Mossad: Rise and Kill First

By Andrey @ Adobe Stock

In The Unz Review, Ron Unz outlines the Mossad’s long history of assassinations, writing:

For the last half-dozen years, Israeli-born Ronan Bergman has served as a reporter with the New York Times, and I’ve regularly heard him described as the best-connected American journalist in Israel, with especially close ties to that country’s powerful security services such as the Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200.

Much of that reputation goes back to the 2018 publication of his book Rise and Kill First, a widely praised and highly authoritative history of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, as well as its sister agencies. As I wrote in early 2020:

The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to an enormous number of official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel’s long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.

That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman’s volume carried glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praised the book as “hands down” the best he had ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory.

If Bergman ever considers bringing out an updated, revised edition of that volume, I think that this newer text might devote an entire chapter to the very serious blow that Mossad recently struck against Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization though the use of booby-trapped exploding pagers, an operation at least as daring and successful as anything covered in his very thick 2018 volume.

Although the Israeli government has not officially claimed credit for the attacks, no one doubts that Mossad was responsible and a dozen of their current and former defense and intelligence officials provided all the details to the New York Times.

Read more here.