When Israel's Mossad Stole A Iraqi Mig-21: The Story Of Munir Redfa

This happened in 1966. Another Israeli conflict with the Arabs was imminent. What worried the Israelis was that the Arabs had received the new Mig 21 fighter from Russia. Not even the US knew anything about the new threat in the sky. Israel had to lay its hands on a Mig 21. This is the story of Munir Redfa, an Iraqi Christian fighter pilot, who was enticed by the Mossad to fly his Mig 21 to Israel.

  Redfa in 1966 and in 1998 before his death

WHO WAS MUNIR REDFA?

Munir Redfa (1934–1998) was an Iraqi fighter pilot, of Syriac origin, who defected to Israel in 1966 by flying a MiG-21 of the Iraqi Air Force. In what is considered as one of the Mossad's most successful operations, Redfa's entire extended family was smuggled safely out of Iraq to Israel. The MiG-21 fighter was evaluated by the Israeli Air Force and was later loaned to the United States for testing and intelligence analysis. Knowledge obtained from analysis of the aircraft was instrumental to the successes achieved by the Israeli Air Force in its future encounters with Arab MiG-21s. Redfa's defection was the subject of the movie Steal the Sky.

Redfa was born Munir Habib Jamil Rufa in 1934 to an Syriac family belonging to the Syriac Orthodox Church from Mosul. He was the second of nine children. Like many other Syriac, his family fled to Iraq as part of the Christian migration from southeast Turkey northwestern mountains.

At the time of Redfa's defection, a press conference was held during which he indicated that he had suffered from religious and ethnic discrimination in Iraq and that he did not feel that it was his home, and requested asylum in the United States. Although he was reunited with his family in Israel, he did not re-emigrate to the US, contrary to his declaration, and he received Israeli citizenship. He and his family shortly thereafter moved to another western country. Shortly after Redfa's defection, Iraqi Christians were not allowed to join the air force per orders from Iraq's then-president. This order was still true until the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Redfa died in 1998 of a heart attack.

 The Mig 21 that Redfa flew into Israel

THE inside story of a daring mission to steal a Russian MiG21 jet fighter from Iraq has emerged in Israel as the country prepares to mark its stunning victory in the six-day war 40 years ago this week.

The secrets of the plane, which was flown to Israel by its decorated Iraqi pilot Munir Redfa, laid the foundation for a triumph by Israeli pilots during the 1967 war, in which the MiGs flown by the Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi air forces were crippled.Last week Zeev Liron, the pilot who persuaded the Iraqi to defect, recalled how the whole mission had nearly unravelled when Redfa’s wife, who had been told nothing, threw a fit in Paris on hearing the news that she was going to live in Israel.In 1966 Redfa was a 32-year-old pilot in the Iraqi air force. He was frustrated that his Christian background was blocking prospects of promotion and outraged that he had been ordered to attack Iraqi Kurds. He was beginning to doubt whether he had any future in Iraq.Joseph Shamash, one of Israel’s top agents in Baghdad, befriended Redfa and his wife Betty and persuaded them to join him on a Greek island holiday during which they were introduced to Liron. They knew him only as Josh.“Josh can help you to leave Iraq,” Shamash whispered to Redfa.

“When Munir heard what we wanted – to fly his MiG from Iraq to Israel – he almost fainted,” said Liron. “‘My MiG? To Israel? Are you guys out of your minds?’” He pointed out that his tanks carried insufficient fuel to reach Israel and that he would be shot down as soon as he tried to head for the border.Speaking as a fellow pilot, Liron pulled out a map and showed Redfa that his plan could work. “Finally Munir was convinced,” Liron said, “but by the morning he’d got cold feet.”Urgent action was required. Mossad consulted Yitzhak Rabin, the army’s chief of staff and future prime minister, who ordered: “Bring him to Israel. Show him where he’ll land and let him fly in one of our jets.”Redfa was given an Israeli passport in the name of Moshe Miz-rahi and touched down with Liron in Tel Aviv, where he was taken to the airfield where he would land the MiG. Before he left Israel, Redfa asked Liron not to tell his wife anything about the plan. “I’ll prepare the ground,” he promised. But he did not – and it almost derailed the operation.Back in Baghdad, Redfa was assigned to a long-haul flight and he convinced his ground staff to add an extra fuel tank to his MiG.Meanwhile, the Israelis arranged for Redfa’s entire family to leave Iraq for their summer holiday. The last to leave were Betty and their two children, aged three and five, who flew to Paris.When Liron met her there ina Mossad safe house and told her they were about to fly to Israel, she had hysterics. “Forget it!” she screamed. “Israel? Are you mad? And who are you anyway? I’m going straight to the Iraqi embassy.”“Only then did I realise Munir hadn’t said her a word to her about going to Israel,” said Liron.

Eventually he calmed Betty down, persuaded her not to expose the plot to the authorities, gave her an Israeli passport and got her onto a flight to Tel Aviv. Several hours after they landed, Redfa and his MiG21, escorted by an Israeli Mirage, landed at the airbase.With Redfa’s help, the Israelis immediately began to unlock the secrets of the Russian plane. Their pilots tested it to its limits. They fought mock dogfights with their Mirages and learnt the tactics needed to beat it.After the 1967 war, Redfa and his family left Israel. Betty had told her husband that living with the enemy was out of the question. Mossad arranged for them to adopt new identities – as the proprietors of a petrol station in the West.The MiG was lent to the US, which tested it in the Nevada desert, and it helped develop a new generation of American fighters. In return, for the first time, the US began to supply Israel with modern jets. Redfa died of a heart attack in 1998. 
Times 

REDFA AND THE BEAUTIFUL AGENT

They contacted a top agent in Baghdad, an American woman, and either on Israeli orders or on her own initiative (sources conflict) she decided to draw out Munir Redfa - a Christian Iraqi air force pilot and a member of Joseph's adopted family.

The American woman was a Mossad agent (it is not clear if she was Jewish) who was not only lively and intelligent but beautiful as well. She mixed in easily in high social circles wherever she went. According to one source, she initiated the contact with Munir Redfa at a party, where the two immediately hit it off. He told her he was a patriotic Iraqi, but he "found himself in violent disagreement with the current war being waged by his government against the minority Kurdish tribesmen in northern Iraq." In the 1960's as in the 1990's, the Kurds tried to maintain their independence in the Arab (and Turkish) world that did not wish to give it to them. As a minority Christian, Munir Redfa was greatly troubled by the fact that he, as a deputy commander of a MiG-21 squadron, was one of those who was asked to lead bombing missions against the almost defenseless Kurds. According to Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau, Redfa "even confessed a 'sneaking admiration' for the Israelis, who were 'so few against so many Moslems.'" There were other things bothering him as well. He had been passed over as commander of his squadron, he was stationed far from his home in Baghdad, and "was allowed to fly only with small fuel tanks, because he was a Christian." The American woman listened. She continued to see him and their intimacy, despite his marriage and several children, grew.

She exploited the connection to suggest a holiday in Europe in July 1966. He agreed. After a few days there, she "suggested that Munir fly to Israel with her. She had friends there who might be of service to him." She pulled out a brand new passport and tickets.

He then knew that this had to have been planned from the start, and she hadn't been attracted to him for who he was. But he also knew that she was making an offer that could be of great benefit to him. Not only would he be through with the bombing missions he so disagreed with - the Israelis would be paying him1 million dollars. It was as attractive as it was dangerous.

Munir wanted to see that not only his wife and children would be taken safely out of Iraq, but his parents and the rest of his extended family as well. Joseph would see to that. Joseph was concerned that of each family member knew that they were going to leave, it was inevitable, due to human nature, that someone would mention the fact to the wrong person, and the whole plan would go awry. Therefore many of the family members were never even told they were going to leave Iraq. As for Munir Redfa himself, not only did the Israelis agree to pay him very well and grant full protection to his family, but they told him that they would provide him "with Israeli citizenship, a home, and a job for life."

Munir Redfa's mind was made up. Mordecai Hod, the commander of the Israeli Air Force, met him and went over the escape plan with him. He would fly a zig-zag route to Israel to avoid Iraqi and Jordanian radar. IAF commander Hod told him: "'You know how dangerous this is going to be. The flight is 900 kilometers. If your own colleagues guess what you're up to they may send planes to blow you out of the skies. If they don't succeed, the Jordanians may try. Your only hope is to remain calm and follow this route. They do not know it, we do.'" Hod continued; "If you lose your nerve you are a dead man. Once you have left your ordinary flight path there is no turning back." Redfa seemed aware of this and responded simply; "'I will bring you the plane.'"

For the remainder of his stay in Israel Munir Redfa and his Israeli handlers went over his planned escape again and again. "He was amazed to see that they knew almost as much about the goings-on at his airbase as he did. They knew the names of all the personnel, both Russian and Iraqi, and the layout of the entire base. They knew minutely the routine of training flights: long flights on certain days, short on others."

He would have to pick a day when he would be permitted to go on a long-range flight.

Redfa and the American woman went back to Europe and from there to Iraq. Soon members of Redfa's family began leaving the country; one as a tourist, another for medical treatment…

Munir Redfa set his date for August 16, 1966. The Israeli Air Force would be expecting him on one of a number of given days in August. He carried on his business as usual as best he could with co-workers he would never see again. He asked the ground crew to fill his tanks to capacity, something the Russian advisors generally had to sign for. But the Iraqis disliked the Russian advisers, who seemed to hold them in contempt. This worked to Redfa's benefit. As a star pilot, they were to happy to obey his orders, rather than those of the Russians.

He took off. After heading out towards Baghdad, he veered off in the direction of Israel. The ground crew radar picked up a blip on the screen heading west and they frantically radioed him to turn around. He didn't. They warned him they would shoot him down.

He turned the radio off.

VIDEO

Hundreds of miles away Israeli radar picked up the blip on the screen. They sent up a squad of IAF Mirages to escort him. He went through his prearranged signals and they flew alongside him to a base deep in the Negev Desert.

That day, "Mossad agents hired two large vans and picked up the remaining members of the pilot's family, who had left Baghdad ostensibly to have a picnic. They were driven to the Iranian border and guided across by anti-Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas. Safely in Iran, a helicopter collected them and flew them to an airfield, from where an airplane took them to Israel."

Newspapers all over the world carried the sensational story of an Iraqi pilot who had defected with his MiG-21 to Israel. "Like all news stories, it stayed in the papers a few days (with constantly shrinking headlines) and was soon forgotten by most people...Among those who did not forget were military leaders of the United States, France, Britain and other powers. They pressed the Israelis for a glimpse of the aircraft, the first to fall into the hands of a nation friendly to their interests..."

The Russians were furious. Their air power secrets were seriously compromised. They threatened the Israelis ferociously and demanded the plane back.

The Israelis, of course, did not return the plane. They did not, however, turn it over to the United States for the time being in order to temper Russian rage.

Moreover, it diminished the KGB's - and of course the Iraqis' - prestige. Redfa was not an unbalanced cadet, as they may have preferred to believe, but "one of the country's best pilots, and he had been very thoroughly screened by Soviet and Iraqi security before rising to his position as an elite air force pilot - even if he did, as a Christian, face certain drawbacks.

The Israelis did not divulge their part in Munir Redfa's defection for quite some time. It took years for the Russians to put together how the theft of the MiG had been arranged. They assumed from the start that the Mossad was behind it. In this they were correct.

A few months later the IAF did loan the MiG to the United States for testing. It was an essential and very important part of American strategic capabilities. They US Air Force used the MiG in simulated dogfights with the intention of gaining as much insight into the Soviet plane's capability that they could.

For the Israelis the benefit of possession of the plane was even more immediate. In an April 7, 1967 dogfight with the Syrians, the IAF shot down six Syrian MiG's to no Israeli planes. In the June 1967 War, the Israeli Air Force commanded overwhelming air superiority over the Syrian and Egyptian MiG's. Not a little had to do with the fact that an MiG had been flown to Israel less than a year earlier with the connivance of Israeli Intelligence.

Munir Redfa came to Israel with his family and was given a new job and a new life. The American woman saw him perhaps once more after he arrived, but she was committed to her work in the Mossad, which was where her ultimate loyalty lay. 

Jewishvirtuallibrary

THE MOVIE ON THE INCIDENT

  STEAL THE SKY

Based on the true story of an American born Israeli spy sent to coerce an Iraqi pilot into hijacking a Soviet jet for Israeli defense research. Which intervention will prove more deadly - their love, or the Iraqi air force? Heart-stopping action builds to an explosive climax.

The Ruthless World Of MOSSAD

 MOSSAD TRIVIA

Rafi Eitan, the legendary former Operations Chief of Mossad told me when we sat together in his living room in a north Tel Aviv suburb:

"I always tried to kill when I could see the whites of a person's eyes. So I could see the fear. Smell it on his breath. Sometimes I used my hands. A knife, or a silenced gun. I never felt a moment's regret over a killing."

Rense

VIDEO

THE AIM OF MOSSAD

It follow the biblical injunction (and the Mossad's old motto):"By way of deception thou shalt make war." The agency's job, its website explains more prosaically, is to "collect information, analyse intelligence and perform special covert operations beyond [Israel's] borders."

Guardian

HISTORY OF MOSSAD IN BRIEF

Founded in 1948 along with the new Jewish state, the Mossad largely stayed in the shadows in its early years. Yitzhak Shamir, a former Stern Gang terrorist and future prime minister, ran operations targeting German scientists who were helping Nasser's Egypt build rockets – foreshadowing later Israeli campaigns to disrupt Iraqi and (continuing) Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear and other weapons.

The Mossad's most celebrated exploits included the abduction of the fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel. Others were organising the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew his MiG-21 to Israel, and support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels against Baghdad. Military secrets acquired by Elie Cohen, the infamous spy who penetrated the Syrian leadership, helped Israel conquer the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war.

It was after that that the service's role expanded to fight the Palestinians, who had been galvanised under Yasser Arafat into resisting Israel in the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The 1970s saw the so-called "war of the spooks" with Mossad officers, operating under diplomatic cover abroad, recruiting and running informants in Fatah and other Palestinian groups. Baruch Cohen, an Arabic speaker on loan to the Mossad from the Shin Bet internal security service, was shot in a Madrid cafe by his own agent. Bassam Abu Sharif, of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was badly disfigured by a Mossad parcel bomb sent to him in Beirut.

Steven Spielberg's 2006 film Munich helped mythologise the Mossad's hunt for the Black September terrorists who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Eleven of them were eliminated in killings across Europe, culminating in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, where a Moroccan waiter was mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, the Munich plot's mastermind. Salameh was eventually killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1979 – the sort of incident that made Lebanese and Palestinians sit up and notice last year's botched training episode in Tel Aviv.

 VIDEO

Meir Amit: The man who made Mossad

MOSSAD TRIVIA

Meir Amit, when he had been director of Mossad, later insisted "we are like the official hangman or the doctor on Death Row who administers the lethal injection. Our actions are all endorsed by the State of Israel. When Mossad kills it is not breaking the law. It is fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day".

VIDEO: HISTORY OF MOSSAD: PART 3

STAINS ON MOSSAD'S IMAGE

 The Killing of Israeli athletes by Black September in the Munich Olympics

The campaign against Black September – which ended with the catastrophic arrest of five Mossad agents. Sylvia Raphael, a South African-born Christian with a Jewish father, was sentenced to five years in a Norwegian prison (of which she served slightly over a year); she may have been among the young Europeans in Israel who were discreetly asked, in nondescript offices in Tel Aviv, if they wished to volunteer for sensitive work involving Israel's security. Other agents who had been exposed had to be recalled, safe houses abandoned, phone numbers changed and operational methods modified.

Over the years, the Mossad's image has been badly tarnished at home as well as abroad. It was blamed in part for failing to get wind of Egyptian-Syrian plans for the devastating attack that launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Critics wondered whether the spies had got their priorities right by focusing on hunting down Palestinian gunmen in the back alleys of European cities, when they should have been stealing secrets in Cairo and Damascus. The Mossad also played a significant, though still little-known, role in the covert supply of arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran to help fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan's presidency.

It has, in addition, suffered occasional blows from its own disgruntled employees. In 1990, a Canadian-born former officer called Victor Ostrovsky blew the whistle on its internal organisation, training and methods, revealing codenames including "Kidon" (bayonet), the unit in charge of assassinations. An official smear campaign failed to stop Ostrovsky's book, so the agency kept quiet when another ostensibly inside account came out in 2007. It described the use of shortwave radios for sending encoded transmissions, operations in Iran for collecting soil samples, and joint operations with the CIA against Hezbollah.

But the worst own goal came in 1997, during Binyamin Netanyahu's first term as prime minister. Mossad agents tried but failed to assassinate Khaled Mash'al – the same Hamas leader who is now warning of retaliation for Mabhouh's murder – by injecting poison into his ear in Amman, Jordan. Using forged Canadian passports, they fled to the Israeli embassy, triggering outrage and a huge diplomatic crisis with Jordan. Danny Yatom, the then Mossad chief, was forced to quit. Ephraim Halevy, a quietly spoken former Londoner, was brought back from retirement to clear up the mess.

Yossi Melman, the expert on intelligence for Israel's Haaretz newspaper, worries that, as before the 1973 war, the Israeli government may be getting it wrong by focusing on the wrong enemy – the Palestinians – instead of prioritising Iran and Hizbullah.

"The Mossad is not Murder Inc, like the Mafia; its goal is not to take vengeance on its enemies," he wrote this week. "'Special operations' like the assassination in Dubai – if this indeed was a Mossad operation – have always accounted for a relatively small proportion of its overall activity. Nevertheless, these are the operations that give the organisation its halo, its shining image. This is ultimately liable to blind its own ranks, cause them to become intoxicated by their own success, and thus divert their attention from their primary mission."

From an official Israeli point of view, the Mossad has an important job to do. Its reputation for ruthlessness and cunning remains a powerful asset, prompting what sometimes sounds like grudging admiration as well as loathing in the Arab world – where a predisposition for conspiracy theories boosts the effect of the disinformation and psychological warfare at which the Israelis are said to excel.

VIDEO: HISTORY OF MOSSAD: PART 4

MOSSAD TRIVIA

Mossad's own unique memorial in Tel Aviv to the dead - a concrete maze shaped in the form of a brain. Each name engraved on the concrete was of an agent who had been killed while trying to destroy Israel's enemies.

Some of those agents had one thing in common. Amit had sent them to their deaths.

"We did all we could to protect them. We trained them better than any other secret service. Sometimes, out on a mission, the dice is against you. But there will always be brave men ready to roll the dice," he said.

__________________________

"Israel need not apologize for the assassination
or destruction of those who seek to destroy it.
The first order of business for any country
is the protection of its people."
Washington Jewish Week, October 9, 1997
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MOSSAD TRIVIA

The man known to Mossad as "The Engineer" ( Yihyeh Ayyash) was a top Hamas bomb-maker. He lived on the West Bank, protected by gunmen.

One day he received a visitor - a distant cousin from Gaza. The young man spoke like so many from that hotbed of Islamic fanaticism.

Over mint tea, the two men spoke far into the evening. Finally, The Engineer invited his guest to stay over. The offer was accepted. The youth asked if he could use The Engineer's mobile phone to call his own family to say they should not worry.

He asked if he could make the call from outside the house to improve reception. The Engineer nodded. The call over, the two men fell asleep on the floor.

Next day, the youth left to return to Gaza. That morning, The Engineer received a call on the mobile. As he put the phone to his mouth and started to speak, his head was blown off.

The youth had been recruited by Mossad to plant a powerful explosive inside the phone. The detonation signal had come from a kidon half a mile away.

No one had seen him arrive. No one saw him go.

HISTORY OF MOSSAD: PART 5 (Caution: This video may contain graphic scenes)



RULES FOR EXECUTION IN THE MOSSAD

Were laid down over half a century ago by Meir Amit, the most innovative and ruthless director-general of the service.

"There will be no killing of political leaders, however extreme they are. They must be dealt with politically. There will be no killing of a terrorist's family unless they are also directly implicated in terrorism. Each execution must be sanctioned by the incumbent prime minister. Any execution is therefore state-sponsored, the ultimate judicial sanction of the law. The executioner is no different from the state-appointed hangman or any other lawfully-appointed executioner."

 Former Mossad agent Tzipi Livni has reached top echeleons of Israeli politics

MOSSAD TRIVIA: WOMEN AGENTS USE SEX

The women  learn how to use their sex. To be ever ready to sleep with someone to obtain vital information. The link between intelligence work and sexual entrapment is as old as spying itself. Meir Amit had said when he was Mossad's chief:

"Sex is a woman's weapon. Pillow talk is not a problem for her. But it takes a special kind of courage. It is not just sleeping with an enemy. It is to obtain information."

THE PLOT TO KILL SADDAM HUSSEIN

It revolved around killing Saddam during a visit to one of his mistresses.

Mossad agents in Baghdad had discovered that the woman, the widow of a serving Iraqi officer who had died mysteriously, would be driven from the palace to keep a tryst with Saddam in a desert villa outside the city.

Heavily guarded, the villa would be a hard target to hit.

But Mossad believed there was a window of opportunity between the time Saddam would land in his helicopter near the villa and enter its well-protected compound.

The plan to kill Saddam has long been on Mossad's agenda. But previous attempts had failed due to Saddam's obsession with changing his movements at the last moment.

Mossad believed he would not do so this time.

"The woman is irresistible," said a report from one of its Baghdad undercover agents.

Mossad had scouted an air corridor through which it believed a kidon could be flown in below Iraqi radar.

A final rehearsal was held in the Negev desert. Israeli commandos doubled as Saddam and his bodyguards - a party of five.

As they landed close to a replica of the villa, the kidon were in position. They were equipped with specially adapted shoulder-firing missiles. But their weapons were to only fire blanks for the rehearsal.

In a tragic mistake, one of the missiles had been replaced with a live one. It killed the make-believe Saddam and his bodyguards.

The operation was cancelled.

________________________________________________________________

Mossad has made no friends on the ground. They rarely do. That is their style: go it alone. They believe they know more than anyone else in fighting terrorism. And they may be right.

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 IN 2008: THE KILLING OF IMAD MUGHNIYED

Two years ago this week, Dagan sent a team of kidon to Damascus to assassinate Imad Mughniyeh. His Mossad file included details of organising the kidnapping of Terry Waite and the bombing of the US Marine base near Beirut airport, killing 241 people. The United States had placed a £12.5 million bounty on his head. Dagan just wanted him dead.

___________________________

What is kidon?

Kidon (Hebrew: כידון‎, "bayonet") is the name of a department within Israel's Mossad that is responsible for assassination and kidnapping. 

___________________________

Mossad psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, psychoanalysts and profilers – collectively known as the "specialists" – were told to decide the best way to kill Mughniyeh.

They concluded that he would be among the guests of honour at the Iranian Cultural Centre celebrations in 2008 for the celebration of the Khomeini Revolution. The team rigged a car-bomb in the headrest of the Mitsubishi Pajero they discovered Mughniyeh had rented, to be detonated by a mobile phone. As Mughniyeh arrived outside the Culture Centre at precisely 7pm on February 12, the blast blew his head off.

Telegraph.co.uk

HOW THE MOSSAD WORKS

In their base deep in the Negev Desert – the sand broken only by a distant view of Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona – the kidon practise with a variety of handguns, learn how to conceal bombs, administer a lethal injection in a crowd and make a killing look accidental.

They review famous assassinations – the shooting of John F Kennedy, for example – and study the faces and habits of potential targets whose details are stored on their highly restricted computers. There, too, are thousands of constantly updated street plans downloaded from Google Earth.

Mossad is one of the world's smallest intelligence services. But it has a back-up system no other outfit can match. The system is known as sayanim, a derivative of the Hebrew word lesayeah, meaning to help.

There are tens of thousands of these "helpers". Each has been carefully recruited, sometimes by katsas, Mossad's field agents. Others have been asked to become helpers by other members of the secret group.

Created by Meir Amit, the role of the sayanim is a striking example of the cohesiveness of the world Jewish community. In practical terms, a sayan who runs a car rental agency will provide a kidon with a vehicle on a no-questions basis. An estate agent sayan will provide a building for surveillance. A bank manager sayan will provide funds at any time of day or night, and a sayan doctor provides medical assistance.

THE KILLING OF GERALD BULL

Within the global intelligence community, respect for Mossad grew following the kidon assassination of Dr Gerald Bull, the Canadian scientist who was probably the world's greatest expert on gun-barrel ballistics. Israel had made several attempts to buy his expertise. Each time, Bull had made clear his dislike for the Jewish state.

 Gerald Bull's gun

Instead he had offered his services to Saddam Hussein, to build a super-gun capable of launching shells containing nuclear, chemical or biological warheads directly from Iraq into Israel. Saddam had ordered three of the weapons at a cost of $20 million. Bull was retained as a consultant for a fee of $1 million.

On the afternoon of March 20, 1990, the sanction to kill Bull was given by the then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Nahum Admoni, the head of Mossad, sent a three-man team to Brussels, where Bull lived in a luxury apartment block. Each kidon carried a handgun in a holster under his jacket.

When the 61-year-old Bull answered the doorbell of his home, he was shot five times in the head and the neck, each kidon firing their 7.65 pistol in turn, leaving Bull dead on his doorstep. An hour later they were out of the country on a flight to Tel Aviv.

Within hours, Mossad's own department of psychological warfare had arranged with sayanim in the European media to leak stories that Bull had been shot by Saddam's hit squad because he had planned to renege on their deal.

HISTORY OF MOSSAD IN BRIEF

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, established Mossad as ha-Mossad Leteum (the Institute for Coordination) on April 1, 1951. Mossad had a checkered record in its first decade. On the positive side, it was the first intelligence agency to capture a copy of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's February 1956 "Secret Speech," in which he denounced the crimes of Josef Stalin before the 20th Party Congress. Mossad also ran several key operations in Arab lands, with Wolfgang Lotz in Egypt and Eliahu Cohen in Syria.

The Syrians eventually exposed Cohen, however, and hanged him in Damascus Square, while the Egyptians captured, tortured, and imprisoned Lotz in 1964. Meanwhile, another operative in Egypt, David Magen, turned out to be a double agent, and the work of Avraham Dar in Egypt during the mid-1950s ended in a disaster for Israeli intelligence, with numerous agents captured and imprisoned. At least one apparent success of this era turned out to be a political failure when Ben-Gurion reversed Mossad efforts to intimidate West German scientists who were assisting the Egyptians. Eager to develop better relations with West Germany, Ben-Gurion dismissed Mossad director Isser Harel (1952–63), who he had once accorded the title Memuneh, "the one in charge."

1960s and 1970s. Mossad, which gained its present name as the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks in 1963, fared much better in the 1960s. Joint operations with Shin Bet, the internal security force, led to the capture of Eichmann—who had overseen the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust—from his hiding place in Argentina. Under the leadership of Meir Amit (1963–68), Mossad focused on intelligence-gathering, which greatly aided Israeli military efforts in 1967. During this period, Mossad also assisted the defection of an Iraqi airman who delivered to Israel a Soviet MiG-21 fighter jet in 1963. In 1968, Mossad successfully captured eight missile boats that Israel had ordered from France, but which President Charles de Gaulle had placed under embargo. That year also saw the capture of nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who had revealed Israeli nuclear secrets to the British press.

Following the massacre of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September at the Munich Olympics in 1972, Mossad directed an assassination effort under an action team dubbed "the Wrath of God" (WOG). Over the next two years, WOG tracked down and killed more than a dozen members of Black September, but also accidentally killed a Moroccan waiter who had no affiliation with the terrorist group.

Failure to predict Egyptian actions leading to the Yom Kippur War in 1973 forced the resignation of several top officers, including Mossad director Zvi Zamir (1968–74). Yet, on July 3–4, 1976, Mossad more than recovered its reputation with the daring raid at Entebbe, codenamed Operation Thunderbolt. After intensive intelligence-gathering at the site, the Israelis assaulted the plane, rescuing all but four of its 97 passengers and losing a single officer—along with 20 Ugandan soldiers—in the process.

1980s and 1990s. During the 1980s, Mossad's intelligence-gathering against Arab countries helped pave the way for Israeli airstrikes against Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in Tunisia, and against an Iraqi nuclear reactor. In April 1988, a Mossad assassination team infiltrated the residence of Abu Jihad, deputy to PLO chief Yassir Arafat, and killed him. Two years later, in March 1990, another hit team killed Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist aiding the Iraqi weapons program, at his apartment in Brussels.

Among the less successful activities of Mossad during the 1980s and 1990s was its involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, when it acted as an intermediary between the United States and Iran. Embarrassment surrounding the failure of Mossad to prevent the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin by an Israeli citizen in November 1995 led to the resignation of Mossad director Shabtai Shavit in 1996. Prime Minister Shimon Peres then appointed Major General Danny Yatom, the first Mossad chief ever publicly identified. In 2000, Mossad undertook a recruitment campaign, complete with newspaper advertisements and a Web site that took applications on line.

MOSSAD TRIVIA

In the few weeks since taking over Mossad, Meir Dagan knew he already commanded something his recent predecessors never managed. Respect.

Barely raising his voice he spoke.

"When I was fighting in Lebanon, I witnessed the aftermath of a family feud. The patriarch's head had been split open, his brain on the floor. Around him lay his wife and some of his children. All dead. Before I could do anything, one of the murderers scooped up a handful of brain and swallowed it. This is how you will all now operate. Otherwise someone will eat your brain."

His every word held them in thrall - even if they sent a shudder through some of his listeners, hardened as they were.

MORE ON MOSSAD

They have a special team of scientists working at the Institute for Biological Research in Tel Aviv. They prepare the deadly toxins for the kidon.

Where other intelligence agencies no longer allow their agents to kill, kidon have no such restraint. They remain fully licensed to assassinate in the name of Israel once they have routinely convinced the incumbent prime minister of the need to do so.

Mossad's assassins routinely witness some of Israel's leading forensic pathologists at work so as to better understand how to make an assassination look like an accident.

They learn how a pinprick or small blemish left on a victim's skin can be a give away. They are shown how to ensure against this.

It makes them probably the most sophisticated lawfully-approved killers in the world.