Unit 504: The Shadow People Revealed

Writing an organization's history is always a complex challenge: abundant information, some more interesting than other parts, many people who share in the successes (and certainly also the failures), and the dilemma of audience, whether veterans of the organization or the wider public. 

Holding and reading the history of Unit 504, the human intelligence (HUMINT) unit in Military Intelligence, published these days, one encounters a success story: important, interesting, instructive, doing historical justice, and a good source for anyone interested in intelligence work and in stories that spark curiosity.

The Unit 504 Alumni Association did this with the knowledge of the standing unit and the head of Military Intelligence. Two skilled writers from the alumni ranks, Eli Evron and Haim Gan Tov, took on the task. Writing by people who worked in the field stands out when reading the book: every chapter on an intelligence operation is written with the greatest care for the story's reliability, without the pathos typical of "bestseller" spy books. The book surveys the unique contribution of agent-sourced information from the Haganah's intelligence service (Shai) and the Palmach's Arab Department and mista'arvim, through the establishment of the military unit in 1948, to the important turn and the successes that followed the intelligence failure of October 7, 2023.

From its founding, the unit's collection officers were called katams (officers for special duties), and they operated in subordinate units covering the northern sector toward Syria and Lebanon, the central sector toward Jordan (until 1967), and the southern sector toward Egypt. In the late 1950s the unit formed a special-operations subordinate unit that later became Sayeret Matkal. Unit operations ("Lahava") helped bring Jews from Syria and Lebanon in the 1960s; an Egyptian couple became a vital source of information on Egypt (Operation "Seniora") after the Six-Day War.

In the "Seniora" story one also encounters the commitment to rehabilitate agents and their families after an agent's fall: his contribution is not forgotten, and that is also signaled to candidates for cooperation (collaborators). The "Good Fence" on the Lebanon border, established with the unit's close assistance in the mid-1970s, was a complex success story through the First Lebanon War and the useful relationship that followed with the South Lebanon Army (SLA). The IDF applied the lessons of that fence through the unit over the past decade amid the upheavals in Syria and the fall of the Assad regime. Among the stories are also double agents, a challenge that always stands before the agent handler.

Unit 560 in Military Intelligence dealt with interrogating prisoners of war and was integrated into Unit 504 in the 1970s. An important chapter in the book is devoted to a deception operation in the Yom Kippur War led by a katam, Captain Rami, who was born in Egypt. After interrogating a captured Egyptian officer, he recruited him (under the nickname "Gargaran") to deceive the senior Egyptian command so that the Second Army would not move from its position until the end of the war to aid Egyptian forces to its south. Over time, POW interrogators became field interrogators (hakash), and they take a close part in operational activity in the fighting ground-force units for counterterrorism.

The book is a badge of honor for human intelligence (HUMINT), whose essence is a human encounter between a handler or interrogator whose job is to bring the best intelligence to the state, and an agent or subject who is not necessarily glad to provide what they know. It is a head-to-head, soul-to-soul confrontation, a blend of knowledge, professionalism, and human sensitivity. Head of Military Intelligence Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder writes of the book that "the failure of October 7 underscored all the more the importance of human intelligence and the need to place it where it belongs, at the core of intelligence work."

The book is packed with information on people and operations, so it is good that noteworthy details are highlighted in short, clear footnotes. A comprehensive and thorough book of this kind would also have benefited from an index of subjects and people, to make the most of its value for research on Israeli history and Israeli intelligence.

Blessed be the "shadow people" of Unit 504 across its generations, and may readers enjoy it.

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