Interviewer: Tell the story about how you tried to find out what they call the Mossad when they deal publicly.
Guest 1: I thought it was a reasonable question. Trouble is you can't pick up the phonebook. There's no Langley in Israel that you can just look up CIA or in our case Mossad. We thought we should ask, "What should we call it in English?" We can translate the words from Hebrew. As I said, "Mossad" is "institute" but when they write a letter to their friends in the C.I.A. or the British intelligence, what do they call themselves? It took a while. It was a matter of asking the Prime Minister's spokesman. The best you could do because officially The Mossad is under the Prime Minister's office and I think he sorta wondered "why do you want to know" and all that to be explained. He came up with the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service. If it were to have initials, it'd be ISIS. Just simple words like that. Interestingly enough kind of a British model. The British don't really like the terms MI5 and MI6 for their foreign service. They prefer S.I.S., Secret Intelligence Service.
Interviewer: What was the toughest bit of information to gather for this book?
Guest 2: I think about the extent, the involvement of the Israeli government in a topic which is very unusual for intelligence and this is immigration. That's probably more sensitive than dealing with Arab military capabilities. Since Israel perceived itself not just as a State of the Israelis and for Israelis. Also, a State for the Jews whenever, wherever they are, so the Israeli Intelligence is becoming the Jewish Intelligence with two specific missions. One, to protect Jewish communities which are in peril. Mainly in Arab countries. Jewish communities that are persecuted by the local authorities and secondly to bring those Jews that they are not allowed to emigrate to bring them over to Israel. Recently, Israeli Intelligence was trying at least still trying to bring Ethiopian Jews over from Ethiopia. What was known as Operation Moses. So, that I think was tougher than talking, researching for Mossad or for (imperceptible). There is a special unit dealing with Jewish immigration.
The third video below has good information on how the Iraq war was being developed and how Israel was concerned with Iraq primarily but perceived that it could not withstand an Arab attack. All previous wars were fought on Arab lands and Israeli citizens were not hurt. Only Arabs. Also, discussed is how much American citizens give Israelis annually. Not including immigrant housing grants. Whatever the figure is stated even decades ago the exact figure was obscured. Arab intelligence efforts are described as elementary compared to Israel’s but Soviet Jews were noted to be moving to Israel in hordes since Gorbachev opened the floodgates. The guests stated that this was a concern of Israeli Intelligence.
