Mossad

“Portions of this article were deleted by the Israeli Military Censor.” So begins a fascinating article, “Spies Like Us,” by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv in Tablet. It goes into considerable detail into the U.S.-Israeli intelligence relationship over recent decades. The story is one of friendship and friction. Among other things, it surveys the foibles and achievements of successive CIA station chiefs in Israel. For example,

the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv from 1995 to 1999 was Stan Moskowitz, a 40-year agency veteran who kept trying to mediate the inevitable disputes. Mossad officials did not like him, not because of his role in the peace process, but because they felt that—perhaps because he was a Bronx-born Jew trying to overcompensate—he kept himself at a frosty distance from the Israelis. This view is reflected in the memoirs of a Canadian-born Mossad operative using the pseudonym Michael Ross. In his book The Volunteer, Ross describes Moskowitz as “a self-important Beltway climber who drove around Tel Aviv in the back seat of a white Mercedes sedan.” 

Like many accounts of espionage, the article has no bottom line. Nonetheless, it offers a fascinating glimpse of the fraught relationship that can develop when two allies spy on one another.

The Dubai police have exposed the “identities” of the people who did it—pointing the finger not only at the Mossad, but also at Palestinian “collaborators” (who may be traitorous members of Hamas, or Hamas-despising members of Fatah, depending on which fork of the tongue you care to believe, if you care to believe either at all). The Arab world is aghast in public, though we may presume that at any rate the King of Jordan and the dictator of Egypt, who apparently have their own reasons, are singing a different tune entirely in private. One Hamas “legislator” is suggesting the victim brought it on himself by sloppiness. The Brits and the Irish have called in Israeli ambassadors to “inquire” about the use of purloined British/Irish identities, the EU is atwitter about it, the Germans are investigating a possibly stolen German identity, and David Miliband, after expressing his “outrage,” has met with Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman to discuss it. (And by the bye, the awesomely illustrious French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, takes the opportunity to observe that this whole affair "shows the need for peace and a Palestinian state, immediately!”) The Israelis are neither confirming nor denying having carried out the operation during which a notorious self-proclaimed Hamas murderer of unarmed Israeli soldiers was assassinated in his hotel room bed.