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Journalism of Courage
July 23: The full title of Israel’s intelligence agency is The Institute for Intelligence and Special Services, but it has always been known simply as “The Institute”, or, in Hebrew, Mossad.
Its first principal benefactor and target was the British wartime secret services. Several dozen Jewish agents were trained and dropped into Eastern Europe to organise Jewish resistance to the Nazis. But Mossad’s predecessor, Mossad le Aliyah Bet (the Institute for Illegal Immigration), was also focused on rescuing Jews and smuggling them out to Palestine, and to that end, organised forged passports and infiltrated the British army and civil service.
The struggle with the British also became the primary role of Mossad’s other progenitor, Shai, the Jewish intelligence unit set up in 1929, which took a leading role in forcing the British out in 1947. Shai and Mossad le Aliyah Bet were merged in 1951.
Perhaps Mossad’s greatest success was the abduction in 1960 of Adolf Eichmann. He was located and tracked by a 12-strong Mossad team who drugged the Nazi, dressed him in the uniform of an El Al crew member, and slipped him past Argentinian immigration officials on to a waiting Israeli passenger plane.
The Mossad mystique was secured in 1976 with the meticulously-planned raid on Entebbe to rescue hostages from a hijacked Air France flight. All but one of them (a Briton, Dora Block) were saved. The only Israeli casualty was Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Netanyahu, the current prime minister’s elder brother.
No intelligence service, before or since, has been involved in such a wide range of operations. Mossad was, for example, instrumental in the covert airlifts of entire Jewish populations from Morocco and Ethiopia.
Its failures have been less well publicised but, in some ways, just as spectacular. It failed to forecast the Arab attack in 1973 and suffered the elimination of entire cells in Egypt and Syria, and the public execution of its agents.
But “the worst-bungled affair in Israel’s history”, in the words of one retired Mossad director, was the running and subsequent unmasking in November 1986 of Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli agent in US naval intelligence. He got life imprisonment and the affair has soured relations between the Israeli and US intelligence services since.
