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Action-packed accounts of the missions of one of the worlds most effective and mysterious
intelligence services, Israels Mossad. The Mossad is widely recognized today as the best
intelligence service in the world. It is also the most enigmatic, shrouded in secrecy. Mossad:
The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service unveils the defi ning and most dangerous
operations that have shaped Israel and the world at large from the agency's more than sixtyyear history, among them: the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the eradication of Black
September, the destruction of the Syrian nuclear facility, and the elimination of key Iranian
nuclear scientists.
Through intensive research and exclusive interviews with Israeli leaders and Mossad agents,
authors Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal re-create these missions in riveting detail,
vividly bringing to life the heroic operatives who risked everything in the face of
unimaginable danger. In the words of Shimon Peres, president of Israel, this gripping, whiteknuckle read "tells what should have been known and isn'tthat Israel's hidden force is as
formidable as its recognized physical strength."
Former Knesset member Bar-Zohar (Shimon Peres, 2007, etc.) and Israeli TV personality and
journalist Mishal (Those Were the Years: Israels Jubilee, 1997, etc.) spare no detail about the
gruesome killings and plots of the Israeli agency. In fact, the authors often boast about the
deadliness of Mossad agents, especially former director Meir Dagan. Most of the missions
included here feature unexpected twists and nearly unbelievable plotlines that rival a fastpaced thriller. For example, there is the story of Elie Cohen, a Mossad agent who posed as a
Syrian expatriate who was homesick in Argentina and wanted to move back to his homeland.
He threw parties and mingled with the political inner circle, all while dispatching their secrets
to Israel on a daily basis. Another operation involved smuggling the unconscious body of a
former Nazi leader out of Argentina by having his double check into a hospital using the
targets name. Though unquestionably exciting, many readers may find the narrative
bordering on propaganda, and the last chapter is disappointing. Bar-Zohar and Mishal cobble
together facts to make an unconvincing argument about how Israel should receive support to
fight against the threat of Iran, cherry-picking facts to fit their position. For example, the
authors write that former Iranian deputy defense minister Ali-Reza Asgari defected to Israel
in 2007, even though the debate continues about whether he actually defected or was
kidnapped.
Entertaining and somewhat informative, but readers should take it with a grain of salt.

Raghuram Rajan, in his book Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the
World Economy , develops a comprehensive explanation for the 2008-2010
financial crises and then presents his ideas on how the economic and financial
system of the United States needs to change in order to avoid similar severe
outcomes in the future. Rajan uses a geographic metaphor, fault lines, to put the
current financial crisis in perspective. He argues that there is no single
explanation for what happened: consequently, the crisis developed along many
fault lines where enormous stresses arose. The world then split along these fault
lines causing tremendous dislocations to emerge in economic and financial
markets.
No one, Rajan argues, is specifically the cause of the development of the fault
lines.
Somewhat frighteningly, each one of us did what was sensible given the
incentives we faced. Despite mounting evidence that things were going wrong,
all of us clung to the hope that things would work out fine, for our interests lay in
that outcome. Collectively, however, our actions took the worlds economy to the
brink of disaster
This book contains so much that is valuable. Unfortunately, I can only present
some
highlights.
Rajan argues that governments can create fault lines for, he writes, Almost
every financial crisis has political roots. He focuses on two specific cases
contributing to the current crisis. The first has to do with the economic policies of
the United States; the second deals with world trade imbalances that have
exacerbated the consequences of the United States economic policies.
Put simply, the former relates to the growing inequality of income in the United
States. The author contends that the long run cause of this inequality comes
from inequalities in education: a substantial disparity in earnings has appeared in
America that is connected with the amount of education an individual has
received. This disparity cannot be eliminated quickly.
Politicians have responded to the discontent this divergence creates in the
electorate with two short run panaceas: first, the effort to achieve high levels of
employment through the monetary and fiscal policies of the government;
second, the effort to help as many individuals as possible own their own homes.
Thus the government has created policies that underwrite efforts to attain high
levels of economic growth and employment and will provide downside protection
against economic contractions and unemployment. Likewise, it will underwrite
the supportive credit inflation of the private sector and will save financial
institutions experiencing trouble on the downside.
Home ownership has become the default policy of government in the inequality
debate because efforts to directly combat income inequality in the United States,
Rajan contends, have been exiled from political debate. Supporting home
ownership for as many people as possible and in as many ways as possible has
been substituted. As a consequence, the number of programs, institutions, and
incentives advocated for home ownership has grown to the point where they
dominate most economic and social policies of the United States government.
Credit creation is the vehicle of choice for the achievement of homeownership

and prancing from bubble to bubble has become the essence of the fiscal and
monetary policy that supports this effort.
The development of world trade imbalances is another story of government
efforts to achieve the specific domestic economic desired by each particular
nation. Some countries following populists economic policies, like the United
States, Spain, Greece, and the United Kingdom, have created incredible
appetites for offshore savings to support the spending of their constituents.
Others, like China, Germany, and Japan, have done just the opposite and
provided the savings these other countries have needed. The resulting
imbalances exacerbated the financial crisis and, Rajan believes, are not
sustainable in any practical sense in the longer run.
But, the private sector must also bear responsibility for the fault lines that
developed.
First, Rajan states that the modern financial system now works with an arms
length business model rather than one that relies on customer relationships. In
the past, for example, a bank would provide a mortgage to a member of the
banks community and then the bank would hold onto the mortgage until the
customer paid off the loan. Now, a mortgage banker originates the loan and sells
the loan to a financial institution that will collect the payments made on the loan,
but will then package the loan with other mortgages, sell the resulting security to
someone else who will then receive the payments on the loan until this someone
else decides to sell the security to another party. Business is done with
strangers and everyone along the way receives fees.
Second, because transactions in the modern world of finance tend to be arms
length, the only way to measure performance is the money that one can earn.
Consequently, firms and individuals are pressured to push the limit or extend
the edge in all they do so that they can achieve a few more basis points return
than their competitors.
Third, Rajan examines how the pursuit of the first two of these factors can
transform unique risk into systemic risk which exposes financial institutions to
tail risks with an extremely high loss exposure. Take the mortgage business, for
example. A company that buys securities backed by mortgages assumes that the
mortgages backing the security are well diversified geographically. Thus, if there
is trouble in one area of the country, the security remains safe because other
areas of the country will continue to perform well. However, if widespread
household distress occurs, mortgages around the country begin to default and
the riskiness of a portfolio of mortgage-backed securities increases. Liquidity risk
may also increase at such times because the marketplace may not be able to
handle the sale of lots of securities all at once. Systemic risk is exacerbated as
the combined increase of credit risk and liquidity risk compounds the problem.
Many of the financial innovations created in the past fifty years have been
purchased under the assumption that the securities acquired are independent of
other instruments. We have learned that these instruments are not always
independent of one another. The probability that these securities will not be
independent may not be very high, but the potential costs of this loss of
independence may be quite large.

The government has introduced moral hazard into this picture by providing
protection against the downside. Rajan states that the government delivered on
the guarantees to the best of its ability and, in fact really did more than
promised to protect against this downside risk... The government now has the
task of convincing the financial sector that it will not do so again.
But the question that follows is, How do we get the private sector to price risk
properly again, without assuming government intervention?
Rajan concludes that The problems emanated at the interfaces between the
private sector and the government and we cannot do away with either side
for realistic reforms have to work on managing the interface. As we have seen,
The supercharged financial sector, having taken advantage of the implicit
guarantees embedded in the governments desire to push housing credit and
promote employment growth, has ended up flat on its back.
The ultimate question is how do we avoid this possibility in the future. Rajan
spends the rest of the book trying to provide answers to this question.