Kurdish villages in the 1930s, when he worked for the Jewish Agency in Baghdad, with a cover as a teacher and part-time journalist.
These mountain people were constantly struggling to obtain autonomy, and their most active and direct aid from the Mossad came in the 1960s when Israeli military advisers trained Kurdish guerrillas. The United States and the Shah of Iran supported the project.
Israel benefited from the fact that one of its major enemies—the Iraqi army, which had invaded the newborn Jewish state in 1948—was tied down in a guerrilla conflict. Also, Israel enjoyed the Kurdish fighters’ help in smuggling the remnants of the Jewish community from Iraq into Iran, from where they were airlifted to Israel.
The Shah, as leader of a Moslem nation, never established formal diplomatic relations with Israel. But the monarch respected Israel’s struggle against its large Arab neighbors, and he supplied oil to Israel and had Iran’s national airline fly Jewish refugees to Tel Aviv.
Senior Israeli officials made unannounced visits to Tehran, and a trade office served as an unofficial embassy. The Israeli goal was to encourage the Shah’s anti-Arab leanings, and he was easily fed information meant to stoke his suspicions.
Decades later, the opposite held: Israelis would maintain quiet contacts with Arab countries and would try to heighten their suspicions about Iran.
With the blessings of the United States and Britain, the Israeli-Iranian alliance was extended to include another important non-Arab Muslim nation: Turkey.
In June 1958, Turkish and Israeli intelligence officials met. Ben-Gurion entrusted this project to Shiloah, even though the Mossad’s first chief had left the agency six years earlier. The talks led to an unannounced visit to Ankara by Ben-Gurion in August, so that he could meet his Turkish counterpart. When journalists noticed an El Al plane at the Turkish capital’s airport, the explanation given was: “engine problems that forced an emergency landing.”
The concrete result was a formal, but top-secret, agreement for comprehensive cooperation between the Mossad and the Turkish National Security Service, the TNSS. The Mossad agreed on a similar pact, around the same time, with Iran’s notorious Savak.
At the end of 1958, the three secret agencies established a formal cooperation network called Trident, which held semiannual gatherings of all three espionage chiefs.
The Mossad found that a plethora of unacknowledged international contacts often required it to play innkeeper, and the agency set up a “guest house” at a highway intersection north of Tel Aviv. Helicopters could land there. Cars could arrive or depart, day or night, without anyone paying any attention; just in case, official press censorship would guarantee no publicity for visits by important but anonymous foreigners.
Within a few years, the area around that guest house—a large, government-owned plot of land—became a training ground for Mossad operatives. Additional buildings were erected, and they formed the core of an academy teaching all the skills of espionage. The Mossad called it the Midrasha , a Hebrew word for the kind of intensive religious school where Orthodox Jews ponder the Bible, the Talmud, and other texts that were articles of faith.
The Mossad’s secular and secretive Midrasha set high standards and passed them, spy to spy, analyst to analyst, generation to generation, to ensure continued excellence for the agency.
The Mossad would eventually move its entire headquarters to the academy site. This gave the Mossad an entire campus with more space and certainly more seclusion, compared with the two previous sites in Tel Aviv: the original huts in Ben-Gurion’s defense compound, the Kirya; and then an American-style office building named Hadar Dafna in a highly trafficked business district.
When censorship prevented any individual or map from identifying the Mossad’s location, government officials
These mountain people were constantly struggling to obtain autonomy, and their most active and direct aid from the Mossad came in the 1960s when Israeli military advisers trained Kurdish guerrillas. The United States and the Shah of Iran supported the project.
Israel benefited from the fact that one of its major enemies—the Iraqi army, which had invaded the newborn Jewish state in 1948—was tied down in a guerrilla conflict. Also, Israel enjoyed the Kurdish fighters’ help in smuggling the remnants of the Jewish community from Iraq into Iran, from where they were airlifted to Israel.
The Shah, as leader of a Moslem nation, never established formal diplomatic relations with Israel. But the monarch respected Israel’s struggle against its large Arab neighbors, and he supplied oil to Israel and had Iran’s national airline fly Jewish refugees to Tel Aviv.
Senior Israeli officials made unannounced visits to Tehran, and a trade office served as an unofficial embassy. The Israeli goal was to encourage the Shah’s anti-Arab leanings, and he was easily fed information meant to stoke his suspicions.
Decades later, the opposite held: Israelis would maintain quiet contacts with Arab countries and would try to heighten their suspicions about Iran.
With the blessings of the United States and Britain, the Israeli-Iranian alliance was extended to include another important non-Arab Muslim nation: Turkey.
In June 1958, Turkish and Israeli intelligence officials met. Ben-Gurion entrusted this project to Shiloah, even though the Mossad’s first chief had left the agency six years earlier. The talks led to an unannounced visit to Ankara by Ben-Gurion in August, so that he could meet his Turkish counterpart. When journalists noticed an El Al plane at the Turkish capital’s airport, the explanation given was: “engine problems that forced an emergency landing.”
The concrete result was a formal, but top-secret, agreement for comprehensive cooperation between the Mossad and the Turkish National Security Service, the TNSS. The Mossad agreed on a similar pact, around the same time, with Iran’s notorious Savak.
At the end of 1958, the three secret agencies established a formal cooperation network called Trident, which held semiannual gatherings of all three espionage chiefs.
The Mossad found that a plethora of unacknowledged international contacts often required it to play innkeeper, and the agency set up a “guest house” at a highway intersection north of Tel Aviv. Helicopters could land there. Cars could arrive or depart, day or night, without anyone paying any attention; just in case, official press censorship would guarantee no publicity for visits by important but anonymous foreigners.
Within a few years, the area around that guest house—a large, government-owned plot of land—became a training ground for Mossad operatives. Additional buildings were erected, and they formed the core of an academy teaching all the skills of espionage. The Mossad called it the Midrasha , a Hebrew word for the kind of intensive religious school where Orthodox Jews ponder the Bible, the Talmud, and other texts that were articles of faith.
The Mossad’s secular and secretive Midrasha set high standards and passed them, spy to spy, analyst to analyst, generation to generation, to ensure continued excellence for the agency.
The Mossad would eventually move its entire headquarters to the academy site. This gave the Mossad an entire campus with more space and certainly more seclusion, compared with the two previous sites in Tel Aviv: the original huts in Ben-Gurion’s defense compound, the Kirya; and then an American-style office building named Hadar Dafna in a highly trafficked business district.
When censorship prevented any individual or map from identifying the Mossad’s location, government officials
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