Israel’s secret service

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33065, 4 November 1972, Page 11

Israel’s secret service

(By

DAVID LEWIS)

To the casual passer-by, the dingy house looks no different from any of the others in the drab Tel Aviv side street. But behind the unobtrusive facade, the building is far from ordinary’.

The windows are steel-shuttered, the walls reinforced and the doors lined with armoured steel. In addition, the rooms are wired to an alarm system to warn of intruders, and most of the people who work there are armed.

It is a veritable fortress—the headquarters of the youngest, smallest but probably most effective secret service in the world. Only a few hundred agents work for the Shin Beth but, despite their limited numbers — America’s C.1.A., in contrast, employ almost as many men in their postal departments alone—they have chalked up some remarkable successes. It is perhaps scarcely any wonder that the Black September terrorists have been forced to carry out their activities outside Israel’s borders. Spectacular results Like the guerrillas, the arm of the Israeli secret service stretches world-wide, but far more effectively. It was the Shin Beth, for instance, which organised Adolf Eichmann’s kidnapping from Buenos Aires in 1960, and it was an Israeli intelligence tip which saved General de Gaulle from an officer’s plot in Algeria. The Shin Beth — formed after May, 1948, when the British withdrew from Palestine and the new state of Israel was created—was especiaaly active in the weeks before the Six-Day War. Their agents successfully penetrated the Egyptian and Syrian armed forces and the information they radioed back to the Tel Aviv headquarters was a major factor in the Israeli’s swift success. Indeed, their efficiency and list of achievements are so spectacular than Mr Allan Dulles, former head of the C.1.A., has described the Shin Beth as “one of the best intelligence organisations in the world.” The German spy master, Reinhard Gehlen, has also publicly praised their resourcefulness and cunning. The man who created Shin Beth and controlled their operations for 15 years until his retirement in 1953, was Iser Harel, a former officer in the Haganah—the organisation responsible for waging war on the British and smuggling in thousands of refugees against the imposed quota. When he came to recruit men for the new secret service, he used one simple method of selection. A former Shin Beth officer, now retired, told me recently: “We wanted volunteers. We weren’t interested in James Bond types, nor career men who thought they could build a future for themselves and gain personal advantage through serving their country.” Any risk Shin Beth agents are prepared to break any law and take any risk, though Iser Harel says he forbade the torture of captured agents on moral grounds. He wasn’t even very happy about the Eichmann kidnap attempt. “I didn’t do it with enthusiasm,” he has admitted, “but the circumstances in this case were extraordinary. If the men of Shin Beth rarely use torture, they are far more frequently prepared to kill. When the British pulled out of Palestine, one of the new secret service’s first tasks was to track down Nazi criminals. Sometimes these men were simply denounced to the authorities of the countries where they were in hiding. Often, they were executed after a secret trial in their homes. The keynote of Shin Beth success has always been audacity — the sort of cool cheek exemplified by the capture of Eichmann and the illegal sailing away of five French gunboats to Israel in 1969. Poor pay It’s the kind of courage that Eli Cohen, one of their top spies, demonstrated when he set up a transmitter in Damascus directly opposite the heavily-guarded Syrian military headquarters. His career, with its mixture of bravery, dedication and determination, could almost be a microcosm of the entire Israeli secret service. Born in Alexandria in 1924, he went to Israel after the Suez invasion. In 1959 he told his wife, Nadia, that he had joined a commercial organisation and would have to travel a great deal. In fact Eli had joined the Shin Beth. As a secret service agent he earned less than a £lOO a month—even Shin Beth departmental heads only draw £l9O a month—but for him the rewards lay in serving his country. It was decided that Eli should be infiltrated into Syria by way of South America. He was to pose as a Syrian whose parents had emigrated to Buenos Aires when he was a child.

Month by month, Eli painstakingly built up a background which would stand up to the most stringent investigation by Syrian counter-intelligence.

Syrian moves When all was ready he went to live in Damascus. There, he soon became part of a clique of high-ranking officers and successful businessmen and, from his position of trust, he was able to warn Tel Aviv of every political and military move the Syrians were hatching. Eli Cohen radioed his information to Tel Aviv on a transmitter the size of a cigarette packet, and it was entirely thanks to him that the Syrian army was rapidly defeated when war broke out. By day, he kept the radio hidden in an ornate light fitting in his flat. It was the frequency of his transmissions, necessary because of the vast amount of classified material he was gathering, that finally betrayed him.

Syrian counter-intelligence guessed that a transmitter was being operated in the area when residents, including some embassies, complained of radio interference. They used a highly sophisticated Russian detector van to locate the flat from which the messages were being sent And at 8 a.m. on Thursday, January 21, 1965, army and police officers burst in on Eli Cohen as he was completing a transmission. Secret trial Tried in secret he was sen-, fenced to death, and Israel did everything possible to save him. They offered to exchange Syrian spies and to pay a staggering £lom in cash and goods for their agent’s life. But the Syrians, outraged by Cohen’s successful penetration of their forces, hanged him publicly in the main square in Damascus on May 19, 1965. The former Shin Beth officer told me: “In some ways we are a young secret service, but in others we are the oldest in the world. You recall how Joshua sent men to spy.” Certainly, this centuries-old tradition is not forgotten by the men of Shin Beth. Before the Six Day war, for example, they employed experts to study an old reference book to trace water holes in the desert.

Later, Israeli units were given obscure map references and ordered to uncover the silted-over holes. Ir. every case, they were successful in finding water. The old reference book the Shin Beth used? It was the Bible.