Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis with a Man Who Led the Mossad by Efraim Halevy

From the Publisher

Israel’s Mossad is one of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies. Having served as its director, Efraim Halevy has witnessed the Middle East crisis from the inside-out. As the secret envoy to prime ministers ranging from Yitzhak Rabin to Ariel Sharon, Halevy was privy to many of the top-level negotiations that changed the landscape of the region—and, in turn, the rest of the modern world. In Man in the Shadows, he provides a fascinating, deeply informed look at the secret workings and global repercussions of Mossad’s fight against Islamic terror, and writes with passion and authority about such topics as:

•  September 11, 2001: What the Mossad knew before and after the attacks; his critique of the 9/11 report; and his assertion that we haven’t seen the worst of radical Islam

•  His candid thoughts about the Bush Administration; George Tenet and his dismissal; the assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal; and other key players in the war on terror

•  Iraq: From Operation Desert Storm to the WMD crisis to the war of the present day, Halevy offers a modern history of the region, as well as an action-plan for the future

…and more. By turns a powerful history lesson and a roadmap to world peace, Man in the Shadows is a must-read for the twenty-first century.

Publishers Weekly

Never mind the dramatic title and jacket: readers expecting fireworks from the former head of the Israeli secret service will be disappointed. Written with the dispassion of an intelligence report, Halevy's memoir turns out to be a 20-year political history that includes much secret maneuvering but little skullduggery. Born in London in 1934, Halevy joined the Mossad in 1961 and quickly moved up to become a deputy division chief. His book opens in 1988-89, when the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait suddenly changed the terms of Mideastern politics. The U.S. increased pressure on Israel to settle its Palestinian problem, and the first intifada heated up. Diplomatic progress was glacial; most of it involved careful political negotiations, dully detailed. The text perks up when Halevy becomes head of Mossad in 1998 and al-Qaeda enters the world stage by blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa. Halevy delivers insightful and often acerbic portraits of world leaders and shows a surprising sympathy toward the Arab point of view. He also describes several operational fiascoes that made the news, but he writes as a loyal Israeli bureaucrat, so secrets stay put. (Apr. 18) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Halevy (Ctr. for Stategic & Policy Studies, Hebrew Univ.) spent 40 years inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service. His memoir covers 1989 to 2003, with much on world leaders he met and peace talks he participated in-many of which the United States was not a party to. An informed reader will appreciate this insider's view. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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Chapter One

The End of the Eight-Year War
(1988--1989)

The Iran-Iraq war was nearing its end. Iraq was employing nonconventional means both to stem the tide of the Iranian-Shiite onslaught and to cow Kurdish resistance from within. For close to eight years Israel had been sitting on the fence and observing the Sunni-Shiite confrontation with considerable satisfaction. The mutual weakening of Iraq and Iran, both sworn enemies of Israel, had been serving Israel’s strategic interests for quite some time and had contributed to the decline of the eastern front threat that had been a central feature of Israeli planning for decades.

Syria in the north, under the dictatorial rule of Hafiz al-Assad, had at that stage begun to realize that it had no real chance of obtaining strategic parity with Israel. Egypt, which had signed a peace treaty with Israel a decade before and had subsequently been ostracized by the Arab world, was to be shortly taken back into the fold of Arab States through readmittance to the Arab League. It had endured the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 1982 without severing its diplomatic relations with Israel. Egypt was able to restore its status in the Arab world and to maintain its strategic peace with Israel at one and the same time. On the Israel-Palestinian dispute, the Palestinian uprising, known as the first intifada, had gone through its first year with little effect on Israel’s powerful status. There had been some ugly incidents but these had not affected its basic capabilities. Surveying the scene at the time, Israel could have rightly concluded that its position in the region had rarely been stronger.

There hadbeen one significant change in the otherwise encouraging picture. King Hussein had renounced his country’s interest in the West Bank and had declared that it was now time for the Palestinians themselves to care for their future. He had done so in 1998 after a failed attempt in 1987 to launch a joint Israel-Jordan initiative, the purpose of which was to produce a solution commonly known as the London Agreement. The agreement was concluded by the then Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and King Hussein at a secret meeting that took place in London at the residence of Lord Mishcon, a personal friend of the two. There were a variety of reasons why this understanding did not materialize. The two authors of the document had agreed that it would be given to the American administration and that subsequently the U.S. government would present it to the parties as an American initiative. Since that was the so-called gentleman’s agreement Mr. Peres refused to give his prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, a copy of the document and told him that he would receive it later on from the American ambassador. Mr. Shamir sensed a “conspiracy” and immediately assumed a hostile approach to the whole scheme. A last-ditch effort to sway Mr. Shamir’s mind by arranging for him to have his own secret meeting with King Hussein in the summer of 1987 was to no avail. He did not accept the London Agreement because it was destined to be implemented under a joint American-Soviet patronage, and Israel had traditionally shied away from Great Power tutelage, which bore the ingredients of an imposed solution.

King Hussein assumed in the summer of 1987 that Mr. Peres would resign from the Israeli cabinet and would dismantle the Labor-Likud national coalition following his failure to get approval for the London Agreement. Since Mr. Peres did not go through with this commitment, King Hussein felt not only that he had been let down but that he had become exposed to the accusation of treachery in the Arab world. He felt that Mr. Peres had undermined his position. Given the fast-diminishing support he was receiving from the Palestinian population in the West Bank, he decided to cut his losses. So, the king severed his ties with the West Bank, leaving the Palestinians to their own fate and the Labor party went on to lose the 1988 general election in Israel.

The London Agreement episode was evaluated at the time as a relatively minor event in the overall scene. It so happened that, simultaneously, Israel was sensing a rapid decline in Jordanian influence on the West Bank after it had fallen into Israeli hands in 1967. During the eighties, Israel had made repeated efforts to bolster Jordanian-supported groups and individuals but to no apparent avail. In essence, both King Hussein and Mr. Shamir had similar interests; neither really wanted a rapid solution to the Palestinian issue. Neither trusted Yassir Arafat. The king always remembered that it was Arafat who had tried to overthrow the Hashemite regime in the summer of 1970 and to assassinate him. Thus, neither of the two leaders was in a hurry to change the status quo. Indeed, the king was to develop a sincere admiration for Mr. Shamir, who, on the face of it, was his most implacable adversary given the latter’s “extreme” positions on the Palestinian issue.

Surveying the international scene, Israel had reason to feel relatively safe and confident. The Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev was rapidly losing its economic capacity to fund and equip its veteran clients in the Middle East with new-generation weaponry. There were already indications that Soviet attitudes toward Israel were to change. At the time, the Soviet Union had not resumed diplomatic relations with Jerusalem, which had been severed in 1967, but through a series of contacts it had become apparent that Moscow now had a deep interest in normalizing its relations with Israel. Mr. Shamir, the then Israel prime minister, had a profound understanding of the Russian scene and was hoping that a thaw on this front would open the gates for renewed immigration from the Soviet Union to Israel. However, in his wildest dreams he did not believe that within a time span of three to four years, a million people would emigrate to Israel, thus enlarging the Jewish population by 25 percent. This dramatic rise in size of the population had an enormous effect on the economy and on the security of the state. Overnight, Israel had become a state comparable in population size to several key European countries, such as Denmark, Norway, and Ireland. The populations of Norway and Ireland were considerably less than that of Israel. Denmark and Israel numbered almost the same number of inhabitants.

The first intifada, was in its second year with no visible signs of any tangible success. The Palestinians appeared to be losing rapidly in their struggle against Israel and as more and more Jews were taking up residence in Judea and Samaria, the “occupied” or “disputed” territories, a real fear of total loss and collapse was beginning to take hold of large segments of the population in the Palestinian world. In 1988, Arafat first hinted that he might change course and contemplate a reconciliation with Israel. The main question in everyone’s mind was whether or not this was a tactical move designed to overcome temporary weakness or the beginning of a genuine strategic change. The issue was destined to become the touchstone of bitter debate in Israel, spanning the entire period covered by this book.

As background to these major developments, there began to lurk a sinister threat in the form of possible proliferation of nuclear know-how into the Middle East. Preliminary indications suggested that Iraq was bent on reactivating its efforts to develop its nuclear capacities which had suffered a severe setback when Israel, in 1981, bombed and destroyed the Iraqi Osirac nuclear reactor, a reactor donated and constructed by the French government under the premiership of Jacques Chirac. We also asked ourselves if there was a real danger that Pakistan would be instrumental in creating the “Islamic bomb” or was this just a figment of the imagination of a few deranged intelligence officers who were readily willing to think the unthinkable, time and time again? And finally, we wondered whether or not other Muslim states in the Middle East were contemplating entry into the fields of weapons of mass destruction.

Consequently, just as the Middle East appeared to be emerging from a dark ten-year period of war, and on the verge of the first glimmer of hope in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far greater potentials for violence and regional destabilization were beginning to cloud the horizon. There was not much enthusiasm in the intelligence community to give these new threats priority over the more conventional and traditional ones. The bitter experience of the intelligence failure leading up to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, motivated those who chose to continue monitoring the threats of war as they had been perceived day in, day out over the years. Rather than cast the net wider away in order to search for new, unknown, and uncharted threats, the conventional intelligence officers preferred to concentrate on what was always closer to home and to fret over questions such as whether or not Syria was about to launch a surprise incursion into Israel and to seize territory in order to shuffle the cards and initiate a move to ward off a new political reality. This was just one example of a daily question at the very top of the Essential Elements of Information---the sacred E.E.I. The nonconventional threats were deemed to be serious but much more remote. They were taken seriously but not given their real weight and value. Thus the years 1988--1989 were to become those in which a major intelligence failure could well have occurred.

Israel was looking westward at the time and was contemplating the Libyan conundrum with all its complexity. Libya was not only a traditional host to Arab terrorist movements and murder squads. Its development and/or purchase of surface-to-air missiles placed Israel’s civilian Mediterranean air corridors within range of Lybian capabilities. Israel had no adequate answer to this threat; it could not patrol the airspace because of the distance from its shores and it could not rely entirely on the capacities and goodwill of southern European countries on the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

Apart from its anxiety over the possible threat from Mu’ammar Gadhafi, Israel’s involvement, in general, in Africa was reaching its climax. For several years it had succeeded in maintaining traditionally strategic relations with veteran leaders, like Felix Houphouet Boigny of the Ivory Coast. In each of these strategic relationships, Israel had invested primarily in the defense field, training and advising the troops loyal to regimes generally considered dictatorial and, in some cases, oppressive. Further south of the Ivory Coast, Israel was allied with the white regime of South Africa and had long range agreements with Pretoria, again basically in the defense area. Israel’s policies were based in the main on its reading of its strategic interests, with minimal regard to human rights and related aspects relevant to those it supported.

Israel’s African policies were a subject for constant review; it established and nurtured relationships with progressive and internationally respected regimes like those of Kenya’s Kenyatta and Tanzania’s Nyerere; however, it also maintained strategic contacts with the likes of Mobutu Sese Seko, a man perceived as a ruthless dictator. These relationships had been cultivated in the sixties, at the height of the scramble by the West, led by the United States, and the Communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union and Communist China. Mobutu, for one, was the “darling” of the West because he had succeeded in staving off a Soviet-led offensive to gain control of central Africa and its vitally strategic minerals. Israel had played a very effective role in furthering its own objectives of narrowing Egypt’s zones of influence in Africa. The African policies allowed us to puncture the efforts of the Arab world, led at the time by Egypt’s charismatic and pro-Soviet leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser who was, at the time, working to isolate the newly born state of the Jews, internationally, and to exercise a vigorous boycott on it. At one and the same time, Israel’s prominent role in Africa was clearly serving Western interests and primarily those of the United States and the latter was quick to recognize this contribution and to applaud it.

Simultaneously, hidden far from the diplomatic human eye, Israel was pursuing activities and policies during the years 1988--1989 that were of considerable consequence both to itself and to many other players on the international scene. On the African continent it had been carrying out a massive rescue operation designed to bring to its shores the Jews of Ethiopia. In the face of the refusal of the Addis Ababa regime to allow these Jews out of the country, Israel launched a rescue operation in the Sudan. The Jews of Ethiopia were encouraged to cross the border from Ethiopia into the Sudan and to find their way to refugee camps situated around five hundred kilometers away from Khartoum, the capital of this impoverished country. This heroic operation, masterminded by the Israeli Mossad succeeded in saving the lives of close to twenty thousand over a period of about ten years. As 1989 was nearing its close, the operation was entering its final stage and was being carried out in a country that was a sworn enemy of Israel and, at the time, under the direct influence of the then extremist Lybian leader, Gadhafi. Mossad operatives gauged their success not only in terms of the number of lives saved but also by the number of losses incurred by the forces on the ground. This number was zero.

In many respects, this operation was outside the ordinary area of responsibility of an intelligence service. Whereas normally an intelligence officer strives to limit his exposure and contact with his surroundings to a bare minimum and to narrow the revelation of his true identity to a chosen few, in this case operatives had to rub shoulders with literally thousands of people whom they had never seen before and amongst whom a hostile individual could well have been planted, without the knowledge of the rest. Thus, in principle, the modus operandi of such an endeavour was diametrically contrary to that of a conventional intelligence service. On the other hand, the success of the operation depended, in no small measure, on the practice of many of the tools of the trade of an intelligence officer. His and her ability to assume identities and aliases; his capacity to recruit local support for seemingly innocuous tasks and his steely courage in maintaining cover in what were often acute circumstances. The operation entailed action on the ground across distances of fifteen hundred kilometers; overcoming road blocks manned by local security forces who controlled all the main arteries of this vast country and functioning for a period of more than ten years without, as mentioned, the loss of even one person. All this was accomplished by the Mossad diverting less than 5 percent of its total capacity to this unique assignment.

The year 1989 was also characterized by a continued Israeli presence on Moroccan soil and the unique relationship that had been nurtured between King Hassan II of Morocco and successive Israeli governments. The liaison between the monarch and the Mossad had come into being in the early sixties of the twentieth century. At the time newly born Algeria had gone to war against its neighboring country, Morocco, and Egyptian units were fighting alongside the Algerians. The relationship between Israel and the Arab league member Morocco fast became a strategic one and ultimately enabled the king to bring together Israel and Egyptian senior envoys at meetings which were destined, in the seventies, to produce the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. Egypt was to endure close to ten years of virtual isolation in the Arab world. The year 1989 saw it beginning to emerge from this difficult phase in its history. As Cairo was again accepted into the Arab community of nations, King Hassan turned his efforts toward convincing Israel to accept the Palestine Liberation Organization and its leader, Yassir Arafat, as a valid negotiating partner. King Hassan engaged in an intensive dialogue with the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir on this issue, but to no avail. Shamir adamantly refused to countenance a dialogue with Arafat, who was in exile in Tunisia, and rejected every overture to permit anybody to deal with the Palestinian leader. Mr. Shamir was very anxious to meet with the Moroccan monarch; he believed such a meeting was in the interests of both countries. But this was never to come about. Instead, the ongoing exchange of views was destined to be conducted between an emissary of the Israeli prime minister and the king.

The year 1989 was also the year that the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union began its march toward the final dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics---the U.S.S.R. The deteriorating economic conditions in the Soviet Union were becoming extremely difficult and Mikhail Gorbachev was encountering one obstacle after another in his efforts to stem the tide that was ultimately to engulf his empire and precipitate its dramatic collapse. In his hour of great need, Gorbachev approached Israel in 1989 and secretly appealed to it to convince the United States to prop up his regime and to prevent its downfall. He seemed to believe that Israeli influence in Washington, D.C., could be instrumental in swaying the administration and Congress to advance massive financial and economic aid to the Soviet Union. After considering the Russian request, Mr. Shamir decided not to take any action on it. I doubt if he had decided otherwise, he would have been able to prevail on the powers that be in the American capital to act and save the Russian empire.

Israel, a state with a population of of around four million in 1989, had become a focal player on the regional scene and was a deft and effective factor on issues well beyond the confines of the Middle East. Its most powerful adversary in the region, Egypt, had despaired of defeating the Jewish state over a decade before and had decided to sign a peace treaty with its erstwhile enemy. All issues had been settled except one---the precise delineation of the border between the two countries in the area of Taba, just south of Eilat, Israel’s most southerly port city. On January 30, 1989, the Egyptian flag was raised over the 91st border stone marking the boundary between Israel and Egypt. The two states had settled the dispute by arbitration and Israel had lost the case.

The year 1989 was to be remembered as the year when Soviet forces finally withdrew from Afghanistan. At the time this was considered one of the greatest triumphs of the “free world” against the Communist empire. It was also a remarkable success of the CIA, which had led the intricate battle against the Soviets and had ran one of the most successful intelligence operations on a global scale in modern times. Little did the highly competent and professional officers of the Agency realize that the recruits they had supported in the battle against the Russians were destined to turn the battlegrounds of Afghanistan into bases for indoctrination and training of extreme Muslim fundamentalist terrorists, who would shortly turn around and not only bite the hands of their benefactors, but also launch a deadly world war against them within a space of ten years. In 1998, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were bombed and destroyed within minutes of each other on one day, thus heralding a new era in world history. The seeds of 1989 had not taken long to bud and to produce their lethal results. It had taken less than ten years. Osama bin Laden, if asked, would probably say that his countdown began during the last week of January 1989, as the Soviet forces completed their withdrawal from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

Israel was not involved in the Afghan campaign but its presence was felt even when, in actual fact, it was not there at all. There were no full diplomatic relations between Israel and either India or Pakistan, but there were constant press rumors that Israel was aiding one side against the other. Israel did have a consulate in what was then Bombay (now Mumbai), but there was not much more than that. However, the reporting about Israeli involvement illuminated one more facet of Israel’s global reach. Its involvement in the affairs of the world had taken on a life of its own. It had become a regional power and was destined to act as one and to reap the fruits of its unique “status” for better or for worse. Its reputation had blossomed to such an extent as to permit it to reap benefits based purely on its growing legend.

Thus was the stage set, both internationally and at a regional level, for the impending war of the Gulf. Within two years the hero of the deadly Iraq-Iran confrontation was to become the most reviled villain of all time.

Copyright © 2006 by Efraim Halevy

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Man in the Shadows

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Excerpted from Man in the Shadows
by Halevy, Efraim
Copyright © 2006 by Halevy, Efraim.
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