Mossad Pulp Fiction
By Philip Giraldi 

The motto of Israel's foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, translates as "By way of deception you shall make war." As every intelligence officer knows, covert actions aimed at deception are force multipliers, enabling a weaker party to create confusion and uncertainty in a stronger opponent. Sun Tzu called deception in military campaigns the key to victory.

Traditionally, a deception operation is carefully planned and executed, requiring patience and painstaking attention to detail to sustain the false narrative. In today's instant news cycle fueled by the Internet, however, deception is no longer necessarily a laborious process involving carefully placing bits of information that initially appear to be true to establish bona fides, eventually resulting in the false intelligence that leads the target down the wrong road. Far better than dropping disinformation bon mots on various websites, it is now even possible to write a self-published or online-generated book to do the job more comprehensively.

[1]A recent book, Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel's Secret Wars [2], appears to be just such a narrative, mixing the certainly true with the plausible and then with the certainly false to create a disinformation package designed to woo the reader into thinking that the Israeli intelligence service is invincible. The book was written by Israelis Yossi Melman, a leading journalist, and Dan Raviv, a political correspondent employed by CBS, both of whom are regarded as experts in military intelligence. Armageddon came out in English last Monday from an obscure New York-based publisher, Levant Books. Parts of it have reportedly become instant samizdat-style best sellers [3] in Tehran, where the sections relating to Iran were quickly translated into Farsi. Iranian readers believe that the book is in part a leak of an accurate account of Israeli intelligence operations directed against their country, a conclusion that is precisely what the two authors and their supporters inside the Israeli intelligence service might well want them to embrace.