I still get some free books from publishers but not as much as I used to since I seldom write book reviews. I usually do what Insty does and put up an In the mail post with the name of the book and the author and an Amazon link. Last week, however, I got this book Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism’s Money Masters by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Samuel M. Katz, and before putting up the In the mail post, I decided to read some of it. I usually am reading about two or three books at a time, and after I started reading this, I put the other books aside and read this one exclusively. One of the blurbs on the cover said it was “fast paced and reads like a thriller”. The author of that blurb was Valerie Plame so I had the tendency to disregard that. She was not wrong.

This book is the history of an Israeli intelligence program called Harpoon which went after terrorist financing. As the book tells us you would think that a suicide bomber was a cheap cruise missile. Actually he isn’t. There’s the cost of the explosives. There’s the cost of smuggling the explosives into the West Bank or Gaza. There’s the cost of the bomb maker. And finally, there is the cost of supporting the bomber’s family for the rest of their lives. That’s one of the incentives for the dumb barbarian to strap on the bomb and kill himself. Israel decided to go after the money that finances these attacks.

The architect of Harpoon was Meir Dagan, who eventually went on to become the head of Mossad, Israel’s secret service. At first, when he came up with the idea, he did not get much buy in but he persisted and persisted and after a few successes, he got all the intelligence agencies and the IDF on board. When he became head of Mossad, he still maintained personal control of Harpoon.

Harpoon not only went after the PLO and the Palestinian Authority (and the other various terrorist groups with Palestinian in their names) but Hamas and Hezbollah. Harpoon could have probably bankrupted both the PLO and the PA but Bush 43 told them that that would bankrupt the Palestinian economy and reined them in. And the downside would be?

One of the biggest successes of Harpoon was a scam they ran against Hezbollah by getting them to invest in a Ponzi scheme. They took Hezbollah for millions.

They raided banks where the terrorist organizations had money which allowed them to “follow the money” and roll up terrorist cells.

This is not merely about money as the book writes about other intelligence coups like the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, which of course Israel neither confirms nor denies.

This book does read more like an intelligence thriller than a dry non-fiction history of an intelligence program. I thoroughly enjoyed it.