Recruitment by key word

Tso-met / Me-lu-cha**Recruitment**Contact surveillance**Hooks**Na-ka**Passports / Papers**Cover**White agents**Payment scale**Black agents**Communications

The Mossad prefers to recruit spies who are already in place. Operations in Arab countries are considered dangerous. Therefore agents are recruited in Western countries where Mossad has stations and easy access to foreign diplomats.

Most Mossad agents in the Arab world are warning agents whose role is simply to watch for indications of war preparation from the vantage of their everyday positions in regular employment, and to report whatever they might notice.

The recruitment of agents, and the operations they are recruited for, nearly always call upon the skills of the katsa in deceiving the target recruit in order first to discover, then to exploit, his personal weakness or ambition.

Deception is therefore the key to recruitment of agents as well as the operations devised to use them, and the Mossad boasts a very high success rate that owes much to the training and acquired skills of katsas, who practice deception as an art form and a way of life.

Not only does the Mossad effectively make Israeli foreign policy with arms sales to militarist regimes around the world, it mounts operations designed specifically to influence the Middle East policy of all Western countries in favor of Israeli militant goals, by providing disinformation to the western media.

Recruitment operations

Agents are recruited by the Tso-met or Me-lu-cha recruitment department of Mossad which operates about 35 katsas an elite corps of highly trained case officers that it dispatches individually and in small groups around the world to set up operations.

The idea of recruitment is like rolling a rock down a hill. ...

You take somebody and get him gradually to do something illegal or immoral.

You push him down the hill. What you're doing is working with traitors. An agent is a traitor, no matter how much he rationalizes it. You're dealing with the worst kind of person. ...

We didn't blackmail people. We didn't have to. We manipulated them. ...

You come to a place, verify that you are clean not being followed, then start to recruit, and afterward write a report.

Surveillance details are debated by team-members back at a safe house, where decisions are made about what to do next and in particular how to make contact with the subject under an appropriate cover.

. Agents are often recruited unawares by accepting money for something that seems almost legitimate. The story of the harbormaster in Tripoli is a perfect example of this technique see By Way of Deception p. 302.

The first is an information report detailing what was said. The second is an operations report, dealing with the operational aspects of the meeting such as who, what, when, where and why.

The two reports each in a seperat folder are then given to a bodel or courier who conveys messages between the safe house and the embassy.

Both reports are sent to Israel separately through computers or in dips under separate information and operation code names. The operational report will be broken down further to fragment the intelligence it contains.

The information reports are advanced to other agencies in the Israeli intelligence community, but not the operations reports, another reason for separate reports.

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Katsas prefer to use their real papers rather than phoney documents at border crossings. But once inside the country for an operation, they will adopt a cover with supporting ID. There are four qualities of passport: top, second, field operation, and throwaway.

Throwaway passports have been found or stolen. The photo and sometimes the name have been changed, but they are used only when a passport is needed to flash. Ne-vi-ot uses them, and they are used for recruiting in Israel. But they would not stand up to scrutiny.

A field-operations passport is normally used for quick operations and carried into the foreign country inside a diplomatic pouch in an envelope with a phoney wax seal Bordero that can be opened and closed without breaking.

The passports could also be delivered to a katsa by a bodel .

Second-quality passports are perfect passports except that they are built on the katsas' cover stories. The passport is not genuine since the identity is false.

Top quality passports have a cover story and a real person to back up the story. They would withstand official scrutiny, even a check by the country of origin.

Jews who emigrate to Israel are often asked to give up their passports for just this reason. These passports are stored by the thousands, classified and coded in a computer geographically, by type of name, age and so on.

A deep cover passport is probably one that belongs to someone living in Israel who has given up the passport.

Mossad has a small factory and chemical laboratory in the Academy to reproduce the paper used by most countries for their passports. The factory also produces bank notes.

Canadian passports are the favorite of the Mossad. I saw more than 1,000 blank Canadian passports in storage, which must have been stolen. Canadian passports are good for recruiting Arabs in Europe because they don't know much about Canada, and because you might have to pretend to go somewhere you can't be reached while the operation cooks.

For each assignment in a place they have operated before, katsas receive reminder slips about the details of their previous assignment, including a list of everyone they met or saw.

Similarly, for every stamp in a passport used before by someone else, there is a detailed account of the circumstances so that the user can remember what he never knew.

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A good cover is something you can explain with one word, a word that has a wide range of possibilities, for example: I'm a dentist. Katsas learn how to build a personality and learn a profession in one day.

The cover of a wealthy businessman is frequently used, but never a top executive because it might be necessary to buy time in order to take a proposal to the boss,in reality: the safe-house team.

Mossad has hundreds of shell companies around the world waiting to come to life. Money is kept in many of these companies, just enough to file tax returns and avoid raising suspicions.

Five rooms at the Mossad are filled with company paraphernalia, occupying eight rows of shelves in sixty boxes per shelf in each room. The boxes include a history of the company, all its financial statements, a history of its logo, who it was registered with, and anything that a katsa might be expected to know about the company.

Lifelines

Israeli embassies have several unlisted phone lines for clandestine communications. Once a katsa commits a telephone and address to someone in a recruitment process, it must be kept alive for at least three years, even if stage one in the recruitment process was never passed unless, of course, there had been a confrontation that could expose the katsa, in which case everything would be closed down.

White agents are always non-Arab and may not even know they are working for Israel. They often have technical knowledge.

Financial guidelines are applied to recruitment. An agent's financial situation is determined prior to agreement. Care is taken not to offer so much to an agent that his new-found affluence might raise suspicion.

Contracts are apparently entered into with agents in target countries. Bonus payments are sometimes offered by the piece and quality of information provided, commensurate with the position of the informant $100 to $1,000 extra per letter on average, up to $10,000 or $20,000 per communiquΘ from a highly-placed source.

Recruitment of Arab agents is nearly always done outside the target country, whenever and wherever they may come for training, education, business or diplomatic reasons.

Intelligence on the weaponry of target countries is normally obtained from manufacturers in the West from whom weapons are purchased.

Arab agents are often recruited with the help of an oter (finder) who sets up a meeting with a katsa because there are very few Arabic speaking katsas. People are always drawn to others in a foreign country who speak their language. Arab subjects are no exception to this rule.

A recruit's file is always studied before the first meeting, to reduce the element of risk.

To the agent in a target countrys agents often have a radio and a fixed antenna either at home or their place of business.

Each one is given a certain time each day when a message to him is broadcast from a computerized station in continuous operation. The messages begin with a code of letters in groups of five, and the message is changed only once a week, to make sure it is received. Microfilm is also used to transmit information to agents. The film floater is retrieved from the inside of an envelope, then is developed in a glass of water and read with a magnifying glass.

From the agent communication is ofter by burst communication and or secret ink. If the agent is of a high rank, meetings held in Europ are preferd.