Targeting a US Vice President, Overseas Assassinations, False Flags: It’s All in a Day’s Work for Israeli Intelligence Agencies

National security operators aren't known to adhere to the highest ethical standards, but the Mossad, Shin Bet and related Israeli agencies are extreme even by their competitors’ standards.

Mordechai Vanunu in a 2005 photo. Two decades earlier, he was kidnapped in Rome during an Israeli honeypot operation implemented to prevent him from exposing the country’s nuclear weapons programs.

A few decades back, a US vice president in Israel during an official visit left his hotel room with a security detail to go to a meeting. A short time later, a Secret Service agent who’d stayed behind but was preparing to leave heard the door handle slowly, carefully being raised. He coughed loudly a few times, the door handle went back down and whoever had been seeking to enter the room stealthily walked away.

The Secret Service agent didn’t know exactly who’d been on the other side of the door, but he immediately knew who they worked for, and it wasn’t the hotel. The reason for his certainty was that he and others traveling with the vice president had been warned before departing the US that when they were in Israel, they would be surveilled and quite possibly approached by Israeli intelligence operatives. 

“They were so brazen it was sometimes laughable,” a former CIA counterintelligence official who shared the story, which he had direct knowledge of. “They’d send prostitutes to target diplomats in Tel Aviv, US sailors in Haifa, intelligence officers, and anyone else on their list of targets, and they were just as aggressive when it came to technical collection. They were trying to break into the vice president’s hotel room! Just incredible.”

The source, who like others I spoke with would only talk off the record for obvious reasons, said he wasn’t certain if the attempt to break into the VP”s hotel room was in the late-1990s or early-2000s, though it’s possible he preferred not to say, as the imprecision means there’s no way to know if the intended target was Al Gore or Dick Cheney. He added, however, that US embassies and consulates receive regular threat level assessments about the risks that diplomats and employees in the respective countries where they’re posted will be spied on by local intelligence services, and Israel was the only allied country where regional State Department security officers and counterintelligence officials in Washington deemed that risk to be as great as it was in Moscow and other enemy states. “Recommendations were made to implement special, very costly procedures to reduce risks, but it never happened and the threat level wasn’t raised either, so as not to offend Israel,” he said. 

Intelligence and internal security agencies aren’t known for being particularly high minded, and the Mossad has a long, well documented track record of foreign assassinations, kidnappings and the like. However, the counterintelligence official suggested the worst things that are known about Israeli operations aren’t the exception, they’re the rule. “At CIA, you learn to never say never if it’s a very valuable target,” he said, but the agency didn’t typically or ever take the type of extreme steps that are routine for the Mossad, Shin Bet and other related agencies, partly because other methods are generally more effective and less risky.

It’s not hard to see how that’s reflected in Israel’s current military operations in Gaza and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s limitless and boundless appetitie for brutality. “The Israelis are extremely incapable, but equally unethical,” the source added. “They’ll try anything they consider doable or possible against friends as well as enemies. They’ll kill, blackmail, entrap, and run false flags, and let the blame fall where it may.”

His opinion was shared by US intelligence officials with more recent government experience. One issue pointed to in particular was Israel’s casual use of honeypots against its targets.

The most famous example in that regard is the case of Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli technician who worked at the country’s Dimona nuclear facility and in 1986 went to the British media with photos to prove his claim that Israel had developed nuclear weapons. At one point the London Sunday Times was keeping Vanunu hidden in a secret location in suburban London while attempting to verify his story. 

Unfortunately, Vanunu happened to meet a young woman named Cindy while visiting tourist attractions in London and they soon embarked on an excursion to Rome for a romantic getaway. Soon after arriving there with Cindy – who turned out to be a married Mossad officer, Cheryl Ben Tov – Vanunu was seized by Mossad officers, forcibly drugged, and smuggled out of Italy by ship to Israel, where he was eventually put on trial for treason and served 18 years in jail. 

In 2010, Rabbi Ari Shvat decreed in a published ruling that seducing an enemy for national security purposes was not only allowable but a blessing. Shvat’s ruling, which ran in Tehumin, which seeks to merge “Halachic Judaism with modern Israeli life,” in the words of an account in Ynet News, cited the biblical tales of Queen Esther, “who slept with Persian King Ahasuerus to save her community, and Yael wife of Heber the Kenite, who seduces and killed the Canaanite general Sisera.” 

While the topic of “sleeping with the enemy" was understandably controversial, Shvat wholeheartedly sanctioned the practice in cases where it would deliver the goods. "Naturally, an unmarried operative should be preferred in 'honey trap' cases, but if there is no other choice but to use a married woman...her husband should divorce her and marry her again after the fact," the rabbi wrote.

Rabbi Ari Shvat: The man who made pork — “Sleeping with the Enemy" — kosher.

Nor is Israel shy about targeting foreign intelligence officers. A former CIA deputy station chief in the Middle East said he once boarded a flight from the US to Israel and by a stroke of good fortune, a gorgeous Israeli had the seat next to his. “She was very friendly and she had all the same interests I did,” he recounted. “We talked for almost the entire flight and when we arrived she said she’d love to get together; I told her I appreciated her interest but it probably wasn’t a good idea given her likely employer.” 

The CIA has run honeypots in the past – and it still may, though if it has, it hasn’t been busted since the Cold War – but I’ve heard from numerous sources that the practice has long been frowned upon, because the risk-reward calculation is generally very unfavorable. Compromising information can certainly be obtained via honeypots, but even if that was accomplished, it’s hard to weaponize because it would be counterproductive to the primary goal: recruiting agents that have access to state secrets. “It's easy to get blackmailable information into public, but that creates a public scandal,” one source told me when I was writing a story for the Daily Mail about the topic earlier this year. “Your target loses his job, his life is destroyed and so is his value.”

Furthermore, a recruitment target might be threatened with blackmail in an emergency – signs he was preparing to go to the FBI, for example – but it's rarely used to compel cooperation. “Persuasion works better than threats,” John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, told me for the same article. “Targets who need to be coerced will turn on you the first chance they get.”

Israel is much more no holds barred than most spy and security agencies in other ways as well,” according to the former counterintelligence officer. “The Israelis conduct wholesale surveillance even if it doesn’t have direct intelligence value,” he said. “They monitor all communications in Gaza to gather compromising information and probably know the name of every gay person who lives there. If they think that can be used to blackmail someone into cooperating, they won’t think twice about doing it.”