The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1364: Ostrovsky's 'By Way of Deception' - Pt. 1 - w/ Philos Miscellany

Episode Date: May 3, 2026

122 MinutesPG-13Philos Miscellany has a YouTube channel in which he reviews rare books.Philos joins Pete to discuss former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky's 1990 book, "By Way of Deception."Philo's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingianos show. Phylos is back. Phylos, how are you doing tonight? I'm doing very well, Pete. It is a absolute pleasure to be back on. We, you know, there are some subjects that people request. And then when they request them, I'm like, all right, who can I tell? Oh, oh, this one.

Oh, okay. Phyllis. Phyllis, most definitely. So, yeah, I think people can see the title of the episode and some may not know exactly what it refers to. So, yeah, I'm just going to let you jump in. Absolutely. So what this book is, by way of deception, by Victor Ostrovsky, Mr. Ostrovsky published this book in 1990.

Later on, when critics came back and told him that many of these facts are face, false, the author was being sensational, that many things that were published in this book were bullshit. He went out and published a second volume called The Other Side of Deception in, I believe, 1994. And what these two books are from this author are, on the one hand, you could call them the Israeli equivalent of Tom Clancy. They're rather fantastical in how they're written. But primarily what this is is the autobiographical story of a. former Massad agent. And to my knowledge, it is certainly the most credible source that has been put out there by a confirmed agent. Interestingly, in my several years in Israel, I had never,

ever heard this book mentioned. And only after coming back to the United States, was I able to even see this in Israel. Initially, I thought it was a fiction book, because there are so many, Christian Zionist writings from the 90s and 2000s out there that portray Israel is fantastically overpowered and invincible but looking more into this book especially after several years in that country and receiving an education there this book blew my mind I could not believe it was published frankly because of how much detail the book provides on the internal operations of the Mossad. Specifically, he has a detailed floor plan

of several layers of the Mossad headquarters. He has maps, he has graphics of his routes, and then in his second book, he includes many pictures of him at various points in his career, which all seem to me to be credible. So I want to say that right at the outset, set. Given my own experience living and working in this area and this part of Israel, I went through and I looked at the locations that he was at. And all the Lechalvovot, all the streets that are

named and listed, they all match with what can be described as a credible experience in the country. The information is not current. This is from 1990. So many things about presumably how the Massad conducts their operations today have changed. But I think for the time being, and frankly, ever since the most recent round of hostilities between Israel and virtually all of its neighbors in some form or another, this is probably the best internal look at the Mossad that any English-speaking audience is ever going to get. So I guess let's start off with this. You mentioned like Christian Zionists would possibly write a book to try to make it more sensational,

make them seem like Superman. What's funny is I actually talked to somebody this week who is a insider at a Christian organization, let's say, a very old Christian organization. If I said the name of it, you would, most people would definitely know it. And he basically said that, like, they take the, they take the opinion, the way they talk. They say Christians are stepchildren and Jews are basically supermen. Does this book attempt to paint the Mossad as a, as like the typical Mossad agent as like a super soldier? It's the opposite, really.

It's basically criticizing every aspect of the agents and the agency, everything from the nature of the Mossad's interactions with its own internal authority structure up to the prime minister's office. But also laterally, each agent is, for the most part, described in some manner or another as a money-seeking. sort of letcherous, uh, psychopath. And, uh, that might seem kind of hyperbolic. And I want to just be very even handed about this. Um, the author did not do something like a full term of enlistment in the Mossad or did not have like a 20 year career in espionage. Uh, this is someone who was in, I believe, for about 14 months between 1984 and 1986. And, uh, depending on his out of his out. either according to his Wikipedia, he was fired for insubordination from the Mossad. I believe according to the actual book itself, he was terminated because he blew or almost blew one of his operations.

And I think that the portrayal since this book actually of both Mossad and Israelis is kind of as these uh yeah i mean without being too like straightforward about it supermen you know extremely responsive agents uh hyper intelligent socially fluid uh seductive you know any any positive quality with no negative quality and you have to also understand that from the israeli perspective this is a net positive. I mean, if I was in the CIA, I would prefer it if everyone else would think that my agents were perfect, amazing warriors with no fears or insecurities or flaws of any kind. I mean, it's a better position to be in when you're being thought of by someone who's in your out group. Before I ask you to start getting into the specifics of the book and what he lays

out, do you think his purpose for writing the book was to, if he saw the agency as, you know, weak, I mean, degenerate, whatever, the purpose of the book was to try to get them to change and become, you know, more competent? I believe so. I mean, part of it is also, you have to understand, I guess there's a couple of perspectives on this. perspective one people that he was presumably personally aggrieved against in the agency he would want to see out i mean he names each person that he interacts with in this book with presumably their first and last name i mean we can't verify if this is their real name or not but that's way too much detail for conventional tradecraft you would never ever i mean you would do a pseudonym at best, but to have a first and last name is a very strange tell, especially when Israelis are not dealing in names that are Joe Smith, for example.

They're not common names. These are easily identifiable from one another. And I think that there's so much operational information present in the book that I think it genuinely did within the Mossad inspire a. professionalism change whether that was a reaction because of embarrassment or reaction because of the author's intention i am not really sure we'll ever know this guy currently doesn't live in israel according to wikipedia he lives in arizona or something and makes art about how bad he feels for being a spy i don't want to say anything personally negative against the guy. You know, he's still alive, but it's just a,

uh, it's a very, like this is very unusual by Israeli standards. Like the, the whistleblower culture is not existing in Israel the way that it exists in Western democracies like the United States and European countries. I mean, there is not like a go public. If you go public with information in Israel, you can expect your character to be destroyed, frankly, if that helps clarify things. Yeah, I would assume in insular culture, going public with certain facts would be certainly looked down upon, if not actually frowned upon. But, you know, he is still walking around. so maybe it didn't do as much damage as he had hope.

Yeah, I suppose we won't know. All right. You want to get into the meat of the text? Yeah, correct. So when we look at this book, obviously starting with the first book, by way of deception was published in 1990. This is a very interesting time period for espionage tell us to be published. If you are looking at this book, just as a literary reference, the closest time analog is the earliest Tom Clancy novels.

So there is a massive explosion and popularity at the end of the Cold War and going into the early 1990s of spy stories, spy tell-alls. These are exceptionally popular because, frankly, a lot of the culture for people are. decades prior james bond movies are very popular with sort of the uh solidification of the post-world war two order in terms of large nation states conducting overt warfare against each other uh the covert became far more romantic and um this is i can't find a massod book earlier than this that i would trust a lot of them are just either purely operational so they'll look at like massad operations or military operations um or there are some weird leon uris an author who wrote the book exodus and a few other ones which later got turned into a movie with uh paul newman as this you know super hand superman

kind of guy uh which is frankly just rabid zionist propaganda i mean these are the your options for consumption about Israeli media beforehand. Well, yeah, just to go back, you had mentioned James Bond. Of course, Ian Fleming was naval intelligence. So, you know, maybe when you look at what Clancy is doing and everything. So I assume that there's some kind of revelation there. Yeah, and I think it's interesting, just as like a pop cultureist, like there's no Yakov-Bondberg like there's no Israeli James Bond

culturally it's like the entire organization gets the clout so to speak well that I mean and anybody who has listened to join your years together like one or two episodes all you would need is to that you'd understand why for sure so I'll go through my usual analysis here a little bit slow lower just because it's very information dense and I want to also kind of occasionally throw in my own anecdotes here. So when you look at this book and the back of it, page 357, there is a glossary of terms to help you break down and understand the Hebrew. My apologies, Pete. I will have to speak Hebrew on this stream, but I will do my best to translate it immediately. I will not like, you know, a lot of these different international relations experts on podcasts or New York Times articles or whatever, I won't over-emphasize the pronunciation like a doofus.

Essentially. I appreciate it. Yeah. The main assertion in the prologue of this book, which is primarily talking about Operation Sphinx. And throughout the entirety of it is that the Mossad is out of control. And by this statement, Mr. Ostrovsky means that the Mossad is unaccountable to the civilian political class. Now, just on its face overtly, that's hilarious because Israel is a mandatory conscription state with no constitution. and the governmental power structures,

the relationship between the prime minister's office, the judiciary, and the subservient political base, is like not structured like a Western democracy. So this author is just, I mean, in the first couple paragraphs, not writing for an Israeli audience, the accountability of the espionage agent is a strange thing to say in relation to civilians because one, every single civilian in Israel at one point was in the military. And two, there is no, to reiterate, there's no constitution.

One of my streams, my first stream, I think, with you three years ago, I brought up the Harari Compromise of 1950, which establishes a series of basic laws, sort of like, if you imagine the Bill of Rights, each individual amendment is a single basic law. But holistically, there's no actual rights that have been established from this. So there's nothing in an Israeli non-existent constitution, which is actually written down that Mossad has a governance structure that is immediately accountable to the broader population. Yes, administratively it is structured under the prime minister. But then so is everything else. Compare this in contrast to the Central Intelligence Agency,

where from its inception in 1947, on my previous stream with Stormy and you, Pete, we talked about how the origin documentation of the CIA very clearly laid out its roots in the Department of Defense, and then later on its own individual reporting to the civilian. in political class. What is the Mossad at time of publication? This organization is both distinct from its predecessors and its initial ballistic founding in 1948 with the creation of the country.

But it's also not the Mossad of 2026. It is both roughly chronologically. It's in the middle, 40 years between two points. Massad, according to Wikipedia, has 7,000. We'll never know if that's true today. But in 1989, Massad had 1,200 employees, which, according to Mr. Ostrovsky, this includes the cleaning staff and the secretaries that function in the building. And according to him, and I would take every single thing this guy says in this book with a huge grain of salt, because there's never a way to verify any of it. There are only about 30 to 35, what are called Kasot. It's a Katsa is the singular iteration of it.

That's a case officer. Only 30 to 35 of these people at any one specific time. So, okay, if you have 30-ish field agents operating internationally and occasionally returning to Israel, well, how do you provide espionage services to an entire country? This book states explicitly that primarily they rely on a broader network of international Jews to assist them in their operations called the Sainim. So Sioneme is my assumption is that none of these international Jews in the countries that they are in are registered as foreign agents. of course not in debt um in the book he says later on with the cyanideh to briefly discuss them because this is i mean we have to just clear this up right off the jump the cyanineem are not paid agents of israel with cash the relationship that's occurring here is that a massad agent is going to choose basically someone who works either

high up in a Jewish organization or as a large-scale philanthropist for Jewish charities or is like a prominent business owner who sometimes likes to, you know, visit Israel occasionally on vacation. any number of different people or demographic elements of Jews everywhere in the world can be selected at any point to aid the Mossad. Now, as this is described, this is not an explicit ask of, you know, I almost like slipped into Hebrew there, but like an Israeli would say, you know, I'm from the Mossad, I need your help. either need monetary assistance, weapons assistance, communication assistance, or I simply need you to watch someone for a building for a few hours. This is, hey, for the good of Israel, for the good of the Jewish people, you know, do you feel like doing your part? And frankly, This sounds like what Gad said admitted to doing a couple years ago.

He said he'd get a call, show up somewhere, do this. And it was usually something that was not dangerous. He was really just gathering information or watching. Absolutely. And to be entirely clear about this, there's not like a super network of crazy agents running around. I mean, a vast majority of intelligence is just collecting information. People's movements, newspapers, hearing snippets of conversation, watching stuff go by on planes or trains. I mean, that is both by Alan Doles' definition, but also by Mr. Ostrovsky's definition,

the basis of almost all of the intelligence picture that's being put together here. And that is what the psionym are being used for. In the book, he clearly delineates that these people are not deliberately putting their own life on the line. Obviously, that would create a massive problem and open up a giant liability for them in an operational sense when they're doing the business on the ground. To continue with the prologue, the initial challenge, chapter recounts the espionage operations behind operation sphinx in 1981, which was the Israeli destruction of the Iraqi-Thamuz 17 nuclear reactor, which was the early iteration of these different nuclear development programs, which Iraq and frankly most of the world thought

was untouchable. The military nature of the operation was, I think Israel flew several flights of highly trained F-15 or F-16 aircraft. They trained them by flying them north-south for something like 12 hours continuously to practice the refueling to stay within Israeli airspace. And then they flew at an extremely low altitude ceiling of something like 3 to 500 feet to stay below all radar and devoid missile defenses and then they conducted an offensive operation and basically had a total conventional success against this facility and then we're able to return home in their flight plan by strategically mapping which Arab countries that would fly back through on the way back from Iraq and they had as I understand it no losses and this essentially

sensationalized the capability of the military of Israel for a broader Western audience. Thomas has talked before about how this kind of, I think, shaped the American defense picture or the American impressions of the Israelis kind of at the end of the Cold War. And interestingly, when I lived in Israel, we watched one of our classes was we just sat down and watched a whole documentary about what an amazing success this operation was and how glorious it was that Israel could do this. The documentary itself was produced in the late 1980s and was in American English. So it was interestingly kind of a relic of one of these sort of propaganda-ish films that went around

that boasted about Israeli capabilities. Now, what the chapter in the book presents, knowing that context and knowing that this is a couple years after this operation, it goes into the espionage that was conducted for this. The specifics are kind of, I wouldn't say irrelevant, but our stream would go on for six hours if we went into all of it. Basically, they squeezed an Iraqi scientist for information with sex and with careful trade craft,

and then kind of throughout this operation, getting the information that they needed. Eventually, when they were done with two other people in this operation, they killed them, which is standard practice for a intelligence operation in a foreign country. As the author writes, this is not, I mean, who knows how much of this you're really supposed to believe, but he says some interesting things that this is sort of not the major goal of Mossad in its operations to leave a gigantic body trail.

Obviously, it's like poor tradecraft. They try to talk their way in and out of situations when they can or blackmail or whatever else. But it's a little bit rare to just leave a giant trail of bodies. But that could all be BS. To talk a little bit about what Mossad actually is. We have to just super quick give a distinction between the major components of the Israeli intelligence community. Amman, Stormy has mentioned Amman before in various hypermodern contexts of this year and last year. I would recommend looking into his streams and what he is talking about in reference to what Amman is doing today.

what it is in Hebrew Agaf Hamodein, which is Israeli military intelligence. This is separate physically within the structure of governance and military from the actual IDF intelligence corps, which is Chayal Hamo Dein. These two organizations, now you might want to think like, well, what's the difference between a military intelligence corps and Israeli military intelligence. Well, the IDF's intelligence core itself is more internal for each combatant brigade that's functional and operating presumably within either Palestine or other limited engagements in Lebanon, or I should rather say unlimited, given the recent conduct.

But Amman is the actual external facing element of this. So this is an organization of Israel that looks at the military capabilities of what it considers adversary countries around the world and occasionally allied countries to keep a full intelligence picture on. And these things are not Mossad. I want to be clear about that. Massad is the espionage organization. These two things, in addition to Mossad, often they cooperate. They sometimes work in tandem. But the explicit function and information sharing is rather compartmentalized from Mossad to these other Israeli intelligence components.

But what actually is Mossad? For the record, I was never. in Massad. I never met anyone in Massad. When I lived in Israel, I lived in a lot of these different areas where the streets and everything referenced in this book were kind of a map to the operations that he's doing and the people that he's meeting. But all the Hebrew that he uses of the component teams and everything at all looks 100% above board. So I kind of trust him when he says the component teams include the following parts. Yalid is the ground component team in the sense that when you have an operation on the ground,

you have an immediate security for the perimeter. You have people that are in charge of monitoring schedules of all individuals within that location, keeping an eye on their routines. And that's also the external casing that is looking at the external facing cameras, that is monitoring how often people go into and out of doors, how often they open and closed windows, sort of the daily life pantheon of all activity within an area in which they're conducting an operation. This Yalid is separate from the Shiklut. I kind of stumbled that one, Shihlutis, which is the listening department. The listening department conducts B&E, breaking and entering into the facilities that they're targeting, and planting one-way

listening devices or other espionage tools. So looking through the nature of this book, looking at these two component teams, and primarily the book is written mostly about the training schedule before their operational schedule. I look. looked at all the different locations that I could identify. Every single one that he references within Israel, they are completely accurate in terms of his proximity, the transit structures, the urban density of the location that he's operating in. So when he says that he's doing this training facility and he's moving to Lechov-Dizengoff or de Kov-Weitzman, he's, that's actually the distance that he's moving.

and his visual picture of this thing is completely accurate. So I just want to say that if there's any doubts as to what's actually happening within his activities within Israel. Generally within the book, interestingly, this is more prevalent in 1990 than there is today. There's a mixture of Yiddish phrases that's been tossed around between these different agents. But within modern Israel today,

this is almost totally gone extinct outside of, explicit religious circles who choose not to speak Hebrew. So Yiddish itself, it used to be spoken way, way more in secular Jewish circles in the 20th century, but it's basically died out similar to Ladino. People either speak Hebrew or they speak English and the Yiddish-speaking ones are, frankly, their religious crazies. Who are these units or teams within the Mossad at the end of the prologue. Well, from what it seems like based on the initial case here, what these guys functionally are doing,

they're weapons salesmen in the mold of Cold War America. Now, they obviously are conducting offensive operations against adversary countries. The geopolitical state of the world at this time is such that, I would say, The battle lines are more drawn. It's quite clear in the nature of the Cold War, based on the different Sunni Arab states

that Israel had recently gone to war against in every iteration of its wars from the name Berries. In Israel, it's called the War of Independence of 1948, Yom Haatsma ut and Yomazigaron are usually the remembrance days within Israel for the Holocaust

and the War of Independence. That's linguistically what it is. But it's called the Arab-Israeli war, 1948. There are also additional operations throughout the 1950s. In the 1960s, there's the 1967 war.

the 60 War and then the 1973 Yom Kippur War and then in the 1980s, there's the 1981 to 1982-ish Israeli invasion of Lebanon. And then throughout all of these different times, Israel is sort of repeatedly antagonizing its neighbors in more covert ways. So that's in a nutshell, the strategic picture. So the Mossad is, yes, conducting operations against these countries, that it's fighting wars against or has recently fought wars against. But when it comes to sort of their day-to-day interactions with allies or neutral countries, frankly, what you see in the book is that they're selling them all the weapons that the Americans give them. I mean, straight out, like, no bullshit.

And the facts as they come will prove this. But I have digressed here. Who is this man? Who is this author? Victor Ostrowski was born November 28, 1949, in Edmonton, Canada. His father served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II as a Lancaster bomber pilot. After the war, he fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war as the commander of the Sederdanov Air Base in Tel Aviv. His base here, Sedadadadav, I want to reiterate that because pops up a ton of the book and I've been there, or to what was there,

This was a critical Israeli Air Force air base that existed from the 1940s. It was previously a British that it existed as a military base all the way through 2019 when it was bulldozed and replaced with luxury apartments. I bet they regret that one. But anyway, sorry, I'm all over the place here. Basically, a slub is not going to be in charge of this airport. It's a critical infrastructure facility with multiple fighter squadrons. Given this man's experience in the Canadian Air Force, his father, this was a man who once he had come to Israel as a Zionist, basically had a tremendous amount of power and status.

Within Israel culturally, the Air Force is considered the absolute highest tier outside of the Sayyelots, which are the BATCBRA for like the scout brigades or within each component military brigade in Israel you have a special forces component that's more ricottis and it's oriented

In addition you also have special operations unit Shetesh Shai's the Altamatkal even different tank units and other such entities can have their own scout units these are more prestigious but at the top of them if you're commanding an airbase in the 1948 war, you are basically a legend within Israel.

So to clarify, this man's father, extremely high status. This man's mother was Israeli. She was a supply truck driver from Tel Aviv to Cairo for the British Army, but one of these like Palestine mandate types. But she became a member of the Haganah. show she was a traitor to the British. The Haganah was the central IDF precursor alongside both the Ilgun and the Lehi

before the 1948 war. These were in brief a series of militant people get sensitive about the label terrorist organizations. I say sensitive about the term terrorist, but I mean the activities that they are doing are inflicting harm upon civilians for maximum strategic benefit, which ironically was the definition that I was taught in Israel about terrorism. This man's parents, his mother and father, obviously, obviously, well off in the IDF.

They frequently travel between Canada, the United States, and Israel in the 1940s, and his grandfather was the auditor general of the United Jewish agency. That was one of the primary international organizations for Jews that was facilitating Alia to Israel in the 1920s and 1930s. For your history, this was the, depending on how you count them, the second to third major wave of modern Zionist immigration to Israel. I believe within Israel, they told us there had been something like seven to eight of them throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This is one of the earlier iterations of it. The man's uncle was in Shulay Shemshon as a Syriot in the Gavati Brigade. And culturally within Israel, when they have their uniforms, they have a fox patch.

That fox patch comes from the Shulai Shemshon. and is prestigious and is part of the foundational lore of the brigade. So, okay, so mother, father, grandfather, uncle, all, like, extremely high up within the Israeli structure of the military. So yet, ironically, for the most part, they're not really living that frequently in Israel, which is, like, insane to me. I mean, knowing what I know now being not a Jew anymore and thinking more about dual loyalties, I wonder how much loyalties these people had to, you know, Canada, the United States. But obviously, very hardly regretted within Israel. Growing up, he writes within the book that the way he views Israel, quote,

it was a country that could do no wrong, would not inflict evil on others, would set an example for all nations to see. see and to follow. If there was anything wrong financially or politically in the country, I always imagined that this was at the lower echelons of government, with the bureaucrats, who would eventually clean up their act. Basically, I believed there were people guarding our rights, great people, like Ben Gleon, whom I really admired. I grew up regarding Began as the militant. I couldn't stand, end quote. So I contextualize that statement. At the age, so he's born in Canada, moves at the age of 12 to Holon,

which is a very nice part of Tel Aviv back then and today. And the way that he's describing his politics totally matches the politics of the time. Again, it's hard not to go off on the Israeli history here, but I suppose that's why I'm here. Between 1948 and the late 1970s, 1977, specifically,

Israel was a quote leftist state. It was broadly, intrinsically, philosophically, hardcore socialist. All the Kibbutzim come from this nature. The Zionism that's coming from Europe and the United States is blatantly leftist, but also extremely racialist and nationalistic in its origin.

Almost, dare I say, a national socialism. for Jews. I mean, not to get all over the place, but like, the more I think on this stuff looking back on it, like, it just kind of blows my mind connecting these dots. The man's background, he says he likes Ben-Gulian, but then he regarded Menachem Begim as a militant. Well, looking at the history of Israel, David Ben-Gulion was, I believe, the head of the Haganah, and Menachim Began, in the War of Independence, ran the Ilgun. So, you have a lot of the history of You have the more centrist, normal, respectable army, quote unquote, in the Haganah, and then you have the Ilgun militants, which are basically killing more civilians.

They're more comfortable with being more radical. They're more brutal as an organization. And politically, the early history of Israel was the leftist, like I said, that's Mapai Avodah. Avada in Hebrew means labor. and that was the dominant party up until 1977. In 1977, approximately, you know, 40 years or so after the, sorry, 30 years, a generation-ish, after the Foundation of Israel, it shifts to Likud with Menachem Begin, who is a ostensible right-winger by Israeli standards.

A lot of early Jews, a lot of everyone from Assad agents, everyone of Mr. Ostrowski's generation and their parents, unless they were overt right ringers. They kind of regard Benghulian as like the Kim Il-sung figure in the country's development, like North Korea. Ben-Gurion similarly also ran the show, with some small exceptions for 22 years as the first prime minister, sort of similar to the time duration, a little bit longer for maybe Netanyahu. another thing he writes which is like again just think on it in context of since October 7th he says when I grew up political tolerance was the main rule Arabs were regarded as human beings we had had a peace with them before and eventually would again that was my ideal of Israel so very humanist

very socialist very secularized not really religious he basically never mentions going to a synagogue for the entirety of the book. As far as his biography, he goes to Israel, age 12, lives in Holon, is raised there with this extremely powerful Zionist family. He joins the IDF at 18 for the compulsory three-year term that everyone does. He ends as a second lieutenant in the military belief, excuse me, military police. and on the back of both books, the first and second book, it's written he was then the youngest officer

in the Israeli military. He musters out of the military police in November of 1971. So you never mentioned seeing combat at this time or being forward deployed. He really doesn't mention anything. But a lot of this also is because being a military police member in Israel,

I mean, you are far more of a police officer than you are like an American style MP, if that makes sense. The division is a little more blurred there. Generally, there's a little bit of tension between the IDF and the military police in terms of assignments and power and everything. And I should also mention one of the point that when, you know, from the day Israel was created to today, your unit that you are in, in the IDF is everything to your career, to your ability to find a spouse, to your ability to have

respect from your community, to frankly, your entire self-perception, your military career to Germans, the trajectory of your entire life. And I saw all the time IDF soldiers giving each other shit for being in various units, or, you know, the guy from San Khanim, which is like the parachute regiment which is i mean that's if you are like a white askenazi in shape you know level-headed dude you're going to go into the san chanim you know a lot of these there's also a certain racial element of different uh brigades a lot of other brigades have more mizrahi jews um and so on so it can sort of get also the stick measuring contest extends throughout the book even in the masearchi juzes Assad when he's writing.

After he musters out in 71, he goes back to Canada for five years to work various jobs. He misses the Yom Kippur War in 1973. But says basically he

feels like what he had to give to Israel wasn't complete. So he returns to Israel in May 1977 and joins the Navy. Now, here's an interesting thing. Usually, it may have been the back then differently but today you can't be what's called a Haya al-Boded or a lone soldier basically a foreigner joining the IDF who then gets out of the military isn't a reservist and then can come

back several years later and join that's fairly unusual and I would imagine one thing he's not saying throughout the nature of this book is just how powerful his family is and how well connected they are within Israel. There's a lot of things that are sort of like, your average, your new immigrant, would not have this experience. This is very atypical. Especially joining the Navy

after the Army. Just strange. So he joins the Navy. Initially, when he's going through his in-processing in-processing in-processing in-hurtzliya, which used to have a huge naval facility, which I think has been mostly decommissioned. he goes through this kind of big process where they test his English and they're just kind of consistently figuring out, okay, you know, what are you capable of? What do you think about these things? And he realizes they're kind of trying him out from Assad. And he goes through this process where he's turning it down continuously for about eight months because he doesn't want to be away from his, you know, family. And he finds out later, once he's in the Massad, that they wanted him to be in Kidon, which is the Metzada department, just to get the name, right?

Like, it's the assassination department. This Metzada was called Kumyut at the time. They like to change the names occasionally, but like the function of the organization is exactly the same. And the Massad used to be called something else during its origin. It used to be, I don't have the Hebrew, the name of it offhand. But I mean, currently it's Hamasad Le Maudi'in, so that's abbreviated to Mossad. Going back forward here, he turns down the Mossad completely. In 1981, at the completion of his Navy service, he was briefly involved in sort of these naval operations at the start of the, they call it the 1982 Lebanon War, but Israel was basically provoking Lebanon continuously in 1981.

But he leaves the Navy following kind of, you know, not really an exceptional career. Perhaps it's classified. Perhaps he didn't feel like disclosing the details of it. obviously the conventional military service pales in comparison to being in the Mossad. He could have also wanted to protect his fellow soldiers, but he never really mentions any close friends or, you know, acquaintances. It's basically purely fixated on the Mossad. In October, 1982, he formally tests into it after a long consultation with his wife.

He goes to Baita Dadaadhafna. It's a big huge complex that still exists today at King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. He says at the time that this is Mossad headquarters. I don't see any reason to disbelieve him, although this is one of these unverifiable facts, essentially, because the way a lot of the stuff within Israel works, you can't really nail them to facts. they'll just tell you it's not true which uh sort of builds to a later point about lying and the masad uh after passing many of these tests continuously and he goes on for chapters and chapters about the training and tests that he has to pass is um he goes to the massad training

academy so okay what is this place massad training academy in hebrew it's called the midrasha which is primarily what that is the midrash is the uh name and process really philosophically of uh talmudic exegesis and Torah interpretation so it is very interesting if you could imagine this the equivalent would be um naming the CIA training farm uh i don't know like christian exegesis you know that's the of what's going on here as far as the naming convention. So you'll see this quite frequently. They'll tie in a lot of Old Testament biblical stuff into their espionage, which I think is frankly like kind of a weird PR religion thing,

even though not many of these people are super moral. There are some extremely religious Jews. He has an interesting story later on of a fellow agent who, sorry, I'm like, it's a, it's a tangent on a tangent here. So stop me if it gets crazy. One of his fellow case officers is extremely religious and always wants to wear a Kipa. Well, the problem with being an operational agent and wearing a Kipa is they can see you wearing one.

So what he does is he shaves his head and he gets a hair piece made in the shape of a Kipa to cover like the now shaven bald spot. So he can always be on an operation and wear his Keepa, which is like extremely strange religious priorities when your job is to go out into the world and morally compromise people and or kill them. Weird sense of religion and morality there. But back to my point, He gets trained as a cutza.

He notes here that the actual case officers themselves, they could not be women. Certain other intelligence gathering agents could be if they were behind the scenes. There were secretary roles. These definitely could be women. And most frequently, women are used in these roles within Israel, culturally, with the exception of certain combat jobs, women are basically everywhere in the military and intelligence and business world. There's no gender divisions.

It's really more, for lack of a better term, gender neutral than anything else in their society. But he notes that actual case officers, the cuts out of these, again, 30-ish people, They could not be women because when they're conducting espionage operations, an Arab ban would never, ever work or take money from a woman. It's just not happening, obviously, in Arab society. As he's going through his ongoing initial testing, he has an infiltration test. He notes, kind of as a throw-aside point, he basically has to get into a hotel. And in the time, this is, what came out late 80s, 1990 or so, as I understand it, I'm a little too young for this, but like they'd have like a guest book in a hotel that you would write your name in. And that, you know, when people were up to no good, they'd leave like a pseudonym, John Smith or whatever.

But in the West and Europe and basically everywhere, they would just leave a guest book there and you'd put a pseudonym in it if you actually wanted private. So, you know, when they call Druma or whatever, it wouldn't actually be you. But interestingly, it's a very subtle but interesting point. He notes that when he's doing his infiltration, in a hotel, that they hide the guest books under the reception desk. Well, that's really weird because you could just use a pseudonym. But this brings up a very crucial point that frames the rest of the book. Israel is a low trust society that is masquerading as a high trust society. when he is practicing infiltration in his initial missions.

He's speaking English to the Israelis because if you're a tourist Jew, you're always treated better. And I will say, based on personal experience, it's completely true. At this point later on, and I just want to repeat that point really quickly again, this will come up over and over and over again

when you're reading this book and you're looking at the conduct and behavior, of his fellow officers, why are they misbehaving so strangely? Why are they so crude? Why are they so morally compromised? Why are they stealing so much money? You could say it's corruption, but you can't corrupt what's already corrupted in a big picture sense.

Like, there's no trust here. He's describing as he's joining the Mossad that they're testing him on his English, and his initial officer was giving him a hard time because he was using like 70s slang like you know far out and groovy and he was giving like a Canadian native English speaker a hard time for his English

and um this endless shit testing within Israel literally goes on from the day that you're born until the day you die um that is how they treat both their own people but also especially foreigners that live there they're usually wealthier um they're usually speaking

multiple languages. They're typically more cultured, better educated. They have more resources. It's also a political dynamic between the significantly more powerful external Zionist support and the actual state of Israel, which is dependent upon it. People think it's this giant unified Jewish block, but that's really not how the actual society breaks down. So with this clarifying point getting back to the book um next chapter cadet 16 is now a trainee cadet in the msad and he begins to sort of outline this process of being a very junior massad and make no mistake they're still being tested throughout their training but what he notes uh massad agents are given a lie detector test every three months um speaking from a perspective uh

This is very unusual for intelligence agencies to put a polygraph in front of someone every three months. It's excessive and insane. It's not done today, I believe also, for Western intelligence services. It was not done at the time to set everybody down with a polygraph. But I think this is more of an iteration of that low trust society perspective. One thing I also have in my notes here is that as he's getting the initial training and they're testing him for various things, there's a huge amount of bravado and propaganda in his introductory statements from his initial Mossad superiors, which again, he names with first and last name. He says they're telling him stuff, I mean, this Hollywood shit, like, you have the right to refuse this test, which gives me the right to shoot you. which is just no one would ever speak like that.

And I'm not sure why this is pervasive throughout the book. Maybe everyone in the Mossad is that insecure and, you know, rude. I wouldn't doubt a lot of it, but also sensationalized, too. What it have to do with the fact that if you have assets all over the world and you've infiltrated so many different cultures and countries, you would expect that, especially if it's a foreigner doing Alia coming home, that possibly they could be undercover and working, you know, working for someone else. It's an extremely good point.

I mean, it could be true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. mistrust um you know if you're if you have people if you have people um infiltrated everywhere you're and that's what you you're you're just going to expect it to be done to you it just

seems like it would be like a perfect kind of paranoia because of uh you know because it's what you do and also i mean the massad itself i mean like many other areas of israel um that are recruiting for talent, they're recruiting from all walks of life. I mean, they're not going to get 30 different identical Mizrahi, Turkish, Jewish agents in the room together. They can't infiltrate anything. You need to basically, and they say this explicitly in the book, that they're looking for a specific type of person, but also a specific type of person for specific operations. So, you know, you want a French Jew to blend in to France and so on.

And yeah, that is a very good point that you bring up, that, you know, if you're bringing someone obviously accustomed to their country of origin, and, you know, this person might just infiltrate the Mossad as well. And the constant light detector tests, I think you're correct. It might point to that. Let's see. As far as the actual, so, okay, so you're teaching an intelligence agent how to do something. On the one hand, you have academic systems, but on the other you have like on the ground systems. So we're just going to go very, very briefly into the academic systems. So they talk about how security was taught by Shabak instructors. Now, Shabakh is the Israeli FBI.

Massad is like the CIA. These are roughly equivalents. They're not quite accurate, but that's basically how it breaks down. He talks about how I forgot the Hebrew acronym for this, but he calls it Naka, which is essentially, it's a, okay, when you write an intelligence report, you need to have a unified writing system for both gathering information, clearly in communicating well, and also reporting it to various audiences, people that might receive it.

So this needs to be a very natural uniform script. The language needs to be innately familiar. And when you are working in this field and you're writing an intelligence report of any kind for any reason, it needs to have extreme procedural consistency and brevity for communication. And the reason that that is the case is because if someone writes some kind of shorthand note, you're going to be working in a high stress, low time environment where you get information into, let's say, like a single piece of paper, you send it up your command structure, they might not be able to determine shit from it.

And so having that uniform writing system means when you're intaking and processing intelligence information, either at local or foreign headquarters organizations or facilities, your actual analysts on the ground that are looking at what your field agents are doing, we're going to be able to very clearly understand and put together a coherent intelligence picture. And so he gets a little bit more into the conduct of operational security. in Hebrew, he calls it Apam. That's Avtachat, Pilut Modinet, which is a literal translation to securing intelligence activity.

Basically, what does that actually mean? This is your on the ground element. This is your, frankly, like, okay, it's your ritual, psychological breakdown and, like, relentless criticizing. So there's a couple different elements here. So you're out on an operation and you need to secure intelligence. Now, you can do that through medium mechanisms.

So you can take pictures, you can write notes, you can basically commit a data point of intelligence. But very frequently, this is a changing, agile, dynamic field where you're thinking and working on your feet. So who survives in this? Well, not an egotistical, self-centered person, not a shy person, not a, frankly, like, unsexy person, a dork. The kind of person that you need to be when you are securing intelligence, when you're on the ground, doing what you're doing, you need to have no ego. you need to have a single-minded focus on your objective, but you also have to be able to be very dynamic and changing. What do you do if you're on an operation and someone comes up to you

and starts speaking to you in English, but you're supposed to be a French person? How do you react? Are you quick thinking enough on your feet to speak in broken French to that person and say, oh, sorry, I speak this other language or vice versa? Um, to get that person in that frame of mind before you send them to the field, you have to basically richly, like, psychologically break down all elements of their ego. But I just want to emphasize in Israel, this is like this sort of needling rudeness, um, being insulted, being inconvenienced. Uh, this is like how the culture functionally is. So on the one hand, you're training it into people. But on the other hand, it's a culture.

practice that everyone's sort of being a part of. Now, what actually illustrates this? Imagine that you are a young German guy and you are a junior engineer on the German train system and you are getting the full dose of German autism. Imagine that you're a young French guy and you are the most junior chef in a French restaurant. You are in this, for lack of a better way to describe it. You're in an institution that is exacerbating all of these cultural stereotypes and strengths which is going to

catalyze and intensify the nature of cultural traits that's going on in this situation. So you're taking a highly critical, rude, self-assessing culture

and you're just turning it into a more concentrated version of yourself. And this is why, that the Mossad is so fucked up, frankly, in his book, in a big picture sense. Most of what's happening here on the ground day to day, it's breaking down your ego, and it's also expanding sort of the nature of your thinking. You need to think about things in a much different way. You need to be much more transient, much more flexible.

What are some things that people would use this for? I think we've heard enough about the training. Page 68. One of the first guys that he describes in this book is a guy that goes to Africa, and he starts dealing in millions of dollars in arms sales. And essentially, the way this operation was conducted on the ground simply, they made contact to find out what the African country needed, what it feared in its existence,

who it regarded is its enemies, And the idea was that the Mossad and its operations in this location would build on these preexisting needs. They would create a stronger relationship. And then they would kind of casually let in to people that were in positions of authority that Israel could supply the government in question with weapons and training, whatever they needed to address these problems. The final step in this process, once a country's leader in Africa, that is usually a strong man figure, had been hooked on the arms themselves, was for the Mossadman to tell him that he must take some agricultural equipment as well. The leader was then put in the position of saying he could expand his ties with the state of Israel only if they set up formal diplomatic relations. It was a way of essentially creating these relations through the backdoor, although in most cases the arms deals were so lucrative that these liaison men never bothered, to follow up with the next step. So, okay, why is this tactic so important?

Well, for one, where are these weapons coming from? Israel has not that many weapons creations organizations. There's IWI. I think that's Israeli weapons industries. They have aerospace technology. But the only time I was ever in a bullet factory in Israel was when they had a museum in one of the kibbutzim from the 1948 war, where they hit it under the kibbutz, ironically a military facility in a civilian location. and they had like a mass produced small arms munitions factory. But like that isn't going to be enough to supply African countries and Middle Eastern countries and European countries.

And wherever the Mossad might do operations because they don't have they don't have like the domestic American arms manufacturing industry. So whose weapons are they selling? This is a key question. Well, dear Americans, they are selling weapons that your taxpayer dollars paid for in the 1970s and 80s, that we would either give to Israel for its own defense or that Israel would quote unquote purchase from the American arms industry, which in previous streams, not myself, but I think other guests or streamers have discussed, that the Israeli weaponsing purchasing industry is essentially like kind of a giant self-licking ice cream cone. So that's for the weapons that are going everywhere overseas.

They are just being sent out. Like this is American weaponry. Hey, Goy, where do you think that Schwarzse got that armolite from? You, you know, and you seal this stuff. And like a lot of it is like Israel kind of. it covers it up with this garbage PR so they have a couple like okay i'll avoid the gun autism for the most part for this stream but basically like they have the galile which is like uh is a platform and then they have what's called the iwai tavovol and then they have the micro tavovall and these are like

bullp hope weapons and every idf soldier that i knew said god damn i do not want to shoot with one of these things like give me the m4 uh i do not like this because like they're bulky they're bulky the magazine releases in weird places yeah i know i know it's like you can't you can't shoulder this fucking microtivore because it's like you know more similar to an uzi than anything else and uh i saw one of those today in a gun show and i'm just like every time i see it i'm just like who thought that was a good idea oh man it's just you know looking at this it's like uh but a lot of these like weapons are like this so obviously I mean, look, I can't blame them.

I can't blame anyone for wanting a shit son of American weapons. I can blame them for just selling it to everybody. This is a big problem. And, I mean, you also have to think about kind of the innate coerciveness of this project where, you know, you demand that they have to take agricultural equipment to maintain formal diplomatic relations. I mean, it's like this stupid. Well, this reminds me of what Lutvac talked about in Kudaita was how, if you want to get control of another country and you want to basically have another country on its knees is you saw them all the weapons that they can't manufacture.

And then so when they go to kill the tribe next door and things start breaking, they have to keep coming back to you. And that's your leverage against them is, yeah, well, if you don't give us what we need, the weapons stop flowing. Yeah, absolutely. And also it relies on this strange stance of, I mean, like, by formal diplomatic relations, they mean, they mean UN recognition and some treaties so that Israel can run around to other countries and say, oh, we were recognized by this other country. I mean, part of a huge amount of what I learned, because I took interestingly enough, a international law course in Israel of the Israeli perspective with international law,

which is a giant oxymoron. It puts all of the, okay, here's a line for you, Pete, which is exactly what they told me. Israel is by virtue of the number of UN treaties about it and also other. country recognitions of the state of Israel formally, it is a legally more legitimate country than any other country on earth. How's that one? So the UN says we're legal, yet when the UN says that we're committing a genocide, fuck them.

Yeah, but you can't recognize Palestine, Pete. I mean, like, this is why I have to laugh at a lot about this. this stuff. I have a lot of the coursework and literature and just looking over it, it's like it's English language and Hebrew propaganda for

foreign Jews coming to Israel going back to other countries. Like it's not a serious analysis of I don't know because you'd have to be like critical. You'd have to be critical of this whole project to understand it, frankly. They're the only

They're the only democracy in the region. Man, for so many of these. Okay, but like, okay, let's get away from the arms sales a little bit, because frankly, that's like small potatoes, even though it's a gigantic problem and still is ongoing. And also, like, they had issues with the F-35I variant and espionage components going over to China. But, you know, you can name like a million of these damn instances.

Okay, let's look at the World Bank. interestingly there was a project that Sri Lanka wanted to do with infrastructure which would take about 30 years of World Bank investment and the head of the president figured out that it could be extremely significant to have this World Bank investment but he wasn't 100% certain about it it would be extremely domestically unpopular the Mossad basically convinced the strong man of Sri Lanka to do it. One interesting thing with the World Bank and the IMF, if you look at the history of international governance organizations, IGOs, as they're known, World Bank IMF, in the 70s, 80s and 90s,

they essentially took, I mean, I'm going to script the financials. Sorry, Stormy, if you're listening to this. They basically debt enslaved the entire third world. And, extracted resources out of there, which I'm actually, I'm not opposed to it. I just find it a little scummy. You know, it's essentially from the Chomskyite perspective, colonialism, but under a new mask. Instead of an actual specific empire doing this, it's an IGO. So to get to the actual intelligence gathering, the rest of my notes for the rest of this stream are going to be sort of these paragraph style stories, it just flows a little bit better.

One new world that was revealed to me and others with a lecture at Mossad headquarters was on Paha, the Department of Pilut Ablanit Oyanet, or hostile sabotage activities, specifically directed at the PLO. That's the Palestine Liberation Organization. A big organization in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 80s, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have sort of changed their structures, but that's way too complicated for this stream. This department was also... I think the PL, I think Israel decided the PLO had to go when they just became way too liberal.

And it was like, well, let's do Hamas to the Palestinian Authority now. Yeah, I mean, it's like this weird... yeah, every decade they find a new subsidiary radical Islamic organization. This is an interesting one. One thing that we were taught there, and again, like everything I'm saying, I should reiterate, perhaps should have said this at the start, everything I'm saying you can find open source. What you're seeing is like in the late 2010s, when Hamas wasn't the big bad guy anymore, because there hadn't been a recent-ish flare-up of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza since what was called the Sukhattan or the 2014 Gaza Incursion.

They essentially said, I think it was called Islamic Jihad. I forget. A lot of these names blend together at this point. but they said there was a more radical Islamic State-aligned Palestinian organization within both Gaza and the West Bank. It was more radical. And also, you know, they threw out, even internally statistics like, we don't actually know how many people are a part of it. And this group claims to be Islamic jihad, but it's Palestinian, but it's more radical. And also, So like it's completely

skilled, experienced, just as dangerous as ISIS, but it's also in Palestine. I mean, all this stuff is bullshit. So to return to the previous point, so he's talking about the hostile sabotage activities and how they track it. Well, okay, interesting thing. They take us to the sixth floor of Mossad,

set us down and told us this was where they gathered daily information on the movements of the PLO, and other terrorist organizations. The instructor opened his huge folding wall about 100 feet across. It's like a bond shit. I mean, I'm sorry. I doubt this entire thing, and I'll tell you why after. There was a massive map of the world, excluding the North Pole and Antarctica,

with a series of computer consoles underneath. The wall was divided into tiny squares that lit up. If you punched Arafat, that is Yasser Arafat, on the computer keyboard, for example, his known location would let up on the map. If you asked for Arafat three days, it would have lit up everywhere he'd ever been over the past three days. The current square was always the brightest. As his movements got older, the light became dimmer. The map accommodated many people.

If, for example, you wanted to know the activities of 10 key PLO people, you could punch their names in and each would show in a different color. You'd also get a printout whenever you needed one. The map was particularly available for swift reference. For example, if 8 of the 10 were all. tracking in Paris on the same day, this means that they have been planning something, and quote, steps could be taken. Now, I just want to say something here. For the level of, I don't doubt that a sort of system like this existed at the time, obviously, any espionage agency of any country is going to have far more advanced computational abilities than is

generally known to the civilian public. That's a fact, especially if they've got it all from the United States. But the ideal that you can locate specific targets with this level of accuracy, I think he's being very dishonest into how capable this thing was. Because the way it's described in the book, you have this like omnipotent Intel machine that's sort of operating in capacities that like literally if you look today in any kind of intelligence gathering capacity for anything if you consider like i don't know like s2 underground or something when he has his dashboard of like any kind of any kind of

osin software that you can just kind of see on twitter or whatever you're not going to have this capability. So you're telling me that Israel alone has like this omnipotent kind of espionage skynet. I think this is him listing an anecdote where he's stretching the truth in order to brag about the Mossad's capabilities. I think part of his intention in a lot of these anecdotes is to overemphasize the competency of the Mossad. Now, on to another anecdote. Next, we were taught about the budlim the bodil in the singular these are people who in masad who operate as messengers i should add these are distinct people these are not yirid or chichruthis that are that i brought up earlier that are actual like operational uh...

these are messengers between safe houses in the embassy or between the various safe houses a buddell's main training is in apam that sort of intelligence notation system I mentioned earlier, knowing whether or not he's been followed. And this bodil carries everything in diplomatic envelopes or pouches. Carriers of the pouch have diplomatic community and carry a document to this effect. Their main function is to bring passports and other documents to the Katzaz, and also to take reports back to the embassy. Katsas are not always permitted to enter the Israeli embassy, depending on the nature of their assignment. Bodlim are usually young men in their mid-20s who do this work for a year or two.

They are often Israeli students who have been in a combat unit, as they tend to be reliable. Though it's essential, they are trained in how to avoid being followed. They can still do the job while students. They are regarded as one of the lower ranks in the station, but even so, it's not a bad job for a student. So, okay, a couple things. A couple takeaways here.

I'm just going to throw this out there. there are young Israeli travelers on vacation from the only everywhere in the world all the time they happen to go mostly to Thailand and India a lot of South America too they tend to

just do a lot of drugs I mean that's not yes I've like seen this and know people that have done this but also like this is just culturally the cachet that Israelis get when they get overseas they go a little bit while, but you know, this kind of Bodlim that he's describing as a group, that seems to track pretty perfectly with the nature of this function. Now, another interesting point here, this sort of,

like, very simple information conveyance job, I should add that every single embassy from every country and every part of the world has intelligence agents of said foreign country in it and it would be stupid of them not to because they are all doing it so in and of itself this is as far as like you know covert sinister assassination and espionage operations go this is like standard practice and not frankly a big deal but it's just interesting to note um you know the overseas presence of Israelis and also a lot of more recent. No, I probably shouldn't say that. I want to, well, okay, I'll just say that like,

there is an increasing threat to Jews, and there's a lot of unclear details on the nature of these explicit physical threats in developed Western cities. things are very strange. That's all I'm going to say. And speaking of strangeness, direct quote, when I visited the facility as a trainee, I saw a large batch of blank Canadian passports. They must have been stolen. It looked like an entire shipment. There were over 1,000 of them. I don't think the shipment was ever reported missing. Not in the media anyway. Okay, well, here's a crazy one, Pete. I can understand, procureur.

like the documentation and falsifying it for espionage purposes but i just want you to like connect the dots between you have a massive cyanim so you have a massive contingent of foreign people who are performing civilian functions for Israel in some capacity and a thousand blank passports show up now i'm sure that you know anybody with a pulse can ascertain um a passport is a protected form of legal international identification. And if you show up at an airport with a blank passport, you are fucked. So a thousand blank Canadian passports in Israel, in a warehouse, not reported missing. How did it get there?

Who put it there? Was it on a ship? Was it on a plane? No one at customs ever looked at. it and that's just really strange because it was stolen but who was it stolen from these are very interesting and obviously quite necessary gaps in the story which is why i think everyone who's interested in israel and the masad should read this book and uh it's not any kind of i don't know personally uh it's it's not like a big issue for me to like read all this because this

This is like, this is 35 years old at this point, this information. Anyway, back to the main point here. Interesting stuff. He talks about a man named Oren Riff, our main instructor who had worked for Teval, which is major telecommunications company within Israel. Sorry, like, it's like a million anecdotes here, but I will continue. Tevel is a telecommunications company. Interestingly, within Israel, they're used to,

to be, I believe, one, it was initially two or three for the entirety of the history of Israel. O'Hange took over in kind of the 90s and 2000s as the premier mobile carrier, basically dominated the entire mobile market. And then antitrust regulation from the Israeli Supreme Court came in and artificially divided this monopoly into seven or different eight unique phone companies. within Israel. So to maintain like competitive pricing and competition and set off. I stay all that stuff because Teval and Orange were like some of the main telecommunications company in Israel back in the day.

And again, as a very strange point of fact, this author lists the man's full name and who he works for, which is again, like, this just doesn't happen. like when I am a Soviet spy and I escaped to the West in 1985 and I write a tell tell all book I don't say like first name last name who worked at like plavda you know in my tell all memoir okay they kill me so very weird series of references here but again enough of the tangent back to the point um he this uh Telecommunications, former guy, he stresses the importance of this information on between 60 and 65 percent of all information collected for the Mossad comes from open media, radio, newspapers, television. About 25 percent comes from satellites, telex, telephone, and radio communications in the business that's called ELINT, electronic intelligence. Five to 10 percent, he talks about from liaison, which he isn't really.

I think that's some weird mistranslation because that doesn't make sense. I'm assuming he means like stolen corporate information of some kind or basically non-military or government obtained information. And between 2 to 4% from human intelligence, agents, people on the ground that are usually just, you know, cultivating social relationships. They were in the Somet department, which later changed to Melukha. But that small percentage, he notes that 2 to 4%, it's perhaps the most important of all the intelligence gathered.

That tracks with the initial Alan Dolis perspective that 90% of information is going to be open source, and only a very small amount of it is going to be derived from espionage. This is maintained even to this day. And I want to just say there's a very interesting thing about human intelligence. This is, again, fully available. In the 1970s, the early to mid-1970s, when the United States and Israel were trying to ascertain the likelihood of a government change or revolution in Iran. That would, it's obviously the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

what was told to me was that the Americans, they went in there and they paid, I believe, the Maronite Christians, a ton of money because they believed they would be the most pro-United States and would therefore be the most willing to cooperate with the Central Intelligence Agency. They were getting paid fat stacks of cash in a very poor economy under the Shah. So essentially, they would just tell the Americans whatever they actually wanted to hear. And if you look at American espionage, very frequently, like, Americans get duped a lot, at least in the Cold War. There's a lot of ego and stuff going on in a lot of other cultures who are sort of getting wise to a lot of these tactics, especially the cash payouts for limited minority stuff. but the Americans, by their own internal assessments within the agency, completely blindsided by the 1979 revolution. Now, contrast that with what the Mossad was doing. Now, what the Mossad did was they had a bunch of, frankly, like, Mizrahi Jews, or they call them in Israel, Svaldic Jews, but they're like not actually.

not actually spell them they're like just kind of an ethnicity they're sort of like Turkish or Persian they're sort of like between the like I mean in the structure of Israel they're like sort of under the Ashkenazim

but they're like above the Arab or North African Jews and the Ethiopians I mean there is that caste system within Israel for the most part Israel in the mid-1970s took a bunch of these people that were essentially Persian Jews,

and they trained them up a little bit, and they sent them into Israel, excuse me, to Iran to be taxi drivers, doctors, hot dog cart vendors, not exactly, but menial positions where they would just do main-on-the-street interviews. And what that would lead to is they were able to get that human perspective where they, by their own logic, They considered that four years before the 1979 revolution, they had a clear intelligence picture that the Iranian government would experience a revolution. Could that whole entire analogy I gave just be bullshit?

Maybe. But it is what was presented to me. And also is what, like, a lot of the academic literature around Israel intelligence and American intelligence in the Islamic Revolution was presented. presented as. So speaking of Jews doing stuff in foreign countries, let's talk about the Sainim. Let's get around to it. I want to cover that bit before, you know, we hit the end of the stream here because I think that's the most interesting and relevant component of this book to a modern audience. And again, chronologically, author still going through massage training at this point in time. The next day, this is on page 86 of the book, if you're

following along the next day rhanes delivered a lecture on the sianim a unique and important part of the massad's operation sayanim that's assistance in english must be 100% Jewish we pause there a hundred percent jewish is um mother and father Jewish not just mother Jewish although halachically if your mother is Jewish you are considered fully Jewish when they say a hundred percent Jewish here, that means ima, the gam Abbas Shalach, Yehudi. Like, your family, all of it is Jewish because you will not have a divided loyalty and run into a situation like me where you become a Christian and an apostate to Judaism.

They don't like that too much. These Sainim, they live abroad, and although they are not Israeli citizens, many are reached through their relatives in Israel. An Israeli, with a relative in England, for example, might be asked to write a letter saying the person bearing the letter represents an organization whose main goal is to help save Jewish people in the diaspora. Could the British relative help in any way? There are, according to him, thousands of Siamim around the world.

In London alone, there are about 2,000 who are active, and another 5,000 on the list. So that's potentially contactable people. They fulfill many roles. A car saan, for example, running a rental agency, could help the Mossad rent a car without having to complete the usual documentation. An apartment, Sayan, would find accommodation without raising suspicions. A bank Sayon could get you money if you needed it in the middle of the night. A doctor Sayan would treat a bullet wound without reporting it to the police and so on.

The idea is to have a pool of people available when needed who can provide services. but will keep quiet about them out of loyalty to the cause. They are paid only costs. Often the loyalty of Sayanim is abused by Katzaz who take advantage of the available help for their own personal use. There is no way for the Saan to check this. So, okay, what does that mean? What that means is,

no other intelligence agency globally has the advantage that the Mossad has in the Saanim. You cannot take a, let's say, Iranian IRGC master spy and drop them into the middle of Canada and have the same fluidity of general experience through that country to their objectives or extraction upon a mission failure in the same manner that a Mossad agent would have with the Sayan. So this creates, one, an over-dependence on the network. But two, also, like, as he just said, the Mossad would exploit other Jews. You know, if I'm in a tight spot and I need 1990s money, I need to, you know, $200 to get out of the country, I'm going to ask that Saan for $300 and then report to the Mossad case officer above me

that I only needed a hundred bucks for the extraction. You see how this can create like a corruption loop. And he says this, here you go, explicitly what the nature of the Siamar. One thing you know for sure is that even if a Jewish person knows it is the Mossad, he might not agree to work with you, but he won't turn you in. You have at your disposal a non-risk recruitment system that actually gives you a pool of millions of Jewish people. people to tap from outside your own borders. It's much easier to operate with what is available on the spot and

Sainim after incredible practical support everywhere, but they are never put at risk nor are they privy to classified information. So my anecdotes here get much shorter and I've been talking for a while. So if you have any thoughts on this, please go ahead. No, no, I was, I was going to make the point that you made that even if we you know the united states wanted to we can't have a network like this like um you know in in most countries because we're going to we're going to stand out like a sore thumb and you know jews can do a really good job of blending in wherever they go and i mean another

thing i should add i mean this is just like a general risk picture perspective um Chinese have massive ethnic cohorts in the United States. So does virtually every other major population country in the United States? Like, like, you know, like the way the Soviets would do it with, you know, I mean, like Israel was not the only country to do this. The issue is, for the most part, I as an American, if I'm a CIA agent, I have no on the ground support. This is why I have that over-reliance on, frankly, like, you know, throwing money at an on-the-ground guy who I think is, you know, hopefully loyal, but ultimately mercenary.

And this creates, like, a problem. Because, you know, every intelligence operation is relative risk. I could conduct one where I want to, like, overthrow. own entire country, but I'm not going to do it because it's too risky. Well, what if I just, you know, my risk profile was like 80% lower? What if I didn't have to worry about getting into or out of the country or, you know, procuring myself a passport, or, you know, even like finding food when I'm there, where I'm going to stay. And it's, it's, it, It means that overall, with that risk perspective being significantly reduced,

it means that you're going to try to get away with a lot more shit. So when we look at like Mossad operations overseas, and I'm not going to bring any specifically to mind at this point, you know, why is it that Israel is so brazen? Well, this is a big explanatory factor in that, at least for their covert actions. When you look at like Newmec

and how the United States nuclear secrets got out of the country into Israel for any other country on the planet that would be you know, okay, you're sending your agents to die and international embarrassment and media attention.

But what if you just didn't have to worry about getting caught? So anyway, just food for thought for people. especially as regarding loyalty, all these sorts of things, risk. That is the intrinsic structure of this man's job as an agent. He talks about how do you recruit people? How do you bring it into it? So no longer the cyaname at this point. Generally, if you're a Mossad agent overseas, how do you get people?

There are three major hooks for recruiting people. Money, obviously, emotion, be it revenge or ideology. and sex. So I want to just briefly go into these three. I listened to a podcast recently where they had John Kirooku and that other guy, the long-haired, like hippie-looking one, the weird one. They have these two on a podcast. There's two CIA agents that are on a podcast.

John Bersculante is the other one. But basically they have these guys. They're like, they go up on YouTube and they talk about life. in the CIA, you know, for like a public audience. They've been all like Rogan and all that stuff. One thing they talk about is that a lot of these motives are essentially extremely ineffective. Sex is obviously very temporary and kind of not effective. Money is good, but it's predicated far more transactionally on how to, like,

that you're paying for a certain price. So in the one hand, there's a little bit more directness in it. But on the other hand, when the money stops, you have no more loyalty. And also, that person will do something else for more money from someone else. So the revenge or the ideology, Ostroffsky argues, is the best point. One thing interestingly that he talks about is there's a couple of these shorter anecdotes. inside the culture of Massad. There are, to be a little vulgar,

there's a lot of sex happening between agents and secretaries. Maybe it was a different time culturally, but also Israelis themselves are pretty fast and loose with this. It's very unprofessional in an espionage, an espionage operation to have any kind of intimate physical relationships. This is why in the United States for the State Department, they rotate people very frequently and also there's strict code of conduct laws. When I read this in the book, it shocked me because the amount of interpersonal drama

and lack of trust that comes about with this thing happening is insane. I mean, it will happen based on having these people in a very sociopathic, high-tension environment. But the way he's describing both individual agents and the culture at large, it's like a miracle they were able to do anything the way he's describing about, like, how frequently this would happen. One interesting thing is that for Mossad combatant agents, when they get first, were deployed out of the country, they tend to go to ground for four years as a standard term of service, as opposed to the Americans, which will rotate people very frequently. But he says that Mossad, when sending agents overseas, oftentimes would get sort of tunnel vision about where they would deploy different people. He says that Mossad only had one source in Saudi

Arabia in the mid-1980s, a man in the Japanese embassy. that I think is an interesting point because I believe like if I was writing a tell-all book about the Mossad and I wanted to draw attention away from something I would point to a location and say oh we don't care about this one I just think it's very weird because he brings up this same fact about the single source in Saudi Arabia multiple times throughout the book I think that's a deflection technique possibly to cover a larger operation that's going on that he could have known about. But it also falls into a pattern of like disclosing too much information, frankly. As far as how they interacted with the British separately, this was when Margaret Thatcher was in charge. They called her at the bitch. They had tagged her as an anti-Semite.

Direct quote, there's one simple question asked when anything happened. Is it good for the judge? Jews or not. Forget about policies or anything else. That was the only thing that counted. And depending on the answer, people were called anti-Semites, whether deservedly or not. As far as their own relationship domestically within Israel, the Mossad didn't like Yitzhaklabin. If you know about the history, in 1994, Yitzhaklabin gets assassinated by a extremely radical Zionist settler. faction type. I think by a khanist within Israel. Yeah, I think

it was a colonist. But people also throw a doubt on that story. I don't want to say more than that. You know, if he's mentioning in 1990 that the massad did not like Rabin,

you know, anyway, you understand. So, you know, one story that he tells about Yitzhaklbien, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States had left that job in 1974 and came back to take over the party. He's talking about Rabin himself. To take over the party and succeed Golda Mail, who's the prime minister in the early 1970s, as the prime minister, Rabin demanded raw data from intelligence rather than the distilled

version normally offered, making it much more difficult for Assad to use their information to set the agenda in the way that they wanted. Masad, however, did like, like Menachem Begin. Interesting. Well, you see, if you know a little bit about the Israeli history, earlier on I mentioned that the country was entirely left, quote unquote. The socialist. The labels are very misused and confusing, and it's frankly ill-fitting in this. But from the 40s to the 70s, it was left. And then, like, Massad didn't like the function of Yitzla in the late 70s, but they loved to Menachem Begim. Menachem Beghan then gets put into power in 1977 with Lecood, which starts basically Le Kud's total dominance. He's arguing throughout the book

that basically Masad is not accountable to the prime minister. And you can sort of connect the dots here. Many, many, many of their training operations and espionage activities are also within Israel. that might be because the author was only in the massage for 14 months and didn't do a large number of international operations. But it also could be, you know, the espionage service comes home to roost and take its techniques and steer things a certain way domestically. This would not be the first time. I want to move on to one additional anecdote on U.S. made fighter aircraft. And let me know, Pete, if you want to wind down.

I have tons of these anecdotes. Yeah, do this last one and we'll start to land the jet. Certainly. So, okay, this is now a Stravsky's story. One day a man, so he's working in some kind of office, presumably, it's presumably a government office based on the nature of how he described the story. One day a man came in and asked me to have a contract, that had to be approved by the prime minister.

Contract was for sale of between 20 and 30 U.S. made Skyhawk fighters to Indonesia, something that contravened Israel's armament agreement within the United States. They were not supposed to resell such armaments without U.S. approval. Yeah, no, shit. Can I mention that it's pretty awesome that they're selling fighters to the largest Muslim country in the world. Oh, yeah. And like, something that people don't know,

especially about the Skyhawk, carrier-capable aircraft, extremely competent fighter aircraft. And also, I should add, this was sold from the United States to Israel for Israel's defense. These were not supposed to, again, leave Israel and go to a different country.

I mean, how many, I mean, this is going to happen as part of corruption, but like, you know, I should reiterate, like imagine, I don't know, every other country that we sell fighter aircraft to, they just keep. They don't resell them. Like, you know, but we have to give more military aid and financial aid to Israel, you see, because they need it, even though they're selling it, you know, find the logic here. Anyway, so, okay, this guy wants to say, sell 20 to 30 Skyhawk fighters to Indonesia and break, you know, the Israeli-American arm agreement, no big deal. So, okay, if you don't mind coming tomorrow or leaving me your phone number,

I'll call you once it's taken care of. The man said, no, I'll wait. During my trip to IAI, that is Israeli aviation industries, that is also the same organization that is the recipient of the F-35 Israeli iteration and function. I had seen about 30, of these Skyhawk fighter jets sitting on a runway, completely wrapped in bright yellow plastic and ready for shipping. When we asked about it, they said they were for shipment overseas, but they wouldn't tell us where they were going. I was quite sure there was no way the Americans would approve of the sale if these planes were going to Indonesia. It would change the balance of power in the area. But it wasn't up to me. So when he said he'd wait for Prime Minister Perez's approval,

that's Shimon Peres, I opened my door, looked in and said, shimon, Shimon, I turned to him and said, sorry, Mr. Perez is not here right now. It's a low-level anecdote, but you can bet your ass those planes got sold to Indonesia. And, you know, there's just like, literally, I want to, as we kind of wrap the conclusion here, these are like a series of anecdotes.

There's probably one of these such stories on every five to ten pages or so, both for the entirety of the remainder of the first book. And when they come back at him, him with criticism and calling him insubordinate and incompetent and lying, he publishes a second book literally just of primary sources of these things happening. And, you know, in the 35 years since these books have been published, and we can look back and say, yeah, all this stuff is true. We can independently verify it through American sources and other media sources and etc. So yeah, I'm happy to move to whatever closing thing you want to do.

And we are about, for context, about three quarters of the way through the first book. Well, you know, we can save the last quarter till you're ready to do the second book. And we can just, you know, put that on there, considering. that I guess a lot of it is going to be anecdotes considering what the second book entails. Absolutely. Do you have any other thoughts on this sort of material? No, you know, it's pretty much what we expected, what we expected, what we knew was happening. And what is this part here?

What is this about Oswald? Oh, let me find that section. Okay, okay, we can do the Oswald one. It's a little more exciting. Okay. Okay. So what they, damn, okay. As you know, Pete and I have to the audience,

Pete and I have covered streams on like the CIA and stuff and storming, many guests have come on to talk about kind of the true nature of the Kennedy assassination. I won't repeat that thesis. this it's not my wheelhouse but i will say this he wrote about the this author in this book read about the kendi assassination this is what he said quote verbatim it was just an exercise but it showed that it was impossible to do what oswald was supposed to have done he wasn't even a professional look at the distance from the sixth floor window of a building the kind of equipment he had he didn't even reinforce the bullets the guy had just bought the right

rifle. Anyone knows it takes time and skill to adjust the telescopic skites on a new rifle. The official version just as unbelievable. I left a part of the quote out. Earlier in the quote, he said that they had built an entire compound to replicate the shooting to learn how it had gone down. interesting and that they'd also watch the Zeprooter film and that there were I think they assigned it as like a mob yeah go ahead Abraham Zapruder yeah and the narrative they lay which is like it's kind of like the quote acceptable conspiracy theory and given the nature of the JFK assassination media that was coming out

at the time when the book is published. Like, okay, here's a deception thing. Here's a metathin. Just real quick. If I wanted to deceive people, you don't actually lie to them. You tell them half the truth. So half the truth here in the JFK assassination is that the mob killed Kennedy. This is like the, quote, acceptable conspiracy theory.

I would argue even today. And at the time when he's writing this in 1990, in the late 80s, all these other, very professionally resourced research books are coming out about the mob connections to the Kennedy assassination. So if I was, say, a Mossad agent, I would in my book, literally titled by Way of Deception, someone would probably ask the question, you know, did Mossad kill Kennedy? and I would answer, well, it's probably the mob. Probably the mob killed him. Because you're not going to give the conventional explanation.

I totally believe everything that happened that day, because that's just going to open yourself up to more questions, more doubt, more incredulity. But it's a guy, keep going. I'm sorry. So like, you know, he didn't have to say that they'd built a whole compound

to test this theory. Like, you know, I always think it's funny that the, the guy who got the film footage was born in Ukraine, Jewish family, the guy who killed Oswald. I mean, it's just the connections. And think about it. This is in Dallas in the early 1960s. And it just so happens that two. of the people who are most connected to this case turned out to be Jewish? All right, sure.

Yeah. And the whole thing about the mob doing it, anyone who has actually studied the mob in this country knows that, much like the United States is a satellite is controlled by Israel. we know who controlled the mob in this country. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And it's just something we're like, I mean, if the whole thing is about this guy's intelligence career and espionage career, why would you even like, why would you mention

Oswald? Yeah. You know? It's, it's just like, there's, there's, you know, no proven connection. Like, it's just, I don't know. It's just, it's really weird. It's like how it's like the same thing of like I don't want to get you in trouble but all I'll say is like when BB comes out and says like guys Israel didn't kill Charlie Kirk I'm going to make like four videos on it. You know, it's just you know and I'm not even going to speak one way or the other.

But it's basically just like why would you why would you cast suspicion on yourself? Why would you like make these strange statements? Like what do you think it's like serving your interests like this is so stupid you know sometimes the best policy as a country as a society Is to shut up and not take action Definitely are not learning that throughout the entirety of this book or the entirety of the msad's actions The volume of activity I should add for 1,200 agents not agents 30 agents With the cyaname network like insane.

Insane. 30 people. Like, give me a break. Yeah. Yeah. So I think this is one of those books where you're getting, it's sort of like a limited hangout. You're getting some truth, but some of it is meant to be put out there and,

deflect away from other things. And yeah, just, you know, pretty much like Edward Snowden, basically. Yeah, man, yeah, fascinating, fascinating stuff. All right, man, we're at two hours. So let's wrap it up. And when you're ready for part two, we'll do part two. Absolutely. I will try not to take too long.

Yeah, a lot of what happens going forward is a lot of primary sources. So, yeah, next couple weeks, we should get it out there. And yeah, I hope people enjoy this episode. Me too. I appreciate you, Phyllis. Thank you. Have a good night, Pete.