Nonsensical as the idea was, it had colored Shamir’s views of the United States to the point of near hatred. He had personally authorized, “as a gesture of goodwill” (another favorite phrase of Shamir’s) to pass on to the Soviet Union a portion of the estimated five hundred thousand pages of documents Jonathan Pollard had stolen. Shamir hoped this would improve Israel’s relationship with Moscow. The documents included current U.S. intelligence on Soviet air defenses and the CIA’s annual review of the entire Russian capability to make war. One document included satellite photographs, communication intercepts, radar intelligence, and reports from CIA agents in the Soviet Union. When Shamir had been told by Nahum Admoni that the data would almost certainly enable Soviet counterintelligence to discover the spies, he had reportedly shrugged.
At their meeting to discuss what to do about Ostrovsky, Shamir repeated to Robert Maxwell what he had told others: he would do anything to reduce American influence in the world, and was convinced that Washington had encouraged Ostrovsky to publish his books as an act of retaliation.
Shamir asked Maxwell to mobilize his powerful media resources to destroy Ostrovsky’s credibility. Maxwell pointed out that before employing him, Mossad would surely have checked his background.
Nevertheless, Ostrovsky became the object of a smear campaign in the Maxwell media, including the Tel Aviv tabloid
Having studied Ostrovsky’s books, senior members of the Israeli intelligence community knew much of what he claimed was true.
The New York court refused to accept the Israeli government’s argument that Israel’s national security was endangered by Ostrovsky’s revelations. His book became a best-seller.
Though the first person to publicly identify Robert Maxwell’s links to Mossad, Ostrovsky had by no means revealed the full story. Like so much else, it had its roots firmly entangled in the activities of Shamir’s old and valued friend, Rafi Eitan.
The two men had known each other since the 1950s, when they had served in Mossad, sharing an equal determination to fight to achieve Israel’s place in the world.
Thirty years on, in 1986, it had been Shamir who had stood by Rafi Eitan during the crushing criticism he had faced in the aftermath of the Pollard affair, condemned as the leader “of a group of renegade intelligence officers acting without authorization.”
The lie was a desperate attempt by the Israeli government to distance itself from an episode from which the intelligence community had hugely benefited, as had those of the Soviet Union and South Africa. With the full connivance of Israel, both countries had received valuable information about U.S. spying activities.
Nevertheless, with the concurrent unraveling of his role in the arms-to-Iran scandal, Rafi Eitan was professionally severely damaged. Though deeply hurt and angry at the way his own peers had singled him out for blame, the old spymaster had remained stoically silent in public; and for those trusted friends who had once sat in his living room and listened enthralled to his account of the capture of Adolf Eichmann, he had a new story to tell: how Israel turned on its own.
Increasingly fewer people rang Rafi Eitan’s doorbell on Shay Street, or joined him in admiring his latest creations fashioned from scrap metal. For hours he would stand alone before his furnace brandishing his fiery torch, his mind filled no longer purely with anger over the way he had been treated, but with plans to find a way not only to “get back into the game,” but also to make himself some “real money.” His decision to continue to help his country despite the ignominy poured on him contained a touching simplicity: “Patriotism is not a fashionable word anymore. I am a patriot. I believe in my country. Right or wrong, I will fight anyone who threatens it or its people.”
That had been the wellspring for a scheme he had secretly nurtured during the height of his involvement in Irangate. Like so many of Rafi Eitan’s plans, this one required him to use his undoubted talent to exploit the original idea of someone else. It would be a plan that would eventually find him no longer remembered only as the man who captured Adolf Eichmann, but as someone who became a close associate of Robert Maxwell.
In 1967, communications expert William Hamilton returned to the United States from Vietnam, where he had devised a network of electronic listening posts to monitor the Vietcong as its forces moved through the jungle. Hamilton was offered a job with the National Security Agency. His first task had been to create a computerized Viet-namese-English dictionary that proved to be a powerful aid to translating Vietcong messages and interrogating prisoners.
