Mossad: Cover Story (2017): Season 1, Episode 2 - Episode #1.2 - full transcript
How do intelligence agencies
around the world recruit assets?
They fulfill your desires.
What are your desires.
Give me one, a little dream of yours.
-Give me a dream.
-To shoot movies in Los Angeles.
He wants to shoot movies
in Los Angeles. Alright?
To be recruited, he needs to believe
I’m looking for a cameraman in LA.
I establish a relationship with him,
a long running one,
and I convince him that he’ll eventually
get that job in Los Angeles.
I tell him, "Look, drive down...
You know what? Choose a highway.
Go and film both sides of the highway.”
OK?
"Show me how good your footage is.
Focus on points of interest."
He'll receive plenty of compliments for
his work, and maybe even some money,
and he'll get any number of these tests,
all as part of his future work in LA.
By the time he realizes
that what he’s done
could land him in
a Shin Bet interrogation room,
he'll have a hard time stopping,
especially if the money is good.
Okay, Los Angeles can wait
a few more years.
An agency’s system for recruiting assets
is very similar to a con operation.
You have to believe that
what you're being sold is real,
and the moment it becomes clear to you
that you've crossed a line
you'll have a hard time moving on
without accepting your new reality.
INSIDE THE MOSSAD
04:30 - 04:32
What’s running through your mind
as you sit here, in front of us?
I'm sitting here, under the lights,
and you're all in front of me,
in the dark,
with all sorts of devices which
I need to figure out what they're for...
Each one of you, on set,
operates in a state of certainty.
You've got certain parameters,
certain numbers,
to make sure the picture comes out right,
and you know, from your schooling,
that you need to hit those numbers.
In total contrast to your line of work,
we work in a state of uncertainty.
You never really know
if the asset across from you
is working for you or against you,
or both at the same time.
You never know.
You work based on assumptions,
on hunches, on hopes.
At the end of the day,
you have to acquit yourself.
Have you got what it takes?
Can you survive the stress of it?
And this job has a lot of stress.
YEHIAM MART
MOSSAD-ASSET RECRUITMENT 1975-2000
When the Mossad contacted me,
I was 22-23 years old.
At the time, I was working
security on El-Al planes.
El-Al was no picnic. There was
gun violence on planes, hijackings,
passengers were shot
at check-in counters...
On the other hand,
working security for El-Al
is a great job to have at that age.
Air crews, stewardesses...
I wanted to go on working for El-Al,
so I told them no.
They said "Go to college.
We'll stay in touch with you."
And that's what happened.
When and how were you recruited by Mossad?
They approached me
as a young college student.
I was quite young, 21-22 years old.
And since, after the '73 war,
I felt, like many others,
that we had made a mistake by not
volunteering to help keep Israel safe,
but only looked out for ourselves,
when they approached me,
I couldn't say no
and I joined Mossad.
Today, it's quite popular:
“I graduated from ‘HaMidrasha.’”
And as a Midrasha graduate, I feel as if
I'd graduated from the air force academy.
RAMI IGRA
MOSSAD CASE OFFICER 1975-2000
When I told my mother
I’d been accepted into Mossad,
she called all my aunts and said,
"The kid is all set!
He's got medical, social security,
a pension fund... He's all set."
Later I told her, "Mossad could have sent
me to Baghdad, and all you cared about..."
She said, "One day you'll realize
that that's what's important."
-And...
-What motivated you to do it?
-What was in it for you?
-I didn't do it to save the country.
It came along, and I went for it.
It wasn’t as if I dreamt
of being a spy as a 9-year-old.
Luckily, I turned out
to be pretty good at it.
What were you trained to do?
I was involved in operations,
from the start and until my retirement.
Which means...? What did you do?
-I was involved in operations.
-OK.
Can you tell me what you did?
Where you were?
I won't go into that. Next question.
OK. What were you trained to do?
Do you want to keep asking
the same question? Go ahead. It's OK.
Uh... OK.
I joined a department that was in charge
of recruiting and operating assets,
Arabs and Iranians,
and that's what I did for 20 years.
I was in a field that requires
creativity...
The professional term is "HUMINT".
In order to recruit a person,
to convince them to give you information,
to the enemy,
you have to take certain actions,
and not just
settle for convincing them that
they should. Because they shouldn't.
So this requires creativity,
it requires...
creating sets, and other things
fairly reminiscent of your line of work.
We're basically doing something which,
in my opinion,
is the most complicated thing there is.
We're basically dealing
with the human mind.
We don't do it for fun,
or because we saw it in a movie.
Our job is to deliver intelligence,
based on the needs
of the state's security forces.
We need to determine
who might possess that intelligence,
and once you determine
who might have that information,
you basically have to put them
through a process,
with or without their knowledge,
so that they’ll be willing
to give you the information you’re after.
AVI DAGAN
HEAD OF ASSET RECRUITMENT 1982-1984
Basically, the person
you're in contact with,
"The Object" in our parlance,
is about to do the most...
despicable thing.
He's basically going
to betray his country.
When I say “betray his country,”
I don't just mean his country's values.
He's betraying his family,
betraying his friends,
betraying the people around him.
What kind of person do you have to be
in order to cross that line?
The asset is a normal person
who falls into a certain situation,
and commits an act
that carries with it a lot of risk,
a lot of dishonor, if they're caught.
I've got hundreds and thousands
of hours of conversations
with people like that,
ones that the viewer might see
as spies, traitors to their countries...
You quickly see they're ordinary people.
You talk to them about other things,
about soccer... He supports Barcelona,
you support Manchester United.
Girls, food, money.
His son's taking private math lessons.
And he's a spy.
He's betraying his country for money.
In Arab countries,
treason is an unforgivable sin.
As they say in Arabic,
“You fling mud at the wall,
and the mark stays there your whole life.”
If you go into
a Palestinian town today,
and you ask someone,
"Who lives on this street?" He'll say,
"The teacher lives there,
the engineer - there,
the shopkeeper - there,
and the traitor - there."
Who's the traitor? It might be
someone whose grandfather
committed treason during
the Arab revolt of '36
and it’s stayed in the family.
Is it possible that their children
are still labeled traitors?
Of course they are.
For us, dishonor...
We're a forgiving country.
Our enemies are not forgiving.
Our enemies...
would even kill the cousin
of the man who betrayed them.
What kind of training do you need
in order to be a case officer?
Anyone who wants to be a case officer
has to learn hand-to-hand combat,
and learn to use a weapon.
But you also learn table manners,
which hand holds the fork.
YOSSI ALPHER
MOSSAD CASE OFFICER 1969-1981
I grew up in a Jewish,
non-Zionist family,
in the Washington DC area.
As a teenager, I was a star
in a program called
"Youth Wants to Know.”
Along with ten other teenagers,
we interviewed, among others, JFK,
three times, before he became president.
They showed documentaries
about the Holocaust.
I learned about the Holocaust
for the first time.
And that stirred strong feelings in me,
that I owe something...
That I have to do something.
Where did they send you?
What did you do?
I was a case officer.
What does a case officer do?
He recruits sources and handles them.
He essentially convinces someone
to betray their own people, no?
You know what?
You're taking me in a direction
that I have no desire
to talk about, I'm sorry.
Could you share a story
about an asset’s recruitment?
One that you handled personally?
I can tell you about a certain object
that we’d pursued for ten years,
unsuccessfully.
We knew that he was probably homosexual.
It wasn't easy for an Arab
to be gay in the '70s.
It's not easy today, either.
They set up a lunch for us
at a nice restaurant in a European city,
and because we suspected he had contact
with his country's intelligence agency,
the preparations for the meeting
were very tense.
My purpose in that meeting
was to recruit him.
And recruiting him meant,
in practical terms,
to receive information from him,
and to give him money.
Of course, I was undercover.
I recruited him undercover.
And we pussy-footed through the
conversation about what I was there to do.
Until, at a certain moment,
I noticed a look in his eyes.
And that's where my American
background came into play.
That look took me back
to the New York subway, at 2:00 AM.
Anyone who happened to be
on a subway platform at 2:00 AM,
in the 1960s at least,
would encounter homosexuals,
who were cruising for partners.
That was it. I knew that look.
And now I knew what I had to do.
I took the envelope with the money
out of my pocket,
and I grabbed him by the lapel,
thrust it into his breast pocket,
and said, "Here's the payment for
the information you're going to give me."
You could say that,
in figurative terms, I raped him.
And that was exactly what he wanted.
I felt great.
I felt like I’d pulled it off,
that I could celebrate.
That evening, I met some
Israeli friends for dinner,
and with the first bite I took,
I was overcome by nausea.
I ran to the bathroom,
and disappeared there for 15 minutes
while I puked and shat my brains out.
They thought I was half-dead.
And I soon learned that that's
what your stomach acid does to you
a few hours after
such a tense experience.
If you're not whole with
what you're doing,
it’s very difficult to do this job.
You need to find the crack
in the other person's personality,
and you have to work that crack,
and make it wider.
PINI MEIDAN
MOSSAD CASE OFFICER
What kind of psychological process
does that person go through?
He goes through a very complex process.
The recruitment process
is fraught with crisis.
You try to create a process
of controlled crisis.
You take a person
who has a certain position,
usually a senior position
in an enemy state,
and you go some distance
with them, hand-in-hand together
until you start to interrogate them
and ask them questions.
We called it “rolling the object
down the slippery slope.”
The penny finally drops.
Eventually, he realizes who he is.
He realizes what he's doing.
How do you know when he gets it?
When you ask him a question,
and he goes like this...
You ask, and he goes like this, which
means "You're asking me for the rope.”
"You're asking me a question which
will land me in the darkest of pits.”
We had a guy once who was a smoker.
He used to...
You'd ask him a tough question
during a conversation
and he would open his mouth, and hide
his face with cigarette smoke…
"It wasn't me who answered."
As if someone else answered. It's...
His wife told me once,
"Look, he's not sick.
He's got a psychological sickness.
Something's wrong with him."
If you didn't go through a crisis
during the recruitment process,
and if your object
didn't pass through a crisis,
it means he hasn't really
internalized what he's done,
he didn't really understand the process,
and he hasn't truly been recruited.
And how do you go through that process?
You experience a very
intense mental challenge.
One of the things that happened to me...
After many of the meetings,
I would have a hard time.
I used to go
and immediately take a shower
in order to cleanse myself
and disconnect myself from
the character I'd been playing.
Does the water wash it all away?
-No.
No two assets are alike,
and so, there's no one way
to handle problems.
Look,
I’ll tell you a story
about an asset we had in Syria.
In my previous unit.
At a certain time, I became concerned
that his cover would be blown,
so I brought him to Israel
with his entire family,
whoever he told me
ahead of time that he wanted to bring.
And he asked my permission,
that the night before he leaves
that I let him settle some scores
with people in his village:
To murder the village leader,
who, many years earlier,
refused to give him
his daughter's hand in marriage.
Next, his sister,
who’d slept around with someone,
and brought all these problems upon him,
as well as the guy she’d slept with,
and 2 or 3 others.
I only gave him the OK to kill his sister.
You gave him the OK
to kill his sister? Why?
Family honor, and whatnot.
But then, it turned out...
We could hear gunshots
and explosions in the distance.
It turned out
he’d settled his scores with everyone.
He came to me, smiled and said
"In all the time I worked for you,
this is the first time
I disobeyed an order."
Get it?
BEIRUT, 1976
Your name in Lebanon
wasn’t "Yair,” right?
I was known as "Abu Daoud.”
-As...?
-"Abu Daoud.”
YAIR RAVID
CHIEF OS STATION, BEIRUT
Look, my roots may be
in Eastern Europe,
my father was Ukrainian,
and my mother was Polish,
but I see myself as a Middle Easterner.
I've lived here, I live here,
I know the mentality, I live among them,
I speak the language well,
I know the sounds, the voices,
the flavors, the smells...
I'm deep into it.
Lebanon is known as a place
where a lot of drugs are produced.
Their hashish is sold all over the world,
and also opium.
There was a Shi’ite
in Southern Lebanon,
Abu Nassif, one of the biggest
drug barons in the world.
-How big?
-How big?
Each shipment was no less than a ton.
You know what they say?
"He plants by the road."
In the parlance of drug dealers,
someone who's well-connected and powerful
can afford to plant drugs anywhere,
including by the side of the road.
We knew about him and his activities,
and I decided to meet with him
and see how we could
use the man for our own ends.
He agreed to cooperate on one condition:
that we don't interfere with his business.
What did he do for you?
He recruited assets for us
in very important places.
DOMINO
Now, these people,
as soon as you're in contact with them,
they keep trying to ensnare you. Because
if he manages to trip you up even once,
you're under his thumb. That’s why
I never met with him alone.
I always had someone with me.
You never want to be in a situation
where it’s your word against his.
Once, he came to a meeting
with a nice present for me:
a beautiful carved wooden box,
with opium in it, for personal use,
for me to enjoy over the weekend.
I didn't hesitate. I pulled out my gun,
pressed it to his head and said,
"Next time this happens
I’ll pull the trigger."
On another occasion,
he brought me a birthday present:
a new Mercedes.
Straight from the showroom.
-So... they’re always trying.
-Did you take it?
-Excuse me?
-Did you take it?
Did I take the Mercedes?
There's a paradox here.
The main thing is trust.
I mean their trust in us.
We must always remain totally skeptical.
You must have doubt at all times.
Otherwise, you could be led astray.
How does your relationship
with an asset work? What's the dynamic?
First of all, it depends on the person.
Some people are...
Practical, let's say. Cooler.
And you can have a conversation...
With others, you have to be
their babysitter, and their father,
and their older brother,
and their confessor...
For several hours, the two men sit,
the handler and the asset,
and they talk.
Many deep conversations,
that sometimes become
intimate confessions.
Those of the asset, not the handler.
With some people,
you have to raise your voice.
With some people, you have to frown.
Others you have to compliment.
Stroke their egos.
You have to give them the feeling
that you're pleased with them,
in order to increase cooperation.
In other words, you can't
take a case and say,
"I'll do this,
because I've done this before."
Every case is different,
because every person is different.
We had one guy, an asset,
who was the best in his field.
The best we ever had.
I was stationed in Europe,
and I learned that the man
was trying to contact us.
And I accepted his request.
We had a first meeting,
and when I heard the name,
to tell you the truth,
I didn't believe it was him.
-I didn't believe it.
-What was his name?
Ashraf Marwan.
When I saw the first batch of material
he brought in.
After I saw it, I said:
"If this is for real,
it's... earth-shattering."
We never had anything like it.
It was unbelievable that this material,
the most top-secret intelligence in Egypt,
had come into our hands.
He was one of the people
who passed information to us
that prevented at least two planes
from being shot down.
Israeli planes,
with hundreds of Israelis on board.
What was so special about him?
How did he obtain
such secret material?
Listen, he was married
to Nasser's daughter!
And in Egypt, being Nasser's son-in-law
is a unique position.
He carried out all sorts of tasks
for the Egyptian government.
He liked to meet with
the head of Saudi intelligence,
and the head of Libyan intelligence,
and maybe even with someone
from the CIA, or the Italians...
With them, it's not like with us.
With us, a thing like that
goes straight to the head of the agency,
who checks, and assigns officers...
There, nobody's going to
ask the son-in-law questions,
because those who do
get their heads chopped off.
And when he goes to London,
the ambassador shines his shoes.
Because he's the son-in-law.
He knows what's up.
He gets a car, an office... Everything.
-Why? He didn't have any money problems.
-Look,
he didn’t just need favors.
Although, if we hadn't paid him,
he wouldn't have worked with us.
I'll tell you a story.
One day, I met in Cairo with
a representative from a large oil company.
And we had dinner.
The kind of dinner where you're served
by black guys with white gloves,
and they light your cigar
with a special straw...
Straight out of the movies.
We go out for some air,
and I see, right next to his house,
I see a small white palace,
all lit up, extraordinarily beautiful.
I say to him, "Look how nice
your neighbor's house is."
He says, "You know who lives there?"
"No, who?"
He says, "Ashraf Marwan."
And right away, I could see
our dollars on the walls.
What other factors can motivate
someone to work with you,
besides money?
Illness.
Maybe his relative is ill.
Maybe he is ill,
and needs medical treatment,
and you can help him get it.
Revenge.
Do you think that was
what motivated Ashraf Marwan?
Yes.
He was motivated by his sense
of disappointment and vengeance
about losing his station
after his father-in-law's death.
He was Nasser's son-in-law.
-So it was all about ego?
-Yes. That came into play.
And he said,
"I want to have influence!"
-How was contact established?
-Look, he came,
and met with Tzvika Zamir.
He met the head
of the Mossad, personally?
Yes. Look...
He liked that he met
with the director of the Israeli Mossad.
It was part of his personality.
As he put it, "The Egyptians might not
like me, but at least somebody does.”
The relationship between a handler
and an asset
is a complicated thing.
It's a relationship, first of all,
between two people.
And Ashraf Marwan was one in a million.
We had
a relationship of mutual respect.
He held me in high regard.
And I held him in high regard as well.
And he could feel it, just as I could.
ZVI ZAMIR
DIRECTOR OF MOSSAD 1968-1974
Is there room for emotions
when working with an asset?
Or is it all about interests?
Look, in this business,
there isn't much room for emotions.
You've got a job to do,
one you believe
helps to keep your country safe.
In certain unavoidable cases,
people...
get killed, or hurt,
as a result of this activity.
You try, as much as you can,
to prevent such cases.
But this is espionage,
not the insurance business.
In the early '70s,
I was in charge of a unit
responsible for recruiting and handling
assets in Syria and Lebanon.
Palestinian terrorists broke into
a high school in Ma'alot,
where they abducted and murdered children,
and we were preoccupied
with preventing them
from entering Israel
and carrying out attacks.
My guys recruited a Lebanese shepherd.
A few months later, he came to a meeting
and reported that he had been
approached by a Palestinian,
a man who spoke
in the Palestinian dialect,
who asked for information about
IDF manouevers in the border area.
I told them to instruct him
to report everything he sees
to the Palestinian terrorist organization
that handled him,
with the assumption that anything
he could see, they could see as well.
Then one day, they asked him to locate
a spot along the border fence,
given his familiarity with the area,
where they could sneak into Israel
and carry out an attack.
He reported this to us,
and we chose a spot,
in coordination with the IDF,
we chose an appropriate spot
along the border fence
where they could be met
with a very warm welcome.
The night before the operation...
he knew because they’d told him
when they were planning to do it,
they informed him, quite cleverly,
that he’d be joining them.
He would be part of the cell,
because they wanted to insure themselves
against possible betrayal.
If I'd told him to refuse,
they would have killed him.
If I had snuck him into Israel,
him and his family,
they would have crossed the border
a month or two later
at a point I didn’t know about.
So he obviously had to go with them.
I told him, "As soon as you hear gunfire,
hit the deck.
We have ways of identifying you
and making sure you don't get hit."
This was, of course, pure fiction.
I knew I was sending him
to his death, but...
My job is to make sure that
the children of Kibbutz Hanita
are safe from harm.
So I made a cold, difficult decision
and I sacrificed a pawn,
like in a game of chess.
It doesn’t weigh on your conscience?
Do you feel remorse?
Personally, of course,
I felt regret, since...
he was killed
while serving us very loyally.
But this is the kind of business
where you don't...
Those kinds of considerations
don't get in the way
of doing what you have to do.
It's a rough business.
Look, both the Mossad and the Shin Bet
are organizations that operate
within the culture of the region.
There are actors here who...
You've got to be one of them. Like them.
As they say in English,
“It takes one to know one."
We have an adversary.
They're just as clever as us,
just as ruthless as us,
and each side is trying
to further its country's interests,
by any means possible.
You can't pretend to be...
the Belgian Novelists' Association
and defeat Hezbollah
with those values. It won't work.
That's what we did in order to win.
Winning isn't easy.
Winning isn't easy.
How can you know that an asset
won’t suddenly flip and betray you?
Look, there’s never 100%
in these things.
No agent is ever 100%.
There's no such thing. I've never seen it.
Anyone who handles assets
has to take into account
that the asset might betray you.
As a matter of fact,
these things happen.
Zadok Ofir and Baruch Cohen
were excellent case officers.
Zadok Ofir met with an asset.
The asset, at a certain point,
became a double agent,
pulled out a gun, and shot him
four times at point blank range.
ISRAELI MURDERED IN CENTRAL MADRID
-Baruch Cohen was in Madrid.
-What happened?
He handled an asset,
and the asset… They said goodbye,
and as he was leaving the cafe where
the meeting took place, someone shot him.
The assumption is that
the asset had been exposed,
and in order to protect himself,
he spilled the beans and betrayed us.
How did you know
Ashraf Marwan wouldn't betray you?
LONDON, OCTOBER 5, 1973
Ashraf Marwan asked
that I come to London,
and said he wanted to inform us
about the war.
-The '73 war.
-Yes.
I decided to go to London,
instead of attending a meeting
with the Prime Minister,
with the head of Military Intelligence,
the Defense Minister,
and the IDF Commander-in-Chief.
Let me tell you why.
When an intelligence man hears
from a source that he trusts,
that war is on the horizon,
with the date already set,
he is obligated to sound a warning,
to ring all the bells, that war is coming.
I had done that once before,
in mid-May.
I was wrong.
They had a field day
at military intelligence.
"Zvi Zamir is dragging us into war."
I told my friends at the Mossad
that we would continue
to do our duty.
I was constantly on the lookout
for signs of double-dealing.
Signs of dishonesty
that you could see or hear.
-I couldn't find any with him.
-Such as?
Such as the story with the gun.
His handler noticed a bulge in his shirt.
So he said,
"What's that in your shirt?"
He had a gun.
And Zvika Zamir, director of Mossad,
was sitting with an Arab asset
who had a gun in his pocket.
He could’ve pulled out the gun
and killed Zvika Zamir,
the handler, and maybe someone else, too.
I’ve never heard of another
intelligence organization whose director
would meet with a foreign asset
armed with a gun in his pocket.
Just imagine, for a moment,
that he’d killed Zvika Zamir
in some flat in London,
along with 1-2 other people.
Imagine what would have happened.
A double agent
would certainly have done it.
But why is the director of the Mossad
meeting with an asset in the first place?
Does the director of the Mossad
often meet with assets in person?
Look, I won't go into detail.
I don't like this line of questioning.
Was it unusual to meet
with an asset like that?
First of all, I don't want to tell you.
-The answer is...
-Weren't you worried he'd betray you?
No.
We were in London.
And I interrogated him about everything
he had told us in the past.
And then we double-checked.
And I double-checked.
And I said to myself, "Zvi Zamir,
You'd better alert the whole country.
Let the people go straight
from prayer service to war,
because this piece of intelligence
is crucially important."
On the 5th...
I’m in London.
I wrote a 5-line telegram.
THE COMPANY STILL INTENDS
TO SIGN THE CONTRACT.
THEY KNOW TOMORROW'S A HOLIDAY.
In which I wrote...
THE ANGEL THINKS THAT
THE CHANCES OF SIGNING ARE 99.9%
...that war would break out,
while knowing full well
that if this information
turns out to be wrong,
as people here thought at the time,
I'd be stoned to death
for pulling the Jews out of synagogue.
That is a transgression which,
under current standards,
is punishable by death.
I left no address.
I was unreachable by phone.
"I'm unavailable.
This is my message to you. You decide."
YOM KIPPUR WAR,
OCTOBER 6, 1973
Eventually, they decided to do it.
They acted too late.
We paid in blood.
Ever since the '73 war,
there’s been an ongoing debate over who's
to blame for the failure of deterrence.
At the same time, Ashraf Marwan's name
was made public.
He worked with us for many years.
He remained an Israeli asset
even after the '73 war.
He worked... No problem.
When did the trouble start?
When it was made public.
CAIRO, DECEMBER 21, 2007
On Wednesday, Ashraf Marwan
died in London,
the son-in-law of the former
Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Suicide or murder?
British police are investigating
the death of Ashraf Marwan,
who collaborated with the Mossad
during the 1973 war.
Ashraf Marwan was a national asset,
and we Israelis are guilty
of not properly protecting him.
THE MOSSAD AGENT WAS
SADA'S CHIEF OF STAFF
Every reporter felt the need
to throw his name around everywhere.
THEIR MAN IN CAIRO
Who he was, what he was,
how he made contact...
And we begged them to stop.
What we know about Ashraf Marwan
is that he felt, as they say,
Emotional Distress,
Because of the charges
raised against him recently,
According to which he acted as a double
agent in the service of Egypt and Israel.
Even after they started talking about him,
he still hoped they would stop,
but they kept on talking about him. The
Israeli press kept pumping the story up,
until someone came
and threw him out the window.
It’s one of the worst
Israeli intelligence failures,
the name of an intelligence asset
being made public.
The world is concluding
that Israel is unable
to protect its assets' identities. Who
would want to work with such a country?
We gave him away.
What...
Looking back,
can you tell us about a dilemma,
or an instance of remorse,
that you experienced in your
work with an asset?
I'll tell you about
a dilemma in retrospect.
I was sitting at home, in Israel.
I had two little children.
My wife and I
were feeding them cornflakes,
before going to work,
and sending them to kindergarten.
I was feeding one kid,
and my wife was feeding the other.
I had one eye on the paper.
In the paper, I see a picture
of an Arab I knew, hanged.
His country had captured him
and hanged him.
Have you ever seen someone you knew,
hanged? You haven't.
So, there he was, hanged.
I remembered him.
I remembered my dealings with him.
I thought, "Was I OK?
Am I to blame here?
Was he caught because of a mistake of his?
Because of a mistake of ours?
Was he caught because
his country's intelligence services
are better and more sophisticated
than ours?" Anything's possible.
-Was he an asset that you recruited?
-Yes.
-Did you have a long relationship?
-Yes.
Where was he from?
It doesn’t matter.
Did your wife know that that hanged man
had something to do with you?
I didn't tell her.
She noticed that I started
feeding the kid more slowly,
so she said, "Hurry up, we're late!”
I kept on feeding my kid,
at the appropriate speed.
A minute later, I moved on with my life.
Everything passes. It doesn't...
That's life.
One minute passes
and you’ve moved on with your life?
Look, when he agreed to do it,
he knew about the risks involved.
He reaped the benefits
he had hoped for.
The possibility that it would happen
was in the air.
And it happened.
Usually, it doesn't happen.
To him, it happened.
That's a very cold way
to look at the world.
Mossad gives you that.
If I look at the ways
that I've changed along the way,
it's in those directions.
My wife tells me, "You've lost your...
You don't hear the birds chirping.
You're not open.
You're cold. You're distrustful.
You're evil.”
It's all true. It's all true.
How did you feel when you heard
Ashraf Marwan had been killed?
I felt sorrow.
Great sorrow.
I didn't rat him out.
I defended him.
I was, to a large extent...
it's funny to say, but...
Someone he could lean on.
And we were...
I'm telling you, we were friends.
Do you think a handler and an asset
can develop an intimate relationship?
Do you think an asset
can become a friend?
A friend? What are you talking about?
An agent isn't...
a true friend.
He's your friend for the moment.
Your friend for the moment.
You must be very wary
of growing close to an asset.
That's true of handlers,
and also of Mossad directors.
If you know what I mean.
This work,
the handling of assets,
involves a lot of wisdom.
And different people
behave in different ways.
And I do as I do.
That’s it. Enough. I've already said
much more than I was going to.
Subtitle translation by
around the world recruit assets?
They fulfill your desires.
What are your desires.
Give me one, a little dream of yours.
-Give me a dream.
-To shoot movies in Los Angeles.
He wants to shoot movies
in Los Angeles. Alright?
To be recruited, he needs to believe
I’m looking for a cameraman in LA.
I establish a relationship with him,
a long running one,
and I convince him that he’ll eventually
get that job in Los Angeles.
I tell him, "Look, drive down...
You know what? Choose a highway.
Go and film both sides of the highway.”
OK?
"Show me how good your footage is.
Focus on points of interest."
He'll receive plenty of compliments for
his work, and maybe even some money,
and he'll get any number of these tests,
all as part of his future work in LA.
By the time he realizes
that what he’s done
could land him in
a Shin Bet interrogation room,
he'll have a hard time stopping,
especially if the money is good.
Okay, Los Angeles can wait
a few more years.
An agency’s system for recruiting assets
is very similar to a con operation.
You have to believe that
what you're being sold is real,
and the moment it becomes clear to you
that you've crossed a line
you'll have a hard time moving on
without accepting your new reality.
INSIDE THE MOSSAD
04:30 - 04:32
What’s running through your mind
as you sit here, in front of us?
I'm sitting here, under the lights,
and you're all in front of me,
in the dark,
with all sorts of devices which
I need to figure out what they're for...
Each one of you, on set,
operates in a state of certainty.
You've got certain parameters,
certain numbers,
to make sure the picture comes out right,
and you know, from your schooling,
that you need to hit those numbers.
In total contrast to your line of work,
we work in a state of uncertainty.
You never really know
if the asset across from you
is working for you or against you,
or both at the same time.
You never know.
You work based on assumptions,
on hunches, on hopes.
At the end of the day,
you have to acquit yourself.
Have you got what it takes?
Can you survive the stress of it?
And this job has a lot of stress.
YEHIAM MART
MOSSAD-ASSET RECRUITMENT 1975-2000
When the Mossad contacted me,
I was 22-23 years old.
At the time, I was working
security on El-Al planes.
El-Al was no picnic. There was
gun violence on planes, hijackings,
passengers were shot
at check-in counters...
On the other hand,
working security for El-Al
is a great job to have at that age.
Air crews, stewardesses...
I wanted to go on working for El-Al,
so I told them no.
They said "Go to college.
We'll stay in touch with you."
And that's what happened.
When and how were you recruited by Mossad?
They approached me
as a young college student.
I was quite young, 21-22 years old.
And since, after the '73 war,
I felt, like many others,
that we had made a mistake by not
volunteering to help keep Israel safe,
but only looked out for ourselves,
when they approached me,
I couldn't say no
and I joined Mossad.
Today, it's quite popular:
“I graduated from ‘HaMidrasha.’”
And as a Midrasha graduate, I feel as if
I'd graduated from the air force academy.
RAMI IGRA
MOSSAD CASE OFFICER 1975-2000
When I told my mother
I’d been accepted into Mossad,
she called all my aunts and said,
"The kid is all set!
He's got medical, social security,
a pension fund... He's all set."
Later I told her, "Mossad could have sent
me to Baghdad, and all you cared about..."
She said, "One day you'll realize
that that's what's important."
-And...
-What motivated you to do it?
-What was in it for you?
-I didn't do it to save the country.
It came along, and I went for it.
It wasn’t as if I dreamt
of being a spy as a 9-year-old.
Luckily, I turned out
to be pretty good at it.
What were you trained to do?
I was involved in operations,
from the start and until my retirement.
Which means...? What did you do?
-I was involved in operations.
-OK.
Can you tell me what you did?
Where you were?
I won't go into that. Next question.
OK. What were you trained to do?
Do you want to keep asking
the same question? Go ahead. It's OK.
Uh... OK.
I joined a department that was in charge
of recruiting and operating assets,
Arabs and Iranians,
and that's what I did for 20 years.
I was in a field that requires
creativity...
The professional term is "HUMINT".
In order to recruit a person,
to convince them to give you information,
to the enemy,
you have to take certain actions,
and not just
settle for convincing them that
they should. Because they shouldn't.
So this requires creativity,
it requires...
creating sets, and other things
fairly reminiscent of your line of work.
We're basically doing something which,
in my opinion,
is the most complicated thing there is.
We're basically dealing
with the human mind.
We don't do it for fun,
or because we saw it in a movie.
Our job is to deliver intelligence,
based on the needs
of the state's security forces.
We need to determine
who might possess that intelligence,
and once you determine
who might have that information,
you basically have to put them
through a process,
with or without their knowledge,
so that they’ll be willing
to give you the information you’re after.
AVI DAGAN
HEAD OF ASSET RECRUITMENT 1982-1984
Basically, the person
you're in contact with,
"The Object" in our parlance,
is about to do the most...
despicable thing.
He's basically going
to betray his country.
When I say “betray his country,”
I don't just mean his country's values.
He's betraying his family,
betraying his friends,
betraying the people around him.
What kind of person do you have to be
in order to cross that line?
The asset is a normal person
who falls into a certain situation,
and commits an act
that carries with it a lot of risk,
a lot of dishonor, if they're caught.
I've got hundreds and thousands
of hours of conversations
with people like that,
ones that the viewer might see
as spies, traitors to their countries...
You quickly see they're ordinary people.
You talk to them about other things,
about soccer... He supports Barcelona,
you support Manchester United.
Girls, food, money.
His son's taking private math lessons.
And he's a spy.
He's betraying his country for money.
In Arab countries,
treason is an unforgivable sin.
As they say in Arabic,
“You fling mud at the wall,
and the mark stays there your whole life.”
If you go into
a Palestinian town today,
and you ask someone,
"Who lives on this street?" He'll say,
"The teacher lives there,
the engineer - there,
the shopkeeper - there,
and the traitor - there."
Who's the traitor? It might be
someone whose grandfather
committed treason during
the Arab revolt of '36
and it’s stayed in the family.
Is it possible that their children
are still labeled traitors?
Of course they are.
For us, dishonor...
We're a forgiving country.
Our enemies are not forgiving.
Our enemies...
would even kill the cousin
of the man who betrayed them.
What kind of training do you need
in order to be a case officer?
Anyone who wants to be a case officer
has to learn hand-to-hand combat,
and learn to use a weapon.
But you also learn table manners,
which hand holds the fork.
YOSSI ALPHER
MOSSAD CASE OFFICER 1969-1981
I grew up in a Jewish,
non-Zionist family,
in the Washington DC area.
As a teenager, I was a star
in a program called
"Youth Wants to Know.”
Along with ten other teenagers,
we interviewed, among others, JFK,
three times, before he became president.
They showed documentaries
about the Holocaust.
I learned about the Holocaust
for the first time.
And that stirred strong feelings in me,
that I owe something...
That I have to do something.
Where did they send you?
What did you do?
I was a case officer.
What does a case officer do?
He recruits sources and handles them.
He essentially convinces someone
to betray their own people, no?
You know what?
You're taking me in a direction
that I have no desire
to talk about, I'm sorry.
Could you share a story
about an asset’s recruitment?
One that you handled personally?
I can tell you about a certain object
that we’d pursued for ten years,
unsuccessfully.
We knew that he was probably homosexual.
It wasn't easy for an Arab
to be gay in the '70s.
It's not easy today, either.
They set up a lunch for us
at a nice restaurant in a European city,
and because we suspected he had contact
with his country's intelligence agency,
the preparations for the meeting
were very tense.
My purpose in that meeting
was to recruit him.
And recruiting him meant,
in practical terms,
to receive information from him,
and to give him money.
Of course, I was undercover.
I recruited him undercover.
And we pussy-footed through the
conversation about what I was there to do.
Until, at a certain moment,
I noticed a look in his eyes.
And that's where my American
background came into play.
That look took me back
to the New York subway, at 2:00 AM.
Anyone who happened to be
on a subway platform at 2:00 AM,
in the 1960s at least,
would encounter homosexuals,
who were cruising for partners.
That was it. I knew that look.
And now I knew what I had to do.
I took the envelope with the money
out of my pocket,
and I grabbed him by the lapel,
thrust it into his breast pocket,
and said, "Here's the payment for
the information you're going to give me."
You could say that,
in figurative terms, I raped him.
And that was exactly what he wanted.
I felt great.
I felt like I’d pulled it off,
that I could celebrate.
That evening, I met some
Israeli friends for dinner,
and with the first bite I took,
I was overcome by nausea.
I ran to the bathroom,
and disappeared there for 15 minutes
while I puked and shat my brains out.
They thought I was half-dead.
And I soon learned that that's
what your stomach acid does to you
a few hours after
such a tense experience.
If you're not whole with
what you're doing,
it’s very difficult to do this job.
You need to find the crack
in the other person's personality,
and you have to work that crack,
and make it wider.
PINI MEIDAN
MOSSAD CASE OFFICER
What kind of psychological process
does that person go through?
He goes through a very complex process.
The recruitment process
is fraught with crisis.
You try to create a process
of controlled crisis.
You take a person
who has a certain position,
usually a senior position
in an enemy state,
and you go some distance
with them, hand-in-hand together
until you start to interrogate them
and ask them questions.
We called it “rolling the object
down the slippery slope.”
The penny finally drops.
Eventually, he realizes who he is.
He realizes what he's doing.
How do you know when he gets it?
When you ask him a question,
and he goes like this...
You ask, and he goes like this, which
means "You're asking me for the rope.”
"You're asking me a question which
will land me in the darkest of pits.”
We had a guy once who was a smoker.
He used to...
You'd ask him a tough question
during a conversation
and he would open his mouth, and hide
his face with cigarette smoke…
"It wasn't me who answered."
As if someone else answered. It's...
His wife told me once,
"Look, he's not sick.
He's got a psychological sickness.
Something's wrong with him."
If you didn't go through a crisis
during the recruitment process,
and if your object
didn't pass through a crisis,
it means he hasn't really
internalized what he's done,
he didn't really understand the process,
and he hasn't truly been recruited.
And how do you go through that process?
You experience a very
intense mental challenge.
One of the things that happened to me...
After many of the meetings,
I would have a hard time.
I used to go
and immediately take a shower
in order to cleanse myself
and disconnect myself from
the character I'd been playing.
Does the water wash it all away?
-No.
No two assets are alike,
and so, there's no one way
to handle problems.
Look,
I’ll tell you a story
about an asset we had in Syria.
In my previous unit.
At a certain time, I became concerned
that his cover would be blown,
so I brought him to Israel
with his entire family,
whoever he told me
ahead of time that he wanted to bring.
And he asked my permission,
that the night before he leaves
that I let him settle some scores
with people in his village:
To murder the village leader,
who, many years earlier,
refused to give him
his daughter's hand in marriage.
Next, his sister,
who’d slept around with someone,
and brought all these problems upon him,
as well as the guy she’d slept with,
and 2 or 3 others.
I only gave him the OK to kill his sister.
You gave him the OK
to kill his sister? Why?
Family honor, and whatnot.
But then, it turned out...
We could hear gunshots
and explosions in the distance.
It turned out
he’d settled his scores with everyone.
He came to me, smiled and said
"In all the time I worked for you,
this is the first time
I disobeyed an order."
Get it?
BEIRUT, 1976
Your name in Lebanon
wasn’t "Yair,” right?
I was known as "Abu Daoud.”
-As...?
-"Abu Daoud.”
YAIR RAVID
CHIEF OS STATION, BEIRUT
Look, my roots may be
in Eastern Europe,
my father was Ukrainian,
and my mother was Polish,
but I see myself as a Middle Easterner.
I've lived here, I live here,
I know the mentality, I live among them,
I speak the language well,
I know the sounds, the voices,
the flavors, the smells...
I'm deep into it.
Lebanon is known as a place
where a lot of drugs are produced.
Their hashish is sold all over the world,
and also opium.
There was a Shi’ite
in Southern Lebanon,
Abu Nassif, one of the biggest
drug barons in the world.
-How big?
-How big?
Each shipment was no less than a ton.
You know what they say?
"He plants by the road."
In the parlance of drug dealers,
someone who's well-connected and powerful
can afford to plant drugs anywhere,
including by the side of the road.
We knew about him and his activities,
and I decided to meet with him
and see how we could
use the man for our own ends.
He agreed to cooperate on one condition:
that we don't interfere with his business.
What did he do for you?
He recruited assets for us
in very important places.
DOMINO
Now, these people,
as soon as you're in contact with them,
they keep trying to ensnare you. Because
if he manages to trip you up even once,
you're under his thumb. That’s why
I never met with him alone.
I always had someone with me.
You never want to be in a situation
where it’s your word against his.
Once, he came to a meeting
with a nice present for me:
a beautiful carved wooden box,
with opium in it, for personal use,
for me to enjoy over the weekend.
I didn't hesitate. I pulled out my gun,
pressed it to his head and said,
"Next time this happens
I’ll pull the trigger."
On another occasion,
he brought me a birthday present:
a new Mercedes.
Straight from the showroom.
-So... they’re always trying.
-Did you take it?
-Excuse me?
-Did you take it?
Did I take the Mercedes?
There's a paradox here.
The main thing is trust.
I mean their trust in us.
We must always remain totally skeptical.
You must have doubt at all times.
Otherwise, you could be led astray.
How does your relationship
with an asset work? What's the dynamic?
First of all, it depends on the person.
Some people are...
Practical, let's say. Cooler.
And you can have a conversation...
With others, you have to be
their babysitter, and their father,
and their older brother,
and their confessor...
For several hours, the two men sit,
the handler and the asset,
and they talk.
Many deep conversations,
that sometimes become
intimate confessions.
Those of the asset, not the handler.
With some people,
you have to raise your voice.
With some people, you have to frown.
Others you have to compliment.
Stroke their egos.
You have to give them the feeling
that you're pleased with them,
in order to increase cooperation.
In other words, you can't
take a case and say,
"I'll do this,
because I've done this before."
Every case is different,
because every person is different.
We had one guy, an asset,
who was the best in his field.
The best we ever had.
I was stationed in Europe,
and I learned that the man
was trying to contact us.
And I accepted his request.
We had a first meeting,
and when I heard the name,
to tell you the truth,
I didn't believe it was him.
-I didn't believe it.
-What was his name?
Ashraf Marwan.
When I saw the first batch of material
he brought in.
After I saw it, I said:
"If this is for real,
it's... earth-shattering."
We never had anything like it.
It was unbelievable that this material,
the most top-secret intelligence in Egypt,
had come into our hands.
He was one of the people
who passed information to us
that prevented at least two planes
from being shot down.
Israeli planes,
with hundreds of Israelis on board.
What was so special about him?
How did he obtain
such secret material?
Listen, he was married
to Nasser's daughter!
And in Egypt, being Nasser's son-in-law
is a unique position.
He carried out all sorts of tasks
for the Egyptian government.
He liked to meet with
the head of Saudi intelligence,
and the head of Libyan intelligence,
and maybe even with someone
from the CIA, or the Italians...
With them, it's not like with us.
With us, a thing like that
goes straight to the head of the agency,
who checks, and assigns officers...
There, nobody's going to
ask the son-in-law questions,
because those who do
get their heads chopped off.
And when he goes to London,
the ambassador shines his shoes.
Because he's the son-in-law.
He knows what's up.
He gets a car, an office... Everything.
-Why? He didn't have any money problems.
-Look,
he didn’t just need favors.
Although, if we hadn't paid him,
he wouldn't have worked with us.
I'll tell you a story.
One day, I met in Cairo with
a representative from a large oil company.
And we had dinner.
The kind of dinner where you're served
by black guys with white gloves,
and they light your cigar
with a special straw...
Straight out of the movies.
We go out for some air,
and I see, right next to his house,
I see a small white palace,
all lit up, extraordinarily beautiful.
I say to him, "Look how nice
your neighbor's house is."
He says, "You know who lives there?"
"No, who?"
He says, "Ashraf Marwan."
And right away, I could see
our dollars on the walls.
What other factors can motivate
someone to work with you,
besides money?
Illness.
Maybe his relative is ill.
Maybe he is ill,
and needs medical treatment,
and you can help him get it.
Revenge.
Do you think that was
what motivated Ashraf Marwan?
Yes.
He was motivated by his sense
of disappointment and vengeance
about losing his station
after his father-in-law's death.
He was Nasser's son-in-law.
-So it was all about ego?
-Yes. That came into play.
And he said,
"I want to have influence!"
-How was contact established?
-Look, he came,
and met with Tzvika Zamir.
He met the head
of the Mossad, personally?
Yes. Look...
He liked that he met
with the director of the Israeli Mossad.
It was part of his personality.
As he put it, "The Egyptians might not
like me, but at least somebody does.”
The relationship between a handler
and an asset
is a complicated thing.
It's a relationship, first of all,
between two people.
And Ashraf Marwan was one in a million.
We had
a relationship of mutual respect.
He held me in high regard.
And I held him in high regard as well.
And he could feel it, just as I could.
ZVI ZAMIR
DIRECTOR OF MOSSAD 1968-1974
Is there room for emotions
when working with an asset?
Or is it all about interests?
Look, in this business,
there isn't much room for emotions.
You've got a job to do,
one you believe
helps to keep your country safe.
In certain unavoidable cases,
people...
get killed, or hurt,
as a result of this activity.
You try, as much as you can,
to prevent such cases.
But this is espionage,
not the insurance business.
In the early '70s,
I was in charge of a unit
responsible for recruiting and handling
assets in Syria and Lebanon.
Palestinian terrorists broke into
a high school in Ma'alot,
where they abducted and murdered children,
and we were preoccupied
with preventing them
from entering Israel
and carrying out attacks.
My guys recruited a Lebanese shepherd.
A few months later, he came to a meeting
and reported that he had been
approached by a Palestinian,
a man who spoke
in the Palestinian dialect,
who asked for information about
IDF manouevers in the border area.
I told them to instruct him
to report everything he sees
to the Palestinian terrorist organization
that handled him,
with the assumption that anything
he could see, they could see as well.
Then one day, they asked him to locate
a spot along the border fence,
given his familiarity with the area,
where they could sneak into Israel
and carry out an attack.
He reported this to us,
and we chose a spot,
in coordination with the IDF,
we chose an appropriate spot
along the border fence
where they could be met
with a very warm welcome.
The night before the operation...
he knew because they’d told him
when they were planning to do it,
they informed him, quite cleverly,
that he’d be joining them.
He would be part of the cell,
because they wanted to insure themselves
against possible betrayal.
If I'd told him to refuse,
they would have killed him.
If I had snuck him into Israel,
him and his family,
they would have crossed the border
a month or two later
at a point I didn’t know about.
So he obviously had to go with them.
I told him, "As soon as you hear gunfire,
hit the deck.
We have ways of identifying you
and making sure you don't get hit."
This was, of course, pure fiction.
I knew I was sending him
to his death, but...
My job is to make sure that
the children of Kibbutz Hanita
are safe from harm.
So I made a cold, difficult decision
and I sacrificed a pawn,
like in a game of chess.
It doesn’t weigh on your conscience?
Do you feel remorse?
Personally, of course,
I felt regret, since...
he was killed
while serving us very loyally.
But this is the kind of business
where you don't...
Those kinds of considerations
don't get in the way
of doing what you have to do.
It's a rough business.
Look, both the Mossad and the Shin Bet
are organizations that operate
within the culture of the region.
There are actors here who...
You've got to be one of them. Like them.
As they say in English,
“It takes one to know one."
We have an adversary.
They're just as clever as us,
just as ruthless as us,
and each side is trying
to further its country's interests,
by any means possible.
You can't pretend to be...
the Belgian Novelists' Association
and defeat Hezbollah
with those values. It won't work.
That's what we did in order to win.
Winning isn't easy.
Winning isn't easy.
How can you know that an asset
won’t suddenly flip and betray you?
Look, there’s never 100%
in these things.
No agent is ever 100%.
There's no such thing. I've never seen it.
Anyone who handles assets
has to take into account
that the asset might betray you.
As a matter of fact,
these things happen.
Zadok Ofir and Baruch Cohen
were excellent case officers.
Zadok Ofir met with an asset.
The asset, at a certain point,
became a double agent,
pulled out a gun, and shot him
four times at point blank range.
ISRAELI MURDERED IN CENTRAL MADRID
-Baruch Cohen was in Madrid.
-What happened?
He handled an asset,
and the asset… They said goodbye,
and as he was leaving the cafe where
the meeting took place, someone shot him.
The assumption is that
the asset had been exposed,
and in order to protect himself,
he spilled the beans and betrayed us.
How did you know
Ashraf Marwan wouldn't betray you?
LONDON, OCTOBER 5, 1973
Ashraf Marwan asked
that I come to London,
and said he wanted to inform us
about the war.
-The '73 war.
-Yes.
I decided to go to London,
instead of attending a meeting
with the Prime Minister,
with the head of Military Intelligence,
the Defense Minister,
and the IDF Commander-in-Chief.
Let me tell you why.
When an intelligence man hears
from a source that he trusts,
that war is on the horizon,
with the date already set,
he is obligated to sound a warning,
to ring all the bells, that war is coming.
I had done that once before,
in mid-May.
I was wrong.
They had a field day
at military intelligence.
"Zvi Zamir is dragging us into war."
I told my friends at the Mossad
that we would continue
to do our duty.
I was constantly on the lookout
for signs of double-dealing.
Signs of dishonesty
that you could see or hear.
-I couldn't find any with him.
-Such as?
Such as the story with the gun.
His handler noticed a bulge in his shirt.
So he said,
"What's that in your shirt?"
He had a gun.
And Zvika Zamir, director of Mossad,
was sitting with an Arab asset
who had a gun in his pocket.
He could’ve pulled out the gun
and killed Zvika Zamir,
the handler, and maybe someone else, too.
I’ve never heard of another
intelligence organization whose director
would meet with a foreign asset
armed with a gun in his pocket.
Just imagine, for a moment,
that he’d killed Zvika Zamir
in some flat in London,
along with 1-2 other people.
Imagine what would have happened.
A double agent
would certainly have done it.
But why is the director of the Mossad
meeting with an asset in the first place?
Does the director of the Mossad
often meet with assets in person?
Look, I won't go into detail.
I don't like this line of questioning.
Was it unusual to meet
with an asset like that?
First of all, I don't want to tell you.
-The answer is...
-Weren't you worried he'd betray you?
No.
We were in London.
And I interrogated him about everything
he had told us in the past.
And then we double-checked.
And I double-checked.
And I said to myself, "Zvi Zamir,
You'd better alert the whole country.
Let the people go straight
from prayer service to war,
because this piece of intelligence
is crucially important."
On the 5th...
I’m in London.
I wrote a 5-line telegram.
THE COMPANY STILL INTENDS
TO SIGN THE CONTRACT.
THEY KNOW TOMORROW'S A HOLIDAY.
In which I wrote...
THE ANGEL THINKS THAT
THE CHANCES OF SIGNING ARE 99.9%
...that war would break out,
while knowing full well
that if this information
turns out to be wrong,
as people here thought at the time,
I'd be stoned to death
for pulling the Jews out of synagogue.
That is a transgression which,
under current standards,
is punishable by death.
I left no address.
I was unreachable by phone.
"I'm unavailable.
This is my message to you. You decide."
YOM KIPPUR WAR,
OCTOBER 6, 1973
Eventually, they decided to do it.
They acted too late.
We paid in blood.
Ever since the '73 war,
there’s been an ongoing debate over who's
to blame for the failure of deterrence.
At the same time, Ashraf Marwan's name
was made public.
He worked with us for many years.
He remained an Israeli asset
even after the '73 war.
He worked... No problem.
When did the trouble start?
When it was made public.
CAIRO, DECEMBER 21, 2007
On Wednesday, Ashraf Marwan
died in London,
the son-in-law of the former
Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Suicide or murder?
British police are investigating
the death of Ashraf Marwan,
who collaborated with the Mossad
during the 1973 war.
Ashraf Marwan was a national asset,
and we Israelis are guilty
of not properly protecting him.
THE MOSSAD AGENT WAS
SADA'S CHIEF OF STAFF
Every reporter felt the need
to throw his name around everywhere.
THEIR MAN IN CAIRO
Who he was, what he was,
how he made contact...
And we begged them to stop.
What we know about Ashraf Marwan
is that he felt, as they say,
Emotional Distress,
Because of the charges
raised against him recently,
According to which he acted as a double
agent in the service of Egypt and Israel.
Even after they started talking about him,
he still hoped they would stop,
but they kept on talking about him. The
Israeli press kept pumping the story up,
until someone came
and threw him out the window.
It’s one of the worst
Israeli intelligence failures,
the name of an intelligence asset
being made public.
The world is concluding
that Israel is unable
to protect its assets' identities. Who
would want to work with such a country?
We gave him away.
What...
Looking back,
can you tell us about a dilemma,
or an instance of remorse,
that you experienced in your
work with an asset?
I'll tell you about
a dilemma in retrospect.
I was sitting at home, in Israel.
I had two little children.
My wife and I
were feeding them cornflakes,
before going to work,
and sending them to kindergarten.
I was feeding one kid,
and my wife was feeding the other.
I had one eye on the paper.
In the paper, I see a picture
of an Arab I knew, hanged.
His country had captured him
and hanged him.
Have you ever seen someone you knew,
hanged? You haven't.
So, there he was, hanged.
I remembered him.
I remembered my dealings with him.
I thought, "Was I OK?
Am I to blame here?
Was he caught because of a mistake of his?
Because of a mistake of ours?
Was he caught because
his country's intelligence services
are better and more sophisticated
than ours?" Anything's possible.
-Was he an asset that you recruited?
-Yes.
-Did you have a long relationship?
-Yes.
Where was he from?
It doesn’t matter.
Did your wife know that that hanged man
had something to do with you?
I didn't tell her.
She noticed that I started
feeding the kid more slowly,
so she said, "Hurry up, we're late!”
I kept on feeding my kid,
at the appropriate speed.
A minute later, I moved on with my life.
Everything passes. It doesn't...
That's life.
One minute passes
and you’ve moved on with your life?
Look, when he agreed to do it,
he knew about the risks involved.
He reaped the benefits
he had hoped for.
The possibility that it would happen
was in the air.
And it happened.
Usually, it doesn't happen.
To him, it happened.
That's a very cold way
to look at the world.
Mossad gives you that.
If I look at the ways
that I've changed along the way,
it's in those directions.
My wife tells me, "You've lost your...
You don't hear the birds chirping.
You're not open.
You're cold. You're distrustful.
You're evil.”
It's all true. It's all true.
How did you feel when you heard
Ashraf Marwan had been killed?
I felt sorrow.
Great sorrow.
I didn't rat him out.
I defended him.
I was, to a large extent...
it's funny to say, but...
Someone he could lean on.
And we were...
I'm telling you, we were friends.
Do you think a handler and an asset
can develop an intimate relationship?
Do you think an asset
can become a friend?
A friend? What are you talking about?
An agent isn't...
a true friend.
He's your friend for the moment.
Your friend for the moment.
You must be very wary
of growing close to an asset.
That's true of handlers,
and also of Mossad directors.
If you know what I mean.
This work,
the handling of assets,
involves a lot of wisdom.
And different people
behave in different ways.
And I do as I do.
That’s it. Enough. I've already said
much more than I was going to.
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