Acid condoms, sunglass-case bombs, and Israel’s worst intelligence failure

Bungling bad is not what you associate with Israel’s famed intelligence agencies. The Mossad, Aman and Shin Bet are usually synonymous with slick executions, impeccable operations, and a spy network that is the stuff of legends now. The Hezbollah pager explosions have Mossad signature all over, but don’t bet on an acknowledgement from Israel. That’s just the way they do things. Under the radar, in secret, an example for spy agencies all over the world. But even Israel messes up. Sometimes, bad.
There are intelligence failures and then there is Egypt 1954. This is the story of Israel’s worst intelligence failure.
It was 1954, and David Ben-Gurion had just retired and left the Prime Minister’s office to Moshe Sharett. Sharett found himself in a fix. He was unable to exert his authority over the defence minister, Pinhas Lavon, who was quite the union boss adept at industry tactics. Military intricacies, however, were another matter.

Former Israeli Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon. Photo: Getty Images

Enter two young, ambitious men: the Chief of Staff at the Defence Ministry, Moshe Dayan; and the Director, Shimon Peres. Dayan and Peres were itching to make their mark and were keener on consulting Ben-Gurion than the new Prime Minister.
At this juncture, Aman had the ear of the government. Mossad, the other intelligence agency in Israel, was sidelined when Lavon came to power. Israel originally had laid down that Mossad had to be involved in all special operations in enemy territory, but Lavon threw the arrangement out of the window. Aman was an aggressive beast that had just been handed powers whose consequences no one foresaw.
Neighbour Egypt was going through its own turmoil. King Farouk was overthrown. The new man in Cairo, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had ambitions of becoming the leader of the Arab world. This Arab socialist dictator’s first priority was gaining control over the Suez Canal and getting rid of the British military presence in the Canal Zone.

An Anglo-French company controlled the Suez at the time. Col Nasser’s agenda meant bad news for Israel. The British out of the Suez Canal would open Sinai up to a probable Egyptian attack. The new state of Israel couldn’t afford that headache; neither could it deal with a tightened Arab blockade against them.
The West’s attitude to the guy in Cairo was anathema to Israel. Israel was getting desperate. The final trigger came in the summer of 1954, when the Aman chanced upon a plan by the British to evacuate the Suez bases. “Something must be done,” was the refrain in the defence corridors.
The ‘something’ that was eventually done, went on to become Israel’s worst bungle on foreign land.
Israel planned to set up a terrorist network within Egypt, pretending to be an Arab one. The targets were British and American. The British Council and American Information Center in Cairo were both to be attacked, for which, the Israelis hoped, Egyptians would be blamed. They hoped Colonel Nasser would go up against his old enemies, the Moslem Brothers, and the Anglo-Saxons would begin to doubt his regime in Cairo.
If Morgan Freeman were to narrate this, he would have said it wasn’t a great idea. Well, anyone narrating this would call it a disaster with a Capital D that no one quite knew how Israel went ahead with.
The ‘something’ was named ‘Operation Suzanna’.
Israel dialled up Colonel Mordechai Ben-Tsur to get together a motley group of Egyptian Jews who were to be trained to carry out the attacks. Mossad and Shin Bet, Israel’s General Security Service, were both involved in Operation Suzanna.
The group of Egyptian Jews in charge of the operation were all cosmopolitan and charming, but none quite tough or experienced as is quintessentially Israel. They were also extremely enthusiastic about the operation and began having meetings in public places or one of their homes. They barely knew how to operate the radio sets given to them by Israel. They were, anyway, looked at with suspicion by Egyptian intelligence. The operation threatened to put all of the Egyptian Jews at risk.
The operatives of Operation Suzanna had to fall back on their wit and bare-bones training. They improvised ‘bombs’ – condoms filled with acid, and spectacle cases filled with explosives – and waited for orders from the homeland.
In July 1954, a bizarre order arrived, writes author Ronald Payne in the book Mossad: Israel’s Most Secret Service: “Begin immediate action to prevent or postpone the Anglo-Egyptian agreement. The targets are, one, cultural and informational institutions. Two, economic institutions. Three, cars, British representatives and other British citizens. Four, anything else that might complicate diplomatic relations. Inform us of the possibility of action in the Canal Zone. Listen in to us daily at seven o’clock on waveband G.”
Some small explosives went off at the post office in Alexandria. The group then contrived to place similar small explosives in sunglass cases in the libraries of the US Information Service in Alexandria and Cairo. They pieced together makeshift bombs to place at cinemas and railway stations across Cairo to mark the anniversary of Colonel Nasser’s revolution, you know, to fake an Egyptian hand behind it all. All of these bombs turned out to be damp squibs. But the worst was yet to come.
In Alexandria, 19-year-old Philip Nathanson waited in a cinema queue with a spectacle case in his pocket. He wanted to get it in, when the case exploded in his pocket. Nathanson was saved by the special branch of Egyptian police, but the ruse was off. They realised what caused the explosion. Within hours, the Israeli network collapsed like a pack of cards.
The Egyptians also caught hold of Max Bennett, a top Mossad agent, who was on business in the neighbouring country. His radio malfunctioned. He had to get in touch with the amateur Egyptian Jew network when the Egyptians swooped in on him. This was a massive blow to the Mossad, who realised that Bennett’s capture left them with no other spy in Egypt. It was a time when they most needed their intelligence operatives in Egypt.
Within four days of the Cairo cinema mess, the Egyptians went to town boasting about the arrest of ten men and a woman, ‘a bloody Zionist gang’. Two cell leaders were hanged in Cairo in January 1955. Max Bennett, meanwhile, used a rusty nail in prison to open up his veins and kill himself. He was a trained spy, after all, unlike the amateurs hanged in Cairo.

Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, the second President of Egypt. Photo: Getty Images

The other agents that Egypt caught received long prison sentences. The sole woman, Victorine Ninio, tried to kill herself twice, unsuccessfully. Finally, in 1968, a prisoner exchange got her home to Israel, where she received the welcome fitting of a national heroine. Her wedding three years later was attended by Golda Meir and top intelligence officers.
Israel wasn’t happy. The government wasn’t happy. The public needed answers. How could Israel make this bad a mess in enemy territory?
A hasty hysterical resignation by defence minister Pinhas Lavon confirmed it for all. The departure of Lavon led to a colossal crisis in the government that could be solved only when David Ben-Gurion had to be called back from exile to take on the reins of the defence ministry once again. Back from his Negev retreat, in kibbutz clothes, Ben-Gurion appeared in the Knesset to take control of the situation after the ‘Lavon Affair’.
Operation Suzanna poisoned Israel politics for many years. A series of secret hearings by the investigation committee found intelligence and government folks at each other’s necks. While the military officers claimed that defence minister Lavon signed off the Egyptian bombing campaign, the latter pinned the blame on Aman. Israel never answered in public who was responsible for the Egypt fiasco. A vague, open-ended statement was the best it did, regretting that they were ‘unable to answer the question put to us by the Prime Minister’.

Former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Photo: Getty Images

“We can only say that we were not convinced beyond reasonable doubt that the senior officer did not receive orders from the minister of defence. We are equally uncertain that the minister of defence did, in fact, give the orders attributed to him,” read the statement, writes Ronald Payne in his book, Mossad: Israel’s Most Secret Service.
Operation Suzanna also set the protocol for any intelligence failures that Israel encountered in the following years. Whenever a ‘security mishap’ happened, they put out statements that claimed that it would be best not to dig further, since it was a question of the security of the country.
True to it, till date, Israel has always shrugged off embarrassing affairs, refusing to confirm or deny any hand of its intelligence. But sometimes the signs are a little too strong to ignore. Like the exploding pagers in Lebanon.