Books - Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

In the secret world of spies and covert operations, no other intelligence service continues to be surrounded by myth and mystery, or commands respect and fear, like Israel’s Mossad. Formed in 1951 to ensure an embattled Israel’s future, the Mossad has been responsible for the most audacious and thrilling feats of espionage, counterterrorism, and assassination ever ventured.

Gideon’s Spies draws from classified documents, confidential sources, and closed-door interviews with Mossad agents, informants, and spymasters toreveal the organization’s deepest secrets. This fifth edition is completely updated with new information, including the Mossad hospital raid that eventually uncovered sleeper cells in Britain, the assassination of the world’s second most-wanted terrorist, the discovery of an unknown nuclear facility in Iran, the intricate relationship between Israeli intelligence and the Bush administration’s war on terror, and why one former Mossad chief says, “We are looking down the barrel of World War III unless the world wakes up.”

Gordon Thomas is the author of some thirty-seven books published internationally, several of which have dealt with various aspects of the intelligence world.

Created in 1951 to ensure the future of an embattled Israel, the Mossad has been responsible for many of the most audacious and thrilling feats of espionage, counterterrorism, and assassination ever ventured. The initial publication of Gideon's Spies, resulting from closed-door interviews with Mossad agents, informants, and spymasters as well as from classified documents and top-secret sources, revealed previously untold truths about the Israeli intelligence agency.

Now, in this updated edition, Thomas's classic text gives readers an even better understanding of the Mossad as it truly exists—brilliant, ruthless, awesome, yet flawed. Three all-new chapters cover such major topics as:

—The London bombings: the untold full story of Mossad's involvement
—Mossad’s key role in the G8 Summit in Scotland
—How Mossad discovered that by June 2005 Al Qaeda had acquired fissionable material from Pakistan and former Soviet Union Islamic Republics
—Secret phone calls to Washington that led to Tony Blair changing his position over war with Iraq
—WMD and Libya, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, China, and the House of Saud
—The mega spy in the Bush and Clinton administrations
—The PLO, Fatah, and Hamas

—The technology wars, and North Korea’s bird-flu war games and "ethnic bombs"

—The Chinese involvement in the Los Alamos fiasco

"One of the few books that has captured the true nature of the Israeli government and the thought process of the Israeli power elite."—Ari Ben-Menashe, former adviser on intelligence to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the Israeli government

"Thomas handles highly dramatic material with clarity and impact."—The Washington Post Book World

"A fascinating look at a spy organization that has remained off-limits to most journalists. Some of the incredible episodes Gordon Thomas writes about seem like they belong in fiction, and yet this is a first-rate nonfiction account."—GQ

"This is an anecdote-rich . . . series of tales about the extraordinary derring-do of Israel's vaunted elite foreign intelligence service . . . he delves into the organization's more significant bungled operations, including the mid-1970s killing of an innocent Arab waiter in Norway who was thought to be one of the PLO perpetrators of the 1972 Munich massacre of Israel's Olympic team. Thomas also provides readers with a good sense of how the Mossad trains its operatives in the field and of how extensively Israeli agents have infiltrated even the most apparently inaccessible parts of the Arab world. (It was a Mossad case officer in the Iraqi desert who, days before the 1991 Gulf War began, discovered that Baghdad had far more SCUD missiles in advanced positions than the CIA knew)."—Kirkus Reviews

"Thomas, author of 37 books, reveals the details of such Mossad operations as the kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, the Jonathan Pollard affair, a case of trafficking in the deadly plutonium-239, the assassination of Abu Jihad and other Arab terrorists, the rescue of hostages being held by hijackers at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976, Mossad's part in the investigation of the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, and its role in the investigation of the attempt on Pope John Paul's life in St. Peter's Square in 1981. Thomas meticulously documents the shadowy world of spies and covert operations."—Booklist

"Thomas, a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction on espionage and international security, has pieced together a book based largely on interviews with people both inside and outside the Mossad, as well as from other international intelligence agencies. Each chapter examines a particular action, operation, or political crisis and offers an entertaining and heavily anecdotal account. Thomas has a winner here."—Library Journal

"Among the world's most respected and feared intelligence services, the Israeli Mossad encompasses shadowy networks of katsas (case officers) often operating undercover, from Washington to Tehran to Beijing. The third update of this well-received book adds expanded sections on post-invasion Iraq, the black market in nuclear material, and other topics, tying up several loose ends from the earlier editions . . . Thomas provides a rare and valuable glimpse at the inner workings of a very secretive organization."—Publishers Weekly

12.89