Document: [Article from The
Daily Telegraph
London, April 5 1998] by Uzi Mahnaimi Tel
Aviv WHEN Ephraim Halevy,
the new British-born head of Mossad, starts work
this week, his first target will be London. Eleven
years after Margaret Thatcher shut down the
Israeli foreign intelligence service's station in
Palace Green, Kensington, and expelled its
operatives, Halevy wants Mossad to resume its
activities in Britain. Intelligence sources say
Halevy considers the issue so important that he has
already asked Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime
minister, to raise it when Tony Blair visits
Israel later this month. The negotiations will be
delicate. A furious Thatcher, then prime minister,
closed Mossad's London base in 1987 after it was
discovered that Israeli agents had withheld from
British intelligence information about a plot to
assassinate a Palestinian journalist. Naji
Ali, a cartoonist, was shot dead in a South
Kensington street. Although it has never
entirely halted activities in Britain, Mossad's
ability to operate has been seriously hampered by
its "illegal" status. Halevy believes Britain is
the leading European centre for Arab and Muslim
fundamentalists. Hamas, the fundamentalist
Palestinian group that has sent a series of suicide
bombers against Israeli targets, receives a
significant amount of its funding from supporters
in England. Mossad wants help in stopping
Hamas raise money, ostensibly for humanitarian
causes, some of which is believed to go to the
families of suicide bombers. As well as providing
information on Hamas, the new station would monitor
British-based members and supporters of Hezbollah,
the Iranian-backed militia that is fighting the
Israeli army in southern Lebanon, and would keep an
eye on representatives of hardline Middle East
states such as Iran, Iraq and Syria. | If anyone can persuade the
British government to allow Mossad back in, it is
Halevy. Brought up in north London, he is the
nephew of the late Sir Isaiah Berlin, who
was sent by Winston Churchill to the British
embassy in Washington 25 years ago to liaise with
American Jews and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Their respect was mutual. "Each time he was in London
we met," Berlin once said of Halevy. "We never
talked about intelligence matters even though I
knew he was a Mossad man. This guy Ephraim is a
true Israeli patriot who knows his job." Halevy, 63, who left Britain
for Israel as a teenager, proved his diplomatic
skills in unusual fashion. In 1987 he was stopped
by police for speeding at 100mph down the M4 on his
way to represent Mossad at a secret meeting between
King Hussein of Jordan and Shimon
Peres, then Israeli foreign minister. He was
let off without showing his Israeli diplomatic
passport or his British one, and even persuaded the
officers to escort him. Halevy will need all his
charm and talent, however, if he is to succeed in
restoring the Israeli intelligence agency not only
to London, but to its former reputation. A one-time Mossad operative
himself - he resigned after being refused the top
job and served as ambassador to the European Union
in Brussels until his appointment last month -
Halevy is taking over an organisation deeply
demoralised by a series of embarrassing
blunders. The agency has yet to recover
from an operation in Jordan last September, when
operatives were caught red-handed and imprisoned
after trying to assassinate a Hamas leader on an
Amman street by squirting poison into his
ear. It was Halevy's personal
intervention with King Hussein, a long-standing
friend, that soothed anger in the Arab country with
which Israel has the warmest relations.
© Daily
Telegraph, 1998 |
No.14, July 20,
1998
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