Review of Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad
Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad
Gordon Thomas
St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999
3460 Words
I am wholly unqualified to assess Gordon Thomas’ 1999 work Gideon’s Spies as a history of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad. Not only did I know little about the topic going in, but, given the murky and sensitive nature of the subject matter, I must assume that Thomas could publish only what the Mossad allowed him to publish—leaving out information that could harm or embarrass the agency or Israel itself. Further, given that people who work for intelligence agencies are by definition professional liars and conspirators, there is no way of telling how much of Thomas’ reporting is true. Sure, he does due diligence with his research and often reports events that can be verified through multiple sources. But when he secures interviews with Mossad agents, active and retired, or when he relates events that only this or that particular Mossad agent could have experienced, was he always given the whole truth? Who knows?
What I am qualified to assess, however, is the book’s readability and its value as non-fiction. In both cases, Gideon’s Spies succeeds well enough for an endorsement. It’s tightly written, suspenseful, evocative, and in parts utterly fascinating. Unless you possess secret information because you are A) a Mossad insider, B) an intelligence community expert, or C) an enemy of Israel that Israel hasn’t managed to kill yet, you will learn a lot from this book and walk away with a more realistic understanding of human nature. At least that was the case for me. As for a discourse on the just or unjust nature of Israel’s occupation of Arab lands or of Zionism itself, that is beyond the scope of this review. So is assessing the justice or lack thereof behind the Palestinian cause against Israel. My goals for this review are not so noble, nor so grand. Instead, I wish to summarize the main points of the book, retell some of the juicier bits for your enjoyment, and describe in detail newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell’s relationship with Mossad, which Thomas covers extensively. Maxwell, as most of us know, was a Mossad operative and the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, the former associate of the late Jeffrey Epstein, whose ghost has been in the news a lot recently.
Wanting to give us a feel for a typical Mossad operation, Thomas begins by relating the agency’s connection with the accidental deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her lover Dodi Al-Fayed in 1997. Mossad had been grooming one Henri Paul, the assistant chief of the Paris Ritz Hotel, as a potential informant since many notorious individuals passed through his hotel. Surveillance had shown him to be quite venal in his interactions with the Paparazzi, often violating hotel policy by allowing them to photograph celebrity guests. He also had a drinking problem and a tendency to pop pills when stressed. In short, he was corrupt and vulnerable, which, according to Mossad psychologists, would make him an ideal mabuah, or gentile informer. A Mossad katsa, or field agent, could easily use this damaging information to persuade Paul to let them keep tabs on whatever foreign dignitary, international terrorist, or arms dealer happened to stay at the Ritz on any given night. Thomas suspects that nonstop pressure from the Mossad spooked Paul and caused him to spiral deeper into pills and alcoholism. Whether this led to Paul’s driving drunk in the wee hours of August 31, 1997, slamming his hotel’s Mercedes into a concrete pillar in a Paris underpass, and killing himself and his famous passengers is anyone’s guess.
But, as with almost everything about the shadowy Mossad, it’s within the realm of possibility.
What follows in Gideon’s Spies is episode after episode which reveal beyond all else the ruthlessness, duplicity, and meticulousness of the Mossad. Explosions, assassinations, kidnappings, political intrigue, sexual entrapments, false identities, tapped telephones, dangerous undercover missions in the dead of night—it’s all there. This is real “spy vs. spy” territory, but the Mossad gives it its own sociopathic dimension. It’s basically Machiavelli meets the Old Testament. For instance, Mossad often incited disturbances or planted black propaganda in Arab countries not to fend off a certain threat but simply to sow distrust among the Arabs. They would also “kill both sides,” an expression coined by senior Mossad spymaster David Kimche. In the 1980s, the Mossad aided the Kurds in revolting against the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian regime, while simultaneously supplying arms to Tehran. Did they have good reasons to do all this? Or were they simply getting bored in Tel Aviv? When TWA flight 800 crashed in 1996, killing 230 people, Mossad’s division of psychological warfare (Hebrew acronym: LAP) blamed it falsely on Iran or Iraq. The FBI wasted many man-hours sussing that one out.
And remember Richard Jewell, who in the same year saved lives during a bomb attack at the Atlanta Olympics and then was labeled a terrorist? Right away LAP planted the lie that he had learned his bomb-making skills in Lebanon, thus piling on the poor man’s persecution. “Divided, we rule,” was the philosophy of 1960s Mossad director Meir Amit. His people did not spurn opportunities to divide their perceived enemies, which according to Thomas could be anyone at any time.
Former CIA director William Casey once compared his agency to the Mossad thusly:
A nation creates the intelligence community it needs. America relies on technical expertise because we are concerned to discover rather than secretly rule. The Israelis operate differently. Mossad, in particular, equates its actions with the country’s survival.
More colorfully, Casey referred to 1980s Mossad general director Nahum Admoni as “a Jew who’d want to win a pissing contest on a rainy night in Gdansk.” Of course, this is the same CIA which was responsible for Operation Mockingbird, MK Ultra, and selling crack cocaine in America’s inner cities in the 1990s. So we should take Casey’s words with a big grain of salt.
Thomas doesn’t exhaustively compare the Mossad with intelligence agencies from other countries, so it remains unclear whether Mossad was or still is more ruthless or duplicitous than its competition. Probably not. But according to Thomas, the Mossad may be the world champion of meticulousness. Its operations tend to be extremely well rehearsed, its agents extremely well prepared, and its eyes everywhere.
In the run-up to the Six Day War in 1967, there was either a Mossad katsa or an informer inside every Egyptian air base and military headquarters. There were no fewer than three in the General High Command headquarters in Cairo, staff officers who had been persuaded by Meir Amit. How he had done so had remained his closely guarded secret.
Thanks to the Mossad, Israel knew exactly where and when to strike the Egyptians. Amit was assured of the war’s outcome before the first shots were even fired.
Here Thomas describes how a katsa had to prepare for a secret mission inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990:
A dialect coach sat with him for hours, listening to him repeat the Sufi’s patois. Already fluent in Farsi and Arabic, Shalom quickly grasped the dialect of the tribesmen. Every night he was driven to a different part of the Negev to sleep, never more than dozing, then move to another place to avoid the instructors he knew were hunting him. Discovery would almost certainly mean his mission would be either postponed for further training, or assigned to another katsa.
As would be expected, Thomas gives us the blow-by-blow of Mossad’s 1960 kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. It was masterminded by Mossad’s longtime deputy director and Nazi hunter Rafi Eitan, whose cutthroat attitude was apparently still legend at Mossad headquarters when Gideon’s Spies was published. This was the man who hunted down and executed the Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. John le Carre based the central character of his novel The Little Drummer Girl on Eitan.
Eitan also greenlit the treachery of US-born Jewish traitor Jonathan Pollard, who, as a naval intelligence officer, handed over more than a thousand classified documents to Israel in the mid-1980s. Pollard was arrested and given a life sentence in 1985, but was released in November 2020. After the Gaza War began on October 7, 2023, Pollard took to the internet to passionately report on the Israeli forces’ suspiciously slow response to the attacks, which allowed over a thousand Israelis to be killed or taken hostage. It’s almost as if they knew of the attack in advance and then let it go on for hours in order to drum up a casus belli for a war which has now taken between 50,000 and 80,000 Palestinian lives and ethnically cleansed nearly 2 million people from Gaza. Would the Mossad be cold-blooded enough to do such a thing? Based on my reading of Thomas and my assumption that the worst of the agency had been kept from him, I would have to say, again, it is within the realm of possibility.
Another telling episode was the 1961 spat President John F. Kennedy had with Israeli president David Ben-Gurion. Kennedy was naturally opposed to Israel acquiring nuclear weapons since he wanted good relations with the oil exporting countries in the Middle East. Thus he insisted that the International Atomic Energy Agency regularly inspect Israel’s nuclear facility at the Dimona settlement in the Negev Desert. This infuriated Ben-Gurian, who instructed a Democratic fundraiser named Abraham Feinberg to turn the screws on Kennedy. “Make the putz understand the reality of life,” he told Feinberg. This Feinberg did, and not for the first time. When Kennedy was running for office, Feinberg had offered him half a million dollars, telling him that, “We are willing to pay your bills if you will let us have control of your Middle East policy.” This time around he warned that an inspection at Dimona would cost him Jewish financial support in the next election. Nevertheless, Kennedy stuck to his guns.
Even more galling, when inspectors came to Dimona with weeks’ prior notice, the Israelis had rigged the place to look like it wasn’t producing nuclear bombs. And the inspectors, who could not speak Hebrew, fell for it. Rafi Eitan was behind this sleight of hand, as well the smuggling of fissionable material out of a nuclear material processing company in Apollo, Pennsylvania, whose owner and chief executive were, predictably enough, also Jewish.
(Recently unredacted files reveal that this brazen theft happened under the nose of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, who may very well have the Mossad’s mole in the agency. Thomas, of course, had no way of knowing this when he wrote Gideon’s Spies, and mentions Angleton only sparingly.)
So does this add up to the Mossad assassinating John F. Kennedy? To say that they would have been cold-blooded enough is no great shakes because any intelligence agency would have been had they found Kennedy sufficiently annoying. How many times did the CIA try to assassinate Fidel Castro? But did the Mossad have the wherewithal at the time to do it? I would say yes. They had katsas everywhere in the United States, with at least one monitoring the White House. Finding some ideologically damaged radical (or radicals) to pump out long-range shots at the President’s motorcade in Dallas doesn’t seem like a stretch for a perspicacious reptile like Rafi Eitan.
Yes, but did they do it? Unfortunately, Gordan Thomas doesn’t give us enough information one way or the other. You will have to go to other sources to answer that question. The evidence may be circumstantial, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
As for Robert Maxwell, it went down like this. In 1984, Maxwell (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch), who owned the English Mirror newspapers, became the Mossad’s most well-connected sayan, or Jewish volunteer, in England. He was overbearing, impetuous, arrogant, bombastic, abrasive, and accustomed to high living. Yet he was a schmoozing genius and had access to some of the most influential men on the planet. Unsurprisingly given his daughter’s future behavior, he was obsessed with sex and was described by one of his senior reporters as “a sexual monster with a voracious appetite for seducing secretaries on his staff.” He also laundered his papers’ pension funds to a Mossad bank account so adroitly that he left “fraud investigators awed by his skilled duplicity.” Such skills enabled him to broker a deal between the Mossad and the KGB which laundered the profits of an Israeli company called ORA during the Iran-Contra affair. When Eitan needed someone to sell rigged surveillance software to intelligence services across the globe, he went to Maxwell. Maxwell also doxed Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower technician who revealed Israel’s nuclear weapons facility at Dimona. Vanunu was in hiding when the Mirror published a large photograph of him and smeared him as a fraud. This led to sayanim and katsas in England finding him, sexually entrapping him, and taking his drugged body back to Israel where he was questioned, tried in secret, and imprisoned for 18 years. 11 of those he spent in solitary.
Despite treating Maxwell like a king in Israel, the Mossad made sure to bug his hotel rooms and keep him well supplied with food, drink, and prostitutes. They obtained video footage of him in all sorts of sexually compromising positions. Things got frosty as Maxwell’s financial difficulties increased. Not only was he unable to pay back loans from Israeli investors which allowed him to purchase his newspapers, but it was revealed that he had skimmed some of ORA’s profits for himself. With characteristic chutzpah, Maxwell then demanded the Mossad not only pay back his pension fraud money, but also that they free Vanunu so Maxwell can publish an exclusive interview with him in his struggling newspaper. If the Mossad refused, who knew what damaging secrets this big-mouthed newspaper magnate could spill? Yes, he stupidly made that threat to Mossad director Nahum Admoni. It was allegedly at that point when the Mossad had decided that Robert Maxwell had to go.
According to Thomas, in November 1991, they had a katsa lure Maxwell to Spain and then to the Canary Islands via his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. While at sea, two men in a dinghy boarded the vessel, overpowered Maxwell, and injected an air bubble into his jugular, killing him almost instantly. (You will read about none of this on Maxwell’s Wikipedia page.) Despite his ignominious demise, the Israelis gave him highest honors at his funeral at the Mount of Olives. While Thomas mentions neither Ghislaine Maxwell nor Jeffrey Epstein in Gideon’s Spies, the notion that either or both could have worked for the Mossad in some capacity is, again, not beyond the realm of possibility.
Believe it or not, I am leaving out some of the best parts of Gideon’s Spies. These include Mossad’s connection to the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II (no, they didn’t do it), the idealistic young Arab mabuah that they so coldly betrayed, the raid on Entebbe affair, the Mossad’s collaboration with BOSS, the security apparatus of Apartheid South Africa, as well as the agency’s numerous high-profile failures and embarrassments. One particularly ghoulish contretemps occurred in 1984 when the Mossad attempted to smuggle ousted Nigerian minister Umaru Dikko out of England. The man was discovered in an airport hangar unconscious in a crate. Cooped up beside him was an Israeli physician with “a syringe in his hand ready to increase Dikko’s drug intake. There was an endotracheal tube in Dikko’s throat to stop him from choking on his own vomit.” Furthermore, the spy-vs-spy wrangling in Africa became, shall we say, spicy during the latter part of the Cold War. The Mossad’s rivalry with CSIS, the Chinese intelligence agency, was especially vicious.
Thomas reports:
For three years, Mossad waged its deadly war of attrition against the CSIS over the length and breadth of Africa. There was no mercy on either side. When a CSIS hit team ambushed a Mossad katsa in the Congo, they fed him to crocodiles, filming his last moments in the water and sending the footage to the local Mossad station chief. He retaliated by personally firing a rocket into the building from where the CSIS operated. Three Chinese were killed.
Despite being a thrilling read, Gideon’s Spies sheds little light on some of the burning mysteries of today. Aside from the Mossad’s potential connection to the Kennedy Assassination or Jeffrey Epstein, many of us would also like to know whether they were behind 9-11, as Wyatt Peterson recently claimed. I also explored the Israel-9-11 connection a couple years ago at Counter-Currents, as well as transcribed Carl Cameron’s banned Fox News coverage of it from December 2001. Unfortunately, none of this circumstantial evidence can be found in Gideon’s Spies. Given its publication date, it’s unlikely that it would be.
Throughout, Thomas maintains a measured respect for the Mossad that does not jeopardize his journalistic integrity. He’s not anti-Semitic, but nor is he servile to Israel or Jews. He may betray a slight pro-Israeli bias, but it’s nothing beyond the pale for a mainstream journalist in 1999. He’s also perfectly willing to expose all that is ugly, cruel, dishonest, and frankly sleazy about the Mossad. He would have to, being their biographer, despite what respect for them he may hold. In the 1990s, former Mossad operatives Ari Ben-Manashe and Victor Ostrovsky had each published books revealing insider details which severely damaged the agency. For example, Ostrovsky alleged that the Mossad had actually plotted to assassinate President George H. W. Bush in 1991. Could Gideon’s Spies have been a Mossad attempt at damage control? Who knows? Again, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility—especially considering that Thomas weirdly ends his book not with a proper conclusion but with the prediction that with all its failures, the Mossad is always one SNAFU away from having a new director general appointed. Was this uncharacteristically soft landing a way of humanizing the Mossad?
My reading of Thomas however leads me to one rock solid conclusion—that Israel is not and never was an ally of the United States. From the very beginning, it was monitoring Americans and stealing from Americans. Thomas reports:
In a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA had identified Israel as one of six foreign countries with “a government-directed, orchestrated, clandestine effort to collect US economic secrets.”
And not just economic secrets. Military secrets, computer secrets, nuclear secrets, sexual secrets, any secrets, really—all of it was on the table. Perhaps the most telling evidence of Israel’s perfidy—worse in my opinion than the attack on the USS Liberty—was how the Mossad knew damn well that the 1983 attack on American marines in Beirut was going to happen. They were supposed to inform the CIA and didn’t. Even worse, they were live monitoring the bomb-laden vehicle as it plowed full speed into Marine headquarters, killing 241 service members. According to Victor Ostrovsky, a Mossad officer callously said afterward of the Americans: “They wanted to stick their nose into this Lebanon thing, let them pay the price.”
Now, to be fair, no one should resent the Israelis because the Mossad is good at what they do. Gordon Thomas certainly doesn’t, and good on him for that. I am sure the CIA has done some nasty things to Israel as well. I have no doubt the CIA bugs and monitors Israelis every chance they get—in the US and abroad, in embassies, and in Israel itself. Of course, they should. Further, if the Israelis ever have something worth stealing, I sincerely hope the CIA would filch it as remorselessly as Israel has filched from the United States. I’m sure that law and ethics are little more than fanciful luxuries in the cutthroat world of spy vs. spy. Therefore I am willing to give wide latitude to the Mossad. But when billions of dollars move in only one direction in the relationship between America and Israel, that’s when we should start resenting the Israelis. It’s one thing to lose your secret stuff to talented spies; that comes with the territory when you run a country. It’s something else entirely to lose your secret stuff, while getting your pocket picked, while listening to your pocket-picker whisper sweet nothings about how he’s your greatest ally, while this same pocket-picker wants you fight his battles for him, while this selfsame pocket-picker is willing to smear you as a Nazi if you dare run your mouth about any of this.
It doesn’t take a hardened anti-Semite or anti-Zionist to see how abusive and one-sided this relationship is. And although I’m sure this wasn’t Gordon Thomas’ intention, this is the conclusion one cannot help but draw after reading Gideon’s Spies.