POISONED toothpaste that takes a month to end its target’s life. Armed drones. Exploding cell phones. Spare tyres with remote-control bombs. Assassinating enemy scientists and discovering secret lovers.

A new book chronicles these techniques and asserts that Israel has carried out at least 2,700 assassination operations in its 70 years of existence. While many failed, they add up to far more than any other Western country, the book says.

Ronen Bergman, the intelligence correspondent for Yediot Aharonot newspaper, persuaded many agents of Mossad, Shin Bet and the military to tell their stories, some using their real names. The result is the first comprehensive look at Israel’s use of state-sponsored killings.

Based on 1,000 interviews and thousands of documents, and running more than 600 pages, Rise and Kill First makes the case that Israel has used assassination in the place of war, killing half a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists, for instance, rather than launching a military attack. It also strongly suggests that Israel used radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat, the long-time Palestinian leader, an act its officials have consistently denied.

Bergman writes that Arafat’s death in 2004 fit a pattern and had advocates. But he steps back from flatly asserting what happened, saying that Israeli military censorship prevents him from revealing what — or if — he knows.

Bergman, the author of several books, says the Israeli secret services sought to interfere with his work, holding a meeting in 2010 on how to disrupt his research and warning former Mossad employees not to speak with him.

He says that while the US has tighter constraints on its agents than does Israel, President George W Bush adopted many Israeli techniques after the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, and President Barack Obama launched several hundred targeted killings.

“The command-and-control systems, the war rooms, the methods of information gathering and the technology of the pilotless aircraft, or drones, that now serve the Americans and their allies were all in large part developed in Israel,” Bergman writes.

The book gives a textured history of the personalities and tactics of the various secret services. In the 1970s, a new head of operations for Mossad opened hundreds of commercial companies overseas with the idea that they might be useful one day. For example, Mossad created a Middle Eastern shipping business that, years later, came in handy in providing cover for a team in the waters off Yemen.

There have been plenty of failures. After a Palestinian terrorist group killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Israel sent its agents to kill the perpetrators — and shot more than one misidentified man. There were also successful operations that did more harm than good to Israel’s policy goals, Bergman notes.

Bergman raises moral and legal concerns provoked by state-sponsored killing, including the existence of separate legal systems for secret agents and the rest of Israel.

One of Bergman’s most important sources was Meir Dagan, a recent head of Mossad for eight years who died in early 2016. Toward the end of his career, Dagan fell out with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu partly over launching a military attack on Iran. Netanyahu said intelligence techniques such as selling the country faulty parts for its reactors — which Israel and the US were doing — weren’t enough. Dagan argued back that these techniques, especially assassinations, would do the job.

By arrangement with Bloomberg-The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, January 29th, 2018