...Yossi Melman: Under the British mandate the element which is known nowadays as Mossad was doing political espionage, diplomatic espionage, to have a feeling of what the British rulers are up to, trying to maintain contact with Arab leaders in the surrounding countries and also were in charge of smuggling the weapons to the Jewish underground formations, the militias, and also they were in charge of illegal, what the British called illegal immigration of Jews mainly from Europe after the Second World War and the Holocaust, to Palestine, to the pre statehood Israel.
Annabelle Quince: According to Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, what made the Mossad so effective was the training many of them gained from the British, both in Palestine and later in Scotland.
Gordon Thomas: What made them good and powerful was they had a British officer who trained them. He was a Zionist and he offered his services to them, and the British wanted him to do that, because they were having a handful of trouble with the Arabs. But he had taught the Israelis exactly the tactics of how to fight and defend themselves, and from that, many volunteered to join the British Army during World War II, and they became members of a special operations executive. They were trained in espionage tactics and the Jews who signed on were young, clever, formidable and they were trained in Scotland, then they were dropped into Europe, and they became among the first spies that entered the war in Europe. When they went back to Israel after the war, they were recruited into the Haganah again, and they became part of the formation that would lead to Mossad, and these people had learnt espionage techniques, they'd learnt guerrilla warfare techniques, and they had also learnt some techniques from the Americans in the jungles of Asia, and they combined all these to form themselves into what eventually became known as Mossad. Now Mossad itself, the word just means 'the office' if you like, and they were very small in number. At one stage there were four separate intelligence services who were conflicting with each other, and one by one, the Prime Minister reduced them all and Ben Gurion insisted as Prime Minister that it would be Mossad. He knew the Mossad people from the war, he knew what they'd done, and these were people he wanted to head his intelligence service. And they began in a small office, then they moved to a building in the centre of Tel Aviv, and now they have a certain number of safe houses around Tel Aviv. They've expanded, they expanded like any small company going big if you like. And they're extraordinary, I mean they're out in the Negev Desert, the people who are out there are the most deadly of all, they are the Kidon. Kidon in Hebrew means of course bayonet, and these are the assassins.
Yossi Melman: Its role and mission has changed during the years. The Mossad I would say have had traditionally more or less four or five missions. One, and it's the most important one, is to provide intelligence, information, about the capabilities and the intentions of Israel's enemies and mainly to provide an early warning if these enemies, these states which are considered to be enemy, though declare themselves as enemies, are planning an attack on Israel, this is the ultimate goal of the Mossad, and for that, they are running agents under deep cover. They are told 'Please do nothing, don't risk yourself, only provide us with information which would indicate let's say the Syrian Army or in the past the Egyptian Army are planning an attack against Israel.' This is the main mission. I can give you a very good example which is still engraved in our minds, and this is the days which led to the Yom Kippur War, the 9th October, 1973 war. The Mossad had a very good agent in Egypt. His name was Alsof Mawan, he was the son in-law of the then Egyptian President, Gamal Abdul Nasser, actually he volunteered to provide information; eventually he was paid but he came to Israeli Embassy in London, wanted to work with Israel, he wanted to take revenge on his father in-law and maybe there was some other motive. First he was rejected. After a few weeks he came back again and then he was accepted, and went underwent some tests and eventually was recruited and run as an agent, and he provided Israel, a day before the war of '73, with very precise information that the war is imminent and it's coming that it would happen within a few hours. The information was so important and so shocking, that the head of the Mossad at the time personally flew to London to meet him secretly, to make sure that this agent is accurate and was telling the truth. And he called the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir at the time, and told her, 'Tomorrow there will be a war'. ...
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