![]() The military censor requires the Israeli media to add the words “according to foreign publications” whenever it mentions secret actions attributed to Israeli intelligence, primarily targeted assassinations. Later in 2011, the chief of the General Staff of the IDF, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, asked the Shin Bet to take aggressive steps against the author, claiming that I had perpetrated “aggravated espionage” by having in my possession classified secrets and “using classified material in order to disparage me personally.” Since then, several actions have been taken by various bodies to stop publication of the book, or at least large parts of it. Letters were written to all former Mossad employees warning them against giving interviews, and individual conversations were held with certain ex-staffers who were considered the most problematic. As early as 2010, before the contract for this book was even signed, a special meeting was held in the Mossad’s operations division, Caesarea, to discuss ways of disrupting my research. The defense establishment did not merely sit with folded arms. A petition to the Supreme Court for an order forcing compliance with the law was dragged out over years, with the complicity of the court, and ended with nothing but an amendment to the law itself: The secrecy provisions were extended from fifty to seventy years, longer than the history of the state. Requests to the intelligence community that it comply with the law by transferring its historical documents to the State Archive and allowing publication of materials fifty years old or more were met with stony silence. How then, it might reasonably be asked, to write a book about one of the most secretive organizations on earth?Įfforts to persuade the Israeli defense establishment to cooperate with the research for this project went nowhere. Its near-total opacity is protected by a complex array of laws and protocols, strict military censorship, and the intimidation, interrogation, and prosecution of journalists and their sources, as well as a natural solidarity and loyalty among the espionage agencies’ personnel.Īll glimpses behind the scenes have, to this day, been partial at best. ![]() THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY guards its secrets jealously.
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