I am wholly unqualified to assess Gordon Thomas’ 1999 work Gideon’s Spies as a history of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad. Not only did I know little about the topic going in, but, given the murky and sensitive nature of the subject matter, I must assume that Thomas could publish only what the Mossad allowed him to publish—leaving out information that could harm or embarrass the agency or Israel itself. Further, given that people who work for intelligence agencies are by definition professional liars and conspirators, there is no way of telling how much of Thomas’ reporting is true. Sure, he does due diligence with his research and often reports events that can be verified through multiple sources. But when he secures interviews with Mossad agents, active and retired, or when he relates events that only this or that particular Mossad agent could have experienced, was he always given the whole truth? Who knows?
What I am qualified to assess, however, is the book’s readability and its value as non-fiction. In both cases, Gideon’s Spies succeeds well enough for an endorsement. It’s tightly written, suspenseful, evocative, and in parts utterly fascinating. Unless you possess secret information because you are A) a Mossad insider, B) an intelligence community expert, or C) an enemy of Israel that Israel hasn’t managed to kill yet, you will learn a lot from this book and walk away with a more realistic understanding of human nature. At least that was the case for me. As for a discourse on the just or unjust nature of Israel’s occupation of Arab lands or of Zionism itself, that is beyond the scope of this review. So is assessing the justice or lack thereof behind the Palestinian cause against Israel. My goals for this review are not so noble, nor so grand. Instead, I wish to summarize the main points of the book, retell some of the juicier bits for your enjoyment, and describe in detail newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell’s relationship with Mossad, which Thomas covers extensively. Maxwell, as most of us know, was a Mossad operative and the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, the former associate of the late Jeffrey Epstein, whose ghost has been in the news a lot recently.
(...)
What follows in Gideon’s Spies is episode after episode which reveal beyond all else the ruthlessness, duplicity, and meticulousness of the Mossad. Explosions, assassinations, kidnappings, political intrigue, sexual entrapments, false identities, tapped telephones, dangerous undercover missions in the dead of night—it’s all there. This is real “spy vs. spy” territory, but the Mossad gives it its own sociopathic dimension. It’s basically Machiavelli meets the Old Testament. For instance, Mossad often incited disturbances or planted black propaganda in Arab countries not to fend off a certain threat but simply to sow distrust among the Arabs. They would also “kill both sides,” an expression coined by senior Mossad spymaster David Kimche. In the 1980s, the Mossad aided the Kurds in revolting against the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian regime, while simultaneously supplying arms to Tehran. Did they have good reasons to do all this? Or were they simply getting bored in Tel Aviv? When TWA flight 800 crashed in 1996, killing 230 people, Mossad’s division of psychological warfare (Hebrew acronym: LAP) blamed it falsely on Iran or Iraq. The FBI wasted many man-hours sussing that one out.
(...)
Despite being a thrilling read, Gideon’s Spies sheds little light on some of the burning mysteries of today. Aside from the Mossad’s potential connection to the Kennedy Assassination or Jeffrey Epstein, many of us would also like to know whether they were behind 9-11, as Wyatt Peterson recently claimed. I also explored the Israel-9-11 connection a couple years ago at Counter-Currents, as well as transcribed Carl Cameron’s banned Fox News coverage of it from December 2001. Unfortunately, none of this circumstantial evidence can be found in Gideon’s Spies. Given its publication date, it’s unlikely that it would be.
Throughout, Thomas maintains a measured respect for the Mossad that does not jeopardize his journalistic integrity. He’s not anti-Semitic, but nor is he servile to Israel or Jews. He may betray a slight pro-Israeli bias, but it’s nothing beyond the pale for a mainstream journalist in 1999. He’s also perfectly willing to expose all that is ugly, cruel, dishonest, and frankly sleazy about the Mossad. He would have to, being their biographer, despite what respect for them he may hold. In the 1990s, former Mossad operatives Ari Ben-Manashe and Victor Ostrovsky had each published books revealing insider details which severely damaged the agency. For example, Ostrovsky alleged that the Mossad had actually plotted to assassinate President George H. W. Bush in 1991. Could Gideon’s Spies have been a Mossad attempt at damage control? Who knows? Again, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility—especially considering that Thomas weirdly ends his book not with a proper conclusion but with the prediction that with all its failures, the Mossad is always one SNAFU away from having a new director general appointed. Was this uncharacteristically soft landing a way of humanizing the Mossad?
My reading of Thomas however leads me to one rock solid conclusion—that Israel is not and never was an ally of the United States. From the very beginning, it was monitoring Americans and stealing from Americans. Thomas reports:
In a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA had identified Israel as one of six foreign countries with “a government-directed, orchestrated, clandestine effort to collect US economic secrets.”
And not just economic secrets. Military secrets, computer secrets, nuclear secrets, sexual secrets, any secrets, really—all of it was on the table. Perhaps the most telling evidence of Israel’s perfidy—worse in my opinion than the attack on the USS Liberty—was how the Mossad knew damn well that the 1983 attack on American marines in Beirut was going to happen. They were supposed to inform the CIA and didn’t. Even worse, they were live monitoring the bomb-laden vehicle as it plowed full speed into Marine headquarters, killing 241 service members. According to Victor Ostrovsky, a Mossad officer callously said afterward of the Americans: “They wanted to stick their nose into this Lebanon thing, let them pay the price.”
Now, to be fair, no one should resent the Israelis because the Mossad is good at what they do. Gordon Thomas certainly doesn’t, and good on him for that. I am sure the CIA has done some nasty things to Israel as well. I have no doubt the CIA bugs and monitors Israelis every chance they get—in the US and abroad, in embassies, and in Israel itself. Of course, they should. Further, if the Israelis ever have something worth stealing, I sincerely hope the CIA would filch it as remorselessly as Israel has filched from the United States. I’m sure that law and ethics are little more than fanciful luxuries in the cutthroat world of spy vs. spy. Therefore I am willing to give wide latitude to the Mossad. But when billions of dollars move in only one direction in the relationship between America and Israel, that’s when we should start resenting the Israelis. It’s one thing to lose your secret stuff to talented spies; that comes with the territory when you run a country. It’s something else entirely to lose your secret stuff, while getting your pocket picked, while listening to your pocket-picker whisper sweet nothings about how he’s your greatest ally, while this same pocket-picker wants you fight his battles for him, while this selfsame pocket-picker is willing to smear you as a Nazi if you dare run your mouth about any of this.
It doesn’t take a hardened anti-Semite or anti-Zionist to see how abusive and one-sided this relationship is. And although I’m sure this wasn’t Gordon Thomas’ intention, this is the conclusion one cannot help but draw after reading Gideon’s Spies.
Mossad & 9/11
https://www.unz.com/article/israel-did-9-11/
https://www.counter-currents.com/2023/01/the-banned-fox-news-report-on-israels-role-in-9-11/
* The CIA likely doing “nasty things to Israel as well”, you say? The Mossad is probably running that organization as well. As well as anything else of importance in their de facto American colony. They are clearly riding their Anglo/White milk herd fight into the ground.
No comments:
Post a Comment