About Jewishness

Mossad
Formerly known as the Central Institute for Coordination and the Central Institute for Intelligence and Security, Mossad was formed on 01 April 1951. Mossad was established by then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, who gave as Mossad's primary directive: "For our state which since its creation has been under siege by its enemies. Intelligence constitutes the first line of defence...we must learn well how to recognise what is going on around us."
Mossad, with a staff of 1,200 to 1,500 personnel, has responsibility for human intelligence collection, covert action, and counterterrorism. Its focus is on Arab nations and organizations throughout the world. Mossad is headquartered in Tel Aviv. It does not use military ranks, although most of its staff have served in the as part of Israel's compulsory draft system, and many of them are officers.

Mossad has a total of eight departments, though some details of the internal organization of the agency remain obscure.
Collections Department is the largest, with responsibility for espionage operations, with offices abroad under both diplomatic and unofficial cover. The department consists of a number of desks which are responsible for specific geographical regions, directing case officers based at "stations" around the world, and the agents they control.
Political Action and Liaison Department conducts political activities and liaison with friendly foreign intelligence services and with nations with which Israel does not have normal diplomatic relations. In larger stations, such as Paris, Mossad customarily had under embassy cover two regional controllers: one to serve the Collections Department and the other the Political Action and Liaison Department.
Special Operations Division, also known as Metsada, conducts highly sensitive assassination, sabotage, paramilitary, and psychological warfare projects.
LAP (Lohamah Psichlogit Department) is responsible for psychological warfare, propaganda and deception operations.
Research Department is responsible for intelligence production, including daily situation reports, weekly summaries and detailed monthly reports. The Department is organized into 15 geographically specialized sections or "desks", including the USA, Canada and Western Europe, Latin America, former Soviet Union, China, Africa, the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. A "nuclear" desk is focused on special weapons related issues.

Mossad was responsible for the clandestine movement of Jewish refugees out of Syria, Iran, and Ethiopia. Mossad agents were active in the communist countries, in the West, and at the UN. Mossad had eight departments, the largest of which, the Collections Department, had responsibility for espionage operations, with offices abroad under both diplomatic and unofficial cover. The Political Action and Liaison Department conducted political activities and relations with friendly foreign intelligence services and with nations with which Israel did not have normal diplomatic relations. In larger stations, such as Paris, Mossad customarily had under embassy cover two regional controllers: one to serve the Collections Department and the other the Political Action and Liaison Department. A Special Operations Division, believed to be subordinate to the latter department, conducted highly sensitive sabotage, paramilitary, and psychological warfare projects.

Israel's most celebrated spy, Eli Cohen, was recruited by Mossad during the 1960s to infiltrate the top echelons of the Syrian government. Cohen radioed information to Israel for two years before he was discovered and publicly hanged in Damascus Square. Another Mossad agent, Wolfgang Lotz, established himself in Cairo, became acquainted with high-ranking Egyptian military and police officers, and obtained information on missile sites and on German scientists working on the Egyptian rocket program. In 1962 and 1963, in a successful effort to intimidate the Germans, several key scientists in that program were targets of assassination attempts. Mossad also succeeded in seizing eight missile boats under construction for Israel in France, but which had been embargoed by French president Charles de Gaulle in December 1968. In 1960, Mossad carried out one of its most celebrated operations, the kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann from Argentina. Another kidnapping, in 1986, brought to Israel for prosecution the nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, who had revealed details of the Israeli nuclear weapons program to a London newspaper. During the 1970s, Mossad assassinated several Arabs connected with the Black September terrorist group. Mossad inflicted a severe blow on the PLO in April 1988, when an assassination team invaded a well-guarded residence in Tunis to murder Arafat's deputy, Abu Jihad, considered to be the principal PLO planner of military and terrorist operations against Israel.

Egyptian security services reported the discovery of a total of seven Israeli espionage networks during 1996, which is a significant increase compared to the 20 similar networks discovered in the previous 15 years.
And Mossad's record has also been blemished by a few embarrasing failures. In Lillehammer, Norway, on 07 January 1974, Mossad agents mistakenly killed Ahmad Boushiki, an Algerian waiter carrying a Moroccan passport, whom they mistook for PLO security head Ali Ahmad Salameh, believed to have masterminded the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics [Salameh was killed in a 1979 car-bomb explosion in Lebanon]. Following the attack, the Mossad agents were arrested and tried before a Norwegian court. Five Israeli agents were convicted and served short jail sentences, though Israel denied responsibility for the murder. In February 1996, the Israeli government agreed to compensate the family of Ahmad Boushiki.
On 15 November 1995, Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an Israeli citizen. Following the controversy over the failure of intelligence to protect Rabin, and the embarrassment over the mistaken assassination of a Swedish national, the Director Geneneral of Mossad, known only as 'S', was forced into retirement. On 24 March 1996, Prime Minister Shimon Peres appointed Major General Danny Yatom as the new Director General of Mossad, the first Director of Mossad to ever be publically identified.

On 24 September 1997, Mossad operatives attempted to assassinate Khalid Meshaal, a top political leader of the Palestinian group Hamas. The assassins entered Jordan on fake Canadian, and injected Meshaal with a poison. Jordan was able to wring a number of concessions out of Israel in the aftermath of the fiasco, including the release of the founder of Hamas, Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, from an Israeli jail.
Ephraim Halevy, a nephew of the late Sir Isaiah Berlin [who helped to negotiate a peace deal with Jordan], became the new head of Mossad after two bungled operations led to the arrests of agents in Switzerland and Jordan. Mossad scaled down overseas assassinations after the bungled operations in the late 1990s. But by 2002 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to remove Halevy, after the two clashed repeatedly about what strategy to adopt against Palestinian violence
In October 2002 General Meir Dagan, who served in the Israeli Army with Ariel Sharon, and assisted him during his election campaign, was confirmed as head of Mossad. Dagan led an undercover commando unit that tracked and killed Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. Sharon wanted Mossad to go back to the undercover and special operations for which it was renowned.
Dr. Ardeshir Hosseinpour, a scientist involved in the Iranian nuclear program, was killed by the Mossad on January 15, 2007.

The Mossad is suspected of assassinating Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas military commander, in January 2010 at Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The team which carried out the killing is estimated, on the basis of CCTV and other evidence, to have consisted of at least 26 agents travelling on bogus passports. The killers entered al-Mabhouh's hotel room, where Mabhouh was electrocuted and interrogated. His veins were then probably injected with a poison whose chemical composition has yet to be disclosed. The door to his room was reported to have been locked from the inside. Although the UAR police and Hamas have declared Israel responsible for the assassination, no direct evidence linking Mossad to the crime has been found. The agents' bogus passports included six British passports, cloned from those of real British nationals resident in Israel and suspected by Dubai; five Irish passports, apparently forged from those of living individuals; forged Australian passports that raised fears of reprisal against innocent victims of identity theft; a genuine German passport and a false French passport. Emirati police say they have fingerprint and DNA evidence of some of the attackers, as well as retinal scans of 11 suspects recorded at Dubai airport. Dubai's police chief has said "I am now completely sure that it was Mossad," adding: "I have presented the (Dubai) prosecutor with a request for the arrest of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu and the head of Mossad," for the murder.

Ceremony in which the incoming Shin Bet director, Yuval Diskin (r), replaces Avi Dichter (l), in the presence of prime minister Ariel Sharon.
March 15, 2005

Shin Bet
Sherut haBitachon haKlali, officially known by the acronym Shabak, officially known in English as Israel Security Agency (ISA), and commonly known as the Shin Bet, is Israel's counterespionage and internal security service.
Shin Bet is believed to have three operational departments and five support departments. The Arab Affairs Department has responsibility for antiterrorist operations, political subversion, and maintenance of an index on Arab terrorists. The Non-Arab Affairs Department, divided into communist and noncommunist sections, concerns itself with all other countries, including penetrating foreign intelligence services and diplomatic missions in Israel and interrogating immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The Protective Security Department has responsibility for protecting Israeli government buildings and embassies, defense industries, scientific installations, industrial plants, and El Al.
Shin Bet monitors the activities of and personalities in domestic right-wing fringe groups and subversive leftist movements. It is believed to have infiltrated agents into the ranks of the parties of the far left and had uncovered a number of foreign technicians spying for neighboring Arab countries or the Soviet Union. All foreigners, regardless of religion or nationality, are liable to come under surveillance through an extensive network of informants who regularly came into contact with visitors to Israel. Shin Bet's network of agents and informers in the occupied territories destroyed the PLO's effectiveness there after 1967, forcing the PLO to withdraw to bases in Jordan.
Shin Bet relies mainly on human intelligence (espionage) to gather information and intelligence. It uses informants from the local population in order to gather intelligence about planned attacks or about the location of terrorist leaders. Shin Bet has overwhelming success with informants, managing to target the top leaders of the Palestinian militant organizations—including Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. The killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and indicates how deeply Shin Bet has penetrated into the Palestinian militias. As a result, the Palestinian groups, mainly the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, have killed many countrymen suspected of being collaborators.
Shin Bet's main duties are:

• Safeguarding state security
• Exposing terrorist rings
• Interrogating terror suspects
• Providing intelligence for counter-terrorism operations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
• Counter-espionage
• Personal protection of senior public officials
• Securing important infrastructure and government buildings
• Safeguarding Israeli airlines and overseas embassies

Shin Bet's reputation as a highly proficient internal security agency was tarnished severely by two public scandals in the mid-1980s. In April 1984, Israeli troops stormed a bus hijacked by four Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Although two of the hijackers survived, they were later beaten to death by Shin Bet agents. It appeared that the agents were acting under orders of Avraham Shalom, the head of Shin Bet. Shalom falsified evidence and instructed Shin Bet witnesses to lie to investigators to cover up Shin Bet's role. In the ensuing controversy, the attorney general was removed from his post for refusing to abandon his investigation. The president granted pardons to Shalom, his deputies who had joined in the cover-up, and the agents implicated in the killings.
In 1987 Izat Nafsu, a former IDF army lieutenant and member of the Circassian minority, was released after his 1980 conviction for treason (espionage on behalf of Syria) was overturned by the Supreme Court. The court ruled that Shin Bet had used unethical interrogation methods to obtain Nafsu's confession and that Shin Bet officers had presented false testimony to the military tribunal that had convicted him. A judicial commission set up to report on the methods and practices of Shin Bet found that for the previous seventeen years it had been the accepted norm for Shin Bet interrogators to lie to the courts about their interrogation methods.
In November 2003, four former heads of Shin Bet (Avraham Shalom, Yaakov Peri, Carmi Gillon and Ami Ayalon) called upon the Government of Israel to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Avi Dichter is one of the chief supporters of building a defense barrier opposite to the Palestinians in the West Bank. The Israeli government began building the in 2003. Dichter has since said that the barrier "is working" and helps to prevent and reduce terror attacks.
In February 2005, Ariel Sharon announced that Yuval Diskin, a veteran Shabak field coordinator, senior negotiator with Palestinian officers and mastermind of the "targeted killings", will replace Dichter after he ends his five-year term. On May 15, 2005 Diskin entered into office after Dichter left with great applause from the press, the politicians, and the public. Dichter has joined the political arena and is now a member of the Kadima party, founded by the former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.
In September 2006, the Shin Bet launched its first-ever public recruitment drive with the creation of a web site. The employment campaign, coming on the heels of a newly approved defense budget, is targeting computer programmers.
In December 2009, the Shin Bet responded to a petition in Israel's High Court, defending their use of torture against detainees.The petition was filed by the Public Committee Against Torture, a prisoner advocacy group which challenged the Israeli practice of forcing Palestinian detainees to sit on small chairs with their hands cuffed behind the chair during interrogations. Shin Bet agents insisted that their methods of interrogating Palestinian detainees are 'humane'. They said that since they increased the length of the chain between the handcuffs to 48 inches, their methods of handcuffing are now humane.The Israeli secret agency said that the handcuffing of Palestinians during interrogation is necessary in order to 'prevent escape attempts', but gave no examples of such escape attempts actually taking place. In 1999, the Israeli High Court determined that a number of torture techniques used by Shin Bet, including the 'banana' technique were illegal. But Palestinian detainees who have served time in Israeli prison camps in the ten years since that ruling say that many of the banned techniques continue to be used by Shin Bet and other Israeli military agencies.

Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, head of Aman

Aman
The Directory of Military Intelligence, or Aman, with an estimated staff of 7,000 personnel, produces comprehensive national intelligence estimates for the prime minister and cabinet, daily intelligence reports, risk of war estimates, target studies on nearby Arab countries, and communications intercepts. Aman also conducts across-border agent operations. Aman's Foreign Relations Department is responsible for liaison with foreign intelligence services and the activities of Israeli military attachés abroad. Aman was held responsible for the failure to obtain adequate warning of the Egyptian-Syrian attack that launched the October 1973 War. Many indications of the attack were received but faulty assessments at higher levels permitted major Arab gains before the IDF could mobilize and stabilize the situation.
During preparations for the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Aman correctly assessed the weaknesses of the Christian militia on which Israel was depending and correctly predicted that a clash with the Syrian garrison in Lebanon was inevitable. The chief of intelligence, Major General Yehoshua Saguy, made these points to the general staff and privately to the prime minister. But, although he was present at cabinet meetings, he failed to make his doubts known to avoid differing openly with Begin and Sharon. Saguy was forced to retire after the Kahan Commission found that he had been delinquent in his duties regarding the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps.
Small air force and naval intelligence units operate as semi-autonomous branches of Aman. Air force intelligence primarily use aerial reconnaissance and radio intercepts to collect information on strength levels of Arab air forces and for target compilation. In addition to reconnaissance aircraft, pilotless drones were used extensively to observe enemy installations. Naval intelligence collected data on Arab and Soviet naval activities in the Mediterranean and prepared coastal studies for naval gunfire missions and beach assaults.
The head of Aman is the highest intelligence officer in the IDF and engages in intelligence decision and policy-making at the same level as the heads of the Shabak and the Mossad: together, they form the three highest-ranking, co-equal heads of the Israeli Intelligence Community, focusing on the military, domestic (including the Palestinian territories), and foreign intelligence fronts respectively. The current head of Aman is Amos Yadin.
In 1976, according to the Lexicon of National Security, some of Aman's principal roles consisted of:

• Intelligence evaluation for security policy, military planning and 'fluid security policy,' and the dissemination of intelligence to IDF and governmental bodies.
• Field security at the level of the General Staff (today, Matkal), and the training and operation of field security in general (all levels).
• The operation of military censorship.
• Direction and operation of the 'Collection Agencies'.
• Drawing maps; providing the direction and supervision for the dissemination of maps.
• The development of 'special measures' for intelligence work.
• The development of intelligence doctrine in the realms of research, collection, and field security.
• Staff responsibility for military attachés overseas.

Jonathan Jay Pollard

Lekem
Until officially disbanded in 1986, the Bureau of Scientific Relations (Leshkat Kesher Madao--Lekem) collected scientific and technical intelligence abroad from both open and covert sources. Lekem was dismantled following the scandal aroused in the United States by the arrest of Jonathan Jay Pollard for espionage on behalf of Israel. Pollard, a United States naval intelligence employee in Washington, received considerable sums for delivering vast quantities of classified documents to the scientific officers (Lekem agents) at the Israeli embassy. Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment. Although the Israeli government asserted that the operation was an unauthorized deviation from its policy of not conducting espionage against the United States, statements by the Israeli participants and by Pollard himself cast doubt on these claims.
Rafael "Rafi" Eitan, born 23 November 1926) is an Israeli politician and former intelligence officer. In the past, he was in charge of the Mossad operation that lead to the capture of Adolf Eichmann. He served as an advisor on terrorism to Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and in 1981 he was appointed to head the Bureau of Scientific Relations, then an intelligence entity on par with Mossad, Aman and Shabak. Eitan assumed responsibility for and resigned over the Jonathan Pollard affair, and the Bureau was disbanded.
Israel granted Pollard citizenship in 1995, while publicly denying that he was an Israeli spy until 1998. Israeli activist groups, as well as high-profile Israeli politicians such as Benjamin Netanyahu, have lobbied for his release. In 2002, Netanyahu visited Pollard in prison. In 2007, Netanyahu claimed that if he was elected Prime Minister he would bring about the release of Jonathan Pollard.

The Knesset, Jerusalem. 9 March 2010

The Honorable Joseph Biden,
Vice President of the United States of America

Dear Mr. Vice President,
The Festival of Passover – the Festival of Freedom of our People is approaching. Sadly, there will be a cloud over our celebration as we remember that for the past 25 years, Jonathan Pollard has been in prison in the United States, and that recently his poor state of health has greatly deteriorated.
Jonathan Pollard, who has expressed regret for his actions, received an extremely heavy punishment, even in comparison with others in the United States who were sentenced for similar offences. The usual sentence for the type of offence committed by Pollard is only 2-4 years in prison.
In a past interview, you expressed your opinion that there is a rationale for granting Pollard leniency. We are therefore calling on you from the depths of our hearts, pleading with you to show mercy to Jonathan Pollard who is so sick, and to grant him clemency as a humanitarian gesture to the Jewish People, to mark the Festival of Passover, the Festival of our Freedom.
The release of Jonathan Pollard would bring extra significance to our Festival of Freedom this year and add real meaning to the special relations and the friendship between our two nations. The release of Pollard will bring only benefit to the United States and blessings from Heaven.

Sincerely yours,

Uri Ariel, MK
Chair, The Knesset Lobby for Jonathan Pollard