Israel's Secret Wars

Below is a limited preview of the book Israel's Secret Wars

 https://archive.org/details/israelssecretwar0000blac_b5m5

Israel’s Secret Wars

: a History of Israel’s Intelligence Services

by Ian Black and Benny Morris

Grove Press, 1991 Kyle D.R. Tadman

BOOK REVIEW

 Israel’s Secret Wars is the first documented, comprehensive history of all three of Israel’s intelligence services, from their origins in the 1930s, through Israel’s five wars, up to the present

Israel’s Secret Wars

A History of Israel's Intelligence Services

by Ian Black

https://groveatlantic.com/book/israels-secret-wars/

Ian Black, the co-author of Israel’s Secret Wars (1991), was the Guardian’s award-winning Middle East editor, after serving as its correspondent in Jerusalem, diplomatic editor and European editor. He also wrote the introduction to The Arab Spring: Revolution, Rebellion and a New World Order (2012) and Zionism and the Arabs (1986). He died in 2023.

About The Book Israel’s Secret Wars

One of the events most crucial to the war in the Persian Gulf occurred nearly ten years before it began, when Israel destroyed Iraq’s most advanced weapon, the nuclear reactor at Al-Tuweitha, acting on information obtained by Israeli intelligence. Israel’s Secret Wars is the first documented, comprehensive history of all three of Israel’s intelligence services, from their origins in the 1930s, through Israel’s five wars, up to the present, including the Ostrovsky affair. Highly readable and exhaustively researched, it contains the most accurate information available about a shadowy and controversial subject in which myth all too often obscures reality.

Using heretofore undisclosed contemporary reports, memoranda, and private diaries, Israel’s Secret Wars describes for the first time in print the beginnings of the Israeli-U.S. intelligence relationship; the Israeli-French espionage connection during the Algerian War, which underlay their military alliance in the Suez crisis; the fateful message from a high-level Arab agent that initiated the Yom Kippur war; and many more previously unexamined operations and episodes.

Placing every event in its historical context, Black and Morris disentangle the often stormy links between spymasters and politicians in such affairs as the Entebbe raid, Irangate, the Pollard spy scandal, and the Palestinian intifada. Israel’s Secret Wars promises to become the standard work on Israeli intelligence for years to come.

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For those wanting to understand why Israel’s intelligence network is widely considered to be one of the most capable in the world today, one would be wise to first examine the book, Israel’s Secret Wars: a History of Israel’s Intelligence Services, by Benny Morris and Ian Black.

In acknowledging their motives and rationale for writing this work, the two authors assert that there was a glaring lack of balanced and factual research previously conducted on this topic, and as such, was a major incentive to their studying Israeli intelligence.1

The two authors additionally note that understanding how Israel has defended itself from Arab aggression through the years also provided incentive for studying the intelligence network’s origins and development into an elite force.2 In making such an assertion of self-defense throughout the work, Morris and Black have tried to take the lives of secret agents, spies, acts of terrorism, and national security out of the realm of popular fiction and instead placed them all within its proper historical context of politics and international relations in the contemporary world.3 In light of the author’s efforts to put their work in such a setting, the book’s argument attempts to provide a historical narrative that illuminates how the nation’s politicians have been influenced by the individual branches and at times, used each of them accordingly to carry out their chosen foreign and domestic policy agenda since before the 1 Ian Black and Benny Morris.

Israel’s Secret Wars: a History of Israel’s Intelligence Services (New York: Grove Press, 1991), xiii. 2 Black and Morris, xv. 3 Black and Morris, xvii. 1 nation’s official inception in 1948. In doing so, the individual branches’ operational successes and failures come to light as the authors explore the numerous encounters between Israeli operatives and their opposition from the likes of Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Arab world, among others. Briefly summarizing Morris and Black’s work illuminates the long and arduous evolution of operational successes and failure by the Israeli intelligence network. Their discussion begins with the Jewish intelligence gathering efforts of the 1930’s as the ‘settlers’ tried to overcome the Arab revolt and then continues on to show how these aspirations laid the foundation for the sophisticated Israeli networks to come several years later. As the book progresses through each of its chapters, the author’s examine how the covert branches tested their intelligence gathering in battle as evidenced from their work during the Sinai Campaign of 1956 and the Six Day War of 1967 that included Israel’s subsequent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The work continues on further to analyze the intelligence network’s experiences through the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and into the nation’s challenges with Palestinian terrorism in the 1970’s, before finally delving into Israel’s reactions to the first Intifada of the late 1980’s where the two authors decide to conclude their discussion. A critical analysis of the historical work’s overall intentions illustrates that there are a couple of points worth noting for further examination. The first notion considers the persuasiveness of Morris and Black’s thesis and their overall efforts to illustrate the success and failures of the intelligence network while it operated within the realm of the overall larger political environment inside Israel.

A further review highlights the idea that the authors do a more than admirable job of recounting the numerous instances of Israeli politics mixing with their intelligence network’s success and failures in fighting Arab 2 aggression. For example, in chapter six entitled, Great Leaps Forward: 1956-1957, readers can witness the impact of Israel’s intelligence successes on the nation’s political situation in months and weeks leading up to and then during the Suez War of 1956 with Egypt as Morris and Black noted the, “Victory in Sinai ushered in a long period of peace on the borders, economic growth, and widening international acceptance.”4

However, it should also be noted that readers are able to discern from its overall argument that the two writers somehow managed to stray from one of their stated objectives for studying this topic and ultimately publishing this book.

A look back at the work’s introduction recalls the author’s intentions of providing a balanced and accurate history of Israel’s intelligence network. Yet reader’s can easily uncover both Morris and Black’s lack of objectivity when one starts to take into account how they fail to consider the perspectives of other nations including the Arab and Palestinian people as they discuss Israel’s countless operations against them and others from around the world.

The authors easily fall prey to the widely accepted definition of ‘terrorism’ without a proper discussion or analysis of the Palestinian people only using the ‘means’ they have had at their disposal; or the notion that Israel’s strategy and tactics could just as well be deemed terrorism by the global community when considering the Jewish state’s use of tanks, helicopters, and other sophisticated technologies.

As a reader, one will not find Morris and Black writing from the perspective of an acknowledged Israeli ‘occupation,’ nor will they uncover any type of moral arguments being made by the authors against Israel’s use of such military capabilities in comparison to what they were up against when confronting the Palestinian’s rocks, Molotov cocktails, and eventual suicide vests. Unfortunately, disregarding the perspectives and rationale of Israeli opposition in this manner only stands to undermine the author’s best efforts to portray the 4Black and Morris, 168. 3 intelligence network as only enduring the consequences of their operations, whether positive or negative, as a result of another’s aggression. Although Morris and Black’s research is coherently organized throughout the chapters, a second noteworthy point of interest leads to another criticism of this historical work.

The ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’ provided fail to adequately serve their anticipated roles within a historical work of research. Whereas one would expect for the ‘Introduction’ to offer considerable direction as to what the significant themes of the work might be, or what is going be covered in each chapter as the work moves along; instead, the authors have chosen to provide some of the incentives and reasons as to why they wrote a book on this subject matter. For instance, one example provides the author’s perspectives in writing from their brief discussion on why they have chosen to study Israeli intelligence in noting that, “it really matters” in referring to the nation’s ‘need’ for taking such measures to combat Palestinian and other nation’s military aggression that threatens its security.5 Overall however, the ‘Introduction’ falls short of laying out the expected framework of the work’s argument for the reader; and perhaps most importantly, fails to foreshadow the book’s intellectual depth surrounding its cast of characters and scenarios before getting starting with its argument.

Unfortunately, readers do not come to realize that they were supposed to decipher a number of overriding points being made about the intelligence network’s responsibilities and its significance to the defense of Israel - until after reading the work’s ‘Conclusion.’ It is not until this point that readers realize they need to now use hindsight and recall how the author’s routinely discussed the roles and importance of individual intelligence chiefs as they replaced one another with time. Or that someone reading this historical account was 5Black and Morris, xv. 4 supposed to understand that obtaining sophisticated weaponry and advanced technologies secretly was a main preoccupation of the Israeli intelligence services; and that this notion was a significant theme in the book.

Or yet still, that the overriding function and objectives of Israeli intelligence has been to assess the military intentions and capabilities of the Arab world. Fortunately, this last notion was somewhat discernable in the ‘Introduction’ following the previously noted discussion on the hostile nature that exists between the two combatants and how ‘it really matters’ that Israel spies on its enemies as much as possible. However, it seems that highlighting the network’s ‘overriding’ functions and objectives more explicitly in accordance with the other previously mentioned points from the very outset would have made considerably more sense to the book’s reader. Doing so would have served them much better than the author’s just pointing out the overriding themes in an ‘oh, by the way’ manner during their concluding remarks on Israeli intelligence. The final point is brief but can be considered immediately upon completion of the book as the reader’s initial reaction finds that this work seems to be the definitive source on Israeli intelligence.

However it should be noted that a further review of what has been published on the subject matter reveals that although Morris and Black’s book is a bit dated and in need of an updated version since its publishing in 1991; the work still appears to be the most widely accepted and credible account on the topic available today despite its shortcomings. In overall summary, it should be pointed out that this book is a very detailed, informative, and well-written account that immediately catches, and then manages to keep the reader’s imagination throughout their discussion on Israeli intelligence. However, it must also be reiterated that although one’s imagination is preoccupied throughout the 5 narrative, Morris and Black’s historical account still contains a handful of rather significant deficiencies as well. As highlighted earlier, the author’s fail to provide the anticipated commentary on the book’s “direction” that one has come expect in the ‘Introduction’ of a historical work.

They have also fallen short in their stated objective of providing the balanced perspective the two spoke about initially, and is easily identified throughout each of the chapters in the book.

That said Morris and Black’s examination of Israeli intelligence still has the ability to enhance one’s understanding considerably of not only how and why the individual branches have operated to a level of success or failure in the manner that they have, but also how the branches have been used by Israeli politician’s to often formulate and even, at times, carry out these political decisions as well. These points should also lead reader’s to conclude that again, despite the book’s shortcomings, this particular work likely offers any of its readers an enlightened perspective on the network’s origins and its development through the years as each branch endured their respective successes and failures while fighting for Israel’s cause.

These noted opportunities to learn a number of things surrounding the history of Israeli intelligence leads to Morris and Black’s book coming highly recommended to historians, academics, and the casual reader alike despite its publishing almost twenty years ago.