Spies of No Country
Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel
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Spies of No Country
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Narrated by:
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Simon Vance
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By:
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Matti Friedman
About this listen
Award-winning writer Matti Friedman's tale of Israel's first spies has all the tropes of an espionage novel, including duplicity, betrayal, disguise, clandestine meetings, the bluff, and the double bluff - but it's all true.
The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel's existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk, collecting intelligence, and sending messages back to Israel via a radio whose antenna was disguised as a clothesline. While performing their dangerous work these men were often unsure to whom they were reporting, and sometimes even who they'd become. Of the dozen spies in the Arab Section at the war's outbreak, five were caught and executed. But in the end the Arab Section would emerge, improbably, as the nucleus of the Mossad, Israel's vaunted intelligence agency.
©2019 Matti Friedman (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about Spies of No Country
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- roger radford
- 17-08-19
Unsung heroes
Brilliantly written and superbly read, this story of the unsung heroes of the nascent state of Israel deserved to be told. These were Jewish refugees from Arab countries who endangered their lives by becoming spies in those countries. Heroism of the greatest kind. As one who is married to a 'Mizrachit', whose parents immigrated to Israel from Aden, the story really resonated for me. Millions of viewers around the world have been hooked on the Netflix series FAUDA, about the mistar'vim, the Arabic-speaking Israelis from Mizrachi families who infiltrate the West Bank to fight Arab terrorism. But as Matti Friedman writes, these special unit operatives are only suitable for hit and run scenarios. They are not 'Arab' enough to maintain their cover for any period of length. All in all, Spies of No Country is a fascinating account of secret agents in a bygone age. Some of them came from Aleppo. I wonder what they think of the modern-day carnage that has left Syria's second city in ruins. Sadness, surely.
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