Israel, the Islamic State, and Hidden Hands

Israeli intelligence is backing radical gangs in the fight against HAMAS, in a stunning repetition of counterterrorism history

Do we really know what’s going on in the world? Does media reporting reflect reality – or merely what powers-that-be want us to see? As subscribers to this newsletter know, a good deal of what the public sees as “news” has been shaped by governments and other interests. Some of it is entirely wrong, or at least media reporting omits so much important information as to be essentially false. Nowhere is this truer than when discussing terrorism.

Intelligence services worldwide play operational games with terrorist groups: influencing them, manipulating them, sometimes even creating them. As a KGB senior officer with considerable real-world experience in these dark arts bluntly told me, “To fight terrorists, you must create your own terrorists.” That’s grounded in the ugly truth, seldom mentioned by journalists or academics, that the easiest way to kill terrorists is by getting them to kill each other.

Indeed, enticing terrorists to kill each other is an effective if risky counterterrorism technique which, done right, can even become an effective strategy to crush the Tangos. Just don’t expect to read about what’s really happening in the newspapers.