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Journalist and award-winning author Matti Friedman’s masterfully told and meticulously researched tale of Israel’s first spies reads like an espionage novel-but it’s all true. Of the dozen members of their ragtag unit, five would be caught and executed-but the remainder would emerge as the nucleus of the Mossad, Israel’s vaunted intelligence agency. In 1948, at the outbreak of war in Palestine, they went undercover in Beirut, spending two years running sabotage operations and sending crucial intelligence back home.

The four spies were young, Jewish, and born in Arab countries. Piercing.” - The New York Times Book ReviewĪward-winning writer Matti Friedman’s tale of Israel’s first spies has all the tropes of an espionage novel, including duplicity, betrayal, disguise, clandestine meetings, the bluff, and the double bluff-but it’s all true. “I was looking less for the sweep of history than for its human heart,” he writes, and he finds it. That and Friedman’s familiarity with the locations he describes give his account an intimacy lacking in many espionage tales. The author’s best material comes from primary sources, including interviews with Shoshan, now 93, and Gamliel Cohen’s 2001 book. Often disguised as Arabs, sometimes working alone and sometimes in teams, they participated in the blowing up of a fake ambulance concealing a bomb destined for a Jewish movie theater, the failed assassination of a Muslim preacher called Nimr (“Tiger” in Arabic), and the attempted destruction of a yacht that once belonged to Hitler and was rumored to be destined for refitting as a warship. Gamliel Cohen, Isaac Shoshan, Havakuk Cohen, and Yakuba Cohen (no relation), whose fluency in Arabic and roots in Syria, Yemen, and British Palestine made them useful at the dawn of the Jewish state, were active between January 1948 and August 1949. In evocative prose detailing mid-20th-century life in the dangerous streets of Haifa and Beirut, journalist Friedman ( Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story) recounts the intertwined stories of four underground spies for the Arab Section of the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization in Palestine that became part of the Israel Defence Forces after Israel’s founding.