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Interesting book by a former katsa (Mossad Operative): By Way of Deception (by Victor Ostrovsky)
By Way of Deception - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Link for free ebook: http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres11/OSTROVbywayofdecep.pdf
I started reading it, haven't completed it. But seems very interesting to me.
I started making a note of some excerpts after a while.
Some excerpts:
By Way of Deception - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Link for free ebook: http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres11/OSTROVbywayofdecep.pdf
I started reading it, haven't completed it. But seems very interesting to me.
I started making a note of some excerpts after a while.
Some excerpts:
BY WAY OF DECEPTION 67
The next major course lecture was given by Amy Yaar, department
head of the Far East and Africa in Tevel (liaison). His story was so
fascinating that when it was over, everybody said "How do we sign
up?"
Yaar's department had people positioned throughout the Far East
who did little real intelligence; instead they set the framework for
future business and diplomatic ties. They had a man with a
British passport living in Djakarta, for example, working under
cover. That meant the Indonesian government knew he was with
the Mossad. He had an escape route ready, and a gold coin belt if
he needed it, among other security measures. His main task was
to facilitate arms sales in the region. They also had a man in
Japan, one in India, one in Africa, and occasionally, people in Sri
Lanka, and in Malaysia. Yaar's annual convention for his staff was
in the Seychelles. He was having a lot of fun with very little
danger.
Yaar's officers in Africa were also dealing in millions of dollars in
arms sales. These liaison men worked in three stages. First, they
made contact to find out what the country needed, what it feared,
whom it regarded as enemies — information gathered through
their on-site activities. The idea was to build on those needs,
create a stronger relationship, then make it known that Israel
could supply the government in question with weapons and
training — whatever they needed. The final step in the process,
once a country's leader had been hooked on the arms, was for the
Mossad man to tell him that he must take, for instance, some
agricultural equipment as well. The leader was then put in the
position of saying he could expand ties with Israel only if they set
up formal diplomatic relations. It was essentially a way of creating
those relations through the back door, although in most cases the
arms deals were so lucrative, the liaison men never bothered to
follow up with the next step.
They did in Sri Lanka, however. Amy Yaar made the connection,
then tied the country in militarily by supplying it with substantial
equipment, including PT boats for coastal patrol. At the same
time, Yaar and company were supplying the warring Tamils with
anti-PT boat equipment to use in fighting the government forces.
The Israelis also trained elite
forces for both sides, without either side knowing about the other,*
and helped Sri Lanka cheat the World Bank and other investors
out of millions of dollars to pay for all the arms they were buying
from them.
The Sri Lankan government was worried about unrest among the
farmers — the country has a long history of economic problems —
so it wanted to split them up somewhat by moving them from one
side of the island to the other. But it needed an acceptable reason
to do this. That's where Amy Yaar came in. He was the one who
dreamed up the great "Mahaweli Project," a massive engineering
scheme to divert the Mahaweli River from its natural course to dry
areas on the other side of the country. The claim was that this
would double the country's hydro-electric power and open up
750,000 acres of newly irrigated land. Besides the World Bank,
Sweden, Canada, Japan, Germany, the European Economic
Community, and the United States all invested in the $2.5 billion
(U.S.) project.
From the beginning, it was an overly ambitious project, but the
World Bank and the other investors did not understand that, and
as far as they are concerned, it's still going on. Originally a 30-year
project, it was suddenly escalated in 1977 when Sri Lanka's
president, Junius Jayawardene, discovered that with a little help
from the Mossad, it could become most significant.
In order to convince the World Bank especially (with its $250
million commitment) that the project was feasible — and would
also serve as a convenient excuse for moving the farmers from
their land — the Mossad had two Israeli academics, (looks like Israeli academics can lie and can be bought ) one an
economist from Jerusalem University, the other a professor of
agriculture, write scholarly papers explaining its importance and
its cost. A major Israeli construction company, Solel Bonah, was
given a large contract for part of the job.
Periodically, World Bank representatives would go to Sri Lanka for
spot checks, but the locals had been taught how to fool these
inspectors by taking them on circuitous routes —
* See Chapter 6: THE BELGIAN TABLE
easily explained for security reasons — then back to the same,
quite small area where some construction actually had been
carried out for just this purpose.
Later, when I was working in Yaar's department at Mossad
headquarters, I was assigned to escort Jayawardene's daughter-
in-law — a woman named Penny — on a secret visit to Israel. She
knew me as "Simon."
We took her wherever she wanted to go. We were talking in general
terms, but she insisted on telling me about the project and how
money for it was financing equipment for the army. She was
complaining that they weren't really getting on with it. Ironically,
the project had been invented to get money from the World Bank
to pay for those weapons.
At that time, Israel had no diplomatic relations with Sri Lanka. In
fact, they were supposedly embargoing us. But she was telling me
about all these secret political meetings going on. The funny thing
was that when news stories were leaked about the meetings, they
claimed Israel had 150 katsas working in Sri Lanka. We didn't
have that many katsas in the entire world. In fact, at that time
there was only Amy and his helper, both on a short visit.
Note: PLO=Palestine Liberation Orgthere was barely a move the PLO could
make anywhere in the world that didn't end up on the Mossad's
giant screen.
Even before reading this book I had read that Mossad's passport counterfeiting dept was probably the best on the planet.Experience showed, in fact, that seemingly innocuous things often
tipped off major activity. On one occasion, before the war in
Lebanon, word came back from an agent that
a shipment of good-quality beef had been brought into a PLO
camp in Lebanon, something these camps normally didn't have.
The Mossad knew the PLO had been planning an attack, but they
had no idea when. The beef shipment tipped them off. It was for a
celebratory dinner. Acting on this information, Israeli naval
commandos made a preemptive strike, wiping out 11 PLO
guerrillas as they were getting into their rubber boats.
This was another example of how important little bits of
information could be — and how essential it was to report
everything properly.
@pmaitra @Dovah @cobra commando @Mad Indian @Free KarmaThe next lecture was more to the point. It was delivered by Pinhas
Aderet and had to do with documentation: passports, ID cards,
credit cards, driver's licenses, and so on. The most important
Mossad documents are passports, and there are four qualities:
top, second, field operation, and throwaway.
Throwaway passports had either been found or stolen and were
used when you needed only to flash them. They weren't used for
identification. The photo would have been changed, and
sometimes, the name, but the idea is to change as little as
possible. But such a document would not withstand thorough
scrutiny. Neviot officers (the ones who did break-ins, cased
houses, and such) used them. They were also used in training
exercises inside Israel, or to recruit inside Israel.
With every passport issued, there was a folio page giving the name
and address, complete with a photocopy of the section of the city
where that address was. The actual house was marked on the
map, and there was a photograph of it and description of the
neighborhood. If you happened to run into someone who knew the
area, you wouldn't be caught offguard by some simple question
about it.
If you were using a throwaway passport, you'd be told in the
accompanying folio where it had been used before. You wouldn't
use it at, say, the Hilton if someone else had recently been there
with it. In addition, you had to have a story to cover all the stamps
that appeared inside such a passport.
74 BY WAY OF DECEPTION
A field-operations passport was used for quick work in a foreign
country. But it was not used when crossing borders. In fact,
katsas rarely use false ID at all in going from one country to
another, unless they are with an agent, something they always try
to avoid. The false passport would be carried inside a diplomatic
pouch sealed by a "bordero," a wax seal with a string on it,
ostensibly to show it can't be opened without detection. It is used
to carry papers between embassies, and recognized around the
world as something that is not to be opened at border crossings.
The carrier has diplomatic immunity. (The passports, of course,
could also be delivered to a katsa in another country by a bode!, or
messenger.) The wax seals were made so that these envelopes
could easily be opened and closed without appearing to affect the
seal.
Second-quality passports, actually perfect passports, were built on
katsas' cover stories, but there were no real persons behind them.
A top-quality passport, on the other hand, had both a cover story
and a person behind it who could back up the story. They would
stand up completely to any official scrutiny, including a check by
the country of origin.
Passports are manufactured on different types of paper. There is
no way the Canadian government, for example, would sell anyone
the paper it uses to make Canadian passports (still the favorite of
the Mossad). But a phony passport cannot be manufactured with
the wrong paper, so the Mossad had a small factory and chemical
laboratory in the basement of the Academy that actually made
various kinds of passport paper. Chemists analyzed the paper of
genuine passports and worked out the exact formula to produce
sheets of paper that duplicated what they needed.
A large storage room was kept at a precise temperature and
humidity to preserve the paper. Its shelves contained passport
paper for most nations. Another part of this operation was the
manufacture of Jordanian dinars. These have been used
successfully to trade for real dollars and also to flood Jordan with
currency, exacerbating that country's inflation problems.
BY WAY OF DECEPTION 75
When I visited the factory as a trainee, I saw a large batch of blank
Canadian passports. They must have been stolen. It looked like an
entire shipment. There were over 1,000 of them. I don't think the
shipment was ever reported missing — not in the media, anyway.
Many immigrants to Israel are also asked if they will give up their
passports to save Jews. For instance, a person who had just
moved to Israel from Argentina probably wouldn't mind donating
his Argentine passport. It would end up in a huge, library-like
room, containing many thousands of passports divided by
countries, cities, and even districts, with Jewish- and non-Jewish-
sounding names, also coded by ages — and all data computerized.
The Mossad also had a major collection of passport stamps and
signatures that they used to stamp their own passports. These
were kept in a log book. Many of them were gathered with the help
of police who could hold a passport temporarily and photograph
the various stamps before returning it to the owner.
Even stamping a false passport was done methodically. If, for
example, my passport bore an Athens stamp on a certain day, the
department would check their files for the signature and stamp
from that day at the correct flight time, so that if someone should
check with Athens as to which officer was on duty, that would be
correct. They prided themselves on this work. Sometimes they'd fill
a passport with 20 stamps. They said no operation had ever been
bungled by a bad document.
In addition, I'd receive a file with my passport, which I had to
memorize, then discard, with general information about the day I
was supposedly in Athens: the weather, the local headlines, and
the current topics of discussion, where I stayed, what I did there,
and so on.
With each assignment, katsas received little reminder slips about
previous work; for example, don't forget that on a certain date you
were at this hotel and your name was suchand-such. These also
listed all the people we met and saw, another reason to include
every detail, no matter how tiny it seemed, in the reports.
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