Israel’s supercops

Mossad by Michael Bar-Zohar & Nissim Mishal HARPER COLLINS; Price: Rs.999; Pages 390 Contrary to the fervid and over-blown imagination of Hollywood movie directors, the lives of spies and counter-spies, intelligence and counter-intelligence agents are nasty, brutal and usually short. The voyage of their lives comprises dangerous clandestine meetings, long hours of surveillance, interrogation, torture, isolation and anonymity. With gunboat diplomacy dead, nuclear stockpiles ruling out conventional wars, and jet travel and ICT (information communication technologies) shrinking distances and reducing national boundaries, to mere nuisances, the covert operations of sophisticated intelligence services such as America’s CIA, Russia’s KGB, Britain’s MI6, Pakistan’s ISI, Israel’s Mossad, Iran’s Mukhbarat and even our own RAW (Research & Analysis Wing), are increasingly shaping the politics, foreign policy and even the future of nations. While the CIA and MI6 have been glamourised — and often parodied — by Hollywood and potboilers, perhaps the world’s most admired secret service is Israel’s Mossad. It has played a major role in this tiny country (pop.8.2 million) surviving the sustained hostility of its Arab neighbours whose combined population exceeds 100 million, and whose enormous oil and petroleum wealth enables them to purchase the latest hi-tech weaponry and armaments. How successive ramsads (directors) of Mossad working in close cooperation with democratically elected governments subject to the supervision of the Knesset (parliament) and an intrusive free press, have managed to nip every conspiracy and extract revenge for historical wrongs against the Jewish people and terrorist atrocities against citizens of Israel (estb.1948), is recounted in this collection of non-fiction case histories detailing the greatest triumphs of this fearsome intelligence agency.    Written in a fluid and economic style by Dr. Michael Bar-Zohar, a former member of the Knesset, professor at Haifa and Emory (USA) universities and author of several fiction and non-fiction works, together with historian and former head of Israel Television, Nissim  Mishal, Mossad begins with the description of a huge explosion in November 2011 of a secret missile base on the outskirts of Teheran which killed Gen. Hassan Moghaddam, mastermind of Iran’s Shehab long-range missiles programme. “But the secret target of the bombing was not Moghaddam. It was a solid fuel rocket engine, able to carry a nuclear missile more than six thousand miles across the globe, from Iran’s underground silos to the US mainland,” write the authors. Indeed a major objective of this compendium seems to be a thinly veiled warning to the theocracy in Iran whose leadership is developing a nuclear programme to make good its “blunt and explicit promise… to obliterate Israel from the (world) map”.  The authors freely acknowledge that even as the US government is conducting slow and tortuous negotiations to persuade hardliners in Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, Mossad is waging a “stubborn shadow war” against it by “sabotaging nuclear facilities, assassinating scientists, supplying plants with faulty equipment and raw materials via bogus companies, organising  desertions of high-ranking military officers and introducing ferocious viruses into Iran’s computer systems”. And since the Iranian leadership doesn’t…