Washington Post/SpyTalk, 2 Sep 2010: The CIA took an internal poll not long ago about friendly foreign intelligence agencies. The question, mostly directed to employees of the clandestine service branch, was: Which are the best allies among friendly spy services, in terms of liaison with the CIA, and which are the worst? In other words, who acts like, well, friends?
“Israel came in dead last,” a recently retired CIA official told me the other day. Not only that, he added, throwing up his hands and rising from his chair, “the Israelis are number three, with China number one and Russia number two,” in terms of how aggressive they are in their operations on U.S. soil.
Israel’s undercover operations here, including missions to steal U.S. secrets, are hardly a secret at the FBI, CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. From time to time, in fact, the FBI has called Israeli officials on the carpet to complain about a particularly brazen effort to collect classified or other sensitive information, in particular U.S. technical and industrial secrets. The most notorious operation employed Jonathan Pollard, the naval intelligence analyst convicted in 1987 and sentenced to life in prison for stealing tens of thousands of classified documents for Israel.
One of Israel’s major interests, of course, is keeping track of Muslims who might be allied with Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, or Iran-backed Hezbollah, based in Lebanon. As tensions with Iran escalate, according to former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, “Israeli agents have become more aggressive in targeting Muslims living in the United States as well as in operating against critics.” . . .
AFP, 2 Sep 2010: A Lebanese Shiite cleric known as a critic of Syrian-backed Hezbollah has been arrested in Syria on suspicion of spying for Israel, a high-ranking Lebanese security official said on Thursday. “Sheikh Hassan Msheymish was arrested in July in Syria based on data Lebanese police intelligence had sent to Syrian authorities indicating that he was implicated in collaborating with Israel,” the official told AFP. Msheymish was still being interrogated by Syrian authorities as preliminary information gathered by Lebanese intelligence indicated he may have spied on targets in Syria, the official said. . . . .
New York Times, 2 Sep 2010: Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who gained worldwide fame for decades as a one-man Nazi-hunting operation, was in fact frequently on the payroll of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, a new biography asserts.
The assertion, based on numerous documents and interviews with three people said to be Mr. Wiesenthal’s Mossad handlers, punctures not only a widely held belief about how he operated; it also suggests a need to re-evaluate the standard view that the Israeli government took no interest in tracking down Nazis until the 1960 capture in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, and little thereafter. . . .
. . . . While reading through Mr. Wiesenthal’s correspondence, Mr. Segev came across names of people he did not recognize and discovered that they were Mossad agents and handlers. He interviewed three of them and named two in the book.
Mr. Segev said that Mr. Wiesenthal was first employed by the political department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, a forerunner to the Mossad, and then by the agency itself. It financed his first office in Vienna in 1960, paid him a monthly salary and provided him with an Israeli passport, the biography says. Mr. Wiesenthal’s code name was Theocrat.
His main task was to help locate Nazi criminals, including Eichmann, one of the architects of the Final Solution, and especially to watch out for neo-Nazis and provide information on the activities of former Nazis in Arab countries, the book says.
It also says that Mr. Wiesenthal was part of a largely unknown earlier attempt to trap Eichmann in Austria in the last days of 1948. According to the book, an Israeli agent who was helping Mr. Wiesenthal probably caused the operation to fail when he regaled fellow New Year’s drinkers in local bars with stories of Israel’s war of independence. Word spread that an Israeli was present and Eichmann’s planned visit to his wife and child was abruptly called off, the book says. The operation was started by Asher Ben Natan, later Israel’s first ambassador to Germany, who spoke about it with Mr. Segev. . . . .
Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends
AFP, 1 Sep 2010: Lebanon has asked Interpol to circulate an arrest warrant against a Lebanese ex-general suspecting of working for the Israeli spy agency Mossad, a judicial source said on Thursday.
“Prosecutor General Said Mirza sent an arrest warrant in absentia against Ghassan al-Jidd, who is suspected of having collaborated with Israeli intelligence, to the Interpol office in Beirut to be circulated abroad,” the source told AFP.
Jidd’s name first surfaced last month when Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah revealed a list of “spies” working for the Shiite party’s arch-enemy Israel at a media conference. Local press reports say Jidd, a retired Lebanese army general, may have fled to Israel or France.
More than 100 people have been arrested on suspicion of espionage since April 2009, including telecom employees, members of the security forces and active duty troops. . .
Haaretz, 27 Aug 2010: The rusty antenna in the Kirya − the defense establishment compound in Tel Aviv − was the last vestige of the period in which the Mossad espionage agency was headquartered there, during its early days. Mossad veterans recall those days, when they would go to work on bus or by foot, and eat whatever the cook, Sabina, dished out for them at their offices, or walk via a dirt path to buy some hummus and pita nearby.
After having been taken down and repaired, the Mossad’s first antenna is now going on display. For years, the antenna was unobtrusively perched on a central traffic artery in Tel Aviv, rising above Derech Petah Tikva (today, Derech Begin); wrapped tightly in secrecy in its heyday, it was eventually forgotten and almost sold as junk metal. Only the last-minute intervention of an engineer, Gadi Roitman, saved the antenna: Now repaired and cleaned up, it will be displayed starting next week near its original site in the southern part of the Kirya, as part of a larger project that will highlight the “golden days” of the compound.
The antenna was originally used by Tachal (the Hebrew acronym for overseas stations) − an intra-departmental agency comprised of the Mossad and the Foreign and Defense Ministries. . . .
. . . . The Tachal agency originated in the Gideonim network run by the Haganah pre-state underground militia. During Mandatory times, the Gideonim were Morse code operators who maintained communications with the ma’apilim (illegal Jewish immigrant) ships coming from Europe and with the Mossad L’Aliyah Bet (the organization responsible for this immigration), which was headed by Shaul Avigur. After the State of Israel was established, the ships were used to ferry new immigrants to the country, by means of a commercial company established by the Mossad L’Aliyah Bet. Avigur supervised the acquisition of military supplies overseas and their transport to Israel, relying on a network of couriers and a wireless communications network, etc.
“During the Mandatory period, the Gideonim network’s broadcast station was located in the home of Avraham Ben-Yosef (who later became Defense Ministry director general), on the second floor of a building on Sderot Nordau in Tel Aviv,” relates Col. (res.) Uri Goren, a veteran Gideonim radio man and founder of the Israel Defense Force’s Communications Corps. “The Tachal network was naturally born of the Gideonim, just as the Mossad intelligence agency is the ‘legitimate son’ of the Mossad L’Aliyah Bet: Both were created by persons involved in illegal immigration and in the Haganah’s weapons-acquisition efforts in Marseilles, Milan and elsewhere.” . . . .
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 220–An Introduction to Israeli Intelligence and Counterintelligence Methodologies
