- JERUSALEM -- The Israeli
spy agency Mossad emerged from the shadows yesterday, launching a website
to attract recruits for "special tasks", as well as intelligence
analysts, waiters and drivers. The agency is raising its profile to compete
with the private sector in the search for talent.
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- "Mossad's mainstay is its people," says the
foreword on www.mossad.gov.il by agency chief Meir Dagan, posted next to
backlit photographs of unnamed intelligence analysts.
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- The launch of the site is the spy agency's second break
with the era of the old-boy network, when veteran agents would tap their
friends when job openings appeared.
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- In 2000, Mr Dagan's predecessor, Efraim Halevy, placed
advertisements for case officers in the Israeli press, a big change for
an agency whose motto is the biblical proverb, "Without subterfuge,
the nation falls". Mr Halevy said market forces took precedence over
mystique.
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- "The days when a security career was seen as the
be-all and end-all of Israeli citizenship are over," he said. "Now
we are an open society, and Mossad has had to appeal to the widest range
of talented applicants who might otherwise head for hi-tech or other private
sectors." Mossad has a reputation for derring-do. In 1960, its agents
captured Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. After 11 Israeli athletes
were killed by Palestinian gunmen at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich,
Mossad hunted down the masterminds, killing some of them.
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- But Mossad has also had its bungles. In 1997, its agents
botched an attempt on the life of a leader of the Palestinian militant
group Hamas in Jordan.
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- And in 1998, a Mossad team was arrested in Switzerland
spying on a local man believed linked to Lebanese Hezbollah.
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- The US Central Intelligence Agency has had a website
since 1995.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=524641
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