Review of Israeli legendary mossad agency, wonder how much it’s
true:
Standing on a canteen table in down-town Tel Aviv, Israel’s
spymaster studied the men and women of Mossad.
In the few weeks since taking over Mossad, Meir Dagan knew he
already commanded something his recent predecessors never managed.
Respect.
Barely raising his voice he spoke.
“When I was fighting in Lebanon, I witnessed the aftermath of a
family feud. The patriarch’s head had been split open, his brain on
the floor. Around him lay his wife and some of his children. All
dead. Before I could do anything, one of the murderers scooped up a
handful of brain and swallowed it. This is how you will all now
operate. Otherwise someone will eat your brain.”
His every word held them in thrall – even if they sent a shudder
through some of his listeners, hardened as they were.
In the canteen were those who had killed many times already.
Killing enemies who could not be brought to trial because they were
hidden deep inside Israel’s Arab neighbours.
Only Mossad could find and kill them. Rafi Eitan, the legendary
former Operations Chief of Mossad told me when we sat together in
his living room in a north Tel Aviv suburb:
“I always tried to kill when I could see the whites of a
person’s eyes. So I could see the fear. Smell it on his breath.
Sometimes I used my hands. A knife, or a silenced gun. I never felt
a moment’s regret over a killing.”
Meir Amit, when he had been director of Mossad, later insisted
“we are like the official hangman or the doctor on Death Row who
administers the lethal injection. Our actions are all endorsed by
the State of Israel. When Mossad kills it is not breaking the law.
It is fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the
day”.
We spoke as he walked me through Mossad’s own unique memorial in
Tel Aviv to the dead – a concrete maze shaped in the form of a
brain. Each name engraved on the concrete was of an agent who had
been killed while trying to destroy Israel’s enemies.
Some of those agents had one thing in common. Amit had sent them
to their deaths.
“We did all we could to protect them. We trained them better
than any other secret service. Sometimes, out on a mission, the
dice is against you. But there will always be brave men ready to
roll the dice,” he said.
Dagan, his listeners in the canteen knew, was cast in the same
mould. He would protect them with every means he knew – legal or
illegal. He would allow them to use proscribed nerve toxins.
Dum-dum bullets. Ways of killing that not even the Mafia, the
former KGB or China’s secret service use. But
he would not hesitate to expose them to death – if it was for the
greater good of Israel.