Keeping the Faith While Spilling the Beans : EVERY SPY A PRINCE The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community <i> by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman (Houghton Mifflin: $22.95; 450 pp.; 0-395-47102-8) </i>

A history of Israel’s intelligence community needs to be, in essence, a history of Israel, for many of the country’s most significant events have involved covert operations. “Every Spy a Prince,” published in London last year as “The Imperfect Spies,” tries earnestly to meet the challenge; it is chock-full of facts, dates, action and brief biographies for scores of spies, superspies, heroes and traitors.

The authors’ efforts, however, seem hampered by a basic conflict. On the one hand, they want to demystify their subject, revealing the seamy side of Israeli intelligence operations and spilling as many beans as possible. At the same time, they refuse to betray a basic loyalty to Zionist faith, and so they just cannot bring themselves to report certain facts. The authors voluntarily submitted their manuscript to Israeli military censors. They claim that certain disclosures are “forbidden by Israeli law,” but a book published in Boston is subject to neither Israeli law nor Israeli censorship.

Loyalty notwithstanding, they manage to spill quite a few beans, and hand us a few real scoops. Most skeletons in the closet are almost masochistically exposed. A long list of debacles and scandals--and some spectacular successes--are narrated in chronological order. (Intelligence insiders usually retort that neither represent the reality of their work. The most spectacular achievements, naturally, will never be revealed.)

A clumsy attempt at public relations is made when the authors present Israel’s secret police as the equivalent of the FBI, but Shabak (known in this book as “Shin Bet,” its old acronym) does not deal with bank robberies or mail fraud. It was a secret-police organization before 1967, and its assignment was always to control Palestinians through intimidation, co-optation, and economic pressures. Before 1967, it was charged with keeping tabs on 300,000 Palestinians in Israel. Since 1967, this number has grown tremendously, so that by 1990 its task is to help control more than 2 million Palestinians.

This book’s most intriguing chapters deal with the Pollard and Vanunu affairs, two cases in which highly unstable individuals found themselves at the center of world affairs.

Jonathan Jay Pollard was the Jewish U.S. Navy analyst and spy for Israel whose 1985 case caused much friction between the two countries. He had been recruited after meeting an Israeli fighter pilot and offering his services. Pollard--filled with James Bond fantasies and Zionist dreams of glory--met Col. Aviem Sella, a handsome hero, cool as a cucumber. Sella never dreamed about military glory; in the air force since age 18, he lived it. He is the antithesis of Pollard, who looks as unmilitary and un-James Bond-like as one can be.

Today, Pollard is serving a life sentence in the United States for selling secrets to Israel, while Sella is back in Israel, his march to the top of the Israel Air Force stopped by his amateurish spy caper.

Vanunu was a technician in Israel’s top-secret nuclear-research center who became a supporter of Palestinian rights without arousing much suspicion until he handed over snapshots of his workplace to a British paper. Israeli justice is more lenient than the American kind, and so Vanunu is going to be behind bars for a total of only 18 years.

The authors’ insights into how Israel spied on Palestinians involved with the intifada , or uprising, will be an eye-opener to most readers. Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza relied for 21 years on “several thousand informers ranged across Palestinian society, from factory workers to intellectuals.”

One of the important achievements of the intifada , now in its 33rd month, is the collapse of this network. Palestinian executions of other Palestinians usually are reported as terrorist attacks, but Raviv and Melman suggest that they might be targeted more specifically at collaborators than has been previously assumed. Their deaths mark another strategic failure in Israeli intelligence operations, one which may be more serious than all earlier debacles.

The authors make a strange omission when mentioning the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinians in 1982. According to Raviv and Melman, the Christian Falangist militia leaders “sent their gunmen on a vengeance mission into the Palestinian refugee camps.” What they don’t say is that the Falangist units actually were ordered into the camps by the Israel Defense Forces, when it was clear that no Palestinian combatants were left there.

The authors’ loyalty to Israel also seems blinding when they attempt to explain away some notorious Third World contacts: “Israel occasionally ended up involved with some of the ugliest regimes in the world. A private intelligence veteran might find a business opportunity, say, in an African dictatorship such as Idi Amin’s Uganda or Mobutu’s Zaire, and before long other former operatives and army veterans were training the security services of these countries. . . . Inevitably, Israel’s unfortunate image as a pariah state in league with other international untouchables was strengthened.”

We should remind the authors that both Idi Amin and Mobutu Sese Seko were given their paratroopers’ wings in the 1960s by Israeli prime ministers in official state ceremonies, not by private individuals. Israel’s connections with these two, and with Manuel Noriega, Ferdinand Marcos, Samuel Doe, Ian Smith, John Vorster, Alfredo Stroessner, Anastasio Somoza, Augusto Pinochet and the Duvalier family (the list could go on), did not come about because of any “private intelligence veteran” who managed to ensnare his unsuspecting government and besmirch Israel’s good name for private profit. They have been part and parcel of Israel’s global strategy.

The real scoops in the book, in addition to the name of the current Shabak chief, include material on Israel’s nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Even more surprising are details about Israel’s chemical-biological warfare research.

The book is marred by many simple errors that could have been avoided had the authors done their homework. The 1950s and the 1960s are, to the authors of this book, ancient history, and they often get their facts wrong (e.g., the military administration for Arabs inside Israel ended in 1966, not 1965; Ahmed Sukarno was ousted in 1965, not 1968). The transcription of the many Hebrew names is sloppy and inconsistent, and the choice of English terms to translate well-known Hebrew concepts is often less than felicitous.

A running theme throughout “Every Spy a Prince” is the decline and fall of Israeli intelligence organizations. In this, it joins a host of books in recent years that deal with Israel in the Dream-and-Disillusionment genre, or the G.O.D. (Good Old Days) school. The formula: Israel used to be great, humane, idealistic, pure, moral, successful; then came 1948, 1967, 1977, 1982 and 1987, and the old ideal disappeared, to be replaced by corruption/cruelty/mismanagement/bad luck. But this fascinating book clearly demonstrates that the Good Old Days were not always so great, and that the seeds of decline were sown quite early.

Despite its shortcomings, this book should be read by anybody seriously interested in the realities of today’s Israel. Given its topic, however, it should be taken with an industrial-strength grain of salt.