Spies Against Armageddon (21 page)

The choice between prison and espionage was familiar to Gamal/Biton by now, and he chose the latter option.

The Israeli who most closely handled Biton, now codenamed Yated, was David Ronen. He eventually rose to the post of Shin Bet deputy director. In the 1990s, he wrote a novel in Hebrew called
The Sting of the Wasp (The Story of a Double Agent)
, and that was loosely based on Operation Yated.

To maintain his credibility with his Egyptian handlers, Biton photographed—but only under Ronen’s close supervision—Israel Defense Forces bases, soldiers at hitchhiking posts, and army unit tags. The Egyptians considered Gamal/Biton one of their top spies.

He married a German woman, and they had a son in Israel—even celebrating his bar mitzvah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem after it was captured from Jordan in the Six-Day War. For Egyptian intelligence, this all seemed like a fantastic coup.

From an Israeli point of view, Operation Yated’s crowning achievement was the transfer of false information to Egypt in the spring of 1967, on the eve of the war. Biton told the Egyptians that according to the war plan he had obtained from his sources, Israel would begin with ground operations. That was a deception of the highest order. It could even be likened to Operation Mincemeat, wherein British intelligence during World War II brilliantly fooled the Germans regarding the site of the Allied landing in northern France in June 1944.

Biton’s misleading information was one of the reasons the Egyptians were so relaxed and careless in leaving their fighter planes out in the open. Israeli pilots had an easy time swooping in and destroying the aircraft on the ground. Thus, the Six-Day War was truly won in the opening three hours.

“He spared us a great deal of blood, and using him was equal to the strength of a division,” Shin Bet veteran Avraham Ahituv said about Biton.

After the war, Israel had no more need for Biton. He had grown increasingly stressed by the daily tensions of his clandestine double life. In light of his mounting complaints to Ronen and growing demands for monetary compensation, Shin Bet decided to let him go—but first to rehabilitate him for a normal life somewhere.

People in the Defense Ministry arranged business opportunities for Biton, including an oil-related partnership with an Italian businessman. But that was not enough for the ex-double agent. He demanded millions of dollars to compensate for his 12 years of service to Israel. Senior Shin Bet officers no longer liked him at all.

Biton had the misfortune of being diagnosed with cancer. He could not shake the fear that Shin Bet would try to poison him in a hospital room, so he demanded to be transferred to Europe for treatment. Israel paid for all that, but it did not last long. He was hospitalized in Germany, and he died there in 1982.

A lingering mystery is why he was buried in Egypt. A few years after he died, an author in Cairo published a long story about a daring and talented Egyptian spy who had penetrated the heart of the “Zionist enemy.” He did not publish the spy’s real name. The story was then adapted for television and became a popular series viewed all around the Arab world. The protagonist was called Rif’at al-Haggan.

Eventually, al-Gamal’s real name was published in Egypt, and a city square in Cairo was named after him. Egypt clearly enjoyed hailing heroes. Harel, the Memuneh who guided Israeli intelligence during much of the Yated operation, shrugged dismissively when asked about the Egyptian claim that Gamal/Biton was definitely their guy.

“If it makes them happy,” said the retired Harel, “let them continue to believe their tall tale.”

The literally smashing air blitz that marked the beginning of combat, on the morning of June 5, 1967, was much discussed beforehand by top Israeli leaders who felt they had to consider how the United States and the Soviet Union would react.

The man who took Washington, DC’s temperature, reporting to official Jerusalem that President Lyndon Johnson would not be opposed to a preemptive strike by Israel, was Amit. Eshkol sent the Mossad chief to deliver a three-part message to CIA headquarters: that war was inevitable, that Nasser started it by trying to strangle Israel, and that Israel was so outnumbered that it would have to launch the first attack—or the Jewish state might not survive.

The CIA director, Richard Helms, listened to Amit. So did President Johnson. They did not explicitly endorse going to war, but they did not object to the notion of a preemptive attack by Israel.

The understanding shown by Johnson and by Helms could be considered a kind of reciprocation for the giant favors that Israeli intelligence had done for the United States: procuring an advanced Soviet MiG fighter by persuading a pilot to defect from Iraq, and obtaining the Khrushchev speech. Amit’s international intelligence links were paying off. The air force and the army had to do the rest, and they made quick work of it. Unfortunately there was no serious planning for the day after the war.

Chapter Nine

Meet the Neighbors

The bed was still warm, the sheets and blankets lay strewn all over the floor, the water boiled over in the kettle, and the tea in the cups was still hot, but the man known as Abu Ammar was not to be found. A few seconds before Israeli troops and security men broke into the three-story house in Ramallah, on the West Bank, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization—who would become world-famous as Yasser Arafat—had fled.

From his second-floor hiding place, Arafat—with amazing instincts honed by danger—heard the voices of the Israelis as they surrounded the villa. Arafat leaped from a window and hid in a car parked nearby. When the men who were after his scalp had left, he hurried eastward and crossed the Jordan River. For the next quarter of a century he did not set foot in the West Bank.

Time and again, the Israelis would try to catch him by land, air, and sea, and still Arafat eluded them. For the Israeli security services, he became their Phantom of the Opera—elusive, unpredictable, and lucky.

After the failed raid in Ramallah, Shin Bet agents took some of Arafat’s personal belongings—even that once-warm bed—to their Jerusalem District Headquarters as souvenirs and as a reminder of their unfinished job.

This was in mid-December 1967, six months after Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

The six-day victory over Arab enemies on three sides was perhaps the biggest event in Israel’s history. Foreigners marveled at a small country’s ability to wage and win a war cleverly and quickly. Seen nearly half a century later, however, the triumph could be considered pyrrhic.

Having given themselves the burden of ruling over their Palestinian Arab neighbors, the IDF and the security agencies were forced into learning more than they ever knew about the people who insistently pursued their own claim on the same historic Holy Land. Eventually, over the decades that unfolded, Israelis would try to make peace with the Palestinians but would then find the efforts frustrating.

The so-called peace process, launched a quarter of a century after the Six-Day War, would go on to a kind of paralysis; and it would not seem nearly as urgent as crises involving Iran and its Shi’ite Muslim allies in Lebanon.

At the very least, from the start, the victory in 1967 presented new challenges in the area of internal and external security—and thus an entirely new era for Shin Bet. Yosef Harmelin, a veteran Shin Bet operative, had replaced Amos Manor as director upon the latter’s retirement in 1964.

No one had a better poker face than Harmelin. He was an impressively tall man, but the ability to maintain an expressionless countenance was his most memorable quality and an excellent attribute for an intelligence operative. He was probably born with the talent when he entered the world in Vienna in 1923.

After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Harmelin’s parents escaped the approaching Holocaust by moving to Mexico. The teenaged Yosef, more Zionist than his parents, moved to Palestine instead. Like Harel and Amit, Harmelin moved onto a kibbutz before enlisting in the British army in World War II. After the war, he joined the Haganah, where he met Harel; and a few years after Israel’s independence, Harmelin was recruited by Shin Bet. He gradually worked his way up to the top.

Harmelin inherited an agency that was small and self-contained, working in virtually total anonymity. The public hardly ever heard of Shin Bet by name, details of its operations were censored out of the press, and it was illegal to identify any of its personnel. The entire force numbered around 500 people, and the atmosphere within was that of a close family in which everyone knew everyone else. Family secrets were never divulged to outsiders.

It was also, however, a lackluster agency that had always been overshadowed by the Mossad and by Aman. Only rarely were a few crumbs of excitement tossed to Shin Bet by the operations department, which it shared with the Mossad. Shin Bet’s main task was the usually unglamorous business of watching vigilantly for foreign spies and domestic subversives. Naturally, the Arab minority in Israel had always constituted the main pool of suspects.

The Arab citizens of the Jewish state—in the 1960s making up around 15 percent of Israel’s population—enjoyed the right to vote for Knesset members, but they had not been governed by the same civilian systems as Jewish-dominated areas. There had been military governors for the Arab-populated sectors, mainly the Galilee and Wadi Ara regions in northern Israel, and the residents had been closely watched also by Shin Bet.

Immediately after the establishment of the State of Israel, the Shin Bet and the army assigned “case officers” or “military governors” to each Arab village and community. They were part of a large system that aimed to control every daily routine of the Israeli Arabs. The system was not something of which to be proud in a free country, but the reason was the suspicion that Israeli Arabs might be a “fifth column”: Their true loyalty might be with their Arab brethren in countries that had declared themselves enemies of Israel.

The case officers were usually Jews from Arab nations who spoke Arabic and understood Arab and Muslim cultures. They were trained to run networks of local informers, collaborators, and agents who fed data of all sorts to Shin Bet. As with most intelligence collection, some of the information was vital and some of it banal.

Four years after independence, distrust had grown to the point that this system sought a deeper penetration into the Arab psyche. In 1952, Shin Bet formed a highly secret unit of young Jews who were trained to behave as Arabs and live in Arab towns and neighborhoods in Israel.

They were given fake identities and planted in such places as Nazareth and Jaffa to be the eyes and ears of the Shin Bet. Their bosses called them “
mista’arvim
,” coining a new word by combining
mistavim
(Hebrew for “masqueraders”) and
Aravim
(the word for “Arabs”).

One of the main goals was to have trusted Israelis on the inside, in case a war were to break out and Israeli Arabs were to join the enemy.

Shmuel “Sami” Moriah, a senior Shin Bet officer who came to Israel from Iraq and had plenty of experience smuggling Jews out of his native country, led the unit. He recruited 10 other Iraqi-born men for this highly demanding mission.

With detailed cover stories about returning to Palestine after fleeing abroad in the 1948 war, they were sent into Arab villages and cities. Their genuine parents, siblings, and friends in Israel were kept in the dark about their whereabouts and activities.

These Shin Bet agents became so integrated in community life that it was fully expected by neighbors and village elders that they would get married—and most of them did.

Moriah said that he left the decision to each man, but “it seemed suspicious that young vigorous men would stay alone, without a spouse. When we sent them on the mission we didn’t order them to marry, but it was clear to both sides that there is such an expectation, and that it would help the job they were doing.”

The elders introduced them to eligible young Arab women. They had the brief courtship typical in conservative Arab societies. And most of the 10 men married, not ever telling their wives that they were Jewish Israelis.

As time passed, the intelligence from this daring deception proved to be almost worthless. Shin Bet wanted to call off the mission. But now Shin Bet had a tough problem.

“The double life they were living cost them a lot, emotionally,” said Manor, who created this project but then backed away after seven years. “I saw that the price is not worth it and decided to put an end to it.”

The unit was disbanded by 1959, but the ramifications haunted Shin Bet for years. The Muslim wives were informed that their husbands were actually Jewish—and, perhaps even worse, government agents—and then the women were given a choice of being sent to an Arab country, to avoid any local retaliation, or being resettled with their husbands in Jewish communities in Israel.

Almost all chose to stay with their husbands, even in the very changed circumstances. Some of the wives needed and got psychological counseling.

“Problems started surfacing,” the project commander Moriah recalled a few decades later with a grimace. “We tried to rehabilitate the people involved, but we weren’t really successful. The agents’ kids experienced serious trauma. They tried to recover, to forget their past, where they come from, but they couldn’t. A few of the kids succeeded in life, but most of them were left behind. They still suffer from problems.”

In 1965 the Israeli government decided to end the military administration of majority-Arab areas, but for the sake of security Shin Bet was asked to step up its observation of those cities and villages.

Two years later, after Israel’s grand victory at war brought more than a million additional Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli rule, Shin Bet was tasked with spotting and quashing dangers in the newly occupied territories.

The intelligence community formed a task force—made up of Shin Bet and Aman men, plus the Mossad’s David Kimche—to explore the politics of the local inhabitants.

“The Palestinians were in a state of shock,” Kimche reminisced. “We thought Israel should exploit the situation by being generous and offering the Palestinians a noble solution that they could live with.” Kimche, with long experience as a clandestine diplomat and honestly trying to pursue diplomatic solutions, proposed granting a form of autonomy to the Palestinians—with a view toward creating a separate state for them. The intelligence men on the task force endorsed that far-sighted vision.

Most Israelis, however, were immersed in a euphoric mood—a shock of victory coupled with a huge sense of relief—that did not foster experimental or generous gestures. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and his cabinet ignored the task force’s advice.

Israel’s leadership seemed focused only on the here and now, while the immense changes in the Middle East called for complex analysis. A unique opportunity to resolve the heart-rending dispute between Jews and Arabs in Palestine was neglected. Almost half a century later, the Israel Defense Forces—a people’s army, thanks to the almost universal military service by Jews—was still stuck as an occupying force in the West Bank. The dilemmas, clashes, roadblocks, settlements, and patrols all threatened the fragile fabric of Israel as a Jewish and democratic country.

Within two months of the transformative Six-Day War, Kimche himself was moving on. The Mossad sent him to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan in northeast Africa, in August 1967. Kimche’s cover, on a brief visit to that Arab nation, exploited his impeccable English accent and manners. He posed as a British journalist at an important Arab summit. The leaders of eight nations convened to discuss the humiliating defeat of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan by the Israelis.

Their public declaration was simple, summarized and immortalized as “The Three No’s.” The summit’s final document declared that there would be no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, and no peace with Israel.

This was one of the bases for Foreign Minister Abba Eban’s observation that Arab leaders “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” for peace. That seemed true enough at the time of Khartoum, but the same accusation could be directed at Israel, the United States, the United Nations, and a host of other parties with interests but few insights in the Middle East.

The Mossad’s Kimche got to see all this in person, and he reported the details—including observations of Arab leaders and delegates—to headquarters. Intelligence analysts had plenty to analyze, but they could not change the reality. Israel had scored a major military victory in June 1967, and perhaps even had saved itself from total disaster, but there was not a single step forward toward peace.

In Kimche’s words, “The events of the two months after the war were dramatic and marked by a historic opportunity missed by both sides—but especially by us, the victorious Israelis.”

The victors naturally felt that they were both brilliant and lucky, but immediate challenges raised doubts as to whether the brilliance and the luck would hold out. It could fairly be said that most Israelis enjoyed—even reveled in—the fact that Jerusalem was reunited, and Jews could again pray at the iconic Western Wall of King Solomon’s holy Temple. Many also derived deep satisfaction from returning to locales in the West Bank that were an authentic part of Biblical history. Yet hardly anyone with a scintilla of sensitivity enjoyed being an occupier: unable to avoid the friction and inequalities between Jews with power and Arabs who had just lost their dignity.

On the Arab side, Arafat’s PLO could easily blame the six-day humiliation on the political leaders of governments that never truly cared about the Palestinians. The PLO was hatching its own ambitious plans, calling on Palestinians to rise up against the Israeli-Zionist occupation. This nationalist rhetoric was reminiscent of the Vietcong, then successfully confronting the powerful American armed forces in Southeast Asia, and of the FLN, which had driven France out of Algeria.

The essence of the strategy was to make the occupied territories ungovernable for the Israelis. The PLO hoped to control daily life in the 500 towns and villages of the West Bank and Gaza, and left-wing theorists among the guerrillas believed a Palestinian revolutionary government would be inevitable.

The PLO borrowed not only foreign concepts, but also operational tactics. Deriving additional inspiration from China’s Mao Zedong and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Palestinians also had active assistance from Colonel Ahmed Suedani, the head of Syrian military intelligence who was credited with catching Eli Cohen in Damascus. Suedani was known as an enthusiastic supporter of “popular struggle” throughout the Middle East—everywhere, that is, except in Syria.

Palestinian militant cells mounted hit-and-run operations against Israeli army vehicles and patrols. They managed to execute ambushes on the narrow streets of West Bank towns.