Cloak-and-Dagger Agents on Front Line in Israel’s Coronavirus War
Cloak-and-Dagger Agents on Front Line in Israel Coronavirus War
(Bloomberg) --
Israel’s Mossad espionage agency, famous for its cloak-and-dagger exploits, has a new gig: Spies are now on the front line of the country’s war against the deadly coronavirus.
At a time when nations the world over are desperate to get their hands on medical supplies, Mossad agents are bringing in equipment in murky operations. Israel has also recruited its Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency to controversially use location technology to find out who has come in contact with virus carriers.
The secret agents are being backed by the wider defense establishment, too. State-run Israel Aerospace Agency Ltd. has retooled a missile line to produce ventilators for a hospital system stretched to its limits.
“When Israelis think about an emergency they want to see the military, whether they have something to contribute or not,” said Liron Libman, a reserves colonel and researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute research center. “The military is very agile and exactly what you are looking for in this situation -- people who think outside the box and find all types of shortcuts to overcome the shortages.”
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It’s not that the private sector hasn’t been mobilized: The Defense Ministry is recruiting companies for partnerships, but it’s taking the lead, according to ministry statements. While other countries are also using security forces to patrol for quarantine violators and to build or provide emergency treatment facilities, their deployment in Israel ranges wide.
Security officials say elite defense personnel are also:
- Developing sophisticated ventilators and upgrading basic machines.
- Manufacturing face shields for hospital personnel.
- Putting final touches on a test kit that gives results within two minutes, and working on an artificial intelligence-based voice test that can detect virus symptoms using a mobile application.
- Installing communications equipment in coronavirus wards to allow patients to speak to medical staff from a safe distance.
Earlier this month, cabinet ministers roped in the Shin Bet to retrace the movements of coronavirus patients to try to contain the disease’s spread. Other countries have used private companies to carry out such tracking, and Israel’s use of a spy agency to do so is a “slippery slope” that represents a dangerous invasion of people’s privacy, according to critics including Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, head of the Media Reform Program and Democracy in the Information Age at the Israeli Democracy Institute.
The security establishment’s other roles haven’t raised alarm bells in the nation of 9 million, where the coronavirus has infected more than 6,000 people, killed 33 and clobbered the economy.
While authorities, operating under a caretaker government after three inconclusive elections, have been able to take emergency actions like recruiting the Shin Bet without parliamentary oversight, “I don’t believe we are going to get to the point where the army is going to interfere in civic life,” said Tomer Naor, legal adviser to the Movement for Quality Government in Israel. “Israel is very sensitive to these issues.”
Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting research fellow at the Chatham House research center in London, doesn’t find the security forces’ involvement so benign.
“It’s never healthy when the security services are so much involved in the day-to-day running of a country,” Mekelberg said. “This is Israel’s default modus operandi, that’s what they’re used to.”
In recent weeks, the Mossad has brought in millions of surgical masks and dozens of ventilators, according to government statements that didn’t identify the source.
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“The Mossad has secret channels and can get stuff from countries that we probably don’t have relations with, so no other body could have done this,” said Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser. The Health Ministry, by contrast, is relatively weak after years of underfunding, Freilich added.
One of the spy agency’s main missions is to source at least 7,000 ventilators, a number that also takes Palestinian needs into consideration, a man identified as a senior Mossad official told Channel 12.
With that focus in mind, Israel Aerospace missile and space engineers reconfigured a missile production line to churn out a ventilator designed by Invoytec, a private company. Thirty have already been delivered, and a Defense Ministry video showed dozens more being loaded for shipment.
“The corona is like an enemy,” said retired general Amos Gilad, a former Defense Ministry director of policy who thinks the government hasn’t sufficiently exploited the security establishment’s capabilities. “It’s no different from a military enemy, and when you’re at war you enlist all the means you have at your disposal.”
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