Ronen Bergman

Readers looking for the greatest hits of an agency staffed exclusively by super-spies are likely to come away from this one disappointed. Well, maybe just a little disappointed. There are parts of this book that James Bond fans will certainly appreciate. Bergman has a real feel for narrative tension: his accounts of the Mossad's most impressive successes and its most embarrassing failures are taut and compulsively readable: he never lets the reader forget how the tiniest details can mean the show more difference between a mission's success or failure. He portrays the Mossad as an institution that often knows how to play the long game: many accounts of these assassinations involve individuals who'd been on the Mossad's list for years, sometimes decades. There's also a lot here about the Mossad's recruiting process and renowned operational precision, which sometimes lives up to its reputation and sometimes, well, doesn't. I don't know enough about either the intelligence community or Israeli history to know what elements in "Rise and Kill First" qualify as revelations, but this one contains more than enough information about the theory and practice of spycraft to keep even the most dedicated reader of spy thrillers satisfied.

"Rise and Kill First" also has a consistent institutional focus. Bergman never forgets to contextualize the Mossad, patiently explaining how the Mossad has cooperated and occasionally competed with other Israeli security organizations such as Shin Bet. It might surprise some readers to know that the Mossad hasn't always been in the vanguard of Israel's intelligence community: much of its reputation can be traced directly to the efforts of Meir Dagan. At the same time, it's also a story of transformation: Bergman tells us how the Mossad's various successes and failures contributed to its current values and operating practices. Should. the Mossad draw upon Jewish foreign nationals in neutral countries? What constitutes an acceptable loss, or an acceptable amount of -- as the United States puts it -- collateral damage? Unfortunately, in this sense, the Mossad serves as a troubling analogy for our entire age. There's quite a lot here about how the Mossad struggled with the morality of the assassinations they carried out: we hear from lawyers, judges, rabbis, and the agents who participated in these operations themselves. I was surprised that many of these assassinations required a real-time go-ahead from the current Israeli prime minister: more than one assassination attempt has had to be postponed because the person in charge was asleep. As time goes on and Israel's relationship with the Palestinians worsens, tactics and both sides become increasingly brutal and moral questions tend to fall by the wayside. The increasingly technological nature of modern warfare serves mostly to obviate most of these moral issues. Israel actually pioneered many aspects of drone warfare, but by the end of the book, the assassinations seem less like special operations and more like an assembly line. Of course, it has to be mentioned that even Dayan realized at some point what Americans have recently learned in Iraq: without a workable political solution, there's only so much that even the best intelligence operation can accomplish. That still isn't in sight, of course. To paraphrase one of the book's own chapter, titles, "Rise and Kill First" is, in many respects, a story of remarkable tactical success and inevitable strategic failure. Recommend. show less

One of the surprises in this book was the number of times Israel's intelligence community (the Mossad, Shin Bet, et al) completely botched a job. Going into the book I had unconsciously imagined that Israeli spies and commandos were complete masters of the field, and my pre-conceived image was only brought into my conscious mind as the book began tearing it to shreds. I don't know if it was more fun reading about the failures or the successes; either way I was fascinated.

Rise and Kill First is an astounding history of secret assassinations, and how turning to murder as an instrument of statecraft corrodes governments. Anyone who's passed Political Science 101 knows that states are founded on the use of violence. Israel's bloody constitutional moment is closer than most. Even prior to the War of Independence in 1949, Irgun carried out a guerrilla war of assassination against British and Arab officials in the Mandate of Palestine. The Jewish Brigade had a show more sideline in occupied Europe bringing SS officers to justice. Even as newborn Israel celebrated liberal human rights, and a constitution that banned the death penalty, it's security services, Mossad, Shin Bet, and AMAN, wrote a very different shadow constitution. Anyone with Jewish blood on their hands would die, and to paraphrase the Talmud, "If a man comes to kill you, rise and kill him first."

Bergman traces a complicated history of professionalizing state-sponsored murder. At first Israel used letter bombs, but this method was random and easy to foil. Human assassination teams were more precise, but the Lillehammer affair, where an innocent man was killed in Norway, was just one of the problems. Human agents could also be exposed, arrested or assassinated in retribution, and close command in foreign countries was impossible.

As Israel faced threats from Egyptian scientists, the radical terrorists of Black September, and later Hamas and Hezbollah, the security services innovated. Israel prefigured the American War on Terror tactics of 'unlawful combatants', assassination via drone aircraft, and high-tech warrooms that collated intelligence to present senior officials with real time "go/no-go" choices on assassinations.

However, for all the investment, it seems like the targeted assassinations were unable to prevent the First and Second Intifada or substantially degrade the suicide bomber recruitment pipeline. Strategic weapons programs in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran were more vulnerable to 'key man' attacks. But I think it's fair to say that the use of assassination has hardened world opinion against Israel as much as the occupation and building of settlements in Palestinian territory, and the longterm running of assassinations has eroded respect for law and life. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. show less

If you want to know whether or not Yasser Arafat was assassinated, don’t read this book. As Ronen Bergman writes, because of Israel’s policy of censorship, “If I knew the answer to the question of what killed Yasser Arafat, I wouldn’t be able to write it here in this book, or even be able to write that I know the answer.”

What Bergman is permitted to reveal, though, is extraordinary: not just that he was allowed to publish an exposé of Israel’s legendarily secretive intelligence show more services, but that he so thoroughly undercuts their aura of invincibility. As an Israeli investigative journalist, Bergman draws back the curtain on Israel’s long struggle in the shadows for survival — a struggle that has misfired as often as not.

Bergman suggests in his prologue that those who cooperated with his investigation were motivated by that most basic of human desires: to talk about the things they’ve done, and to explain their side of the story. This motivation is doubtless all the stronger in a nation torn between its alignment with the liberal democracies of the West and the zeal of its regional enemies to kill it.

I found the result highly readable and even-handed, but depressing. Starting from the violent birth of modern Israel, the mind numbs as corpses pile up through decades of car bombings, poisonings, missile strikes, and sniper kills in response to suicide bombers, abductions and murders, rocket attacks, and programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Certainly Bergman does not let his countrymen off easy. He doesn’t minimize the suffering of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Arab civilians caught in the crossfire of history. At times, the depths of Israel’s suffering pushed its leaders to commit or permit what can only be described as war crimes.

And yet it’s equally clear that on balance, Israel’s leaders have usually operated within rules of engagement meant to minimize or avoid civilian casualties, sometimes to the detriment of Israelis. Only the most relentlessly ignorant or ideological critic could compare Israel disfavorably to an assortment of foes who deliberately target and murder as many civilians as they can.

This book left me with a profound sense of sadness, but it’s a useful lens through which to view the cycles of retribution that consume the headlines. Critics from right and left might find it too bleeding-heart or too lenient, respectively. One thing is certain: it’s difficult to foresee an end to the bloodshed, and it’s easy to foresee that mutual forgiveness and reconciliation will prove as elusive as the human threats Israel has spent its existence hunting down and killing. show less