Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [244]
In 2007, Ashraf Marwan, a wealthy Egyptian businessman living in London, fell from his fourth floor apartment to his death. Marwan’s death became the subject of much speculation, centering on allegations that he had been a long-time spy for Mossad or that he was a double agent. Marwan had been a son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak issued a statement denying that Marwan had spied for Israel. Also in 2007, Muhammad Sayyid Saber Ali, an Egyptian nuclear engineer, was sentenced to life in prison for spying for Israel. Ali admitted delivering reports taken from Egypt’s atomic agency but said they were not secret and were available online.
In addition to its emphasis on HUMINT, Israel has developed an independent satellite imagery capability and is at the forefront of imagery cooperation between nations. Press reports cite India and Turkey as two of its partners.
Israeli intelligence has conducted a variety of covert operations abroad, including both kidnapping and assassination. The most famous kidnapping was of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, who was abducted in Argentina in 1960. Eichmann had been responsible for the implementation of Hitler’s “final solution,” the extermination of the Jews. He was brought to Israel, where he was tried and executed. In 1986 Israeli intelligence abducted Mordechai Vanunu, who had worked at Israel’s secret nuclear installation at Dimona. A year after leaving Dimona, Vanunu published details about Israel’s nuclear weapons program in the London Sunday Times. Lured from London to Rome, Vanunu was abducted and returned to Israel, where he was sentenced to eighteen years in prison.
Israeli assassinations have targeted terrorists outside of Israel or the occupied territories. Targets have included the terrorists responsible for the capture and death of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, although one innocent Arab in Norway was misidentified and also killed by Israeli agents. More recently, Israel has killed a number of terrorists during the unrest in both occupied and Palestinian-controlled areas. Israel refers to these as targeted killings, or interceptions, not assassinations or military reprisals. They appear to have been carried out by either intelligence or military forces.
Like the United States and the Soviet Union, Israel has suffered a major strategic intelligence failure. In 1973 Egypt and Syria achieved strategic surprise in the opening phase of the Yom Kippur War. In a still-controversial postwar investigation, the Agranat commission primarily faulted the military leadership and Aman for the surprise. The commission found that, although many signs pointed to an impending attack, the military was overly committed to an indications and warning (I&W) concept that led them to play down what they were seeing because not all of the conceptual indicators had been observed. In other words, they had created an I&W model and refused to react to the indications they were seeing because the Arab actions did not fit the I&W concept. Thus, even with an indications and warning model, the threshold had been set too high. This experience provided a valuable lesson on the possibility of surprise. Commenting on it nine years after the war, the staff director of the Knesset committee responsible for oversight of intelligence said: “The United States [during the cold war] has to watch every part of the globe. We know who our enemies are. We only have to watch six or seven countries—and still we were surprised.”
Israel has long faced a terrorist problem and is also deeply concerned about WMD proliferation, for which it has an active and independent collection effort. Israel has also shown a willingness to act unilaterally against suspected WMD threats. In 1981, Israeli jets attacked the Osirak reactor near Baghdad. In 2007, as noted above, Israel conducted an air strike against a site in Syria that some believe was a nuclear site, perhaps being supported by North Korea. Iran’s nuclear program