I was thinking of writing a brief history of electronic espionage involving Jews in Israel and the United States, but I was a bit daunted by the work it would require. I would have to extract and condense a very sizable amount of text from my not-so-magnus opus on the subject, The Secret War Against the Jews. Mark Aarons and I wrote this rather lengthy (and controversial) book back in 1994 (after several rounds of censorship by the CIA Publications Review Board).
Nevertheless, what survived the censors thoroughly documented that the spy services of several Western nations have made a daily habit of spying on their Jewish citizens at home, not to mention those living abroad in the land of Israel. In the early days, Mark and I were often accused of exaggerating the extent to which the world has secretly watched the Jews, and worse, betrayed their secrets to their Arab enemies.
Time has been on our side, and with it has come the declassification of documents suggesting that, if anything, Mark and I had understated the extent of espionage against the MOTs (members of the tribe). In the last 20 years, our irritatingly long 652-page book has become an international bestseller. As a result, Mark and I have learned that defending the truth about surveillance has made us targets of surveillance as well.
Mark knew this surveillance story from experience. His Russian Jewish grandparents were sent to organize the socialist labor revolution in Australia. Electronic surveillance of the Aarons family became a full employment opportunity for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIO).
Young Mark had the cheeky idea to write his family’s history straight from the ASIO archives, which, after several generations of gathering dust, were now due to be released to the public. ASIO, of course, objected vehemently and swore to the court that releasing any of “the family files” (the eventual title of Mark’s book) would compromise various secret codes and methods of the British Secret Service.
I flew to Australia to testify as an expert witness on British declassification. My principal argument was that the British Secret Service had no secrets left to protect. Its entire “secret” coding system was openly shared among all the Allies during World War II, and none of the other Allies had been asked to keep it a secret afterward, only the gullible Australians.
I recited the entire British intelligence code system from memory, which made the three judges on the panel laugh about the absurdity it all. When I saw that the judges had a sense of humor, I told the court that as far back as World War I, the Huns had learned the British coding system, discovering, for example, that the British secret code for Germany was the number 12, which is pronounced “zwolf” in German.
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