Historical Dictionary of Israeli Intelligence

thought that they were just interrogating Tobianski as a suspect and did

not know that they had sentenced him to death. Afew hours after the ex-

ecution, Be’eri informed the prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, that an

army unit had shot to death a traitor. Tobianski’s widow learned of her

husband’s arrest three weeks later from the press.

An emotional letter from Tobianski’s widow to Ben-Gurion led to

an investigation of the affair, which cleared Meir Tobianski of the es-

pionage charges. Ben-Gurion awarded Meir Tobianski the rank of

captain and ordered a state pension for his widow and their son. Be’eri

was tried for his part in the execution in October 1949. The court de-

cided to remove Be’eri from military service. Privately Be’eri main-

tained that Tobianski was a British spy and that there was ample evi-

dence to prove it. Be’eri said that he declined to state this publicly

during his trial because by doing that he might cause pain to the dead

man’s family.

TOLEDANO, SHMUEL (1921– ).Born in Tiberias, Israel, Toledano

attended the Scottish College in Safed. Before the establishment of the

State of Israel, he was an officer in the Haganah underground militia,

was arrested by the British, and was imprisoned at Latrun. In the Ha-

ganah, Toledano, under his codename Uzi, was a controller of the In-

formation Service’s Arab Department in the Jaffa area. After the es-

tablishment of the state, he served in Military Intelligenceof the

Israel Defense Forces (1949–1952), where he monitored Arab press

and radio stations and interrogated Arab prisoners. He was demobi-

lized with the rank of major and then joined the Mossadand became

one of its most senior officers (1953–1976). Having grown up among

Arab neighbors in Tiberias, Toledano was a fluent Arabic speaker, and

because of this and other factors he was considered to possess impor-

tant qualifications in the Mossad.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Toledano worked under diplo-

matic cover at the Israeli embassy in Paris, where he concentrated on

protecting Jewish interests around the globe. To his colleagues, he

was then known by the code name Amnon. He was the officer in

charge of the Israeli intelligence network in Morocco, known by its

code name Misgeret. Periodically he traveled to Morocco disguised

as a Palestinian refugee, always and everywhere speaking Arabic.

The network’s purpose was to initiate the illegal Moroccan Jewish

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