Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services

One of the events most crucial to the war in the Persian Gulf occurred nearly ten years before it began, when Israel destroyed Iraq’s most advanced weapon, the nuclear reactor at Al-Tuweitha, acting on information obtained by Israeli intelligence. Israel’s Secret Wars is the first documented, comprehensive history of all three of Israel’s intelligence services, from their origins in the 1930s, through Israel’s five wars, up to the present, including the Ostrovsky affair. Highly readable and exhaustively researched, it contains the most accurate information available about a shadowy and controversial subject in which myth all too often obscures reality.

Using heretofore undisclosed contemporary reports, memoranda, and private diaries, Israel’s Secret Wars describes for the first time in print the beginnings of the Israeli-U.S. intelligence relationship; the Israeli-French espionage connection during the Algerian War, which underlay their military alliance in the Suez crisis; the fateful message from a high-level Arab agent that initiated the Yom Kippur war; and many more previously unexamined operations and episodes.

Placing every event in its historical context, Black and Morris disentangle the often stormy links between spymasters and politicians in such affairs as the Entebbe raid, Irangate, the Pollard spy scandal, and the Palestinian intifada. Israel’s Secret Wars promises to become the standard work on Israeli intelligence for years to come.