the establishment of the Committee of Directors of the Intelligence Ser-
vices, known by its Hebrew acronym VARASH. It first convened in- Its members currently are the directors of the Mossad, MI, and the
ISA; formerly the inspector general of the Israel Police, the director of the
CPR in the Foreign Ministry, the counterterrorism adviser to the prime
minister, and the director of Nativ were also members of VARASH.
Academic centers for strategic studies affiliated with Israeli universities
serve as intelligence assessment organizations of a sort, as well. The best
known are the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies at Bar
Ilan University; the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism
(ICT) at the Academic Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya; the Jaf-
fee Center for Strategic Studies (JCSS) at Tel Aviv University; and the
Moshe Dayan Center for the Middle East, also at Tel Aviv University.
By and large, the mantra of the Israeli intelligence community, as in-
vented by Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former DMI, and still applied, is “know
your enemy.”
SUCCESSES SCORED BY THE ISRAELI
INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
MI is known for a long list of assessment failures, especially the 1973
Yom Kippur War surprise. Yet its successes may be assumed to out-
number the failures. Successes are kept secret, while failures and fias-
cos immediately become headline news far and wide. Libya’s decision
to cease its nonconventional weapons program was presumably the re-
sult of good or probably excellent Israeli intelligence gathering on that
country. Israel no doubt shared this intelligence with the U.S. intelli-
gence community, and the result was heavy pressure on Libya. Interna-
tional pressure on Iran may well be the outcome of first-class intelli-
gence in whose collection Israel has taken part and still does, along with
other Western intelligence communities.
MI has also dispatched Israeli spies to Arab countries. The best
known are Eli Cohen, Max Binnet, and Wolfgang Lotz, among others.
Although these three were ultimately caught, there were Israeli spies
who were not apprehended and gathered important intelligence infor-
mation that contributed to the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War. In the
1960s the task of dispatching spies to Arab countries was assigned toINTRODUCTION• xlv06-102 (01) FM.qxd 3/24/06 7:22 AM Page xlv