Mossad

In March 1979 the CIA's counterintelligence staff finished a secret handbook on Israel's intelligence and security services. Its description of the Mossad was blunt: the service collected foreign intelligence, ran covert action programs outside Israel, answered to the prime minister, and kept its headquarters in a wing of a commercial office block in central Tel Aviv, across the street from the army compound it had once shared with military intelligence¹.

Origins

Israel came out of the 1948 war with several competing intelligence bodies inherited from the pre-state underground and the new government: the army's intelligence branch, the internal security service (Shin Bet), and a political department in the Foreign Ministry that ran agents abroad. On 13 December 1949 David Ben-Gurion had Reuven Shiloah set up a central institute to coordinate them. In March 1951 it was reorganized as a separate service attached to the Prime Minister's Office^7,2.

The founding arrangement, as the CIA described it in 1979, was a committee of service heads, the Va'adat, chaired by the director of the Mossad. The chairman was called the memuneh, "the one in charge." By the late 1970s the CIA judged that the director of military intelligence had come to outweigh him, because Israel's security rested above all on its army¹.

The Harel years

Shiloah left in 1952, and Ben-Gurion gave the service to Isser Harel, already head of the Shin Bet. Harel kept control of both until 1963. He built liaison with the CIA and with non-Arab states on Israel's periphery, including Iran and Turkey².

The service's most famous operation of the period was the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in May 1960. The CIA's own file on Eichmann, released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, shows the agency afterward keen to learn how the Israelis had done it^3,6.

The Mossad also ran officers under deep cover in Arab states. The 1979 CIA survey singled out two: Wolfgang Lotz, who posed as a former German army officer running a riding school in Cairo, and Eli Cohen, who lived in Damascus as a returning Syrian émigré until his arrest in January 1965. Both were caught in 1965. Lotz was imprisoned in Egypt and later released; Cohen was hanged¹.

Harel's campaign of threats against German engineers building rockets for Egypt led to his break with Ben-Gurion and his resignation in March 1963. Meir Amit, who had headed military intelligence, replaced him².

Amit, Zamir and Munich

Under Amit the service carried out Operation Diamond, the recruitment of an Iraqi Air Force pilot who flew his MiG-21 to Israel on 16 August 1966. Israel later lent the aircraft to the United States for testing⁴.

After Palestinian gunmen killed eleven Israeli team members at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the government of Golda Meir authorized a campaign against people it held responsible, usually called Operation Wrath of God. On 21 July 1973 a Mossad team in Lillehammer, Norway, shot dead Ahmed Bouchikhi, a Moroccan waiter with no link to the attack, in the belief that he was the Black September leader Ali Hassan Salameh. Norwegian police arrested several team members, and a Norwegian court convicted five of them. A Norwegian commission later found no evidence that any Norwegian service had helped the Israelis^5,1.

Secrecy and the record

Until 1996 Israel did not publish the name of the Mossad's director. Most of what is known about the service before then comes from trials abroad, foreign government files, and the memoirs of former officers, which seldom agree in every detail^7,6.

Abroad, the 1979 survey reported, Mossad stations generally worked under diplomatic cover inside Israeli embassies and consulates, with stations in the United States, most European capitals, Turkey, Iran, and centers in Latin America, Africa and the Far East. They ranged from formal liaison with host services to unilateral operations¹.

Operations in these files

September 1957 – 22 May 1960 The capture of Adolf Eichmann In May 1960 a Mossad team led by Isser Harel seized Adolf Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street, held him for nine days and flew him to Israel, where he was tried and hanged for his part in the Holocaust. 1963 – 16 August 1966 Operation Diamond In August 1966 an Iraqi Air Force captain recruited by the Mossad flew his MiG-21, the Soviet Union's newest fighter, to Israel. Israel tested it and in 1968 lent it to the United States, which flew it at Area 51. September 1972 – 22 January 1979 Operation Wrath of God After the 1972 Munich massacre, Israel's government authorized the killing of Palestinians it held responsible. Only one episode reached a courtroom: the 1973 murder of an innocent waiter in Lillehammer, Norway.