Sep 21, 2008 08:17 AM
1708 Views
In the past few weeks, most of the books I have read have been non-fiction. In this spate of reading non-fiction, I came across this book . I started reading it out of curiosity and finished this over one weekend....This is a book describing the real life recruitment, training and several international events of a real life spy and the intelligence agency that he was a part of. Compared to this James Bond sounds like child's play....
The author Victor Ostrovsky was born in Canada and moved to Israel at a young age. He like all young Israeli's went through compulsary miltary training & service. During this time, he was recruited by Mossad - the Israeli Intelligence Service with whom Victor worked for 4 years before getting dis-illusioned with Mossad, quitting the agency and moving back to North America. When he wrote this book, the Israeli govt. tried to block publication of this book in North America, understandably so as it revealed not only their recruitment and training methods but also the role of Mossad in several international incidents.
As I read this book, I was amazed at the efficieny and auadacity of Mossad. The sheer brilliance with which they plotted - all in the interest of Israel - is just unbelievable. How they penetrated organizations which they deemed as terrorist organizations or foregin intellegence agencies (including friendly ones too), helping them prevent terrorist strikes against Israeli interests or their role in taking advantage of an incident to further the interest of Israel is just astonishing. However, I wonder, how much longer can they continue to manipulate the rest of the world's spy orgs and keep succeeding....?
In this day and age when we have terrorists setting off bombs blowing off innocent victims to further their agenda, the only way to protect citizens is by gathering advanced intel in and making preventive strikes. Our Indian Intelligence agencies can certainly learn this skill from their Israeli counterparts...If you are interested in spy thrillers - this is the book for you. I recommend you read this one and follow it up with Gideon's Spies ( look for my next review on this book..).
