Spies of No Country: Israel's Secret Agents At The Birth Of The Mossad, Friedman - C

 This is the story of four young Jews, all born in the 1920's in the Arab world, three named Cohen, and one Shosan, who were the foundation of one of the world's premier intelligence agencies, the Mossad.  Only Jews born in the Middle East had any prayer of acting as a spy. The Askkenazi Jews from Europe could not speak Arabic and did not look Arab. Even these four had occasional difficulty. They were the 'Arab Section' and we follow them from January 1948 to August 1949 in Beirut and Haifa. The fighting had begun in late 1947 after the UN agreed with British plans to leave Palestine and that there would be an Arab and a Jewish state in Britain's stead. The British left on May 14, 1949. The men of the 'Arab section' spied, bombed, assassinated, reported on Arab attitudes and in particular, on Arab intentions and plans as the Arab invasion failed. They came in from the cold and helped build the state after the Independence War.