Spies of No Country Award-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. 
 The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit
known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British
spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather
intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit
consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus
easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel’s existence in the
balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in
Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk,
collecting intelligence, and sending messages back to Israel via a radio
 whose antenna was disguised as a clothesline. While performing their
dangerous work these men were often unsure to whom they were reporting,
and sometimes even who they’d become. Of the dozen spies in the Arab
Section at the war’s outbreak, five were caught and executed. But in the
 end the Arab Section would emerge, improbably, as the nucleus of the
Mossad, Israel’s vaunted intelligence agency. Spies of No Country is
 about the slippery identities of these young spies, but it’s also about
 Israel’s own complicated and fascinating identity. Israel sees itself
and presents itself as a Western nation, when in fact more than half the
 country has Middle Eastern roots and traditions, like the spies of this
 story. And, according to Friedman, that goes a long way toward
explaining the life and politics of the country, and why it often
baffles the West. For anyone interested in real-life spies and the
paradoxes of the Middle East, Spies of No Country is an intimate story with global significance.

Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel PDF

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