Gaza Flotilla Like Jewish Refugees In Exodus Says Former Mossad Agent

Victor Ostrovsky in SpyTalk at The Washington Post:

“The Israeli commando attack on a civilian flotilla was “so stupid it is stupefying,” says former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky. Ostrovsky spent six years in the Israeli navy, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander before Mossad recruited him in 1982. He quit after four years and in the 1990s he wrote two highly critical, first-person books about the intelligence service.

Monday’s raid on a seaborne civilian aid mission to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which left nine dead and about 75 wounded, was carried out by the Israeli navy’s commando unit, “Shayetet 13,” Ostrovsky said.

“It’s a fantastic unit. … It was not typical of Flotilla 13,” he said, using the English translation for Shayetet, which he called “one of the top units in the Israeli military.”

Members of the unit “have trained extensively for overtaking a ship,” he said. “However, their training was directed at overtaking a hijacked ship.”

Evidently the tactics weren’t adjusted for this mission.

“Mossad probably had more than one man on board” the ships, Ostrovsky said, secret agents who would have been giving Israeli mission planners an accurate picture of what was happening on the vessels.

Were their reports ignored?

“At this point,” says Jeffrey White, a former Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, “it is hard to say if this was a failure of collection, assessment or operational preparation.”

“My sense is that somewhere in the process from collection to conduct, the notion that this would be an action against moderate opposition became fixed ….”

“The mistakes were on every level,” said Ostrovsky, “from the order to forcefully board outside the territorial waters to the actual attack.”

Responsibility for the raid, which has provoked widespread condemnation and a diplomatic uproar, should be laid at the feet of “the shoot-from-the-hip prime minister,” Ostrovsky said — Binyamin Netanyahu, whom he blamed for two previous messy intelligence operations in Dubai and Jordan.

Flotilla 13’s typically careful planning, he speculated, was supplanted by orders from Netanyahu or his ultra-conservative foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to “do something now.”

“Nobody can do a good job in a rush,” he said.

Stopping the flotilla in international waters was “a grave mistake,” Ostrovsky said.

“Why not wait? They knew where it was going.”

Ostrovsky, who developed missile capabilities for Israeli gunboats, said there were several, far safer, alternatives to sending black-clad commandos rappelling onto the ship from frightfully noisy helicopters in the middle of the night.

The commandos could have easily sneaked up to the ships and boats from behind in “wet submarines” (which look like open torpedoes) and disabled their propellers, he said.

“Eventually they’d run out of food and water and they could be towed to shore,” said Ostrovsky, now chief executive of TheBookPatch.com, a Web site for writers.

Ostrovsky said it was also inexplicable that the commandos were sent to land on the top decks in the middle of the ships, where they were vulnerable to resistance from terrified and angry passengers and crew. A better tactic would have been to have the commandos board from the stern and bow and work inward.

In any event, the episode has become a public relations debacle for Israel, Ostrovsky said.

“We look like the British stopping the Exodus,” he said.

The 1960 blockbuster movie, based on a best-seller by the same name, dramatized the efforts of 611 Jewish refugees to defy a British blockade of occupied Palestine after World War II.

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