✡✡ Israeli Secret Intelligence Service THE MOSSAD | המוסד ✡✡ - YouTube ✡✡ Israeli Secret Intelligence Service THE MOSSAD | המוסד ✡✡ Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on May 30, 2012 New video I've just made about the Mossad! Israeli Mossad - the strongest and most qualitative secret intelligence service in the world. **Credit to Speedy (media) for all the info on the Mossad ops. Category Mossad - The World's Most Efficient Killing Machine By Gordon Thomas 12-9-2 Standing on a canteen table in down-town Tel Aviv, Israel's spymaster studied the men and women of Mossad. In the few weeks since taking over Mossad, Meir Dagan knew he already commanded something his recent predecessors never managed. Respect. Barely raising his voice he spoke. "When I was fighting in Lebanon, I witnessed the aftermath of a family feud.

The patriarch's head had been split open, his brain on the floor. Around him lay his wife and some of his children. All dead. Before I could do anything, one of the murderers scooped up a handful of brain and swallowed it. This is how you will all now operate. Otherwise someone will eat your brain." His every word held them in thrall - even if they sent a shudder through some of his listeners, hardened as they were. In the canteen were those who had killed many times already. Killing enemies who could not be brought to trial because they were hidden deep inside Israel's Arab neighbours. Only Mossad could find and kill them. Rafi Eitan, the legendary former Operations Chief of Mossad told me when we sat together in his living room in a north Tel Aviv suburb: "I always tried to kill when I could see the whites of a person's eyes. So I could see the fear. Smell it on his breath. Sometimes I used my hands. A knife, or a silenced gun.

I never felt a moment's regret over a killing." Meir Amit, when he had been director of Mossad, later insisted "we are like the official hangman or the doctor on Death Row who administers the lethal injection. Our actions are all endorsed by the State of Israel. When Mossad kills it is not breaking the law. It is fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day". We spoke as he walked me through Mossad's own unique memorial in Tel Aviv to the dead - a concrete maze shaped in the form of a brain. Each name engraved on the concrete was of an agent who had been killed while trying to destroy Israel's enemies. Some of those agents had one thing in common. Amit had sent them to their deaths. "We did all we could to protect them. We trained them better than any other secret service. Sometimes, out on a mission, the dice is against you. But there will always be brave men ready to roll the dice," he said. Dagan, his listeners in the canteen knew, was cast in the same mould. He would protect them with every means he knew - legal or illegal. He would allow them to use proscribed nerve toxins. Dum-dum bullets.

Ways of killing that not even the Mafia, the former KGB or China's secret service use. But he would not hesitate to expose them to death - if it was for the greater good of Israel. That was the deal those in the canteen had accepted when they were recruited. They, too, were ready to roll the dice. Dagan, only the tenth man to head Mossad and bear the title of memune - "first among equals in Hebrew" - reminded his listeners sat on their plastic-form chairs what Meir Amit had once said. Then Dagan added: "I am here to tell you those days are back. The dice is ready to roll." Dagan jumped down from the table and walked out of the canteen in total silence. Only then did the applause start. Shortly afterwards came the Mombasa massacre of eleven days ago. An explosive-laden land-cruiser drove into the reception area of the island's Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel. Fifteen people died and 80 were seriously injured. Two shoulder-fired missiles nearly downed an Israeli passenger plane bringing tourists back to Tel Aviv from Kenya. Two hundred and seventy-five barely missed a Lockerbie-style death.

Meir Dagan immediately suspected it was the work of Osama bin-Laden's al-Quaeda and that the missiles had come from Iraq's arsenal. But to suspect and prove would be the greatest challenge Mossad had faced since the War on Terrorism was launched by President Bush. "Mossad would not be operating in its own backyard against suicide bombers. It would be working 1,500 miles away in a hostile environment. There would only be lip-service support from the authorities on the ground. Other intelligence services would be trawling through the evidence looking for clues that would fit their agendas. The CIA for a fix on bin-Laden. MI6 for a lead back to a threat to Britain. The same for the Germans," a senior intelligence man in Tel Aviv told me. But for Meir Dagan it was time to roll the dice. Every person with proven field experience was on a plane to Kenya within an hour of the massacre. They would sift and search the wreckage, using sophisticated equipment to do so. Detectors that could detect a sliver of metal deep inside a corpse - metal that would show where the explosives came from. And much else. The team who would "roll the dice" travelled separately - as they always did.

They had their own aircraft, their own pilots. They were the men and women of kidon, Mossad's ultra-secret assassination unit. Their sole job in Mombasa was to find and kill the perpetrators of the massacre: those behind the three bombers who had gone to their deaths laughing. The kidon would kill the planners of the massacre after they had traced them to their lair - wherever it was. It might take months - as it had with avenging the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. But the kidon would find the men behind the Mombasa outrage and kill them. They would use a small laboratory of poisons, sealed in vials until the moment came to strike. They had long and short-blade knives. Piano wire to strangle. Explosives no bigger than a throat lozenge capable fo blowing off a person's head. An arsenal of guns: short-barrel pistols, sniper rifles with a mile killing range. The team chosen to go to Mombasa had local language skills. They could pass for Arabs or for Indian traders. Between them, they spoke Swahili and other dialects. They dressed the part; they looked the part.

They also understood the closed language of their world. They had learned how to memorise fibres - precise physical descriptions of people. Neviof , how to break into an office, a bedroom, or any other given target and plant listening bugs - or a bomb. Masluh, the skill of shaking off a tail. The women had learned how to use their sex. To be ever ready to sleep with someone to obtain vital information. The link between intelligence work and sexual entrapment is as old as spying itself. Meir Amit had said when he was Mossad's chief: "Sex is a woman's weapon. Pillow talk is not a problem for her. But it takes a special kind of courage. It is not just sleeping with an enemy. It is to obtain information." The kidon team had passed the two years course at the Mossad training school at Henzelia, near Tel Aviv. They had been sent to a special camp in the Negev desert. There they had learned to kill. "They are taught how to use the weapon appropriate for the target. Strangulation with a cheese-cutter if the victim is to be killed at night. A handgun fitted with a silencer.

A nerve agent delivered by an aerosol or injection," explained Victor Ostrovsky, a former member of kidon. Ostrovsky, who today lives in Arizona, will not say who he has killed. But he quit Mossad - saying he could not "stomach the way they did things". My sources in Mossad say he is "long past his sell-by date. We do things differently now". And, by all accounts, more ruthlessly. The man known to Mossad as "The Engineer" was a top Hamas bomb-maker. He lived on the West Bank, protected by gunmen. One day he received a visitor - a distant cousin from Gaza. The young man spoke like so many from that hotbed of Islamic fanaticism. Over mint tea, the two men spoke far into the evening. Finally, The Engineer invited his guest to stay over. The offer was accepted. The youth asked if he could use The Engineer's mobile phone to call his own family to say they should not worry. He asked if he could make the call from outside the house to improve reception. The Engineer nodded. The call over, the two men fell asleep on the floor. Next day, the youth left to return to Gaza.

That morning, The Engineer received a call on the mobile. As he put the phone to his mouth and started to speak, his head was blown off. The youth had been recruited by Mossad to plant a powerful explosive inside the phone. The detonation signal had come from a kidon half a mile away. No one had seen him arrive. No one saw him go. Over the past years, Mossad have killed scores of Israel's enemies by such methods. "We try to never use the same method twice. Our technicians spend all their time devising new ways to kill," a Mossad source told me last week. Their roll-call of Mission Successful includes; Fathi Shkaki, the leader of Islamic Jihad, and Gerald Bull, the rogue Canadian investor of Saddam's supergun. The usual composition of a hit team is four. One is the "target locator". His task is to keep tabs on the victim's movements. Another is the "transporter", to get the team safely away from the killing area. The remaining two men perform the execution. In the case of Gerald Bull they knocked on his front door late in the evening. The ballistic expert had just moved in. He had been assured he was safe by his Iraqi minders.

But they had been lured away by some of the kidon back-up team. These are known as sayanim - the Hebrew word for helpers. Throughout the world there are tens of thousands. Each has been carefully recruited to provide the kind of help that the kidon unit required to kill Bull. The assassination was simple. Both kidon wore FedEx courier uniforms. One carried a package. The other knocked on the door. When Bull opened it, the package was thrust at him. As he stepped back he was shot - once in the forehead and once in the throat. He flew backwards into the hall. The package was retrieved, the door closed behind the dead Bull. Both men calmly walked away to where the "transporter" was waiting. In hours, the team was back in Tel Aviv. Preparation for an assassination can take weeks, even months. The hit team, once selected, is moved to a Mossad safe house, one of many in Israel. Eli Cohen, a former Mossad agent, told me that "a safe house looks like it was furnished from a car boot sale". It was in one such safe house that the plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein was prepared. It was elaborate even by Mossad standards.

It revolved around killing Saddam during a visit to one of his mistresses. Mossad agents in Baghdad had discovered that the woman, the widow of a serving Iraqi officer who had died mysteriously, would be driven from the palace to keep a tryst with Saddam in a desert villa outside the city. Heavily guarded, the villa would be a hard target to hit. But Mossad believed there was a window of opportunity between the time Saddam would land in his helicopter near the villa and enter its well-protected compound. The plan to kill Saddam has long been on Mossad's agenda. But previous attempts had failed due to Saddam's obsession with changing his movements at the last moment. Mossad believed he would not do so this time. "The woman is irresistible," said a report from one of its Baghdad undercover agents. Mossad had scouted an air corridor through which it believed a kidon could be flown in below Iraqi radar. A final rehearsal was held in the Negev desert. Israeli commandos doubled as Saddam and his bodyguards - a party of five. As they landed close to a replica of the villa, the kidon were in position. They were equipped with specially adapted shoulder-firing missiles.

But their weapons were to only fire blanks for the rehearsal. In a tragic mistake, one of the missiles had been replaced with a live one. It killed the make-believe Saddam and his bodyguards. The operation was cancelled. But last week Meir Dagan was said to be considering adapting it to once more try and kill Saddam. After eleven days investigation, his teams in Mombasa confirmed the massacre had all the hallmarks of being an Iraqi-sponsored act carried out by al-Quaeda. How and when Mossad will strike against Saddam is, understandably, a closely guarded secret. But an intelligence sources suggested to me that a successful assassination of Saddam could see the looming threat of war recede. "With Saddam out of the way there is no reason to invade Iraq. The people themselves will rise," said the source. Dagan, the Mossad chief who could possible achieve that was born on a train between Russia and Poland. He speaks several languages. He is an action man, working 18 hour days. His private life is simple: he eschews the trappings of power that goes with the job of running MI6 or the CIA. His salary is a fraction of what their directors get.

Three months into the job, he is adored by his staff. In the past years, Mossad has experienced many publicised failures, a loss of morale and, worst of all, growing public criticism among its own people. All that Meir Dagan is determined to change. In his open neck shirt and chain store pants and sneakers, Dagan is no James Bond. The only spy fiction he is known to read is John Le Carre - because, he has told friends, he can at least empathise with its hero, Smiley. Meir Dagan is also an avid reader of history of other intelligence services. It is said he knows more about the CIA and MI6 than many of its current employees. He constantly reminds his staff that action cannot wait for certainty. That motive and deception are at the centre of their endeavours. That they must create situations which seek to draw fact out of darkness. For him the art of informed conjecture is an essential weapon. Since Mombasa, Dagan has virtually worked and slept in his office. Its windows look eastwards to the Judean Hills.

Beyond are the tribal badlands of Pakistan - where Dagan is convinced Osama bin-Laden is hiding - and the desert of Iraq through which Dagan believes Saddam will try and escape if war starts. The Mossad chief will be waiting. Meantime, he is preoccupied with the latest news from Mombasa - and all those points east where his kidon team are tracking the planners of the outrage. Some have gone to the Philippines. Others to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mossad's scientists and pathologists, as well as field agents, katsas, have combed and bagged the clues from the Paradise hotel disaster area. Every day an El Al plane has flown northwards to Israel with the evidence despite behind-the-scene protests by the Kenyan intelligence service. Mossad agents in Nigeria have provided important details on al-Quaeda in that country. Katsas in South Africa have joined colleagues in Mombasa. From Rome, Malta and Cyprus, other Mossad agents sped down through Africa into the country's fierce heat. Dagan's men are polite to the counter-intelligence officers from the CIA, MI6 and European services. "But these are Israelis who are dead or injured. This is Mossad's job.

And everybody had better remember that," said one Mossad source. Mossad has made no friends on the ground. They rarely do. That is their style: go it alone. They believe they know more than anyone else in fighting terrorism. And they may be right. In Tel Aviv, having done all he could for the moment, Meir Dagan waits. The 57 years-old, battle-hardened hero of past wars in Lebanon, in all those places in the Middle East where the alleys have no names, has earned his reputation as a no-holds barred leader. In those days, with a handgun in his pocket and his dog at his heel, he had led from the front. Twice he had been wounded, so that nowadays he sometimes uses a walking stick. He dislikes doing so. He detests any sign of weakness in himself or in others. Dagan is a blunt man, proud and imperious and prepared to stand on his record. He crushed the first Intifada in Gaza in 1971. Two years later he fought in the Yom Kippur War.

For him, Mossad, and ultimately Israel, the Mombasa massacre is a test - to show that Mossad is back on centre stage with a vengeance. No other intelligence service has a better history of operations in Central Africa. In the 1960s Mossad drove out the vaunted Chinese Secret Intelligence Service. It stopped Cuba's Fidel Castro exporting his revolution into Africa. It beat the KGB at its own plans to turn the Congo into its playground. It was a dirty and deadly war. A terrorist group ambushed a Mossad katsa in the Congo and fed him to the crocodiles. They filmed his last, threshing moments in the water - and sent the footage to the local Mossad station chief. He retaliated by placing a two-pound bomb under the toilet seat of the terrorist leader. It blew the villa apart. Twelve terrorists died. Mossad built up a relationship with BOSS, the security service of the South African apartheid government. It sent a team to Pretoria to teach BOSS the art of sophisticated methods of interrogation.

Israeli instructors showed them the black art of sleep deprivation, hooding, forcing a suspect to stand facing a wall for long hours, and mental tortures such as mock tortures. "The one certainty is that if the Mombasa killers are caught Mossad won't bother with mock executions," said a Mossad source. The methods Mossad uses are often outside the law. They have a unit that specialises in burglary - using far more sophisticated means than those employed by the infamous Watergate burglars. Their ineptitude led to the downfall of President Nixon. They have a special team of scientists working at the Institute for Biological Research in Tel Aviv. They prepare the deadly toxins for the kidon. Where other intelligence agencies no longer allow their agents to kill, kidon have no such restraint. They remain fully licensed to assassinate in the name of Israel once they have routinely convinced the incumbent prime minister of the need to do so. Ariel Sharon needs little convincing. Mossad's assassins routinely witness some of Israel's leading forensic pathologists at work so as to better understand how to make an assassination look like an accident. They learn how a pinprick or small blemish left on a victim's skin can be a give away.

They are shown how to ensure against this. It makes them probably the most sophisticated lawfully-approved killers in the world. This morning (Sunday) Meir Dagan, as he has done every day since the Mombasa attack, will awaken from a combat veteran's light sleep. This squat, barrel-chested man will take his customary cold water shower and eat his daily breakfast of natural yogurt, toast spread with honey washed down with several cups of strong black coffee. Next he will study the latest reports from not only East Africa - but from all those areas where his team of hunters have now moved. After briefing the prime minister on the scrambler phone that links Dagan to Ariel Sharon, the memune may spend an hour at an easel in the corner of his office - touching up one of the watercolour paintings which are the only known passion in his life. But like everything else about him, they will remain under lock and key. Just as with his plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein, the first the world will know, if Mossad is successful, will be after it has happened. SENSATIONAL NEW EBOOK NOW AVAILABLE FROM GORDON THOMAS Documents and details illegal mind control and germ warfare experiments carried out by the CIA on US citizens.

It is a shattering account of how the dark side of science collaborated with sheer lunacy to create a chilling tour de force of terror. Based upon impeccable research, it shows how our elected governments lied to the people for over fifty years - and continues to obscure the truth. It is a story of murder, inhuman experiments and torture. It is supported by a wealth of never before published evidence; personal interviews with those doctors involved in the work that mocks their oath to do no harm to their patients. It is also the story of a brave man, William Buckley, the longest serving agent in the CIA, until his own terrible death at the hands of a doctor trained in the techniques the CIA pioneered. Buckley was a close personal friend of the author. · Never-seen-before documents from inside the White House, CIA and other agencies. · Reveals the documentary evidence that links US Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the cover-up of the death of top CIA scientist, Frank Olson. · Explains how the CIA financed a ruthless and systematic assault of the human psyche - using a British-born psychiatrist to spearhead the assault.

· Names other world renowned physicians who were involved in the most sinister research programme ever created by any United States government - and its secret partner - the British government. · Reveals how a woman was programmed to become a CIA assassin. · Describes how a CIA chemist was murdered by his own colleagues after he had turned to the one man he thought he could trust - a London psychiatrist engaged in similar work. · Reveals how "expendables" - the CIA generic name for those selected for killing - were secretly murdered after they had been experimented on in Europe. · Describes how the CIA used prostitutes and mental patients in other experiments. · Explains how the CIA deliberately pioneered the drug culture whose effects are still with us. · Reveals how the CIA agent selected to monitor the experiments eventually died at the hands of a physician steeped in the methods perfected by the CIA. · Identifies how the CIA experiments are still carried on in secret establishments in Israel and China. · Uncovers CIA terminal experiments on Vietcong prisoners in Vietnam. · Publishes the CIA Manual of Assassination - a shocking document describing how to commit state-approved murder.

For further information and download instructions visit "Phantom Control": Israel's Secret Service and the Occupation August 26, 2012 "Phantom Control": Israel's Secret Service and the Occupation Yael Berda's new book The Bureaucracy of Occupation sheds light on Israel's more invisible control over the Palestinians Members don't see ads. If you are a member, and you're seeing this appeal, click here I support the real news because they deal with real issues, not meaningless articles and sound bites - Gary Log in and tell us why you support TRNN precis In recent years Israel's control over the Palestinian people in the occupied territories has changed. While the presence of the Israeli army has been greatly reduced, the occupation has taken a more invisible form. In her new book The Bureaucracy of Occupation, attorney Yael Berda sheds light on how the Israeli secret service (the Shabak) exploits every point of contact with Palestinians, especially the imposed permit system, to recruit informants to further its control over the population.

Activist Anan Quzmar of Birzeit University's Rights to Education campaign tells The Real News' Lia Tarachansky how this form of "phantom control" makes political involvement and activism nearly impossible. Workings of Israel's secret service exposed Workings of Israel's secret service exposed From London Times, 2 August, 1996 THE operational structure of Mossad, Israel's secret intelligence service, which has always prided itself on weaving a cloak of impenetrable secrecy around its covert operations, has been disclosed by a British specialist journal. The details of Mossad's "family tree" appear in Jane's Sentinel journal, which has published a special edition on the eastern Mediterranean. The Israeli defence establishment has already reacted with concern over revelations in the same publication about the Israeli Air Force, including the location of all its air bases. The detailed focus on the air force and intelligence services is due to be published in Sentinel next week. Apart from studying the internal workings of Mossad, which is estimated to employ about 1,200 people, the journal looks at the rest of the Israeli intelligence community, including Shin Bet, the counter-espionage agency and internal security service.

Mossad, the Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions, is the equivalent of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. Israeli newspapers and broadcasting services are prohibited from writing about Mossad. According to the journal, Mossad's largest operational branch is the Collections Department, responsible for intelligence-gathering operations abroad. The Collections Department is split into sections and includes separate "desks" covering different regions. Branch A is said to cover Spain, Egypt, Cyprus and Algeria. Branch C is reported to cover the Mossad stations in London, Paris and Marseilles. The journal also says that Mossad has a clandestine operations command, known within the Israeli secret service as Metsada, which runs "small units of combatants who carry out actions abroad against those considered to be a threat to Israeli security". The journal says: "These missions have included assassinations and sabotage." The Metsada unit is said to be answerable directly to the head of Mossad, who was recently named by the Israeli Government as Major-General Danny Yatom, 51. General Yatom, said to be nicknamed "The Prussian", replaced Shabtai Shavit who resigned earlier this year after nearly seven years as Mossad's head.

Other Mossad branches are listed as the Political Action and Liaison Department which deals with friendly foreign intelligence services, including the American CIA and Britain's MI6, and a special section called LAP (Lohamah Psichlogit) which covers psychological warfare. The journal says that one of the most important of the support departments is the Research Department, which has 15 separate desks, including ones for the United States, Canada, Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, Libya, Syria and Iran. It says there is also a nuclear desk which specialises solely in nuclear developments around the world. Israel is known to be keeping a close watch on Iran's nuclear ambitions; Iran is said to be ten to 15 years away from a nuclear bomb. Sentinel says Mossad's Research Department produces short daily reports and longer weekly summaries on all areas of interest. Shin Bet, the internal service, is reported to have three operational departments and five support departments. The operational sections are listed as the Arab Affairs Department, which monitors suspected Arab subversives; the Non-Arab Affairs Department, which is involved in "the penetration of foreign intelligence services and diplomatic missions" in Israel; and the Protective Security Department, responsible for protecting national representatives and assets.

What the Secret Service Can Learn From Israel's Shin Bet | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com Inaugural Tears of Joy I watched President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration on TV in Israel, alternating between Hebrew- and English-speaking channels, so as not... “I don’t think [Israel’s protection of dignitaries] is different from what the Americans do,” former Israeli Mossad agent Gad Shimron, who was never part of the Shin Bet’s VIP security service but is familiar with its operations, told JNS.org. “It’s the same training, more or less. It’s like the training of an elite soldier, whether he is in the Israeli army or the American army. Maybe there are little differences, but the basic training is the same, the aim of the service is the same.” A former senior Israeli security official told JNS.org that working on culture, rather than changing tactics or overhauling organizational structure, can help the Secret Service fix its problems. “Every organization is built out of people, procedures, and culture,” said the official, who asked to remain anonymous.

“So if this is true, take out the written procedures, take out the people one by one as private individuals, and try to figure out whether there is something left.” Shimron said that even if agencies like the Secret Service are guarding dignitaries 24/7, all it takes is “two seconds of carelessness” for a disaster like an assassination. “Or in this case, I’m sure that the White House normally is very well-guarded, but somehow, for reasons I can’t really tell you because I don’t know all the details, someone managed to jump over the fence and run into the White House,” he said. Questions were raised about the effectiveness of the Secret Service after Omar Gonzalez, carrying a knife, on Sept. 19 jumped the White House fence, ran inside the front door, and passed the presidential living quarters into the East Room, where he was stopped by an off-duty agent. More embarrassment for the agency came when leaks to the media uncovered that President Barack Obama, while visiting the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, rode in an elevator with an armed security guard who possessed a criminal record and proceeded to take pictures of the president.

The last straw came with the revelation that the Secret Service delayed confessing that shots fired at the White House in 2011 hit their target. Initial reports on the incident had said that all of the shots missed the building. After a heated House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Sept. 29 in which lawmakers on both sides of the aisle expressed their lost confidence in the leadership of Julia Pierson, the Secret Service’s director, Pierson resigned. Her post was quickly given to former U.S. special agent Joseph Clancy, who came out of retirement to act as interim director. Pierson, who assumed the position in March 2013, had succeeded Mark Sullivan, who resigned after it was reported that 11 agents engaged with prostitutes while they were on a trip with the president to a summit in Colombia. The former Israeli security official commended Pierson’s resignation, saying that when a director of such an agency steps down, it sends the message to citizens that the concept of responsibility is still important. In Israel, the Shin Bet has a dual role: part VIP security agency and part anti-terrorism organization.

With a large portion of its members coming from other Israeli intelligence agencies, the anti-terrorism branch offers protective service agents on the ground with clear alerts on threats. The Shin Bet’s meticulousness was recently demonstrated in a visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who came to the U.S. to attend the U.N. General Assembly. Reporting on a dinner between Netanyahu and Jewish philanthropist Sheldon Adelson at a New York City restaurant, aNew York Post reporter mused about the 30 security personnel tagging along—closing off the block and making the restaurant’s patrons go through a metal detector. Yet the Shin Bet is also no stranger to security failures, in particular the 1995 assassination of Rabin by an Israeli extremist. “That was the equivalent of the JFK assassination in America, in terms of the shock waves domestically and worldwide—and the humiliation that the bodyguards experienced,” said Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent who co-authored the book “Spies Against Armageddon,” which offers a history of Israeli security and espionage. “Shin Bet veterans told me that they did not imagine that an Israeli Jew would murder his own country’s prime minister.

They had, in effect, been on the lookout only for threats that Arab attackers might pose.” Shimron said that Israeli intelligence became aware of a possible internal threat to Rabin after he signed the Oslo Peace Accords. That turned out not to be enough to prevent the assassination. After the murder, the Shin Bet went through its own upheaval, which included the resignation of its director and a change in tactics. The Shin Bet shifted its focus when protecting dignitaries toward surrounding them with agents, preferably those who were taller and bigger than the individual they are trying to protect, so that a gunshot was more likely to hit an agent wearing a bulletproof vest than the dignitary. The number of agents protecting the prime minister was also significantly increased after the Rabin assassination. Now, whenever the Israeli prime minister goes anywhere, “the whole regiment of security people are busy making sure that there will be as little contact and as little exposure as possible,” Shimron said. In situations involving large groups of people, the Shin Bet now utilizes casually dressed agents among the crowd who look for potential threats—often using women for the job.

“Something interesting that we found was that women have a much better capability to detect strange behavior in a potential threat than men,” said the former Israeli security official. “They probably don’t have the physical power [as male agents], but when it comes to detecting suspicious behavior that might lead to a potential threat, they are much better than men.” The official also pointed out that there are structural differences between the Shin Bet and the Secret Service that might contribute to varying degrees of effectiveness. In Israel, Shin Bet agents are usually much younger than their American counterparts and usually serve between five and seven years. In the Secret Service, the older average age means more seasoned agents, but they may lose some of their sensitivity and alertness. Raviv told JNS.org that lapses like the recent White House intrusion are less likely to occur with the Shin Bet. “Would anything so ridiculous as what happened at the White House occur at an Israeli government building—or specifically, at the home of the prime minister in Jerusalem? It’s not at all likely,” he said. “Israeli facilities have fences that are far more serious, including sensors that high-tech Israeli industries developed.

And, frankly, Israeli guards—[who are] part of Shin Bet—would be far more likely to open fire on an intruder.” Share this Story: Real History and Mossad,the Israeli Secret Service New York, Wednesday, January 15, 2003 Israel to kill in U.S., allied nations By Richard Sale From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk ISRAEL is embarking upon a more aggressive approach to the war on terror that will include staging targeted killings in the United States and other friendly countries, former Israeli intelligence officials told United Press International. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has forbidden the practice until now, these sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Israeli statements were confirmed by more than a half dozen U.S. foreign policy and intelligence officials in interviews with UPI. With the appointment of Meir Dagan, the new director Israel's Mossad secret intelligence service, Sharon is also preparing "a huge budget" increase for the spy agency as part of "a tougher stance in fighting global jihad (or holy war)," one Israeli official said.

Since Sharon became Israeli prime minister, Tel Aviv has mainly limited its practice of targeted killings to the West Bank and Gaza because "no one wanted such operations on their territory," a former Israeli intelligence official said. Another former Israeli government official said that under Sharon, "diplomatic constraints have prevented the Mossad from carrying out 'preventive operations' (targeted killings) on the soil of friendly countries until now." He said Sharon is "reversing that policy, even if it risks complications to Israel's bilateral relations." A former Israeli military intelligence source agreed: "What Sharon wants is a much more extensive and tough approach to global terrorism, and this includes greater operational maneuverability." Does this mean assassinations on the soil of allies? "It does," he said. "Mossad is definitely being beefed up," a U.S. government official said of the Israeli agency's budget increase. He declined to comment on the Tel Aviv's geographic expansion of targeted killings. An FBI spokesman also declined to comment, saying: "This is a policy matter.

We only enforce federal laws." A congressional staff member with deep knowledge of intelligence matters said, "I don't know on what basis we would be able to protest Israel's actions." He referred to the recent killing of Qaed Salim Sinan al Harethi, a top al Qaida leader, in Yemen by a remotely controlled CIA drone. "That was done on the soil of a friendly ally," the staffer said. But the complications posed by Israel's new policy are real. "Israel does not have a good record at doing this sort of thing," said former CIA counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson. He cited the 1997 fiasco where two Mossad agents were captured after they tried to assassinate Khaled Mashaal, a Hamas political leader, by injecting him with poison. According to Johnson, the attempt, made in Amman, Jordan, caused a political crisis in Israeli-Jordan relations. In addition, because the Israeli agents carried Canadian passports, Canada withdrew its ambassador in protest, he said. Jordan is one of two Arab nations to recognize Israel. The other is Egypt. At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, "I have no intention of stopping the activities of this government against terror," according to a CNN report.

Former CIA officials say Israel was forced to free jailed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and 70 other Jordanian and Palestinian prisoner being held in Israeli jails to secure the release of the two would-be Mossad assassins. Phil Stoddard, former director of the Middle East Institute, cited a botched plot to kill Ali Hassan Salemeh, the mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. The 1974 attempt severely embarrassed Mossad when the Israeli hit team mistakenly assassinated a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway. Salemeh, later a CIA asset, was killed in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1976 by a car bomb placed by an Israeli assassination team, former U.S. intelligence officials said. "Israel knew Salemeh was providing us with preventive intelligence on the Palestinians and his being killed pissed off a lot of people," said a former senior CIA official. But some Israeli operations have been successful. Gerald Bull, an Ontario-born U.S. citizen and designer of the Iraqi supergun -- a massive artillery system capable of launching satellites into orbit, and of delivering nuclear chemical or biological payloads from Baghdad to Israel -- was killed in Belgium in March 1990.

The killing is still unsolved, but former CIA officials said a Mossad hit team is the most likely suspect. Bull worked on the supergun design -- codenamed Project Babylon -- for 10 years, and helped the Iraqis develop many smaller artillery systems. He was found with five bullets in his head outside his Brussels apartment. Israeli hit teams, which consist of units or squadrons of the Kidon, a sub-unit for Mossad's highly secret Metsada department, would stage the operations, former Israeli intelligence sources said. Kidon is a Hebrew word meaning "bayonet," one former Israeli intelligence source said. This Israeli government source explained that in the past Israel has not staged targeted killings in friendly countries because "no one wanted such operations on their territory." This has become irrelevant, he said. Dagan, the new hard-driving director of Mossad, will implement the new changes, former Israeli government officials said. Dagan, nicknamed "the gun," was Sharon's adviser on counter-terrorism during the government of Netanyahu in 1996, former Israeli government officials say. A former military man, Dagan has also undertaken extremely sensitive diplomatic missions for several of Israel's prime ministers, former Israeli government sources said. Former Israel Defense Forces Lt.

Col. Gal Luft, who served under Dagan, described him as an "extremely creative individual -- creative to the point of recklessness." A former CIA official who knows Dagan said the new Mossad director knows "his foreign affairs inside and out," and has a "real killer instinct." Dagan is also "an intelligence natural" who has "a superb analyst not afraid to act on gut instinct," the former CIA official said. Dagan has already removed Mossad officials whom he regards as "being too conservative or too cautious" and is building up "a constituency of senior people of the same mentality," one former long-time Israeli operative said. Dagan is also urging that Mossad operatives rely less on secret sources and rely more on open information that is so plentifully provided on the Internet and newspapers. "It's a cultural thing," one former Israeli intelligence operative explained.

"Mossad in the past has put its emphasis on Humint (human intelligence) and secret operations and has neglected the whole field of open media, which has become extremely important." Regarding Mossad's new policy and budget increase, Kim Farber an Israeli Embassy official said, "There is so little information available on this, there is nothing I can add." Copyright C 2001-2003 United Press International Mossad facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Mossad Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group, Inc. MOSSAD israel's institute for intelligence and special tasks. The Mossad is Israel's central intelligence agency, responsible for intelligence collection, covert action, and counterterrorism outside the borders of the state. It was founded in 1951, under orders from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, by Reuven Shiloah, a senior member of Israel's diplomatic corps.

It replaced a number of organizations, including the SHAI (Sherut Yediʿot), the intelligence service of the Haganah, and the political department of the Jewish Agency, which had been created by the political leadership of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine ). Responsibilities and Leadership The division of functions and the boundaries between the various intelligence agencies had for many years been unclear. The founding of the Mossad left all official and overt diplomatic activities to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; military intelligence, intelligence analysis, and information assessment to the Intelligence Division (Aman) of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF); counterinsurgency and counterespionage inside the country to the Security Service (Shin Bet); and counter-criminal intelligence to the police. All covert activities and espionage abroad were assigned to the Mossad. The head of the Mossad, whose identity was for many years kept secret, was directly responsible to the prime minister and served as chairman of the coordinating committee of all heads of Israel's intelligence services. In 1952, Shiloah was replaced by Isser Harel, until then the head of the Shin Bet, who went on to serve as director of the Mossad for more than a decade.

Despite formal definitions of the respective realms of activities, it took some years and some internecine struggles among the various services for the exact boundaries to be established. Thus, for example, military intelligence continued to keep a special unit that operated agents across the borders and was responsible for the ill-advised activation, in the summer of 1954, of its espionage ring in Egypt , which ended in a fiasco that later became known as the Lavon Affair. A public scandal erupted when it was discovered that Harel had ordered the planting of recording devices in the office of the leaders of the left-wing MAPAM Party, which followed a pro-Soviet line, under the false suspicion that MAPAM was implicated in subversive activities. On the other hand, Mossad agents managed in 1956 to obtain the full record of Nikita Khrushchev 's famous speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, in which some of the horrors of Stalin's rule were disclosed. This was shared with a grateful CIA in Washington. Over the years Harel gained great personal influence over some key political leaders. He was also called upon to execute some unconventional and dramatic operations abroad.

One such was the discovery and rescue of a boy who had been kidnapped by his ultra-orthodox grandfather, who hid the boy in France in order to bring him up according to strict Orthodox traditions. Harel's most famous operation was the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the high-ranking Nazi SS commander who was responsible for organizing the extermination of many hundreds of thousands of European Jews during World War II . Eichmann was captured in his home in Buenos Aires , smuggled to Israel, tried in Jerusalem , and sentenced to death in 1962. In 1963, Harel came under severe criticism by David Ben-Gurion for his disproportionate response to the involvement of some ex-Nazi officers in unsuccessful Egyptian attempts to develop long-range missiles and unconventional weapons. He was obliged to resign in the spring of 1963. Many subsequent heads of the Mossad were army generals who came from the ranks of the IDF. The man who replaced Harel was general Meir Amit, previously the director of military intelligence. Amit served as Mossad's chief from 1963 to 1968.

Among his noteworthy activities was a trip to Washington to secure a cautious go-ahead from the Johnson administration before Israel launched its offensive in the June 1967 Arab–Israel War. Subsequent heads of the Mossad were Zvi Zamir (1968–1974), Yitzhak Hofi (1974–1982), Nahum Admoni (1982–1990), Shabtai Shavit (1990–1996), Dani Yatom (1996–1998), and Ephraim Halevy (1998–2003). International Relationships and Operations During the 1960s, the Mossad developed close relations with SAVAK, the intelligence service of Iran under the shah, and supported the Kurds in their rebellion against the officers' regime of Baghdad . Over the years, the Mossad managed to capitalize on its widespread image as one of the world's most efficient intelligence agencies and created close relationships with many other national agencies, not the least important of which was that with the CIA.

After the June 1967 war, the Mossad concentrated much of its resources on countering Palestinian terrorist activities. Thus, for example, it assassinated most of the al-Fatah operatives involved in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Mossad agents also killed Khalil alWazir (Abu Jihad), Yasir Arafat's deputy in charge of military affairs, in his home in Tunis . Over the years, the Mossad also succeeded in placing its spies in a number of high positions in Arab capitals. Some of its successes may not be revealed for many years to come, but the spies who were eventually caught prove the point. The most important such was Eli Cohen, who established himself in Damascus , developed close relations with the Syrian elite, and reported invaluable information back to Israel before he was apprehended and hanged in 1965.

Two more outstanding successes added to the towering prestige of the Mossad: the landing of a MiG-21 advanced Soviet combat plane from the Iraqi air force at an Israeli airport in 1966, and the January 1969 whisking away of three missile boats from the French port of Cherbourg, where they had been built for Israel but were being detained under an embargo declared by President Charles de Gaulle after the outbreak of the June 1967 Arab–Israel War. The Mossad has also been involved in many nonintelligence operations, in particular with regard to clandestine political relations and endangered Jewish communities. Mossad agents undertook secret negotiations with Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, and other Arab leaders long before the first peace treaty was concluded with Egypt in 1979. The Mossad also helped diaspora Jewish communities organize self-defense and was instrumental in the exodus of Ethiopian Jews via Sudan to Israel. It was also responsible for Israel's relations with Lebanese politicians and with Maronite militias, eventually paving the way for the IDF invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

On the eve of the October 1973 war, the Mossad gave the government an early warning of an imminent Egyptian offensive against the Bar-Lev Line, but military intelligence did not take the warning seriously. The failure of military intelligence to make the correct assessment during that war brought about changes in the mandate of Israel's various intelligence agencies. A unit for research and information assessment was added to the Mossad and to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the purpose of cross-assessment and verification. The Mossad's main functions, and apparently also its main departments, are: information collection, utilizing a network of spies and other agents operating in stations around the world political action and intelligence liaison psychological warfare, propaganda, and dis-information research and assessment special operations, such as sabotage, assassination, and other activities, especially beyond Israel's borders. A well-known example of special operations was the failed attempt to assassinate Khalid al-Mashʿal, head of the political bureau of HAMAS in Amman , Jordan . On 4 October 1997, Mossad agents injected Mashʿal with a toxic substance, but his life was saved when, in response to heavy Jordanian and U.S.

pressure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a physician to administer an antidote to the poison. The affair caused not only a sharp deterioration in Israeli–Jordanian relations but also an uproar in Israeli political circles. In what may signal a decline in its mythical infallibility, the Mossad has been faulted for failing to anticipate the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000. On the other hand, in recent years senior Mossad officials have been intensively involved in the evolving peace process with the Palestinians. Mossad chiefs Ephraim Halevy and General Dani Yatom (along with Shin Bet's Israel Hasson) began to appear in the media in the unusual roles of unofficial peace negotiators. Since these activities exposed the head of the Mossad to public view, the government decided to make the names of past and future directors public. In 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon nominated his long-time friend General Meir Dagan, who had served in the IDF under him, to replace Ephraim Halevy as Mossad's director.

see also amit, meir; aqsa intifada, al-; arab–israel war (1967); arab–israel war (1973); ben-gurion, david; haganah; hamas; harel, isser; jewish agency for palestine ; lavon affair; shiloah, reuven; shin bet. Bibliography Bar-Zohar, Michael. Spies in the Promised Land: Iser Harel and the Israeli Secret Service, translated by Monroe Stearns. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Black, Ian, and Morris, Benny. Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991. Eisenberg, Dennis; Dan, Uri; and Landau, Eli. The Mossad: Israel's Secret Intelligence Service Inside Stories. New York: Signet, 1978. Eshed, Haggai. Reuven Shiloah: The Man behind the Mossad, translated by David and Leah Zinder. London: Frank Cass, 1997.

Raviv, Dan, and Melman, Yossi. Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel's Intelligence Community. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. mordechai bar-on Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. MLA Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Security COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. Mossad █ JUDSON KNIGHT Israel's principal agency for intelligence collection, counterterrorism, and covert action is the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, best known as Mossad, an abbreviation of its Hebrew name, ha-Mossad le-Modiin ule-Tafkidim Meyuhadim. In a tiny country surrounded by foes, the Mossad has been extremely active ever since its establishment in 1951. Its successes include the capture of former Nazi leaders, most notably Adolf Eichmann, as well as numerous triumphs of intelligence-gathering that contributed to Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Mossad also conducted the legendary raid at Entebbe , Uganda , in which it rescued the passengers and crew of a French jetliner hijacked by Palestinian terrorists.

Yet, Mossad has often come under criticism for perceived excessive actions against Israel's many enemies. History David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, established Mossad as ha-Mossad Leteum (the Institute for Coordination) on April 1, 1951. Mossad had a checkered record in its first decade. On the positive side, it was the first intelligence agency to capture a copy of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev 's February 1956 "Secret Speech," in which he denounced the crimes of Josef Stalin before the 20th Party Congress. Mossad also ran several key operations in Arab lands, with Wolfgang Lotz in Egypt and Eliahu Cohen in Syria . The Syrians eventually exposed Cohen, however, and hanged him in Damascus Square, while the Egyptians captured, tortured, and imprisoned Lotz in 1964. Meanwhile, another operative in Egypt, David Magen, turned out to be a double agent, and the work of Avraham Dar in Egypt during the mid-1950s ended in a disaster for Israeli intelligence, with numerous agents captured and imprisoned.

At least one apparent success of this era turned out to be a political failure when Ben-Gurion reversed Mossad efforts to intimidate West German scientists who were assisting the Egyptians. Eager to develop better relations with West Germany, Ben-Gurion dismissed Mossad director Isser Harel (1952–63), who he had once accorded the title Memuneh, "the one in charge." 1960s and 1970s. Mossad, which gained its present name as the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks in 1963, fared much better in the 1960s. Joint operations with Shin Bet, the internal security force, led to the capture of Eichmann—who had overseen the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust—from his hiding place in Argentina . Under the leadership of Meir Amit (1963–68), Mossad focused on intelligence-gathering, which greatly aided Israeli military efforts in 1967. During this period, Mossad also assisted the defection of an Iraqi airman who delivered to Israel a Soviet MiG-21 fighter jet in 1963.

In 1968, Mossad successfully captured eight missile boats that Israel had ordered from France , but which President Charles de Gaulle had placed under embargo. That year also saw the capture of nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who had revealed Israeli nuclear secrets to the British press. Following the massacre of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September at the Munich Olympics in 1972, Mossad directed an assassination effort under an action team dubbed "the Wrath of God " (WOG). Over the next two years, WOG tracked down and killed more than a dozen members of Black September, but also accidentally killed a Moroccan waiter who had no affiliation with the terrorist group. Failure to predict Egyptian actions leading to the Yom Kippur War in 1973 forced the resignation of several top officers, including Mossad director Zvi Zamir (1968–74). Yet, on July 3–4, 1976, Mossad more than recovered its reputation with the daring raid at Entebbe, codenamed Operation Thunderbolt.

After intensive intelligence-gathering at the site, the Israelis assaulted the plane, rescuing all but four of its 97 passengers and losing a single officer—along with 20 Ugandan soldiers—in the process. 1980s and 1990s. During the 1980s, Mossad's intelligence-gathering against Arab countries helped pave the way for Israeli airstrikes against Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in Tunisia , and against an Iraqi nuclear reactor. In April 1988, a Mossad assassination team infiltrated the residence of Abu Jihad, deputy to PLO chief Yassir Arafat, and killed him. Two years later, in March 1990, another hit team killed Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist aiding the Iraqi weapons program, at his apartment in Brussels . Among the less successful activities of Mossad during the 1980s and 1990s was its involvement in the Iran -Contra affair, when it acted as an intermediary between the United States and Iran.

Embarrassment surrounding the failure of Mossad to prevent the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin by an Israeli citizen in November 1995 led to the resignation of Mossad director Shabtai Shavit in 1996. Prime Minister Shimon Peres then appointed Major General Danny Yatom, the first Mossad chief ever publicly identified. In 2000, Mossad undertook a recruitment campaign, complete with newspaper advertisements and a Web site that took applications on line. Organization and Operations From its headquarters in the Israeli capital of Tel Aviv, Mossad oversees a staff estimated at approximately 1,200 personnel in the mid-1990s. It is assumed to consist of eight departments, of which the largest is Collections, tasked with espionage overseas. Officers in the Collections Department operate under a variety of covers, some diplomatic. The Political Action and Liaison Department is responsible for working both with allied foreign intelligence services, and with nations that have no normal diplomatic relations with Israel. Among the departments of Mossad is the Special Operations Division or Metsada, which is involved in assassination, paramilitary operations, sabotage, and psychological warfare.

Psychological warfare is also a concern of the Lohamah Psichlogit Department, which conducts propaganda and deception activities as well. Additionally, Mossad has a Research Department, tasked with intelligence production, and a Technology Department concerned with the development of tools for Mossad activities. █ FURTHER READING: BOOKS: Eisenberg, Dennis, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau. The Mossad Inside Stories: Israel's Secret Intelligence Service. New York : Paddington Press, 1978. Eshed, Haggai. Reuven Shiloah: The Man Behind the Mossad: Secret Diplomacy in the Creation of Israel. Portland, OR: F. Cass, 1997. Horesh, Joshua. An Iraqi Jew in the Mossad: Memoir of an Israeli Intelligence Officer. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1997. Thomas, Gordon. Gideon 's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Westerby, Gerald. In Hostile Territory: Business Secrets of a Mossad Combatant. New York: HarperBusiness, 1998.

SEE ALSO Oxford Dictionary of Rhymes © Oxford Dictionary of Rhymes 2007, originally published by Oxford University Press 2007.

Mossad •ad, add, Allahabad , bad, Baghdad , bedad, begad, cad, Chad , clad, dad, egad, fad, forbade, gad, glad, grad, had, jihad, lad, mad, pad, plaid, rad, Riyadh , sad, scad, shad, Strad, tad, trad •chiliad • oread •dryad, dyad, naiad, triad •Sinbad • Ahmadabad • Jalalabad •Faisalabad • Islamabad • Hyderabad •grandad • Soledad • Trinidad •doodad • Galahad • Akkad • ecad •cycad, nicad •ironclad • nomad • maenad •monad, trichomonad •gonad • scratch pad • sketch pad •keypad • helipad • launch pad •notepad • footpad • touch pad • farad •tetrad • Stalingrad • Leningrad •Conrad • Titograd • undergrad •Volgograd • Petrograd • hexad •Mossad • Upanishad • pentad •heptad • octad Cite this article Israel’s Aggressive Spying in the U.S.

Mostly Hushed Up Israel’s Aggressive Spying in the U.S. Mostly Hushed Up By Jeff Stein On 5/8/14 at 10:50 AM U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry walks past American (back) and Israeli flags at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv January 6, 2014. Brendan Smialowski/Pool/Reuters World Israel The Middle East United States When White House national security advisor Susan Rice’s security detail cleared her Jerusalem hotel suite for bugs and intruders Tuesday night, they might’ve had in mind a surprise visitor to Vice President Al Gore’s room 16 years ago this week: a spy in an air duct. According to a senior former U.S. intelligence operative, a Secret Service agent who was enjoying a moment of solitude in Gore’s bathroom before the Veep arrived heard a metallic scraping sound. “The Secret Service had secured [Gore’s] room in advance and they all left except for one agent, who decided to take a long, slow time on the pot,” the operative recalled for Newsweek. “So the room was all quiet, he was just meditating on his toes, and he hears a noise in the vent.

And he sees the vent clips being moved from the inside. And then he sees a guy starting to exit the vent into the room.” Did the agent scramble for his gun? No, the former operative said with a chuckle. “He kind of coughed and the guy went back into the vents.” Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week To some, the incident stands as an apt metaphor for the behind-closed-doors relations between Israel and America, “frenemies” even in the best of times. The brazen air-duct caper “crossed the line” of acceptable behavior between friendly intelligence services – but because it was done by Israel, it was quickly hushed up by U.S. officials. Despite strident denials this week by Israeli officials, Israel has been caught carrying out aggressive espionage operations against American targets for decades, according to U.S. intelligence officials and congressional sources. And they still do it. They just don’t get arrested very often.

As Newsweek reported on Tuesday, American counter-intelligence officials told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees at the end of January that Israel's current espionage activities in America are "unrivaled and unseemly," going far beyond the activities of other close allies, such as Germany, France, the U.K. and Japan. “It has been extensive for years,” a former top U.S. security official told Newsweek Wednesday after Israeli Intelligence Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, among other top Israeli officials, “unequivocally” denied the Newsweek report, saying Israel stopped all spying operations in the U.S. after Jonathan Pollard was convicted of spying for Israel in 1987. One anonymous official was quoted in the Israeli media as saying Newsweek’s account “had the whiff of anti-Semitism in it.” But a former U.S. intelligence operative intimately familiar with Israeli espionage rejected the anti-Semitism charge. “There is a small community of ex-CIA, FBI and military people who have worked this account who are absolutely cheering on [the Newsweek] story,” he said. “Not one of them is anti-Semitic. In fact, it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

It has only to do with why [Israel] gets kid-glove treatment when, if it was Japan doing it or India doing it at this level, it would be outrageous.” Beginning in the mid-1990s, well after Israel promised to stop spying in the U.S. in the wake of the Pollard affair, the FBI regularly felt compelled to summon Israeli diplomats in D.C. for a scolding, two former top counterintelligence officials told Newsweek. During the decade following 9/11, one said, the Israelis were summoned “dozens” of times and told to “cut the shit,” as one, a former top FBI official, put it. But as an “ally,” the Israelis almost always got off with only a warning. But no matter how stern the FBI’s lecture – usually delivered personally to the embassy’s senior intelligence representative – the Israelis were unmoved, another former top intelligence official said. “You can't embarrass an Israeli,” he said. “It’s just impossible to embarrass them.

You catch them red-handed, and they shrug and say, 'Okay now, anything else?'” Always lurking, former intelligence officials say, was the powerful “Israeli lobby,” the network of Israel’s friends in Congress, industry and successive administrations, Republican and Democratic, ready to protest any perceived slight on the part of U.S. security officials. A former counterintelligence specialist told Newsweek he risked Israel’s wrath merely by providing routine security briefings to American officials, businessmen and scientists heading to Israel for meetings and conferences. “We had to be very careful how we warned American officials,” he said. “We regularly got calls from members of Congress outraged by security warnings about going to Israel. And they had our budget. When ... the director of the CIA gets a call from an outraged congressman–’What are these security briefings you're giving? What are these high-level threat warnings about travel to Tel Aviv you're giving? This is outrageous’ – he has to pay close attention. There was always this political delicacy that you had to be aware of.” The annual exercise in which the State Department publishes security profiles on foreign countries gave the intelligence agencies huge headaches, he added. “When we were doing the annual threat rating for the U.S.

Embassy and consulates [in Israel], it was always a huge debate,” he said. “The intelligence community would always be urging the highest level of threats, while the State Department would be saying, ‘This is not going to go over very well, we can't give this kind of rating, because there will be certain consequences in terms of travel warnings and restrictions.’ It was always a big, big debate on how you rate the threat over there.” But the danger is real, he and other former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with Israel’s methods say. Israeli agents “go after senior U.S. Navy officers on shore leave in Haifa, after space industry officials, or scientists with intellectual property, anywhere. This has always been a huge concern for the community.” In the States, Israeli officials and businessmen are forever trying to lure attractive American targets to visit Israel. Representatives of Maf’at , an administrative body that yokes the Israel Defense Ministry to its military industries, give U.S. counterintelligence agencies great concern, one of the former U.S. intelligence officials said. "They were the ones that really caused us a lot of concern. Because they had a plausible reason to attend all these conferences and defense contracting facilities and whatnot.

It was a great cover vehicle for industrial espionage,” he said. “I remember speaking to one U.S. scientist who was at a conference and being worked by a group from [Israel],” the former U.S. intelligence operative continued. “And this scientist, who was savvy enough to recognize what she saw, said it was really unbelievable how the elicitation techniques were being used – the invitations to come over – basically getting the data dump from a fellow scientist. And the naïveté on the part of the American scientists was really striking. We saw this all the time.” Israeli officials were brazen enough to pitch even him. After giving a speech at a recent security industry gathering in Washington, he said, he was approached by the commercial attaché of the Israeli Embassy. “He said, ‘Oh, it was great to hear your background, that was a great talk you gave, how interesting,’ and so forth. And I thought, Here it comes, here comes the pitch. And sure enough, he said, ‘Have you ever thought of coming over?

We'd love to have you come over, we’ll pay all your expenses while you're over there, we'll give you the tour…’ I thought to myself, Come on guys, come on.” “Their goal,” he continued, “is to get contacts to come out of the U.S. and over there and then wine them, dine them, assess them, see what their weaknesses are. I mean, we had government officials going over there who were offered drugs, like, ‘Hey, do you want to go get some pot?’ What? These are U.S. government officials. The drugs, women coming to your hotel room – they throw everything at you. No matter how high the official.” On Wednesday, Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz batted away such espionage allegations, saying “Israel does not spy in the U.S., does not enlist spies in the U.S., and does not do intelligence gathering in the U.S.” Likewise, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said he “would not agree to any spying on the United States, neither directly nor indirectly.” He called the allegations, attributed by Newsweek to intelligence officials who have briefed Congress, “malicious.” But current and former U.S. intelligence officials stood their ground.

“It really spans the gamut of everything you can think of,” said a former U.S. intelligence official who has been a familiar face in the executive suites of several U.S. security agencies over the decades. “It used to be when French students came to the United States as interns, summer employees and things like that, they all had a French DGSE officer they had to report back to at the embassy,” he said. “Similar things occur with respect to the Israelis … [who] have a lot of Israeli travelers in the United States." Such blanket accusations infuriate defenders of Israel, who detect that “whiff of anti-Semitism” in them. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials who opposed Pollard’s early release were also accused of anti-Semitism. Related Stories Israel Won’t Stop Spying on the U.S. The high number of young Israelis who overstay their visits to the U.S. has been a sticking point in Israel’s drive to get off the U.S. visa-required list. Another is its failure to regularly report lost and stolen passports to Interpol. A bigger issue has been its rough treatment of Arab Americans and pro-Palestinian activists travelling to Israel. But Israeli efforts to pursue U.S.

military, scientific and industrial secrets has also emerged as a major hurdle, if not the major hurdle, in normalizing visa relations, according to congressional sources. “I was in this briefing — there were several” on Israeli espionage by U.S. security officials in 2013, a former congressional aide told Newsweek. “The one I was in had senior staffers from foreign affairs, the full committee, the subcommittee ... from judiciary, Republicans and Democrats, senior leadership staff. I don’t think there was anyone in there who didn’t work for a member that wasn’t ardently and publicly pro-Israel,” he said. “And afterwards, we were saying, ‘No way. You’ve got to be fucking kidding.’” The evidence of Israeli spying was overwhelming, he said. Visa waivers was off the table. “The voices in the room,” the aide recalled, were, “‘There’s just no way that this is possible.’”

Question: What is the name of Israel's secret service?
Answer: MOSSAD