A society which employs Certified Public Accountants presupposes that people will be able to keep track of certain things, certainly money, for sure, and who people are, though this book finds a certain glory in how easy it is to fool official guardians of the identity assumptions with simple tricks. Obviously, this works best at places like Numec, a company specializing in reprocessing nuclear waste, in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Anybody ought to be able to figure out how likely it is that the following events, prior to December 1982, but reported as background information, might have actually occurred:

His two companions were described on their cards as scientists from `The Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel'.
There was no such department.
The men were LAKAM security officers whose task would be to see the best way of stealing fissionable waste from Numec. All three spent four days in Apollo, passing many hours touring the Numec plant, sitting for more hours in Shapiro's office. What they spoke about would remain a secret. On the fifth day Eitan and his companions left Apollo as unobstrusively as they had arrived.
A month later the first of nine shipments of containers of nuclear waste left Numec. Each container would bear the words: `Property of the State of Israel: Ministry of Agriculture'. The containers would carry a stencil stating they had full diplomatic clearance and so were exempt from customs checks before they were stowed on board El Al cargo freighters to Tel Aviv.
The containers were destined for Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility in the Negev Desert. (pp. 55-56)

One way to be a Mogul, buying companies close to bankruptcy and investing enough to turn them into successes, is described in this book as just the starting point for how "Robert Maxwell was the Barnum and Bailey of the financial world, the great stock market ringmaster able to introduce with consummate speed and a crack of his whip some new and even more startling financial act. But increasingly his high-wire actions had become more dangerous - and long ago he had abandoned any idea of a safety net." (p. 34). Maxwell's arrangements with Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the Soviet KGB, who had been involved in the August plot to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from office, made certain bankers insecure enough to want Maxwell to pay some of their loans. Maxwell thought 400 million pounds might be enough "to stave off his more pressing creditors. He asked Mossad to use its influence with Israel's banker's to arrange a loan. He was told to try to do what his fellow tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, had done when he had faced a similar situation. Murdoch had confessed his plight to his bankers and then renegotiated his debts, which were almost twice what Maxwell owed." (pp. 13-14). Actually, Maxwell must have owed far more than he told the Mossad. A Daily Mirror headline in the photographs section, after the "Maxwell Dies at Sea" picture, reported, "Maxwell: 536m pounds is missing from his firms/ The increasingly desperate actions of a desperate man."

Assuming that much, the rest of the book is written around questions raised by Efraim.

`If the truth about Robert Maxwell surfaces and he is destroyed in the process, who else will be compromised? How great will the damage be to Israel?' (p. 15).

Americans might be interested in this book for judging the current chances for success of American policies that seem to parallel the desperation of Robert Maxwell, but might cause Bill Casey even greater pain, if he were still in charge.

This book is anything but boring--calling this book boring strikes me as a desperate subterfuge by someone who want to keep its explosive contents from fuller circulation. This book is *fascinating* and explosive, not least because of the very well documented coverage it provides of how Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, used Robert Maxwell to penetrate not just the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice, the military, and the national laboratories, but many foreign governments including the Chinese, Canadians, Australians, and many others, with substantial penetration of their intelligence service databases, all through his sale of a software called PROMIS that had a back door enabling the Mossad to access everything it touched (in simplistic terms).

Also shocking, at least to me, was the extensive detail in this book about how the Israeli intelligence service is able to mobilize Jews everywhere as "sayanim," volunteer helpers who carry out operational (that is to say, clandestine) support tasks to include spying on their government and business employers, stealing documents, operating safehouses, making pretext calls, and so on. I am a simple person: if you are a Jew and a US citizen, and you do this for the Israeli intelligence service, then you are a traitor, plain and simple. This practice is evidently world-wide, but especially strong in the US and the UK.

The book draws heavily on just a couple of former Israeli intelligence specialists to address Israeli use of assassination as a normal technique (and implicitly raises the possibility that it was used against Senator John Tower, who died in small airplane crash and was the primary "agent" for Maxwell and Israel in getting PROMIS installed for millions of dollars in fees all over the US Government).

Finally, the book has a great deal of detail about the interplay between governments, crime families, Goldman Sachs and other major investors, and independent operators like Robert Maxwell who play fast and loose with their employee pension funds.

This book is not boring. Far from it. It is shocking, and if it is only half-right and half-accurate, that is more than enough to warrant its being read by every American, whatever their faith.

Another aspect that is mentioned in the book is the situation of manpower within the IDF. In the first phase of it's history the IDF was a compact, highly trained, and motivated fighting force. But in the seventies and eighties the force became bloated and ineffective. The IDF accepted so many conscripts that all but the elite units were trained effectively.Van Crevled opionizes that the conscription of women has only made the problem worse. Van Creveld tells about how ill educated IDF officers are compared to their foreign counterparts. Unlike most Western nations the IDF has no formal service academy. Instead IDF officers had to prove their leadership ability while as an NCO and then go to officer training school. The attempt to introduce a defense university has only met with failure in Israeli history. In the eighties and nineties a vast majority of educated Israelis opted out of the IDF officer corps. But very ill educated but religious Israelis became a large percentage of the current Israeli officer corps. Van Creveld believes that these new religious officers pose a great threat to Israelis democracy. The only criticisms that I have with the book is that Van Creveld glosses over Israeli operations in the Golan Heights during the 1967 and 1973 wars. Other than these minor criticisms this is by far the best book about the history of the IDF.

My only real criticism is a nitpick. This text is in need of a good editor. There are many awkward and plainly incorrect phrases, as well as outright mistakes. My "favorite" mistake was a reference on page 418 to the American President in 1972, Jimmy Carter. Gee, I was pretty sure Richard Nixon was President in 1972 (and I'll wager that Mr. Gilbert knows that, too)!!! Just to satisfy my curiosity, I even checked the index and found that Carter was cross-referenced to the incident described on page 418.

When all is said and done, I highly recommend this book to readers who want a well researched, single volume history of the state of Israel.

My biggest complaint about this series is the sometimes inappropriate use of humor. Humor is welcome, of course, but the 1992 edition led a (admittedly somewhat gullible) friend of mine to the remote fishing village of Abu Qir in search of the International House of Pancakes Let's Go said was there. Many people seem to memorize the Cairo drivers' "honking dictionary" that appeared in the 1998 edition, when this was either a joke or the product of a serious lack of understanding on the part of the authors.

All in all, though, a very good book and the one to buy if you're coming to the region.

That said, I used this book in 1998 to travel around Egypt, Israel, and Jordan, and I found it useful, insightful, and (yes) funny too. The Let's Go authors share more interesting observations, pay closer attention to detail, and express themselves more clearly than the authors of most other travel guides I've used (and I have used many).

The maps in the book were definitely a weak point. I suggest taking along a supplemental map or two, especially if visiting the big cities.

That said, I used this book in 1998 to travel around Egypt, Israel, and Jordan, and I found it useful, insightful, and (yes) funny too. The Let's Go authors share more interesting observations, pay closer attention to detail, and express themselves more clearly than the authors of most other travel guides I've used (and I have used many).

The maps in the book were definitely a weak point. I suggest taking along a supplemental map or two, especially if visiting the big cities.