The trouble with this story, as with the book generally, is that Friedman yokes research, suspenseful storytelling and austere but potent prose to historical narratives that are both simplistic and pernicious. The explosion left a hole “the size of a large dining room table,” and the ship was eventually sold for scrap, its toilet ending up “in an auto shop in Florence, New Jersey.” As I said, extremely entertaining. During World War II, we learn, the Grille’s crew members wore white dress uniforms and “had to be at least six feet tall.” The Jewish saboteur, named Rika, carried, along with flippers and the mines, “a bottle of rum to warm him up when he came out of the water” and “‘energy pills,’ probably methamphetamines.” After diving under water to avoid the searchlights of a British warship, he struggled with a slippery, defective detonator. In his new history, “Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel,” Matti Friedman tells this story with great style.

31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble as well as “Great Feeling” by Alex Kizenkov.It is entertaining to learn that in Beirut in 1947, Jewish intelligence agents detonated a mine attached to the Aviso Grille, which was once Hitler’s personal yacht. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. They discuss the challenges and risks the spies faced while undercover, the complex identities of these Mizrahi Jews who had to pose as Arabs, and the importance of telling the stories of these Jewish heroes from Middle Eastern lands. In this podcast, Matti Friedman joins Jonathan Silver to talk about his new book. This was the world of Israel’s first spies, the unsung heroes of the nation’s founding. Focusing on the lives of four of these men, Friedman transports us back to a world without a State of Israel or an IDF, where the fate of Palestine’s Jews remained uncertain and the project of Jewish statehood hung in the balance. In Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, journalist and author Matti Friedman tells the story of these mista'aravim, Jews who went uncover as Arabs.

Sent back into the Arab lands they had left behind, these brave Jews risked their lives to become spies for a country that was yet to be born. In the spring on 1948, before the State of Israel had even been declared, a handful of young Mizrahi Jews were recruited to serve in the Palmach’s Arab Section and charged with going undercover among the Arab population of Palestine and neighboring countries. Long before the Mossad became known as one of the world’s greatest intelligence agencies before the capture of Eichmann and the raid of Iran’s nuclear archive before Eli Cohen and Rafi Eitan before Fauda captured audiences around the world, Israel’s first spies were dispatched to Beirut without so much as a radio to contact home.

Spies of No Country by Matti Friedman