By Way of Deception

Israeli intelligence services have made their share of mistakes but few have been as stupid as trying legally to suppress publication of By Way of Deception. Not only did the effort fail miserably, but the attendant publicity made the book a number one best seller for weeks on end. As a result, Ostrovsky has gained a huge audience for his grab-bag of true and imaginary stories.

When Ostrovsky restricts himself to his personal experiences as a Mossad trainee in the mid-1980s, his account is sometimes reliable but not very interesting; he tells us that intelligence agencies in Israel operate just about the way they do elsewhere. But this is not what made his book a sensation. Rather, his stories about Mossad dirty tricks won him fame and fortune. We learn that Mossad knew in advance about the truck bomb that killed 241 U.S.Marines in October 1983 but held this information back from the Americans; that Mossad is to blame for the Iran/contra affair; that it has killed Palestinians willing to talk to Israel, fearing a diplomatic solution; and that it kept the Iraq-Iran war going by keeping each side informed of the other's ships.

How Ostrovsky knows all this is something of a mystery. He reports in detail on a division of the Mossad called Al so "super-secret" that most Mossad employees do not know what it does-yet he was nothing but a trainee and novice case officer. In fact, Ostrovsky has enshrined the banter and braggadocio of the mess, freely mixing fact and fantasy. His account is not all wrong, but it has no credibility.

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