Spies Against Armageddon by Dan Raviv Page A

century later—after the terrorism of 9/11 triggered a greater sense of all being in the same boat. Yet senior Mossad operatives felt that they were sharing “almost everything,” as one put it, “unless it endangered our sources or some ongoing operations.”
    Angleton asked the Israelis in 1954 to step up cooperation sharply, and not just pass along tidbits from conversations with new immigrants in Israel. Now the American wanted something a lot more ambitious. He suggested that Israeli intelligence open secret stations in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe.
    “With considerable hesitation, we agreed,” Manor said. “I personally recruited and briefed a number of people and sent them to be our representatives in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, and Sofia. But I didn’t agree to send people to Moscow, because I was afraid they would be caught there.”
    The intelligence officers were assigned as diplomats and operated in Israel’s embassies under that cover. Manor said: “My instructions to my people were: ‘Don’t endanger yourselves, look for connections you can make as diplomats, and try to get people to give you political information.’ I didn’t even dream of military information.”
    In a way, they were acting as surrogates for the Americans, who knew that intelligence officers at U.S. embassies would be under surveillance and suspicion a lot more than would Israelis. This was a wonderful convenience for America that ended after the 1967 war, when the Communist nations broke their relations with the Jewish state.
    The Manor-Angleton connection explains why it fell to Shin Bet—and not, more naturally, to the foreign espionage experts at the Mossad—to run the official liaison with America and even to send operatives abroad. It was all personal. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, who did not care a whit for bureaucratic titles, saw that Manor was the man forging a relationship with the CIA.
    It would be more than 10 years before the Mossad would assert its primacy in friendly foreign ties. Agency chief Meir Amit, after 1963, would insist on a restructuring of the intelligence community—including professional titles.
    The separate agency Nativ, which conducted secret ties with Jewish communities in the Soviet-bloc nations and arranged transportation for Jews to Israel, also posted officers at embassies in Eastern Europe under diplomatic cover. Nativ did not avoid the Soviet Union and indeed could not. Israel looked at the millions of Soviet Jews as a reservoir for the future growth of the Jewish state. The pools of immigration from Arab lands were drying up, yet eventually, a huge number of Jews would move to Israel from Russia, Romania, and other ex-Communist countries.
    In the 1950s and 1960s, some of those Nativ representatives were arrested and expelled by the host governments, mainly the Soviet regime in Moscow, for what were termed hostile and undiplomatic activities.
    When Manor began expanding his personal and professional networking with Angleton, the Israeli was still only the head of the counterespionage department within Shin Bet. Manor was summoned by Harel, who had taken over the Mossad and was the overall “Memuneh” in charge of the entire intelligence community.
    Harel surprised Manor by offering him the directorship of Shin Bet in mid-1952. The Memuneh was apparently dissatisfied with the incumbent, his former assistant, Isidore Roth, who had Hebraized his name to the homonym Izzy Dorot.
    Dorot moved over to the Mossad and worked with Harel for another 11 years as his right-hand man for special missions. After his retirement, however, Dorot was completely forgotten for four decades. There was no mention of his having been the second director of Shin Bet. Only in the 21st century was his role reinstated, when Shin Bet became slightly more open and featured a brief history of itself on an official website.
    As for Manor, he still thought of himself as a new immigrant and thus had