Dietl, who now lives in a tranquil village near Munich, spent 11 years as an agent for the West German intelligence service BND in the Middle East.
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Even the wave of arrests in Lebanon over the last year of those accused of being “Mossad agents” does not change Wilhelm Dietl’s opinion that “the Arab intelligence agencies, including that of Lebanon, are ineffective.” Dietl, who now lives in a tranquil village near Munich, knows what he is talking about. For about 11 years he was an agent for the West German intelligence service BND in the Middle East, with his work as a journalist for the now defunct German weekly Quick, and then as a freelancer, providing his cover.
He visited Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other places, met with terrorists, military commanders, intelligence services representatives and politicians. He transmitted to readers some of his impressions in the hundreds of articles he wrote as well as in a number of books. Other confidential information was written up in reports he penned for his intelligence superiors. Several years ago his name was exposed.
“Yes,” he acknowledged in a June 2007 interview published in Haaretz Magazine. “I was a spy. I was what you in Israel call a collection officer, I was a handler. I collected information and ran agents. I bribed army officers. I traveled throughout the Middle East – Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt – and in doing so I risked my life for Germany.”
Recently Dietl, who left the BND as is now involved in legal battles with them, published a book in Germany titled “Schattenarmeen: Die Geheimdienste der islamischen Welt” (Shadow Armies: the Secret Services of the Islamic World ) about the history of the spy agencies in Islamic countries, especially Arab ones. He also hopes to find an Israeli publisher who is interested in the book.
It is the most in-depth book on the subject since Yaacov Caroz’s tome “The Arab Secret Services” published in Hebrew in 1976, over a decade after he resigned as deputy director of the Mossad.
“Most of the Arab intelligence services are completely different from what we in the West are familiar with when we think about intelligence services,” he says now. “Most of the work of the BND, for example, is to collect information of strategic, political or military value, and to understand, evaluate and analyze trends; not killing people and not torturing them. The Arab agencies see their primary task as preserving the regime or the leader and therefore, they are cruel and without limits. They are above the law; they are the law itself. They see themselves as a divine entity. They torture suspects relentlessly, so it is not surprising that many suspects are willing to confess to every crime. This is therefore one of the reasons why I believe they were also able to expose the Israeli spy ring in Lebanon.”
His evaluation stands in contrast to the suggestions made in the international media that they were exposed because of modern monitoring equipment provided by the U.S. to the Lebanese army.
“The exposure of those accused of being Mossad agents started first with an interrogation by Hezbollah’s preventive security service, which investigated unusual behavior among several suspects, such as sudden spending sprees,” he says. “Later on in the investigation they ‘arrested,’ i.e. abducted, the suspects, tortured them and extracted confessions from them.”
Only then were they transferred to the military intelligence branch, which in Lebanon is also responsible for domestic security.
According to reports last week from Lebanon and France, the recent wave of arrests focused on senior employees of Alfa, a cellular phone company operating in Lebanon since 1996. One of the detainees, Tareq Raba’a, who worked in the company’s technical department, was arrested after he raised suspicions by going on an extravagant spending spree in Paris.
In order to prevent Israeli intelligence from infiltrating its ranks, Hezbollah had set up a separate cellular phone network, despite the objections of former prime minister Fuad Siniora’s administration, and thereby further entrenched its status as a state within a state.
The network was set up for Hezbollah with expertise and funding from Iran. It covers areas heavily populated by Hezbollah’s base of Shiite Muslims.
“Indeed,” Dietl says, “Israeli intelligence failed in Lebanon, but in the end it was more a matter of luck than professional work. This time the Lebanese intelligence was luckier than in the past. I have not read or heard Israel’s reaction and perhaps that is a good thing. That is also why I don’t know what Israel did with regard to what happened in Lebanon, and what lessons it learned, but based on what I know of the Israeli intelligence, I am convinced that investigations were conducted and conclusions were drawn from what happened. In the end, I believe, the Lebanese spy agency, like those of the other Arab countries will also not change in the future. It will continue to be ineffective.”
Living a double life, especially in the Middle East, entails quite a few risks. Dietl was arrested in 1982 near the Syrian city of Hama, a short time after security forces there massacred Muslim Brotherhood members who rebelled against the regime. Dietl replayed for his interrogators an interview with the Syrian information minister he had conducted during his visit, and told them an interview with President Hafez Assad had been scheduled for him.
It was a lie but due to disrupted telephone service, they were unable to verify the information. The fear of the presidential palace and their identification of the voice of the information minister did the trick and the interrogators released him.
He feels this story reinforces his argument that members of the Arab intelligence services are more worried about making mistakes that may cost them their jobs if not their lives, than they are about doing their jobs in a professional manner.
“And this is just great luck for the Israeli intelligence services that they are their rivals,” Dietl says.