthodox approaches.

The unexpected secret alliance that brought the tiny Jewish state of Israel into partnership with two Muslim giants, Iran and Turkey, was based on strong common interests. They were all concerned about the activities of Soviet spies throughout the Middle East, and the three intelligence communities pooled their knowledge of what the Russians were doing.

In addition, Turkey helped the Mossad by sharing information that TNSS agents had collected in Syria, focused on that radical Arab regime’s intentions toward Israel. The Mossad trained Turkish secret agents in counterintelligence techniques and the use of technical devices. Similar training took place for the Shah of Iran’s secret police, but that abruptly stopped when he was overthrown in 1979.

In eastern Africa, Israel—along with American and British intelligence—found Ethiopia to be of prime strategic importance in the 1950s. The country overlooked the shipping routes leading into the Red Sea and northward toward Israel’s port of Eilat and Egypt’s Suez Canal.

Ethiopia also seemed pro-Western and fairly stable, under the rule of self-proclaimed emperor Haile Selassie. For over two decades he described himself as a descendant of the ancient Hebrew tribe of Judah. His royal emblem was Judah’s majestic lion, and Selassie warmly admired the modern Jewish state.

After an Israeli consulate was opened in Ethiopia, the diplomats were followed by agricultural advisers, by professors who helped establish the University of Addis Ababa, and by the inevitable military advisers and intelligence personnel. Israelis helped the emperor train his security forces. The Mossad was able to maintain a large station, an office fulfilling various covert roles, in the Ethiopian capital.

This corner of the Horn of Africa had a crucial advantage: its location. Just to the north were two Arab countries, Sudan and Egypt, and just across narrow sea lanes were Saudi Arabia and Yemen. For access to many kinds of people and information, Ethiopia and its immediate neighbors were excellent hunting grounds for Israeli intelligence.