If you like Ludlum, you'll love Gideon's Spies. This is "the" international espionage book. With a plot so intriguing and details so amazing, you have to keep reminding yourself that it's not fiction. A great read.

Gives you a real good insight into the world of spies and intelligence communities around the world. The style of writing makes easy and fluent reading.

This is a well written and entertaining view inside of what has always been seen as the supreme espionage agency in the world. This books confirms the dedication and professionalism of the people of Mossad as well as showing that the staff is human and susceptible to the errors of judgement and bad luck that affect all human endeavors.

Most computers are "state of the art computers". Most conversations are "picked up by computers", not by mikes. Most thoughts any Mossad Director had, twenty or thirty years ago, are known to the author (who also memorably states, on page 230 of the PB edition, that Andropov died from "hepatitis, a disease of the kidneys", thus opening new avenues to medicine). If it were limited to verifiable facts, and wasted less space on large font and line spacing, this book could easily be half the size.
Even then I wouldn't recommend it, for the good reasons the one-star reviews to the second edition state or hint at (silly of me not to have read them before buying this shelfspace-consuming product).
(As an irrelevant aside, I've noticed that the negative reviews are -at least for me, and unless written by a crank or "a reader"- the most useful; they are also the worst rated, except perhaps in string theory and the IDers-Darwinist debates: I think this might be because, as somebody noted, if you are going to picnic you don't like somebody telling you it's going to rain).
But there are other factually inaccurate books that one reads with pleasure. It is the style that makes this one insufferable. It
is replete with inane sentences; thus, one reads in page 308 "A desert was like no other place on Earth for surprises. A sandstorm could appear in moments, changing the landscape, burying him alive. One kind of sky meant one thing, another something quite different. He would do his own weather forecasting; he would have to do everything by himself and learn to let his ears adjust to the silence, to remember that the silence of the desert was like no other. And always he must remember that his first mistake would be his last". This previously unknown secret wisdom occupies almost a quarter of a page. Fortunately Thomas doesn't stop here: one learns that "beneath his hupta he wore goggles; their lenses gave the dark landscape a crepuscular definition. The only weapon Shalom carried was the one the Sarami would expect to find on him: a hunting knife". Quite: goggles are widely used by desert Bedouins. But not only goggles: afterwards Shalom "began to photograph and time what he saw".
Then, in another chapter (page 331), "Shortly before 6:30 AM, Yatom's Peugeot entered the parking lot in the basement of Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, and he took the elevator to a fourth-floor conference room. Waiting there were two men and to women ... each was in his late twenties, suntanned, and superbly-fit looking. For the past few days they had been up in the snow of northern Israel brushing up on their skiing". Gee, Mr. Thomas, thanks for the amazing and relevant info! How would one otherwise know Yatom took an elevator to the fourth-floor conference room on 16 February 1998?
Then, in page 231 we are taken into the Pope study, where (in 1983) "the room's bookshelves offered clues to the pope's expanding interests. Along with leather-bound Polish editions of the classics and the works of theologians and philosophers, were copies of the 'International Defence Review' and books with such arresting titles as 'The Problems of Military Readiness' and 'Military Balance and Surprise Attack' ... ". Anyone with the barest acquaintance of how any organizarion works is aware that their Heads, when they want to know about something, have a report prepared, and are briefed. They don't have time to read books to find out facts and background. But no, wait! The military books and reviews "reflected the Pontiff's unswerving conviction thet the main enemy the world still faced in 1983 was Soviet Communism". And the former Primate of Communist-dominated Poland took to reading the IDF to confirm that conviction? C'mon!
And so it goes, on and on and on, like this review. In page 135 we learn that "on a damp spring morning in 1997, David Kimche instructed Arab landscapers how he wanted to have his garden rearranged in a Tel Aviv suburb. His manner was diffident, the mellifluous voice more suited to a college campus than dealing with manual workers, suggesting Komche was descended from generations of administrators who had once raised Britain's Union Jack over far-flung lands ... his every gesture while briefing the gardeners -the flicking away of hair from his forehead, the lengthy pauses, the thoughtful stare- suggested a lifetime spent cloistered on a college campus". Well, it's fortunate for us that the Arab landscapers recorded their impressions for posterity. Or was Thomas there, busily taking notes?

Other space-filling gimmicks Thomas uses to inflate his book to mammoth size are unnecessary/meaningless sentences and verbiage ("On the video, Bazoft eyes showed signs he had been drugged. Mossad pharmacologists found it impossible to decide which drugs had been used", page 167; or "[In] 1988 Nir and Stanton travelled togethe to Madrid under false names ... why had they chosen aliases for the flight tickets when they both travelled on their real passports would never be explained [and is a very difficult feat. Try it yourself and see the result!]. Another mystery was why they took a flight first to Madrid when there were several scheduled direct ones to Mexico City. Was Nir trying to impress his lover with how easy it was to fool most people most of the time ... ? ... these questions were to remain unanswered", in page 321.

The last trick is that anything goes, provided you always use the conditional/hypothetical "it's not impossible that X could have done Y","one can't discard the hypothesis that Z"; make generic statements "not everybody agrees with this" and stop short of identifying the "they"; etc.

In short, this book is a mixture of fact (the one-page list of Mossad's Directors and their tenures) and sentences about real or imaginary events, techniques and things the author understands poorly, couched in the language of a third-rate fiction thriller. If you don't have it, don't buy it and so hopefully prevent another edition and therefore save some trees, vastly nobler creatures. If you have it, and didn't like it, give it to a paper recycler. If you liked it, well, tastes difffer.

Most computers are "state of the art computers". Most conversations are "picked up by computers", not by mikes. Most thoughts any Mossad Director had, twenty or thirty years ago, are known to the author. If it were limited to verifiable facts, and wasted less space on large font and line spacing, this book could easily be half the size.
Even then I wouldn't recommend it, for the good reasons the one-star reviews to the second edition state or hint at (silly of me not to have read them before buying this shelfspace-consuming product).
(As an irrelevant aside, I've noticed that the negative reviews are -at least for me, and unless written by a crank or "a reader"- the most useful; they are also the worst rated, except perhaps in string theory and the IDers-Darwinist debates: I think this might be because, as Jerome K. Jerome noted, if you are going to picnic you don't like somebody telling you it's going to rain).
But there are other factually inaccurate books that one reads with pleasure. It is the style that makes this one insufferable for me. It resembles the obfuscating techniques used by Pauwels and Bergier in their popular bestseller of many years ago, "Le matin des magiciens", and their following monthly Planète: write anything (even true things), but darkly, using convoluted sentences and hinting at the ultra-technical, the mysterious and the unexplainable; always use the conditional/hypothetical "it's not impossible that X could have done Y","one can't discard the hypothesis that Z"; make generic statements "not everybody agrees with this" and stop short of identifying the "they"; etc. But at least P&B inserted some footnotes.
This product is a Potemkin village, but the front houses are not even nice.

Gideon's spies is very well written and informative. The detail of events is incredible, and I look forward to checking out other books by this author. This book will definitely take you into a different world and will change your perspective of international relations.

What I found most interesting in this book is the reach of the Mossad. Because Jews can be found in most of the countries of the world, the Mossad has friends in place who can assist Mossad's agents. No other intelligence service in the world has this sort of assistance. And it is because Jews are bound by something more than nationalism. Their bond trancends loyalty to country, and it is even more so since the Holocaust. In part it is survival in a hostile world.

This is a heavily embroidered mish mash of anecdotes, the majority told elsewhere with more style. Lots of fascinating and entertaining stuff, no question, but Gordon Thomas is a myth-maker, so accuracy takes a back seat to speculation and romanticized conspiracy theorizing at every turn. If the guy can't get something simple like Sayaret Matkal right (Sayanet Maktal?!), as one of numerous examples, he's also just plain careless. The update doesn't really add a whole lot of new information. I'd recommend The Volunteer by Michael Ross -- a Mossad officer talks about the real-life functioning and actions of ha'misrad in the 1990's and the relationship with our CIA -- along with The Mossad, and Israel's Secret Wars.

This book is amazing. You will find some real pearls in here. The Princess Diana story was quite telling. The book is shocking in some parts, hard core in others, but the book is so well written, it is difficult to put it down.

Books about the history and activities of espionage organizations (both gathering intelligence and covert operation) are by nature subject to be taken with a grain of salt, since the nature of the business is secrecy.

Gordon Thomas does a good job unveiling that secrecy through his various sources, some named, some not, some within the Mossad organization itself, and many from without. He explicitly names these sources on an "acknowledgment page," citing his sources within Israel and Elsewhere. One can only judge the credibility of the information by comparing it to other accounts of the same operations, and asking oneself if it is believable based upon consistency with factual events.

Thomas pulls no punches in portraying the Mossad as arguably the most effective intelligence service in the world. He reveals their various tactics including psychological warfare, their legendary human intelligence capabilities, their worldwide presence (Thomas claims the Mossad has a mole in the White House, which the FBI has been searching for for years), and their covert assassination teams (known as kidons), and their ruthlessness in getting the job done in the defense of the State

Thomas excels at this, especially with this new, updated 2007 edition that covers the role Mossad plays and continues to play in the Iraq War, and probably an upcoming pre-emptive war with Israel's arch foe, Iran. He reveals tidbits of information, such as the unconfirmed "fact" that Israel possesses three nuclear missile armed submarines, currently in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iran, completing its triad of nuclear umbrella cover. This, as an example, is something that Israel would probably never really officially confirm or deny. But it passes the "does it make sense?" test with flying colors. Israel's land based nuclear facilities at Dimona (in the Negev Desert) is probably the worst kept military "secret" in the world." Nuclear payloads can be delivered by missile, aircraft, or seaborne vessels. Bombing Iran by air would not be practical due to the long ranges involved, so it does indeed make sense that it would need a third, seaborne leg of its nuclear capabilities.

Other accounts conflict to varying degrees with other sources. Since covert agents routinely use aliases, this is not unexpected; however, Thomas identifies the famous "man who captured Eichman" as the long term Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan. Others, including Peter (Zvi) Malkin wrote a book on the subject some years ago, in which he takes credit for making the first physical contact with Eichman on that audacious mission in 1960.

There are several useful resources included in the book, including a comprehensive index, a list of the Directors-General of Mossad, along with their years of service from 1951 through the present, a general glossary, and an additional brief glossary of Arabic terms, and of course a bibliography and acknowledgment of sources and credits.

My only criticism is that the time line of events recounted is not linear, sometimes making it difficult to follow. But the more you know about Israeli history, the easier it is to overcome this. Also, the sheer length of the book (587 pages, not including addenda), makes for a long, but fascinating read. The newly released 2007 version of this came out just in time - a lot has happened since the original version.

This book should appeal to anyone interested in Israeli defense, politics, and especially espionage. Highly recommended for serious students of Israel..

Books about the history and activities of espionage organizations (both gathering intelligence and covert operation) are by nature subject to be taken with a grain of salt, since the nature of the business is secrecy.

Gordon Thomas does a good job unveiling that secrecy through his various sources, some named, some not, some within the Mossad organization itself, and many from without. He explicitly names these sources on an "acknowledgment page," citing his sources within Israel and Elsewhere. One can only judge the credibility of the information by comparing it to other accounts of the same operations, and asking oneself if it is believable based upon consistency with factual events.

Thomas pulls no punches in portraying the Mossad as arguably the most effective intelligence service in the world. He reveals their various tactics including psychological warfare, their legendary human intelligence capabilities, their worldwide presence (Thomas claims the Mossad has a mole in the White House, which the FBI has been searching for for years), and their covert assassination teams (known as kidons), and their ruthlessness in getting the job done in the defense of the State

Thomas excels at this, especially with this new, updated 2007 edition that covers the role Mossad plays and continues to play in the Iraq War, and probably an upcoming pre-emptive war with Israel's arch foe, Iran. He reveals tidbits of information, such as the unconfirmed "fact" that Israel possesses three nuclear missile armed submarines, currently in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iran, completing its triad of nuclear umbrella cover. This, as an example, is something that Israel would probably never really officially confirm or deny. But it passes the "does it make sense?" test with flying colors. Israel's land based nuclear facilities at Dimona (in the Negev Desert) is probably the worst kept military "secret" in the world." Nuclear payloads can be delivered by missile, aircraft, or seaborne vessels. Bombing Iran by air would not be practical due to the long ranges involved, so it does indeed make sense that it would need a third, seaborne leg of its nuclear capabilities.

Other accounts conflict to varying degrees with other sources. Since covert agents routinely use aliases, this is not unexpected; however, Thomas identifies the famous "man who captured Eichman" as the long term Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan. Others, including Peter (Zvi) Malkin wrote a book on the subject some years ago, in which he takes credit for making the first physical contact with Eichman on that audacious mission in 1960.

There are several useful resources included in the book, including a comprehensive index, a list of the Directors-General of Mossad, along with their years of service from 1951 through the present, a general glossary, and an additional brief glossary of Arabic terms, and of course a bibliography and acknowledgment of sources and credits.

My only criticism is that the time line of events recounted is not linear, sometimes making it difficult to follow. But the more you know about Israeli history, the easier it is to overcome this. Also, the sheer length of the book (587 pages, not including addenda), makes for a long, but fascinating read. The newly released 2007 version of this came out just in time - a lot has happened since the original version.

This book should appeal to anyone interested in Israeli defense, politics, and especially espionage. Highly recommended for serious students of Israel..