Mossad The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service5stars

 

 

Spies and Saboteurs on the Loose

By Michael Bar-Zohar & Nissim Mishal

ECCO, $27.99, 388 pages

This remarkable book documents amazing and controversial events in the history of Israel’s secret service, the Mossad. Well documented and authoritative, it describes clandestine missions against many of Israel’s most determined enemies. The capture of Adolph Eichman is a well-known Mossad success. The authors describe how Eichman was apprehended and spirited out of Argentina in 1960, then tried and executed in Israel for his horrific Nazi crimes against European Jews during World War II. Similarly, Herberts Cukurs, the so-called Butcher of Riga, a Nazi concentration camp in Latvia, was tracked down in Brazil in 1965. The Mossad’s response to the ‘Black September’ attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics is also described. The book is full of such stories, highlighted by detailed descriptions of clever missions. It also includes undercover rescues of ill-treated Syrian and Ethiopian Jews. Among the most recent exploits are the bombing of a nuclear reactor in Syria, and the destruction of Sadam Hussain’s threatening ‘super gun’ in Iraq. And the book ends with a hint of potential missions ahead…

Regardless of one’s feelings pro or con about Israel and the Mossad’s work, some readers may find this book disturbingly difficult to put down.

Reviewed By Gustav Schreiber

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