Mossad 'aggressively' censored television documentary in Israel

Israeli intelligence services have tried to derail a television documentary planned to be broadcast on the Israel’s Channel 10 next Sunday, Israeli journalist Amnon Levy said on Tuesday.

Levy presents a weekly show for Channel 10 called “The Right Face”. For this particular show, he was preparing to cover the lives of Mossad agents and their families. He said that he attained all the permissions he needed from the state and from the relatives of the Mossad agents.

Producers of the show told Israeli newspapers that security issues were not discussed during the programme. Neither was there any mention of how the Mossad works.

But they said that the Mossad exerted much effort to stop the production of the show despite the fact that the censorship department had approved it.

Speaking to Haaretz, Levy explained that the show discusses the dangers of being a Mossad agent’s child: “We talked about facial reconstruction that Mossad agents underwent as part of their change of identity, and examined if the agency used female agents as seductresses.”

“At a certain point the organization began to fight us in all possible ways. At the last minute, the evening before or in the same morning of a [scheduled] interview, we received calls cancelling the interview, because the interviewees were forbidden to cooperate with us,” he said.

Levy described how participants who planned to appear received threats by telephone or e-mail after the censorship department passed their names to the Mossad.

A wife of one former agent told Haaretz that her husband applied for permission to appear in the show, but his application was refused. They agreed that the wife and her daughter could appear, but later on they suddenly called her and told her to cancel her participation.

Levy told the newspaper that the measures taken by the Mossad were not justified and were “aggressive.” He insisted on that because, according to him, the show does not disclose any state secrets. He said it only talks about the personal price that Mossad agents and their families pay.