Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services by Ian Black, Benny Morris (With)

Publishers Weekly

Cataloguing half a century of Israeli intelligence's triumphs, debacles and infighting, this dense work will be of most use to specialists. (June)

Library Journal

This just may turn out to be the definitive work on the Jewish state's highly touted and often emulated intelligence operations. The authors have crafted a comprehensive and very readable guide to the labyrinthine history of Israel's efforts to spy on its Arab, Palestinian, European, American, and global neighbors from the 1930s to the present. Their ability to provide such encyclopedic coverage is bolstered by access to previously classified and unavailable diaries, reports, and documents. While Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman's Every Spy a Prince ( LJ 7/90) and Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy's By Way of Deception ( LJ 11/15/90) cover this same topic and are worth reading, the first suffers from a tendency to preach about Israeli ethics and the latter is a very personal accounting of spycraft without much historical coverage. Secret Wars avoids these faults and is a ``must buy'' for any library with any size collection in the area.-- David P. Snider, Casa Grande P.L.

Booknews

A comprehensive, contextual history of all three of Israel's intelligence services, from their origins in the 1930s to the present, including the Ostrovsky affair. Not only thoroughly researched and documented, but comfortably readable, this is likely to be the standard account for some time. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Product Details