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Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad | 
 enlarge | Author: Gordon Thomas
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy Used: $4.79
You Save: $13.16 (73%)
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 57439
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3rd
Pages: 640
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 0312361521
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.125694
EAN: 9780312361525
ASIN: 0312361521
Publication Date: January 23, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Created in 1951 to ensure an embattled Israel’s future, the Mossad has been responsible for the most audacious and thrilling feats of espionage, counterterrorism, and assassination ever ventured. Gordon Thomas’s 1999 publication of Gideon’s Spies, resulting from closed-door interviews with Mossad agents, informants, and spymasters, and drawing from classified documents and top-secret sources, revealed previously untold truths about the Israeli intelligence agency. And now, in this fourth edition, Thomas updates his classic text and shows a Mossad as it has historically been: brilliant, ruthless, and flawed, but ultimately awesome.
Six all-new chapters and updated appendices and glossaries examine:
*The London bombings: the untold full story of Mossad’s involvement
*Mossad’s key role in the G8 Summit in Scotland
*How Mossad discovered that by June 2005 Al Qaeda had acquired fissionable material from Pakistan and former Soviet Union Islamic Republics
*Secret phone calls to Washington that led to Tony Blair changing his position over war with Iraq
*WMD and Libya, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, China, and the House of Saud
*The mega spy in the Bush and Clinton administrations
*The PLO, Fatah, and Hamas
* The technology wars, and North Korea’s bird-flu war games and “ethnic bombs”
*The Chinese involvement in the Los Alamos fiasco
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
Arguably, the Most Reliable, Accurate Book on the Subject April 8, 2007
Sandor J. Woren (Glendale, CA)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
Books about the history and activities of espionage organizations (both gathering intelligence and covert operation) are by nature subject to be taken with a grain of salt, since the nature of the business is secrecy.
Gordon Thomas does a good job unveiling that secrecy through his various sources, some named, some not, some within the Mossad organization itself, and many from without. He explicitly names these sources on an "acknowledgment page," citing his sources within Israel and Elsewhere. One can only judge the credibility of the information by comparing it to other accounts of the same operations, and asking oneself if it is believable based upon consistency with factual events.
Thomas pulls no punches in portraying the Mossad as arguably the most effective intelligence service in the world. He reveals their various tactics including psychological warfare, their legendary human intelligence capabilities, their worldwide presence (Thomas claims the Mossad has a mole in the White House, which the FBI has been searching for for years), and their covert assassination teams (known as kidons), and their ruthlessness in getting the job done in the defense of the State
Thomas excels at this, especially with this new, updated 2007 edition that covers the role Mossad plays and continues to play in the Iraq War, and probably an upcoming pre-emptive war with Israel's arch foe, Iran. He reveals tidbits of information, such as the unconfirmed "fact" that Israel possesses three nuclear missile armed submarines, currently in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iran, completing its triad of nuclear umbrella cover. This, as an example, is something that Israel would probably never really officially confirm or deny. But it passes the "does it make sense?" test with flying colors. Israel's land based nuclear facilities at Dimona (in the Negev Desert) is probably the worst kept military "secret" in the world." Nuclear payloads can be delivered by missile, aircraft, or seaborne vessels. Bombing Iran by air would not be practical due to the long ranges involved, so it does indeed make sense that it would need a third, seaborne leg of its nuclear capabilities.
Other accounts conflict to varying degrees with other sources. Since covert agents routinely use aliases, this is not unexpected; however, Thomas identifies the famous "man who captured Eichman" as the long term Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan. Others, including Peter (Zvi) Malkin wrote a book on the subject some years ago, in which he takes credit for making the first physical contact with Eichman on that audacious mission in 1960.
There are several useful resources included in the book, including a comprehensive index, a list of the Directors-General of Mossad, along with their years of service from 1951 through the present, a general glossary, and an additional brief glossary of Arabic terms, and of course a bibliography and acknowledgment of sources and credits.
My only criticism is that the time line of events recounted is not linear, sometimes making it difficult to follow. But the more you know about Israeli history, the easier it is to overcome this. Also, the sheer length of the book (587 pages, not including addenda), makes for a long, but fascinating read. The newly released 2007 version of this came out just in time - a lot has happened since the original version.
This book should appeal to anyone interested in Israeli defense, politics, and especially espionage. Highly recommended for serious students of Israel..
 An insult to the reader October 29, 2007
WB, Zeno
8 out of 16 found this review helpful
Most computers are "state of the art computers". Most conversations are "picked up by computers", not by mikes. Most thoughts any Mossad Director had, twenty or thirty years ago, are known to the author (who also memorably states, on page 230 of the PB edition, that Andropov died from "hepatitis, a disease of the kidneys", thus opening new avenues to medicine). If it were limited to verifiable facts, and wasted less space on large font and line spacing, this book could easily be half the size.
Even then I wouldn't recommend it, for the good reasons the one-star reviews to the second edition state or hint at (silly of me not to have read them before buying this shelfspace-consuming product).
(As an irrelevant aside, I've noticed that the negative reviews are -at least for me, and unless written by a crank or "a reader"- the most useful; they are also the worst rated, except perhaps in string theory and the IDers-Darwinist debates: I think this might be because, as somebody noted, if you are going to picnic you don't like somebody telling you it's going to rain).
But there are other factually inaccurate books that one reads with pleasure. It is the style that makes this one insufferable. It
is replete with inane sentences; thus, one reads in page 308 "A desert was like no other place on Earth for surprises. A sandstorm could appear in moments, changing the landscape, burying him alive. One kind of sky meant one thing, another something quite different. He would do his own weather forecasting; he would have to do everything by himself and learn to let his ears adjust to the silence, to remember that the silence of the desert was like no other. And always he must remember that his first mistake would be his last". This previously unknown secret wisdom occupies almost a quarter of a page. Fortunately Thomas doesn't stop here: one learns that "beneath his hupta he wore goggles; their lenses gave the dark landscape a crepuscular definition. The only weapon Shalom carried was the one the Sarami would expect to find on him: a hunting knife". Quite: goggles are widely used by desert Bedouins. But not only goggles: afterwards Shalom "began to photograph and time what he saw".
Then, in another chapter (page 331), "Shortly before 6:30 AM, Yatom's Peugeot entered the parking lot in the basement of Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, and he took the elevator to a fourth-floor conference room. Waiting there were two men and to women ... each was in his late twenties, suntanned, and superbly-fit looking. For the past few days they had been up in the snow of northern Israel brushing up on their skiing". Gee, Mr. Thomas, thanks for the amazing and relevant info! How would one otherwise know Yatom took an elevator to the fourth-floor conference room on 16 February 1998?
Then, in page 231 we are taken into the Pope study, where (in 1983) "the room's bookshelves offered clues to the pope's expanding interests. Along with leather-bound Polish editions of the classics and the works of theologians and philosophers, were copies of the 'International Defence Review' and books with such arresting titles as 'The Problems of Military Readiness' and 'Military Balance and Surprise Attack' ... ". Anyone with the barest acquaintance of how any organizarion works is aware that their Heads, when they want to know about something, have a report prepared, and are briefed. They don't have time to read books to find out facts and background. But no, wait! The military books and reviews "reflected the Pontiff's unswerving conviction thet the main enemy the world still faced in 1983 was Soviet Communism". And the former Primate of Communist-dominated Poland took to reading the IDF to confirm that conviction? C'mon!
And so it goes, on and on and on, like this review. In page 135 we learn that "on a damp spring morning in 1997, David Kimche instructed Arab landscapers how he wanted to have his garden rearranged in a Tel Aviv suburb. His manner was diffident, the mellifluous voice more suited to a college campus than dealing with manual workers, suggesting Komche was descended from generations of administrators who had once raised Britain's Union Jack over far-flung lands ... his every gesture while briefing the gardeners -the flicking away of hair from his forehead, the lengthy pauses, the thoughtful stare- suggested a lifetime spent cloistered on a college campus". Well, it's fortunate for us that the Arab landscapers recorded their impressions for posterity. Or was Thomas there, busily taking notes?
Other space-filling gimmicks Thomas uses to inflate his book to mammoth size are unnecessary/meaningless sentences and verbiage ("On the video, Bazoft eyes showed signs he had been drugged. Mossad pharmacologists found it impossible to decide which drugs had been used", page 167; or "[In] 1988 Nir and Stanton travelled togethe to Madrid under false names ... why had they chosen aliases for the flight tickets when they both travelled on their real passports would never be explained [and is a very difficult feat. Try it yourself and see the result!]. Another mystery was why they took a flight first to Madrid when there were several scheduled direct ones to Mexico City. Was Nir trying to impress his lover with how easy it was to fool most people most of the time ... ? ... these questions were to remain unanswered", in page 321.
The last trick is that anything goes, provided you always use the conditional/hypothetical "it's not impossible that X could have done Y","one can't discard the hypothesis that Z"; make generic statements "not everybody agrees with this" and stop short of identifying the "they"; etc.
In short, this book is a mixture of fact (the one-page list of Mossad's Directors and their tenures) and sentences about real or imaginary events, techniques and things the author understands poorly, couched in the language of a third-rate fiction thriller. If you don't have it, don't buy it and so hopefully prevent another edition and therefore save some trees, vastly nobler creatures. If you have it, and didn't like it, give it to a paper recycler. If you liked it, well, tastes difffer.
 Caution: read with a heavy dose skepticism August 5, 2008
K. S. Lutz (Hamilton, NJ USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book was painfully difficult to finish simply because it was clear to me that the material provided was highly sensationalized, over-reaching, inaccurate, and just flat out incorrect. The book kept my attention for the first part where Mossad had been involved with assassinations in the Middle East- I believe there is truth to what the author reports here. However, as the book enters the 1980's, it is full of "hype" and sensationalism that one can smell a mile away, i.e., the trap door on the PROMIS software was created by the NSA not Mossad and was sold to foreign governments so that the US could spy on them. Secondly, Mossad has a long history of established contacts with CSIS- long before 1992- to say that the Israelis established with them in 1992 is definitely deceiving. Thirdly, the Israelis have sold arms to most countries especially China even after ignoring protests from the US government- thanks to its lobby in Washington, AIPAC. So the author saying that the Israelis gave up arms sales to foreign countries because of US protest is absolute nonsense! Fourthly, Israel is just as guilty for the conflict with the Palestinians- something the author does not take into consideration. Instead, he labels the Palestinians as terrorists, suicide bombers, and threats to Israel. Meanwhile, a lot more Palestinians are killed every year than Israelis- yet, the Israelis are mere victims in the view of the author. What about the innocent Palestinians? Finally, I have a hard time believing that Osama Bin Laden has close relationships with the Chinese given that they are now a secular consumerist society- something which Bin Laden is against. Yet, according to the book, he visited Beijing in 2005?! That is just too bizarre.
Though the Middle East is a complicated place, I do not think that everything is about the destruction of Israel. Other countries have hostile relationships with one another, i.e., Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Saudis view the increased power of the Iranians as a threat. Hence, the reason for their increased ambition for nuclear technology. It is definitely not about Israel. In fact, more occasions than not, the Saudis have invited friendly relations with the Israelis. The author creates an impression that every Middle East country is calling for the destruction of Israel- which is simply not true. As for the Iranian president saying "wiping Israel off the face of the world map" is debatable given that many sources on internet are saying that the interpretion was incorrect.
But the harshest criticism I have for this book is the alleged Mossad support for critics against the Iraq War. It has been reported that the alleged evidence against Sadam Hussein was indeed planted by Mossad- the very thing that the author writes to the contrary. To suggest that Mossad had no involvement for the drumbeat to war is , in my opinion, absurd. I guess the money that AIPAC pumped into the current administration had nothing to do with the US going into Iraq either and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's statement to that fact. One has to be really naive to believe that Israel or Mossad did not support the push for war.
I have to say I am deeply disappointed in this book. I thought it would be more than it really is. In my opinion, this borders on the fictional spy thriller that cannot be taken seriously. If you are into mainstream press and propaganda, this is the book for you. But if you are one who believes in critical thought and factual information, look elsewhere because this book does not have it. Not recommended.
 Mossad's reach October 17, 2007
Harold K. Strunk (Pleasanton, CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
What I found most interesting in this book is the reach of the Mossad. Because Jews can be found in most of the countries of the world, the Mossad has friends in place who can assist Mossad's agents. No other intelligence service in the world has this sort of assistance. And it is because Jews are bound by something more than nationalism. Their bond trancends loyalty to country, and it is even more so since the Holocaust. In part it is survival in a hostile world.
Gideon's Spies January 1, 2008
L. E. Frost
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a well written and entertaining view inside of what has always been seen as the supreme espionage agency in the world. This books confirms the dedication and professionalism of the people of Mossad as well as showing that the staff is human and susceptible to the errors of judgement and bad luck that affect all human endeavors.
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