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Rise and Kill First
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Behind the scenes with the real Garbiel Allon's. A recommendation on rise up and kill first.
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Casting choices.....for Meir Dagan and maybe Avraham Shalom, I wonder who could play them.
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Casting choices.....for Meir Dagan and ..."
I wonder if they would be able to recreate the Operation Spring of Youth Chapter......
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Among general pop culture, there are some perceptions and stereotypes of spies by nationality. The British are either suave and smooth talking, or morose, depressed arse covering beuracrats, but ones who take gathering useful intelligence seriously. The Americans are either the Christians In Action who can’t help but make a bad situation worse, or are blundering and violently jingoistic and incomptent with their militarized approach to the gentleman’s game. The Russians are the gleefully card carrying villians who take the no – kill live overkill approach to destroying enemies of the Motherland, while at the same time crafting delicate, sometimes too clever by half gambits. And then, we come to the Israelis.
The general perception of the Israeli intelligence and military community, is that of the kill artist. Considering the surprisingly large number of former arts students or amateur artists among the list of most honored and revered Mossad Officers, it should come as no surprise that whether it comes to gathering intelligence, or preparing and executing a black operation where many bodies will hit the floor, Mossad, Shin Bet, Aman and the Israeli Defence Forces approach the spying game like how an artist approaches their work, crafting masterpieces that stand for years to the renown and admiration of the audience.
By far the most famous masterpiece the guardians and gatekeepers of the Jewish State have crafted is the world’s most sophisticated paramilitary capability run by an intelligence service. Sure, the CIA has the Special Activities Division, the SIS has The Increment, the French, their Service Action and the Russians have an army of thugs and mechanics along with their rough and tumble Spetsnaz teams, but none of them possess the political freedom, experience, precision and sheer, jaw dropping creativity that units like the Kidon Team do. It’s this paramilitary capability, this masterpiece, which has been running almost non stop since the creation of Israel that has been used to anihilate her enemies and their sympathizers from Canada to the Sudan. And as a result, Israel has come under constant, unceasing criticism by otherwise friendly governments and activists who haven’t walked in the shoes of those whose job is to ensure that never again will the Jews live with a boot being stomped into their face like through much of world history.
But who are the guardians and gatekeepers really? Like any world class spies, they prefer the muggles of the general public know only what they want them to know. This end is achieved by a hurricane of lies, omissions and selective exaggeration, given a helping hand by generations of thriller writers and filmmakers aroud the world. The SIS benefitted from 50 years of free advertising by EON’s James Bond, and organizations like Mossad and Shin Bet have been hit by similar mystique. However, such a portrayal only has grains of truth, but not the truth. And these cloak and dagger magicians have historically been more content with going to the grave with their secrets.
However, in the book I’m going to review today, those magicians have decided to tell a little bit more of the truth about themselves, their profession and the duty they’ve performed with unbeliable skill, against bibilacal odds over more than half a century. As they, themselves would say, in a world where antisemites are once again on the march, whether Islamist, far leftist or far rightists, sometimes, when they are coming to kill you, you need to rise up, and kill them all first.
Rise And Kill First. It is the title of a new book written by Ronen Bergman, a noted Israeli investigative journalist. The head security corespondent of the most widely circulated daily paper in Israel, Bergman reports on the activities of the Israeli Intelligence and Defence aparatus along with any major geopolitical developments that concern the Jewish State. With a list of insider sources as long as the Golan Heights, Bergman’s work has become renowned and infamous for gaining a far more accurate picture of what the Ramsads and the Gatekeepers get up to, compared to exhuberent sensationalists like Gordan Thomas and chartlans like Ross and Ostrovsky. Bergman’s writing is a balance between the pace and juicy details of a spy thriller novel, and the sobert, cooly dispasionate assessment of a seasoned geopolitical analysis. While his work is exciting, on a deeper level, it assesses some very relevant global security issues to a far more insightful degree than his peers.
And Rise And Kill First is no exception. It’s a book, that is the unofficial history of the Israeli Military And Intelligence communities, and what could be considered Berman’s magnum opus. It charts the development of Israel’s paramilitary capability from the wild, uncertain days of the Post WW2 British Mandate Era, right up to 2016 on the eve of one of the more contentious elections in Israel’s history. Black ops, intelligence gathering, counter – terrorism and geopolitical powerplays, Bergman lays it all on the table and throws them into a non fiction, intergenrational epic saga, unlike any other. This intergenrational saga is about the story of a country, told from the perspective of the men who have defended it all these years. It is about how they first formed their paramilitary apratus, the first jobs they conducted and how they changed and evolved with each new threat they faced. And along the way, Bergman transcends his original brief and explores a very important theme that is almost never covered in your average spy novel. But that can wait for later. Now to the review. What happens when you’re tasked with making sure an entire race and religion is never going to be wiped out again, in a world full of nations out for your blood and people who just don’t care?
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It’s this incident, a microism of the institutional disagreements Israeli intelligence and military services have had with their civilian masters over the years, which is one of the pillars of this book and the entry into a true, inter – generational saga of the ages. We then segway into the first chapter where Bergman tells the tale of the war for Israeli Independence in the wild days of the British Mandate era where hardline Zionist groups sought to speed up the decolonization process through liquidating troublesome British policemen and Arab leaders who thought the growing Jewish Community was a menace to them. While crude and amateurish, and disowned by leaders like David Ben Gurion, these methods are the progenator of the ones that would be used by the Kidon Teams and others over the coming decades. Such methods would gain legitimacy, as Bergman recounts after WW2, with 6 million European Jews wiped out by the industrialized genocide machine built by Nazi Germany.
The lesson learned over the Holocaust was that the Jewish people would need to sharpen up. No longer would they be the Jews of the diaspora, treated as the runt of the litter by successive European states whose rulers hypocritically made use of the excellent human capital of their Jewish subjects while at the same time persecuting them violently on a whim. Instead, it would be men like Isser Harrel, Rafi Eitan and others like them who would ensure that the future Jewish state could destroy those coming to wipe it out, and its coming generations avoid the fate of dying on their knees.
And it’s this goal, to preserve, protect and defend Israel, that gave birth to the legendary Israeli intelligence community and is its primary mandate. Over the course of 35 chapters, Bergman takes us readers on an odessy that spans generations and more than half a century of Middle Eastern geopolitics. He shows us the main players, the founding fathers of the Israeli paramilitary and covert ops capability and their successors. Their first jobs where they navigated the learning curve with methodical skill. Their triumphs and tragedies where they gained renown and infamy while taking a few knocks along the way. The midlife crisis which like the CIA, they suffered from. And the ressurgence where with new talent and reforms, they got back into the game of kicking arse and taking names with aplomb. Everything from the legendary operations such as the dramatic Spring of Youth Hit, to the lesser known missions like the SALT FISH project is covered in Rise and Kill First, but with new facts and information that will surprise you in some cases, in how it gives a true behind the scenes look at the background, and also at times brings the reader’s expectations which may be distorted by works of fiction, back down to earth. A thousand battlefields across the Middle East and the world at large, fought by men and women who understood the line from the Talmud that motivates them to be the watchers on the wall, not just for Israel, but for jews worldwide. When A Man Comes To Kill You, Rise Up And Kill Him First.
In terms of content, Rise Up and Kill First is a grand, detailed journey through history that leaves almost no stone uncovered. Most people are familiar with the hallowed names, of Sayaret Matkal, Shin Bet, the Kidon Teams and Aman. But few know how they came to be established in the first place and the individuals who set them up. Rise and Kill First, brings the story of their Genesis to a mostly unfamiliar Western audience for the first time in decades. The Kidon Teams for instance, the stars of the Munich movie are usually seen as these slick, dashing gunmen who outwit Western Police and terrorists with gleeful abandon. Bergman however tells us the story of how it, and the other paramilitary units controlled by the Jewish state were formed. We also get apperances by the Grenade Rangers of Ariel Sharon, the IDF Flotilla 13 unit and the Cherry Gaza Strip Squads among others which have never achieved the recognition or accurate portrayals in media that they deserve. Bergman outlines the initial political and social factors that led to the future state of Israel investing heavily in paramilitary teams to become a foreign policy tool and defend the state, which included repeated historical persecution and the fact that non Jewish nations while saying “never again”, would almost readily let butchery go down on their watch.
A key part of what makes Rise and Kill first so fresh and interesting, in the world of cookie cutter books about the Mossad is that it expands on legendary operations and broader historical events with never before revealled details, weaving them all into a canvas that paints a far clearer picture than before. Highlights include the Operation Spring of Youth Incident, the clockwork raid into the heart of Beirut with Ehud Barak cross dressing and blazing away with an Uzi, the 1971 Wrath of God Project where the Kidon unit stepped out for its blood splattered coming of age party and the 1980s shennanegans in Beirut where the biggest game of whack a terrorist ended up levelling most of the city in three years. But what Bergman does is show the hidden things that the particpants of the ops left out. Whether it be the fact that the Mossad getaway driver let one of the Flotilla 13 commandos bleed to death on the night of Spring of Youth, Yasser Arafat being in the rifle scopes of seven IDF snipers as he walked out of Lebanon, or even what went down when Mossad found the CIA Beirut station deep in bed with a Palestinian terrorist, Rise and Kill first will keep surprising you to the very end and make you reevaluate some of the things you thought you knew.
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But one bullet is not effective on its own. The author shows how the tit for tat killing portrayed in a Scott Harvath novel ultimately doesn’t cut it in real life, as Mossad and Shin Bet initially found out during hunts in glittering Europe and the claustraphobic Gaza Strip. Rather, as both agencies and the IDF learned, you need to set up systems and procedures to utilize the ingredients of an assasination to perfection. Whether it be integrated ops rooms for the departments to work in sync, trailblazing in mobile surveillance and miniturized explosives, creating the first weaponized UAVs, and before that, using drones to improve the accuracy of Apache Helicopter gunships, Rise and Kill First shows that the true strength of the Israeli Paramilitary appratus is not badass gunmen who can put a bullet between your eyes at a thousand yards, but rather ingenuity, an obsessive compulsive eye for detail and the ability to use information in such a way to apply the firepower to the place where it can cause the most devestation to the target.
This is seen in beautifully recounted detail where Shin Bet under the briliant Avi Dichter and Yuval Diskin’s successful effort at smashing the Hamas organization through successfully using a combination of advanced tracking techniques and tradecraft to pick off the cogs that cultivated the suicide bombers attacking Israel. It’s not about killing the head of the wolfpack which makes a difference and will save lives. It’s about shooting as many members of the wolfpack as possible so it can’t threaten you as much.
Another thing that makes Rise and Kill First stand out is the attention paid to the cockups and more unsavory moments of Israeli Intelligence. The morality of the spying business switches between light and dark gray, with it usually being the latter in the Israeli context due to the constant threat of the assymetric threat targeting it. Such incidents like the Bus 300 affair where Avner Shalom, the Shin Bet director had two amateurish terrorists beaten to death and then proceeded to frame a senior IDF General for responsibility of the deed are covered in full, along with others such as the darkly comedic intrulude where IDF Chief of Staff Raful Eitan piloted a plane to bomb Arafat and barely missed. Rise and Kill first, will give a rather jarring reality check to readers who have been blissfully unaware that for all the profesionalism, experience and resources, the men and women who are part of the IDF, Mossad, Shin Bet and Aman are still human and can fall prey to the occasional mistakes, emotions and malicious pettiness that anyone else can. Probably one of the reason why the powers that be have grinded their teeth at this book and Bergman is because by showing a far more rounded picture of them, he damages the mystique and legend that has generated fear among the enemies that they’re going after. But for us readers, such coverage of errors, is enriching as it humanizes the people working in the shadows. They’re not perfect, but they’re working at their best day in and day out to protect their country from harm.
Thematically, the book focuses on some of the most interesting and relevant themes you don’t normally see in a non fiction book about spying. The first, and in my view, the most important, is the nature of real life paramilitary operations in the espionage business. No nonfiction book on spies and geopolitics has ever gone into this area, and what Bergman has done here is groundbreaking. Most spy thrillers focus on paramilitary work, assassins, soldiers and shooters killing evil men and women, and Rise and Kill First, by focusing on the real life nature of paramilitary work, would make any exhuberent Post 9/11 spy thriller fan very, very sober and a lot more appreciative of just how complicated it really is.
The author examines the utility and morality of paramilitary tactics in real life, and how far can a democracy really go with them. He explores the real prices that a country and those of its citizens who dive down this dark covert ops rabbit hole have to pay in engaging in such stressfull, nerve destroying work. Bergman finds that as a tool, paramilitary operations in espionage can have a positive result for those executing them when geared towards a specific, focused goal and acting as one of many means to an end, rather than the only means and the only end. Most civilians would shudder at the perceived immorality of paramilitary ops, but one would concur that done in a precise fashion, and taking care to minimize collateral damage, it is far cleaner than dropping a bomb on a apartment block from an F16 jet fighter. Finally, Bergman shows the consequences of what happens when paramilitary operations get infected with hubris and politics, leading to some very disastrous results.
The second theme which is less pronounced is the cautionary tale about having intelligence services distinctly geared towards operations. What results, is cripling overspecialization, with inferior analysis of future threats and opportunities. Mossad, for instance is an operations focused agency, which means it’s geared to current threats and usually unable to pre – empt current ones as its analysis of data isn’t as good as, say the UK SIS. That flaw led to Israel nearly reaching the point of death during the Yom Kippur War, being blindsided by Hamas and the Hezbollah puppet controlled by Iran and other issues that it’s been forced to clean up in a permanent fashion. It’s the inversion of its western counterparts who have good analysis, but lack the operational capability to react to them.
Thirdly, and the one very casual observers of the Israeli Palestinian conflict will find most interesting. The desperate, desparing search for a long term solution. Most of the individuals who run the Israeli military and intelligence apparatus are far from being the jingoistic demons that Palestinian activists worldwide paint them as. As Bergman shows, they’re much more reflective and almost unanimously in favor of a two state solution. They’re not peaceniks but realists who, while rightfully proud of their work and the legacies they’ve made in fighting foreign and domestic threats to Israel, know that the state of affairs they’re in is unacceptable, and may be unsustainable in the long run against an adversary that is equally as tenacious as them. Unfortunately, ever since The Six Day War when the third Ramsad Meir Amit, wrote in his diary, despairing at the fact his political masters had got caught up in the national euphoria and neglected to make a peace that would appeal to the more pragmatic and cordial instincts of Israel’s neighbours, the soldiers and spies have had to shoulder the burden of a political leadership that has sometimes let them down with a lack of guidance and occasional foolhardy decisions which the military and intelligence profesionals have had to provide a check and balance on
There’s so much more I could talk about on Rise and Kill First. But I will have to stop here to not break the wordcount limiter for goodreads reviews. Ronen Bergman has written a triumph of modern journalism, and done his profession proud, in the age of hysterical pundits and a limp wristed fourth estate that is no longer deserving of the title of “gatekeeper”. Rise and Kill First is an epic, non fiction saga spanning generations and the history of a nation like no other. Told from the perspective of a unique community of individuals with special sets of skills, that has seen many members come and go over more than 70 years, the book, examines the most significant security isses ongoing today, in a clear, beautifully nuanced and fair style. Handling its violate subject matter with consumate skill, Rise and Kill first masterfully explores timeless, relevant themes like civilian – military/intelligence clashes, the nature of modern terrorism and most impressively of all, a deep investigation into how far a free society can take paramilitary operations in the world of espionage. The world is at its most dangerous now since the end of the Cold War. The wolves and vultures are blowing down the door and circling in for the kill. But there’s one country which has learned a lesson of survival at times like these. To Rise And Kill First.
Well put Samuel :)
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I wanted to write a bigger review, and so I did....and yet I don't feel I have articulated my thoughts well enough. But at least I've captured the sentiment of my feelings about this triumphant book.
Samuel..... I said it, and Felix as well, that your writing was exemplary. You think you articulated simply general thoughts.
Hang on- Im going somewhere with this:)
I have read everything you have written re this book, from reviews, discussions, questions, answers and why you referred it..
Many times a sentence or a single word triggers one to read between the lines.
Though I cant read your mind, I think whatever you feel missing in words are the feelings in between those lines.
So now... who do you think will play Peter Malkin in this series?
Incredible review, Samuel. Very perceptive. Thank you.
Stacey wrote: "Samuel..... I said it, and Felix as well, that your writing was exemplary. You think you articulated simply general thoughts.
Hang on- Im going somewhere with this:)
I have read everything you ha..."
Stacey wrote: "Samuel..... I said it, and Felix as well, that your writing was exemplary.
You think you articulated simply general thoughts.
Hang on- Im going somewhere with this:)
I have read everything you ha..."
Samuel- thank you for telling me about the movie and the series. Operation Finale opens Wednesday.
Peter Malkin's role is being played by Oscar Issac, and you had said Ben Kingsley was playing Eichmann. Peter Strauss is also in it.
Trailer looked great. LKM when after you see it.
Congratulations go to Ronen Bergman, author of"Rise and Kill First"
He has just won an award for Best Book in the category of History
from the National Jewish Book Council.
Well deserved!!
Kudos to you Ronen!!!
Samuel had written a fabulous review of his book on 6/19/2018
It is worth the read.
As a rule magicians never tell their secrets and prefer to die with them rather than loosen their lips. The same can be said for the Guardians of Israel who like any good spies, prefer misdirection, strategic exaggeration and the occasional modest downplaying to keep what really happened under wraps. Case in point the sometimes exuberant journalist Gordon Thomas whose Gideon's Spies has been shown to have quite a bit of exaggeration over the years.
This time however, the magicians have decided to tell more of the truth in a book that is set to be the seminal 2018 release, beating out Steve Coll's Directorate S for the most hotly anticipated non fiction history book of this year.
"Rise up and kill first". These are the words that the men who run Israel's paramilitary operations live and die by. Taken from the Babylonian edition of the Talmud, it's a reference to how Israel does not want to see another would be Hitler getting to that blood soaked finish line.
To achieve this end, whether it be a bomb sent by express delivery through an Iranian nuclear power plant or that trademark hail of .22LR lead fired from Italian made automatics, Mossad and Sayaret Matkal were finding, fixing and finishing people before Mitch Rapp and Scott Harvath made it cool.
This book is written by Ronen Bergman, the journalist in Israel who knows all the main players and has illuminated the pitch black dark spaces. At 900 pages it is the complete history of covert ops, intelligence gathering and assassination by those who defend Israel.
Starting from the humble days of the British Mandate era where Zionist militants were knocking off British Tommies and Ruperts, we then go on an odessy through the war against the Post Colonial Arab nations, the wave of PLO terrorism, the dark days of the Lebanese Civil War, both Infatadas and concluding in 2016 with the death of one of the greatest Middle Eastern spies in history, saying that there's a lot of detail in this book is like saying bullets go through flesh and blood.
A thousand anecdotes, a thousand battles on the never ending covert war that is the espionage game. Chronicling the greatest hits by letter bomb, car bomb, air force bomb, bullets and in one case, the worst dental hygiene product in the world.
Exploring the biggest defeats and setbacks which include the ones that they would have preferred to keep under wraps, this book is the warts and all portrait of the most idolized and demonized group of soldiers and spies in the world that in the age where facts are now irrelevant but feelings are in fashion is truly a welcome relief. This is proof that proper journalism is not dead.
The cast of characters is phenomenal and so are the little stories woven into the narrative. We have Mossad's founding fathers and how they got their first office (a group of Nazi loving German Protestants were in Tel Aviv and were removed from the vicinity permanently), their assets like Otto Skorzeny who proved to be an even better intelligence officer and manipulator than commando when Mossad hired him for a job, the seminal events like the formation of the Kidon team that has brought the fear of Allah to millions of terrorists from Paris to Beirut, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. The material in this book would provide any spy series with enough information to go on for decades.
As I said above however, this is a true warts and all account. Some people you may admire do not come off well in this book. And some of the biggest mistakes stuff ups and some of the more mad "proposals" that were considered are recounted in detail that will leave you quite shaken even. But this serves in humanizing the people in the story. They're not Gods, but very human, trying to do the best they can in spite of what their job throws at them.
At the heart of this story however, is an analysis about the paramilitary side of the espionage game (aka the side of the business which the most beloved spy novels are drawn from). It shows you the planning, the hard work and sheer effort it takes to kill a man that you only see a third of in a thriller novel.
The men who developed the paramilitary capability as you'll learn in the book, are proud of their creation and rightfully so. But they understood that it can only bring short term tactical victories, but not the long term solution that they realize their country would need. And it's this tactical victory and strategic defeat dichotomy that you'll learn cuts to the heart of the utility of paramilitary operations in covert affairs.
To conclude. This is the book about the real Gabriel Allons and peels back the curtain to show you the time, effort and suffering they've had to do to create that "badass Israeli" legend. For thriller fans, "Rise Up and Kill First" can leave you unsatisfied with many spy novels. For writers, this book is an amazing resource if you want to write about Mossad, Shin Bet and Amamn. And for those who want to learn something new and are tired about the same old portrayals, this is the book for you.