LONDON – Poisoned toothpaste that takes a month to end its target’s life.Armed drones. Exploding mobile phones. Spare tyres with remote-controlbombs. Assassinating enemy scientists and discovering the secret lovers ofMuslim clerics.
A new book chronicles these techniques and asserts that Israel has carriedout at least 2,700 assassination operations in its 70 years of existence.While many failed, they add up to far more than any other western country,the book says.
Ronen Bergman, the intelligence correspondent for YediotAharonot newspaper, persuaded many agents of Mossad, Shin Bet and themilitary to tell their stories, some using their real names. The result isthe first comprehensive look at Israel’s use of state-sponsored killings.
Based on 1,000 interviews and thousands of documents and running more than600 pages, Rise and Kill First makes the case that Israel has usedassassination in the place of war, killing half a dozen Iranian nuclearscientists, for instance, rather than launching a military attack. It alsostrongly suggests that Israel used radiation poisoning to kill YasserArafat, the long-time Palestinian leader an act its officials haveconsistently denied.
Bergman writes that Mr Arafat’s death in 2004 fit a pattern and hadadvocates. But he steps back from flatly asserting what happened, sayingthat Israeli military censorship prevents him from revealing what – or if –he knows.
The book’s title comes from the ancient Jewish Talmud admonition, “Ifsomeone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” Bergman says a hugepercentage of the people he interviewed cited that passage as justificationfor their work. So does an opinion by the military’s lawyer declaring suchoperations to be legitimate acts of war.
Despite the many interviews, including with former prime ministers EhudBarak and Ehud Olmert, Bergman, the author of several books, says theIsraeli secret services sought to interfere with his work, holding ameeting in 2010 on how to disrupt his research and warning former Mossademployees not to speak with him.
He says that while the US has tighter constraints on its agents than doesIsrael, President George W Bush adopted many Israeli techniques after theterrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and President Barack Obama launchedseveral hundred targeted killings.
“The command-and-control systems, the war rooms, the methods of informationgathering and the technology of the pilotless aircraft or drones, that nowserve the Americans and their allies were all in large part developed inIsrael,” Bergman writes.
The book gives a textured history of the personalities and tactics of thevarious secret services. In the 1970s, a new head of operations for Mossadopened hundreds of commercial companies overseas with the idea that theymight be useful one day. For example, Mossad created a MiddleEastern shipping business that, years later, came in handy in providingcover for a team in the waters off Yemen.
There have been plenty of failures. After a Palestinian terrorist groupkilled Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Israel sent its agentsto kill the perpetrators – and shot more than one misidentified man. Therewere also successful operations that did more harm than good to Israel’spolicy goals, Bergman notes.
Bergman raises moral and legal concerns provoked by state-sponsoredkilling, including the existence of separate legal systems for secretagents and the rest of Israel. But he presents the operations, for the mostpart, as achieving their aims. While many credit the barrier Israel builtalong and inside the West Bank with stopping assaults on Israeli citizensin the early 2000s, he argues that what made the difference was “a massivenumber of targeted killings of terrorist operatives.”
One of Bergman’s most important sources was Meir Dagan, a recent head ofMossad for eight years who died in early 2016. Toward the end of hiscareer, Dagan fell out with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu partly overlaunching a military attack on Iran. Netanyahu said intelligence techniquessuch as selling the country faulty parts for its reactors – which Israeland the US were doing – weren’t enough.
Dagan argued back that these techniques, especially assassinations, woulddo the job. As Bergman quotes him saying, “In a car, there are 25,000 partson average. Imagine if 100 of them are missing. It would be very hard tomake it go. On the other hand, sometimes it’s most effective to kill thedriver, and that’s that.”
This article originally appeared on Bloomberglink>