Spies Against Armageddon-and Towards a Moral Morass?
Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, a real life “thriller” about the exploits of Israel’s intelligence agencies, has been making headlines since its publication on July 9. Not only do its authors, CBS News’ Dan Raviv and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman, confirm widely held suspicions that Israel was responsible for the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists and for interjecting the Flame and Stuxnet viruses into the computers that control Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but they make the case that Israelis-not local lackeys or political dissidents such as the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK)-carried out the assassinations on Iranian soil:
“For such a sensitive dangerous and daring mission as a series of assassinations in Iran’s capital, the Mossad would not depend on hired-gun mercenaries,” Raviv and Melman assert. “They would be considered far less trustworthy and there was hardly any chance that the Mossad would reveal to non-Israelis some of its assassination unit’s best methods.”
Unnoticed in the effusive advance praise promoting the book is that much of Spies Against Armageddon is a rehash of Raviv and Melman’s earlier collaboration Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community, published in 1990. Although the authors state that they have updated, revised and amplified their previous work in light of new documentation that has become available, large chunks of text-for example, the extensive section on Jonathan Pollard-are incorporated practically verbatim. Chapter titles have been tweaked slightly, and in some cases the chronological order has been reshuffled. Both books conclude with a chapter whose heading is “Into the Future,” and with the identical closing sentence: “The community’s history has demonstrated both the maximal achievements and the inescapable limitations of intelligence.”