Dan Raviv

Every Spy a Prince is an authorized biography version of Israel's secretive intelligence services, blending a public overview of the structure of this shadow world with a greatest hits version of its intelligence coups, and also some journalist criticism of the intelligence community.

The intelligence community in Israel has been traditionally protected by a veil of censorship unheard of in a democracy. The four key agencies at the time were Mossad, the foreign intelligence service; Aman, the show more military intelligence service; Shin Bet, in charge of domestic counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism; and Lekem, a scientific intelligence agency that also managed the nuclear program. Lekem has since been dissolved and its duties parceled out across the ministries. The identities of the heads of these agencies were not allowed to be published, as just the tip of secrecy.

The early Mossad was strongly influenced by the extremist militant group Irgun. The first few decades of intelligence work saw a series of massive human intelligence wins. Israeli intelligence got the first non-Soviet copy of Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin, convinced an Iraqi pilot to defect with a then state-of-the art MiG-21, and captured Eichmann in Argentina. Day to day, the intelligence community did pretty well. Spying is a difficult game, and while agents were blown due to bad luck or sloppy tradecraft, with fatal consequences for those in Arab countries, on the whole the Israeli secret services punched above their weight.

Conversely, the 70s and 80s saw a series of alarming failures. Aman missed preparations for the Yom Kippur War, confidently assuming the Arab states would never attack. Mossad fumbled the Lillehammer assassination, killing an innocent man in Norway instead of a member of Black September. After years of ruling the occupied Palestinians through informers, Shin Bet was caught off-guard by the first intifada. And Lekem ran Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who's spying threatened the key relationship with the United States.

Raviv and Melman close by arguing that the harsh censorship reign is absurd given that the chief of Shin Bet can throw a wild birthday bash attended by gossip columnists. The also raise warnings about the existence of a shadow foreign policy run by ex-intelligence arms merchants. While Mossad has long served as a shadow foreign ministry in countries which cannot officially acknowledge Israel, ex-Mossad agents are only vaguely controlled by the state, and their misdeeds in training and supplying dictators and gangsters reflects badly on Israelis everywhere.

Every Spy A Prince is a little scattershot, and being published in 1990, it now a historical artifact itself. Rise and Kill First by Bergman is the 21st century update. The spycraft stories are still engaging, and its a good read. show less

The story here is interesting, but the writing is poor. The author repeats information again and again, often within the same chapter and certainly between chapters. If he stopped telling the reader the same thing repeatedly (and honestly, he often states the same facts in the exact same way multiple times), the book would be half the length.

An engaging account of the Israeli intelligence community - Mossad, Aman, Shin Bet - up to 1990. I definitely recommend it.

Difficult to stick with, but interesting.