Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services

Surveys Israeli intelligence operations from the 1930s to the Ostrovsky affair and describes relations with the American intelligence community

Cataloguing half a century of Israeli intelligence's triumphs, debacles and infighting, this dense work will be of most use to Middle East and national security specialists. According to the authors, Israeli intelligence incorrectly predicted the British withdrawal from Palestine and 1948 Arab invasion; misread Egyptian and Jordanian troop deployment prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and failed to provide adequate warning of the 1973 Arab onslaught. Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the authors maintain, was "Israel's greatest intelligence failure." A checkered record is described: Israeli intelligence agents arranged the clandestine exit of the Iraqi, Moroccan and Ethiopian Jewish communities; kidnapped Nazi Adolf Eichmann to make him stand trial in Israel; returned Yossele Schumacher, who was snatched to New York by his ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist grandparents, to his parents in Israel, and bought classified American documents from American-Jewish intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard. Black and Morris are the authors, respectively, of Zionism and the Arabs and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.