Spies of No Country

Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel

By: Matti Friedman

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Award-winning writer Matti Friedman's tale of Israel's first spies has all the tropes of an espionage novel, including duplicity, betrayal, disguise, clandestine meetings, the bluff, and the double bluff - but it's all true.

The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel's existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk, collecting intelligence, and sending messages back to Israel via a radio whose antenna was disguised as a clothesline. While performing their dangerous work these men were often unsure to whom they were reporting, and sometimes even who they'd become. Of the dozen spies in the Arab Section at the war's outbreak, five were caught and executed. But in the end the Arab Section would emerge, improbably, as the nucleus of the Mossad, Israel's vaunted intelligence agency.

©2019 Matti Friedman (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Excellent Book

This is a great story and well told. I would definitely recommend it. good performance as well.

Critical background

The author in the story gets reader some great insight on how the past the 1930s in the 1940s I’ve influenced the affairs in the middle East of today

Hear what Israel is

This is a unique book. The nature of the spies contradicts modern imagining. The story as the author insists is as much about the composition of modern Israel as the spies of the title. The shared pathos of the two enemies, the Arab Muslims and the Arab Jews whose country became Israel the author draws out in poignant stories.

Riveting

I was engrossed from the first chapter. Somewhere between spy thriller and biography, it is at times funny but at its core, devastating.

Untrained spies with little support

A rather sobering read about post-WWII Hebrew spies who tried to navigate through extreme hardship – they were required to live in abject poverty, physical danger - many were killed, and debilitating loneliness without training or any real support. Kim by Rudyard Kipling is mentioned quite a bit, time for me to dust off that book and endeavour to read it to the end this time. I had just finished reading Habakkuk in the bible and one of the young men in this book is also named Habakkuk: the author notes that both Habakkuk’s displayed a similar passion and mindset towards their ‘country’ – they did.

Extra: Though the topics in this book are challenging, the author doesn’t present them with gratuitous violence. I can’t remember any swearing, though one of the spies keeps lambasting others in Russian, so I’m not quite sure what he was saying ;)

Isreal History - dry however unique

my father faught in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. This gave me an understanding of my heritage

Amazing story of regular people becoming spies

The author paints a colorful and moving picture of the brave men who became some of the first spies for Israel.

INTERESTING PEICE OF ISRAELI HISTORY

Gripping narrative. Well written and good insight into a small section of the War for Israeli independence. I have a read a lot on this subject but this book gave me a lot of new information.

A lesser known history of Israel’s founder heroes

Matti Friedman has written a deeply human and poignant story about the search and struggle for identity in the shifting sands of early twentieth century Middle East. An essential book for anyone wishing to understand modern Israel’s complex social weave and history of the conflicting human stories of Israel, the Palestinians and their neighbours.

Read This Book

I found Spies of No Country extremely well written. The author held my interest through out the book.
I loved learning about a spy section I knew nothing about.
By the end of the book you feel you know and care about its main characters.
My congratulations to the author for a job well done.