Historical Dictionary of Israeli Intelligence

fice, Carmon resigned his position because of health problems. Horev

then transformed MALMAB into a large organization with very ex-

tensive authority. Under Horev, direct or indirect MALMAB opera-

tives increased in number to well beyond 1,000 security officers at Is-

raeli defense installations and industries around the country.

Horev himself investigated the most renowned cases of leaks of

highly sensitive security information. He investigated Avner Cohen,

an Israeli historian and author of Israel and the Bomb, about his

sources and motives in writing the book, on Cohen’s return from self-

imposed exile in Washington, D.C. This was Israel’s first-ever crim-

inal process involving academic research. In 2001 Yitzhak Ya’acov, a

former head of Israeli defense research and development, was se-

cretly arrested and interrogated by MALMAB for writing his mem-

oirs. Among other things, MALMAB was responsible for perpetually

pushing back Vanunu’s release date after his conviction and impris-

onment and keeping Israel’s entire nuclear weapons program under

complete secrecy. MALMAB obsessively opposed the publication of

any uncensored material on the Israeli nuclear program.

Yet for all its enormous power MALMAB is not an autonomous

intelligence organization, in contrast to the Mossad or the ISA. David

Ivri, a former director-general of the Defense Ministry who was in

charge of MALMAB, even claimed that the MALMAB is not an in-

telligence organization at all, as it does not engage in any collecting

of information. More than once, Horev has clashed with the actual Is-

raeli intelligence organizations, especially the ISA. The argument

against the MALMAB is that Israeli law does not authorize

MALMAB to conduct interrogations, the domain only of the Israel

Police and the ISA. In response, MALMAB has stated that it merely

carries out a “preliminary check,” although the difference between

this and actual interrogation seems slim to none.

MALMAB and the current DSDE, Yehiel Horev, might well have

remained secret but for the fact that in early 2000 the Israeli-Arab

Knesset member Issam Mahoul, of the Hadash party, identified

Horev as the last unnamed member of a secret group of civil servants.

DISKIN, YUVAL (1956– ).Diskin served in the Israel Defense Forces

in the Shaked Reconnaissance Unit (1974–1978). He joined the Israeli

Security Agency(ISA) in May 1978 as a field agent in the West Bank

DISKIN, YUVAL•79

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