Article taken from the "SPOTLIGHT", Volume XVI, Number 39,
September 24, 1990 Pg.  6
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               US CENSORS BOOK AT ISRAEL'S BEHEST

              BY WARREN HOUGH AND LAWRENCE WILMOT


   In a legal move, which, according to Constitutional experts,
has no precedent in American history, the Israeli government
obtained a court order in New York on September 12 banning
publication of "By Way of Deception: a Devastating Insider's
Portrait of the Mossad", a history of recent Israeli espionage
operations written by Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad case
officer, and by Claire Hoy, a veteran investigative reporter in
Ottawa.
   The Mossad, Israel's secret service, ran dozens of
"deceptive" and "murderous" covert operations against the U.S.
which "set the stage" for the current Persian Gulf crisis during
the Reagan era, according to the book.
   Ostrovsky, born in Canada but holding dual Canadian-Israeli
citizenship, worked for the Mossad from 1984-1986. He is in
hiding, in or around Toronto, fearful of being kidnapped by
Mossad agents and spirited to Israel to face certain
imprisonment.
   To obtain the injunction, attorneys from the Manhattan law
firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom told New York
State Supreme Court Justice Michael J. Dontzin that Ostrovsky's
work "contained extremely confidential information."
   Publication would "endanger the lives of people in the employ
of the state of Israel and would be detrimental to the state of
Israel," lawyers for the Israeli government argued at an unusual
midnight hearing held at the judge's apartment.
   In a decision issued at 1:05 am, Justice Dontzin ordered St.
Martin's Press, the book's U.S. publishers, to immediately halt
publication and distribution of By Way of Deception. His order,
apparently based on a similar ban issued in Toronto barring
publication of the book in Canada, was made without having read
the work itself, the judge admitted.
   Angrily denouncing the judicial gag order and pledging to
fight it immediately in appellate court, Thomas J. McCormack,
president of St. Martin's Press, said, "I have no idea why this
book is "dangerous."
   He refused to elaborate, answering several phone calls from
SPOTLIGHT reporters only with the statement: "We have been
gagged."
   So did other publishing and media sources: John Pickton of
the Toronto Star told SPOTLIGHT special correspondent Paul
Chevasson: "I have just been served with a contempt of court
order just for making a brief mention of the book in a story I
wrote for the paper last week. I haven't seen the book yet, and
if I had, I could not tell you what is in it."
   The case is extremely unusual in that so-called "prior
restraint"--the gagging of speech before it takes place, is
almost never granted in the United States. Lawyers around the
country reacted in shock at the judicial decree, describing it
as "unprecedented" and an "aberration."
   Having obtained a detailed summary of the book's contents
from confidential New York publishing sources, the SPOTLIGHT's
investigative team found that the work denounced by Israel as a
"threat" was in fact a dramatic indictment of the devious and
subversive covert operations sponsored in this country by Israel
and her powerful lobby.
   Among its main points:

   # Mossad Agents committed a number of political
assassinations in the United States and Western Europe,
disguising them to look like accidents or the acts of "Arab
terrorists."

   # One Israeli terrorist strike was targeted at a top Iraqi
government official, who was set up with an attractive
prostitute in his hotel room then murdered. The hit was made to
appear to be the work of the United States, and although it was
hushed up, it fueled secret hostility between Washington and
Baghdad.

   # The Mossad did not just direct a number of covert action
sorties, it worked behind the scenes to stir up so-called
revenge violence among Arab activists in order to choke off
friendly contacts between the United States and the vast Islamic
world.

   Based on first hand information obtained by Ostrovsky while
working as a Mossad officer, the book reveals that the Mossad
may have had a hand in--or at least had reliable advance
information about--the desperate suicide bombing of the U.S.
Marine encampment in Lebanon which killed 241 American fighting
men in 1983. But Israel gave Washington no warning of the
attack.

   # While successive Israeli governments loudly denied that
they were spying on the United States, the Mossad maintained an
elite division with dozens of clandestine operatives dispersed
in major American cities. These agents did not just perform
high-level espionage assignments which involved stealing many of
the U.S. government's most closely guarded secrets for Israel;
they approached and subverted Congressional leaders and other
decisionmakers in Washington to support Israel's interests above
America's own strategic priorities.

   # Protected from police surveillance, prosecution and from
the media by the Israel lobby--the most powerful alien interest
pressure group in the nation's history--the Mossad considered
America its "easiest target....a playground" for agents, rather
than a zone of danger.

   In private, Mossad officials laughed and sneered at the
subservient reports of dual loyalist "investigative writers" in
New York and Washington who speculated that Jonathan Jay
Pollard, convicted in 1988 for selling Israel "trunksful" of
secret defense documents was the only Mossad spy infiltrated
into the U.S. national security bureaucracy.

   # In fact, while the term "dual loyalist" has been viciously
denounced by the Anti-Defamation League, the World Zionist
Organization and other Israeli front organizations as "anti-
Semetic", the book makes it clear that a similar term was in
frequent use among Mossad officers to describe Americans who
were ready to become Mossad assets in large numbers because they
were willing to place Israel's interests above those of their
own nation.

   "Israel has reasons for trying to suppress this book, says
New York Literary editor Wilfred Hahn, "But the same reasons
make this an extremely important work whose publication--shortly
[to be] approved by an appeals court, I hope--must be followed
by the widest distribution.
   "The current U.S.--Arab confrontation in the gulf has raised
hard questions many Americans have been reluctant to ask. This
book clears up a lot of them."