A spymaster's story
http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=6739931
Mar 30th 2006
From The Economist print edition
The intrigues behind Israel's diplomacy, and sometimes America's too
TOP spymasters usually take a while to emerge from the shadows. Efraim
Halevy has waited only four years. As director of Israel's Mossad
intelligence service until 2002, and one of its senior executives for
33 years, he must possess a Scheherezade's store of tales. Needless to
say, few real secrets have made it into this book. Readers expecting
insights into tradecraft, assassinations, dead-letter drops and secret
codes will be disappointed. Even so, by filtering familiar events
through the unfamiliar lens of the spymaster, Mr Halevy gives a fresh
twist to the story of the period he focuses on: the 13 years between
Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the American invasion
of Iraq in 2003.
The possession of secrets lifts a spy's life above the ordinary. Yet
some modern spymasters do more than merely try to understand the world,
they try also to change it. Since Israel has so little formal contact
with its neighbours, it falls to its military and intelligence
officers, says Mr Halevy, to conduct the "most meaningful contacts
and negotiations" with its adversaries.
.
|
