Jewish Chronicle, 7 April 2006

It is always exciting when a spymaster emerges from the shadows. A buzz is created from our vicarious entry to a glamorous secret world of privileged confidences and derring-do.

But whenever they do thus emerge, the sense of anticipation is almost invariably disappointed. Given what they know, they never tell you enough; and what they do tell you has to be treated with circumspection. These people, after all, have dissembled for a living.

We have surely rarely been in an age when the role of intelligence agencies has been more controversial, and when we are more in the dark about what they do or do not know even while we demand greater transparency.

The CIA failed to prevent 9/11; MI5 failed to prevent the London bombings last year; all the intelligence agencies of the west got Saddam Hussein’s threat to the west catastrophically wrong either by over-stating it, or – even more controversially –by refusing to accept the clear evidence that the secular tyrant in whom they had invested so heavily as a bulwark against Middle Eastern meltdown was in fact in bed with global Islamist terror and was a key player in that meltdown. Take your pick; in the world of the double-double- cross, all is murk.

One aspect of the intelligence world that has become ever clearer as these various controversies continue to rage is the role that it plays, not just in collecting information about the history that is in the making, but in the actual shaping of it. It is unsettling to discover the extent to which these most secret of officials form a kind of unofficial diplomatic service, often acting at variance with the version of events with which an unsuspecting public is being fed.

In Man in the Shadows, his newly published memoir of his long career in Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, its former head Efraim Halevy lifts an edge of the curtain to reveal the key role that he apparently played both in brokering a peace between Israel and Jordan and in creating the strategy of marginalising Yasser Arafat by investing in a Palestinian prime minister. So much did he think of himself as an actor in the diplomatic drama that he complains how, over both Oslo and the Road Map, he was kept firmly out of the loop.

One of the most striking and troubling aspects of his account, however, is his ruthlessly pragmatic – some might say, amoral – view of the inescapable utility of shifting alliances, an approach to global realpolitik that we have been led to believe was abandoned by the US after 9/11.

Thus – as he amplified on a visit to London last week – Saddam Hussein had been a justifiably vital ally in holding the Arab line against the Iranian Shi’ite revolution and had had a legitimate grievance against Kuwait and the rest of the Arab world over their refusal to help Saddam with the huge debts he incurred during that fight.

As Halevy put it, angels may be transformed into devils and vice versa. Such reversals do not invalidate alliances fitting particular circumstances, such as the west’s alliance with the Taleban which defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Well, hang on a minute. Through that alliance, the west also breathed life into its own potential nemesis by helping create al Qaeda. So did the west really benefit from this deal with the devil?

Halevy maintains that the west cannot win the war against al Qaeda on its own. That victory can only be achieved if the Muslim world itself helps to defeat it. And he suggests that the breakthrough might come if Hamas can be persuaded that its interests lie not in fighting to eliminate Israel, but in fighting alongside Israel to eliminate al Qaeda.

How, though, could this ever happen? Hamas, after all, is part of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist zealot movement whose founding creed is the Islamisation of the world and the elimination of the Jews who are seen as an infernal evil threatening both Islam and the entire planet.

Well, says Halevy, Hamas is also a movement whose interests are specifically tied up with running affairs in a discrete geographical area called Palestine – a local focus which is directly threatened by the Brotherhood’s fascistic global ambitions. The only challenge lies in getting Hamas itself to see it that way.

And if you think that is just too incredible for words, he says, well what do you think people would have said in 1900 if they were told that within fifty years there would be a thriving Jewish state once again in Palestine? History teaches us that the incredible can happen.

True enough. Convinced? No; nor yet am I.

Posted by melanie at April 10, 2006