"I've learned over years as a reporter,” writes Matti Friedman in the beginning of Spies of No Country, “that time spent with old spies is never time wasted.”
He's right. As the novelist John le Carré observed, “Espionage is the secret theater of our society.” Or as Friedman puts it, with characteristic elegance: “Countries have cover stories and hidden selves, just like their spies, and our clandestine basements conceal insights into the world aboveground.”
And this is the story he tells, one ostensibly about spies, but in reality about the state of Israel: its founding myths, the legends it created and continues to create about itself—its cover stories.
The book centers on “The Arab section,” a group of Arab Jews from the Islamic world that performed perhaps the most vital espionage work in and around the birth of Israel—spying on its neighboring Arab states, from the inside. He focuses on four in particular: Gamliel, Isaac, Havakuk, and Yakuba. From their interlocking stories emerges the section that eventually became the nucleus of Israel's foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, a staple of Israeli pride and global conspiracy theorists ever since.
Here one must understand the importance of the Mossad as myth—both for Israel and its enemies. It is central to Israelis because their homeland is “a small country in a precarious position,” and because the legends of the Mossad “conceal the frailty of the people behind the curtain.” Equally, it is useful to Israel's enemies in playing the role of the “hidden hand” that explains their repeated failure to defeat a tiny state with a (comparatively) minute population.
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