Secrecy has a price

As of Wednesday night, despite extensive media coverage in Israel and abroad, most of the story of "Mossad agent" Ben Zygier/Alon remained unknown. It will take some time to see whether more details are published and whether publication of the story was in fact damaging, but we can draw some central conclusions now.

The shadow war: Espionage organizations naturally conduct secret intelligence wars. As part of this, they use foreign citizens and foreign passports and employ methods that are less than polite. Every slip-up has the potential not only to create a diplomatic fiasco (as in past incidents where the Mossad was allegedly involved) but also endangers the lives of operatives. An effort to maintain secrecy, even about past operations, is therefore a necessity for all pertinent state bodies.

The disappearance of people: It doesn't look or sound good, but sometimes in cases like this one, people disappear. Not in the terminal sense, as in the reign of the military junta in Argentina, but in the Western sense, in which people are arrested, tried and imprisoned away from public scrutiny. This happens in a very small number of cases around the world (not only in Israel) in which there is an extreme risk that exposing a person and his actions would cause irrevocable damage.

The secret detention: The question is not whether the public knew, but whether the people who needed to know knew. The question is not whether Zygier/Alon disappeared from public view, but whether he disappeared from the entire world. The answer to this question is no. It is reasonable to assume that the Mossad, which according to foreign sources employed Zygier/Alon, knew. The Shin Bet, which investigated him, knew. His family knew. The lawyers who represented him (and there were several) knew. The courts, which approved and extended his detention, knew. Even the Australian government apparently knew. At first glance, this is enough.

The failures: If Zygier/Alon was in fact a Mossad agent, a probe needs to be conducted on how he was hired and how he ended up in a situation in which he was arrested on such grave suspicions. A parallel probe needs to be conducted by the Prison Service to find out how its best guarded and most supervised prisoner was able to commit suicide. Both of these probes can be internal, but they must have outside legal and parliamentary supervision in order to ensure they are thorough and produce the necessary lessons.

The gag orders: In general, there are too many gag orders, which are too easily obtained. But in this particular case, it is hard to criticize the courts, because there is no doubt that there was a high likelihood of imminent and real danger to state security, which required secrecy to prevent potential damage. But the balance changes once the information is published in the media around the world, as happened two days ago. In the current technological era, it is hard to protect information and efforts to hide it can increase the damage. To put it simply, there is no chance that what didn't work with Mordechai Vanunu 30 years ago and Victor Ostrovsky 20 years ago would all of a sudden work in 2013 with Ben Zygier/Alon.

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