Isser Harel
Encyclopedia
Spymaster
A spymaster is a ring leader of a spy ring, run by a secret service.-Historical spymasters:*Dai Li *Francis Walsingham *James Jesus Angleton *Joseph Peters...
of the intelligence
Intelligence (information gathering)
Intelligence assessment is the development of forecasts of behaviour or recommended courses of action to the leadership of an organization, based on a wide range of available information sources both overt and covert. Assessments are developed in response to requirements declared by the leadership...
and the security
Security
Security is the degree of protection against danger, damage, loss, and crime. Security as a form of protection are structures and processes that provide or improve security as a condition. The Institute for Security and Open Methodologies in the OSSTMM 3 defines security as "a form of protection...
services of Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
and the Director of the Mossad
Mossad
The Mossad , short for HaMossad leModi'in uleTafkidim Meyuchadim , is the national intelligence agency of Israel....
(1952–1963). In his capacity as Mossad director he oversaw the abduction, and secret transport to Israel, of Holocaust organizer Adolph Eichmann.
Childhood and youth
Isser Harel was born in VitebskVitebsk
Vitebsk, also known as Viciebsk or Vitsyebsk , is a city in Belarus, near the border with Russia. The capital of the Vitebsk Oblast, in 2004 it had 342,381 inhabitants, making it the country's fourth largest city...
, Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
(now Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...
) to a large, wealthy family. The exact date of his birth was not passed on to him because the book of Gemara
Gemara
The Gemara is the component of the Talmud comprising rabbinical analysis of and commentary on the Mishnah. After the Mishnah was published by Rabbi Judah the Prince The Gemara (also transliterated Gemora or, less commonly, Gemorra; from Aramaic גמרא gamar; literally, "[to] study" or "learning by...
in which the date was recorded was lost in the migrations of the Russian Revolution of 1917
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...
and World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. The family had a vinegar
Vinegar
Vinegar is a liquid substance consisting mainly of acetic acid and water, the acetic acid being produced through the fermentation of ethanol by acetic acid bacteria. Commercial vinegar is produced either by fast or slow fermentation processes. Slow methods generally are used with traditional...
factory in Vitebsk. It was a gift of his maternal grandfather, who had a concession to make vinegar in large parts of Tsarist Russia. Young Isser was five years old when the revolution broke out and Vitebsk passed several times between the Whites and the Reds. On one occasion he saw Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
give a speech in the town.
The Harel family faced hardship when the Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
regime confiscated their property. In 1922 they emigrated from the Soviet Union to Dvinsk
Daugavpils
Daugavpils is a city in southeastern Latvia, located on the banks of the Daugava River, from which the city gets its name. Daugavpils literally means "Daugava Castle". With a population of over 100,000, it is the second largest city in the country after the capital Riga, which is located some...
in independent Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...
. On the way, Soviet soldiers stole their suitcases, which contained the rest of their possessions. In Dvinsk, Isser began his formal studies, completed primary school, and began secondary school. As he grew, a Jewish national consciousness grew within him and he joined a Zionist
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
youth organization.
When he was 16, Harel began preparations to immigrate to (what in the future would become) Israel. During this preparatory year he worked in agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
with the aspiration to join a kibbutz
Kibbutz
A kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism...
.
With the outbreak of the 1929 Hebron massacre
1929 Hebron massacre
The Hebron massacre refers to the killing of sixty-seven Jews on 23 and 24 August 1929 in Hebron, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine, by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were massacring Arabs in Jerusalem and seizing control of Muslim holy places...
, his friends decided to move up their immigration date in order to reinforce the Jewish settlement in Palestine. Documents were prepared for the 17-year-old Harel stating that he was 18 and eligible for a British visa. At the beginning of 1930 he immigrated to Israel. He crossed Europe from north to south to board a ship in Genoa, carrying a pistol that he concealed in a loaf of bread.
After the creation of the State of Israel, Harel founded and became the first director of Israel's internal security agency, the Shabak. Later, he took over the Mossad a year after it was created in 1951. As chief of two of the nation's three intelligence agencies, Harel wielded considerable power in Israel's first 15 years.
He had one child, a daughter, from his first marriage. She currently works for the Shabak in Israel. She did not serve in the Israeli Defense Forces but instead in the National Work Program which is an alternative for women who do not or cannot serve the mandatory 18 months in the I.D.F.
Eichmann Abduction
In 1957, members of the West German government provided Israel with information that indicated Adolph Eichmann was living in hiding in Argentina under the name "Ricardo Klement." Eichmann, as director of Department IV-B4 of the Third Reich's Reich Main Security Office during the Second World War, had played a crucial role in the planning and execution of the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question,"Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion
' was the first Prime Minister of Israel.Ben-Gurion's passion for Zionism, which began early in life, led him to become a major Zionist leader and Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization in 1946...
believed that seeking Eichmann's extradition from Argentina by legal and diplomatic methods would be unsuccessful. In 1959, he placed Harel in charge of the operation to locate, seize, and secretly extract Eichmann from Argentina, with the intention of returning him to Israel to stand trial.
In April, 1960, Harel's hand-picked team of agents arrived in Buenos Aires, and tracked Eichmann to a residence in the San Fernando neighborhood of the city. Harel followed soon after. On May 11, they kidnapped Eichmann as he walked from a bus stop to his home. Days later, Eichmann was drugged and clandestinely placed on an Israeli diplomatic aircraft, disguised as a crew member. He was flown to Tel Aviv. According to Harel himself, when he arrived back in Israel with the captured Eichmann, Harel went to Ben-Gurion's office and told the prime minister: "I've brought you a present. Eichmann is here."
Eichmann stood trial for, among other charges, crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in an outlawed organization. He was found guilty in December 1961 and sentenced to death; the penalty was carried out on May 31, 1962. Eichmann's body was cremated and the ashes were scattered by the Israeli Navy in international waters.
Harel later stated that it was his belief that if the Eichmann operation had begun some weeks earlier, the Mossad may have had a chance to apprehend Dr. Josef Mengele
Josef Mengele
Josef Rudolf Mengele , also known as the Angel of Death was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University...
, the notorious physician who presided over the selections on the train platform at Auschwitz. His book about the operation, "The House on Garibaldi Street," became a best-seller.
Secret Speech
Harel was also responsible for the intelligence coup which cemented the Mossad's reputation with Western intelligence agencies. In March 1956, three years after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, his successor Nikita Kruschev denounced Stalin's "cult of personality" and brutal paranoia in a seminal speech before a closed session of the Communist Party's 20th Congress. Word spread of this event, but U.S. intelligence agencies were unable to get their hands on the text of the so-called "Secret Speech"
On the Personality Cult and its Consequences
On the Personality Cult and its Consequences was a report, critical of Joseph Stalin, made to the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It is more commonly known as the Secret Speech or the Khrushchev Report...
.
The Soviet politburo delivered copies of the speech to a few Eastern-bloc countries; in Poland, a journalist named Viktor Grayevsky borrowed a copy from his girlfriend, who worked in the office of the First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party. Grayevsky, who was Jewish, had recently visited Israel and had decided to emigrate; he gave the speech to security officers at the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, and they in turn sent photographed copies to Harel in Tel Aviv.
Harel shared the speech with his counterparts in other Western intelligence offices, most notably counterintelligence spymaster James Jesus Angleton
James Jesus Angleton
James Jesus Angleton was chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's counterintelligence staff from 1954 to 1975...
of the American C.I.A.
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
Political career
After leaving Mossad, Harel turned to politics. He joined David Ben Gurion's newly created National ListNational List
The National List , sometimes translated as the State List, was a political party in Israel. Despite being founded by David Ben-Gurion, one of the fathers of the Israeli left, the party is an ancestor of the modern-day Likud, Israel's largest right-wing bloc.-Background:The National List had been...
prior to the 1969 elections
Israeli legislative election, 1969
Elections for the seventh Knesset were held in Israel on 28 October 1969. Voter turnout was 81.7%.-Results:¹ Meir Avizohar defected from the National List to the Alignment² Avner Shaki left the National Religious Party and remained a single MK...
, and was elected to the Knesset
Knesset
The Knesset is the unicameral legislature of Israel, located in Givat Ram, Jerusalem.-Role in Israeli Government :The legislative branch of the Israeli government, the Knesset passes all laws, elects the President and Prime Minister , approves the cabinet, and supervises the work of the government...
as the party won four seats. However, after Ben Gurion resigned from the party it began to disintegrate, with two of the MKs defecting to Likud
Likud
Likud is the major center-right political party in Israel. It was founded in 1973 by Menachem Begin in an alliance with several right-wing and liberal parties. Likud's victory in the 1977 elections was a major turning point in the country's political history, marking the first time the left had...
and the other to the Alignment
Alignment (political party)
The Alignment was an alliance of the major left-wing parties in Israel between the 1960s and 1990s. It was established in 1965 as an alliance of Mapai and Ahdut HaAvoda but was dissolved three years later when the two parties and Rafi formally merged into the Israeli Labor Party...
. As a result, Harel lost his seat in the 1973 elections
Israeli legislative election, 1973
The Elections for the eighth Knesset were held on 31 December 1973. Voter turnout was 78.6%.-Results:1 Aryeh Eliav left the Alignment and merged with Ratz to form Ya'ad - Civil Rights Movement...
.
Personal life
Harel's powerful position stood in sharp contrast to the austerity of his personal life. According to biographers, nobody who saw this small, nebbish man being bossed around by his wife would ever have guessed this was Israel's spymaster. His neighbors took him for a minor government official.One popular anecdote has it that Isser Harel only took orders from two people: his wife and David Ben-Gurion.
Another has him boarding a taxi; the driver asks him, "What's your destination?" Harel answers, "That's a secret."