Lies and Spies and Media Hype

Time magazine a year ago ran a big story, flagged on its cover as “Israel Prepares for War,” about fears of a Syrian attack on the Golan Heights. The supposed crisis began in August 1996, when Syria’s leader Hafez Assad moved his 14th Division from Beirut to the border. There’s no doubt that the Syrian army division was moved forward. Far more questionable was the view of the Israeli high command that an attack might be imminent.

The uproar overshadowed the peace process, then being even further discredited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and suggested that Israel’s suspicions of any process involving the word “peace” might be well-founded. Time’s long story on Dec. 9, 1996, stressed the ill-preparedness and underbudgeted state of Israel’s armed forces, thus furnishing ammunition for increased U.S. aid.

The whole crisis, as ultimately relayed by Time, was fomented by a Mossad officer who was a member of Moledet, a right-wing party hostile to anything resembling a peace process. The 63-year-old officer, Yehuda Gil, retired in 1989 but was still filing intelligence reports to the spy agency because his longtime Syrian mole was regarded as critically important. But there was no such highly placed Syrian source. Gil, noted for his Mossad training course titled “The Lie as Art,” was making everything up and pocketing the money he was meant to be handing over to his agent.

At some point, Gil aroused suspicions, if not in the bosom of his credulous or complicit overseers in Mossad then among other intelligence agencies chided for lacking the superb Damascus contacts of the legendary Mossad.

Gil was finally placed under surveillance by his Mossad colleagues and confronted; he soon confessed and now faces trial. The case has been covered extensively in the Israeli press, but was a one-day item in U.S. media. In some Israeli papers, heroic efforts were made to put as much space as possible between Gil and his employer, and between Gil and any political agenda.

Like many career officers in intelligence, Gil was certainly a diligent liar. In retirement he volunteered to serve on the water board of his village, Gadara. Not long thereafter, the Gadara water board, wearied by his unceasing deceptions even in this picayune function, gave him the boot. But here was no pensioner who started to crack up only in retirement. By some Israeli press accounts, Gil was drafting politically explosive intelligence assessments a decade before he retired to the semiofficial status that still had him handling Mossad’s “top agent” in Syria.

Prominent in the program of damage control has been the assertion of Mossad’s allies in Israel that this was somehow a unique blot. “In the 46 years of the Mossad’s work, there has never been an instance in which its officials defrauded in terms of the intelligence reports which they conveyed,” wrote Ron Ben-Yishai, a military reporter for Yediot Aharonot.

It’s impossible to read this sort of stuff without laughing, since Mossad’s violent mendacities from its earliest days are by now well-known. As perhaps the most famous example, we have only to read the recent historical excavations of the Lavon affair of the 1950s, in which Mossad undertook an extensive program of provocations against Egypt.

Mossad’s role has always been to misrepresent and exaggerate the threats to Israel’s security and to head off, often by assassination, any human threats to its preferred image of Arab intransigence. Years ago, when he was director of U.S. central intelligence, Adm. Stansfield Turner underwrote an agency report that denounced Mossad’s achievements and reputation as vastly overblown.

As the CIA headed into the Reagan years it was freighted with Yehuda Gils by the hundred, all lying their heads off in the collective effort to inflate the terrible Soviet threat (and of course the Arab threat, too), to be beaten back only by vast new U.S. military expenditures.

Gil is a far more useful emblem of the nature of spying than someone out of Le Carre. In Gil, you have the paradigm of all those intelligence officers whispering their fantasies into eager journalists’ ears down the decades, insisting--to take the latest bout--that Moammar Kadafi’s irrigation scheme in Libya is in fact a sinister military plot, as the New York Times reported. Of course, Kadafi has twice hosted Nelson Mandela and has been mustering increasing international support. Time to take him down a peg or two and reassert his mad-dog status. That’s the function of the Yehuda Gils of this world, and the secret agencies they work for, helped along by the Fourth Estate.