Gideon’s Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service, The Mossad | Gordon Thomas

If Thomas is to be believed, Mossad has been involved in every murky happening anywhere in the world for decades. Henry Paul, for example, who drove Princess Diana into a column of the Alma underpass, turns out to have been a Mossad agent. The old story that Robert Maxwell stole from the Mirror Group pension fund to finance Mossad’s world-wide operations, and was then murdered by Mossad agents, is trotted out for another airing. When Nizar Hindawi was tried in England for planting explosives on his girlfriend to blow up an El Al airliner, his defence was that he was a Mossad agent taking part in an elaborate sting designed to discredit Syria. The jury did not believe him, but Gordon Thomas has swallowed it whole. A variety of Hezbollah coups, such as the murder of 240 US marines in the Lebanon in 1983, are said to have been detected by Mossad in advance, and then allowed to happen in order to stoke up American hostility to Hezbollah’s Arab patrons.

Many other examples could be cited. Basic mistakes about those cases whose facts are known do not encourage confidence in the author’s other revelations. And if Mossad was even half as skilful and all-knowing as Thomas suggests, Israel’s military and political problems in the Middle East would surely have been solved long ago.

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Comments

Omadhaun

August 8th, 2008 4:42pm

Mr. Sumption's review of the book- or rather his opinion on the Mossad and Israel- is obviously tainted by his preconceptions which ,as an earlier commentator stated, are more in line with the Guardian than in any objective publication.
When push gets to shove- I would much rather be protected by the fallible Mossad [yes who go out and assassinate/kill enemies] than the CIA or most western intelligence agencies.

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Brian Gould

June 22nd, 2008 4:44pm

Not everybody agrees with your reviewer's judgment that the Mossad is ineffective:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/995077.html

Cui Bono

June 21st, 2008 5:47pm

"Gordon Thomas is an Irish-resident Welshman," says it all really.

David Nordell

June 20th, 2008 2:23pm

The first edition of this book was, as Jonathan Sumption writes, a collection of material culled from other published sources, fantasists' stories, and large amounts of tosh; and I'm sure that he is correct in saying that the same is true of the latest edition.

But Sumption himself is guilty of the same shoddiness and inaccuracies of which he rightly accuses Gordon Thomas. The Mossad has indeed always been good at HUMINT, but not because of a shortage of technological prowess, which the Israeli intelligence community has always had in spades (the beeper, for example, was invented by the Shabak, the internal security service, in order to communicate discreetly with agents in the field, and the Mossad's own bag of tricks rivals anything carried around by James Bond). Jonathan Pollard wasn't recruited and run by the Mossad, but by a semi-private intelligence fiefdom within the defence ministry called LAKAM (the bureau for scientific liaison), which was run by a former senior Mossad man who had been rejected for the top job. Mossad has had outstanding successes in intelligence collection and analysis as well as special operations, but it's the nature of its work that these don't get publicised. The Mossad has also been very successful in developing and maintaining Israel's relations with foreign countries that don't, or at the time didn't, have official diplomatic relations with Israel.

There's certainly plenty to say about the Mossad's inefficiencies, operational failures, and management cock-ups, as well as the success stories. But neither Gordon Thomas nor Jonathan Sumption are close enough to the real facts to reveal these. A little humility would not be out of place.

June 19th, 2008 12:27pm

You're a bit late with this review, aren't you? The present (third) edition was published in January 2007 in the UK and a month earlier in the US.

The overall anti-Israel tone of the review sounds more like the Guardian or the Independent than the Spectator. The first three paragraphs have little or nothing to do with the book -- the softest of soft leads. Also, to describe the author as "an Irish-resident Welshman" is to overlook the Palestinian element in his family background. His access to Israeli sources is clearly much greater than your reviewer gives him credit for.