Methodological and epistemological reflections on elite interviews and the study of Israel’s intelligence history: interview with Efraim Halevy

ABSTRACT In recent years, the literature on elite interviews has been receiving growing attention from scholars across diverse fields, especially those of intelligence and national security. However, this debate has mostly concentrated on the intelligence history of the ‘Five Eyes’ alliance, while neglecting the Middle East. Using Israel as a case study, this article explores the factors underpinning this lacuna. I argue that there is an acute need to apply a constructivist approach (as understood in international relations theory), with an emphasis on foreign policy analysis – i.e., a single-actor focus, which examines the experiences of individuals and their influence on decision-making processes. Elite interviews are the ideal methodological and epistemological means for this inquiry. Although they are not a silver bullet for the study of Israeli national security, elite interviews help not only to explore and situate Israel’s role in the field of global intelligence studies, but also to imbue intelligence scholarship with a sense of humanity, emotion and feeling. Crucially, this highlights the individual actors in a history that would otherwise be composed of merely impersonal processes and ‘top-down’ decision-making.


Introduction
The body of scholarly literature on security and intelligence is growing rapidly. One of the focal points of this literature has been the 'Five Eyes' alliance. This refers to the study of intelligence based on the experiences of the Anglo-Saxon world, specifically the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (USA), Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. However, recent debates in the field of intelligence studies and International Relations (IR) have looked beyond the 'Five Eyes' paradigm. 1 Work by scholars such as Philip Davies and Kristian Gustafson has argued for the acute need for comparative study of national intelligence outside what they term the 'Anglosphere'. Zakia Shiraz and Richard Aldrich have recently built on this debate and pointed out the importance of studying the intelligence history of the Global South and Latin America, and more generally the importance of combining intelligence studies with area studies. 2 Meanwhile, Dina Rezk's important work has developed our knowledge about the Anglo-American perception of the Arab world and how it has been shaped by 'orientalist discourse'. 3 Maha Abdelrahman, along with Owen Sirrs and Rezk, respectively, re-examined Egypt's intelligence history. 4 Following this thread, then, were we to look at intelligence history through area studies lens, we would need to start by contextualising Middle Eastern intelligence history, and specifically Israel's role in this puzzle. How might this be achieved?
One of the key methods at our disposal to start investigating this area is interviews with Israeli intelligence personnel and the diplomatic elite. Elite interviews have proven to be a vital tool that has received much attention in recent decades from scholars in the fields of IR, Cold War studies, critical security studies, and intelligence history 5 . The current state of the art demonstrates numerous and sophisticated works that provide a wealth of documented insights about, inter alia, how to contact the interviewee, prepare for and undertake the interview, and how to use interview material in scholarly writing. 6 There are also some excellent examples of methodological and ethical reflections on interviews as a research tool, as well as literature that emphasises the practical aspects of conducting elite interviews and managing such projects. 7 As noted by Andrew Hammond in his agenda-setting piece, elite interviews are particularly valuable for studying intelligence history, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in particular, despite imposing particular demands on the researcher. 8 The present article builds upon this vast body of work and the recent debates touched on above, but will focus primarily on the ways that interviewing Israeli elite personnel can illuminate the sense and essence of this most notable of intelligence communities. In doing this, it will provide initial context to Israel's role within global intelligence history. It also offers a number of insights into the particular demands imposed upon the researcher when conducting elite interviews and field research in Israel, and how these interviews can ultimately benefit research on Israeli national security, diplomacy and intelligence history.
While it is not surprising that Israel and the Middle East, much like the Global South, has remained outside the scope of the 'Anglosphere', it is still quite puzzling that the opportunity to build a systematic body of knowledge about interviews with the Israeli intelligence elite has been generally overlooked. Such an account could, among other things, include an oral history archive and more frequent publication of interviews with the Israeli intelligence elite, such as that in the second part of this article. These interviews can provide meaningful insights into a range of topics that the Israeli national/intelligence archives cannot provide alone and illuminate a fragmented history. Nevertheless, most of the Israeli and non-Israeli scholars who conduct elite interviews do not seem to be keen to share their interview transcripts, to publish them in academic journals, or to take part in innovations such as an open-access repository of oral history. 9 This article seeks to start filling this gap, and this will be the focus of both parts of this article.
As noted by Damien Van Puyvelde, 'Government intelligence archives are only available in select democratic countries, and even there many documents remain unavailable'. 10 Israel is definitely not one of these select countries. The scholarship regarding Israel's national security and foreign policy has mostly been conducted through a realist lens, with a focus on Israel's survival posture in the hostile Middle East and its characterisation as a country with a deep security problem. Although Israel's intelligence and diplomacy history is heavily entwined, the two strands have been artificially separated within archival research. The realist lens also imposes two separate yet interconnected positivist issues: (1) The Israeli authorities' approach to de-classifying state archives tends to overemphasise Israel's national security concerns, in order to justify keeping many topics and periods unavailable for research. In particular, it is not possible for researchers to access the archives of Israel's national intelligence institutions (the Mossad, Ha-Shabak or Sherut Bitachon Klali [in Hebrew] and Aman), on the premise that doing so would pose a threat to Israeli national security or foreign policy; 11 and (2) most scholars working on Israel's diplomacy and intelligence history using archival research therefore adopt these categories of artificial separation between national security and diplomacy.
I argue, however, that there is an acute need to apply a constructivist approach (as it is understood in IR theory), with an emphasis on Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) -i.e., a single-actor focus, which examines the experience and influence of individuals on decision-making processes. Elite interviews are the methodological and epistemological means for this inquiry: while they are not a silver bullet for the study of Israeli national security, elite interviews hold great promise for unveiling important information about a wide range of topics. 12 These Interviews help to situate and explore Israel's role in the field of global intelligence studies, but also imbue intelligence scholarship with a sense of humanity, emotion and feeling, highlighting individuals in a history that would otherwise be composed of merely impersonal processes and top-down decision-making. This is not to say that it is impossible to generate from the interviews data that can be fruitful for understanding grand strategies and collective decision-making. The constructivist approach, underpinned by Israel's relatively open intelligence community, along with the generational changes in the study of its diplomatic and intelligence history, should provide an accommodating climate for this methodological and positivistic shift.
The present article unfolds in two parts. In Part I, the article provides a brief historical overview of the field of Israel's intelligence history and the state of the art of elite interviews as a research method. It examines the factors underpinning the embedding of this method in the study of Israel's diplomatic and intelligence history. In this part, I also provide methodological and epistemological reflections and some initial insights and lessons from elite interviews carried out in Israel during the author's doctoral studies. Part II starts with a short biography of Efraim Halevy, the 9th director of the Mossad, and then offers the transcript of our interview from 2016. The transcript of Halevy's interview imbues intelligence scholarship with a sense of humanity and show how elite interviews can contribute to the study of Israeli historiography and the country's role in the global history of intelligence and connects between the two parts of this article.

Elite interviews and the state of the art of Israel's national security: towards a global history?
The state of Israel, established in 1948, can be seen as something of a bridge between the 'Five Eyes' alliance and the Middle East, and functions well as a border line case study. 13 The Israeli intelligence community can be characterised by three main features: firstly, Israel's diplomatic and intelligence culture has been closely engaged with and influenced by, even shaped by, its close relations with the 'Anglosphere'. Due to Israel's alignment with the western powers, specifically the US during most of the Cold War, Israel's politics and culture and its deep connection with the US have influenced its self-image. 14 Secondly, however, from an area studies viewpoint and taking into account Israel's geopolitical location, Israel is grounded in the Arab Middle East as a 'nation in arms'. 15 And thirdly, as part of the positivist debate, although Israel's intelligence and diplomacy history are deeply entwined realms, they have been artificially separated by means of archival research and arbitrary censorship regulations. These three characteristics must be the starting point of any state-of-the-art section that attempts to examine Israel's position and role within the international history of intelligence studies. Set against this background, what follows will focus on two key questions: how can one make sense of Israel's intelligence history? And what weight do different scholars give to elite interviews in the study of Israel's intelligence and national security?
In the present journal elite interviews are used frequently. 16 As noted in the work of Van Puyvelde, 'researchers conducted and referred to their interviews in 15 per cent of all the articles published in Intelligence and National Security (INS)'. 17 Moreover, although elite interviews are widely used in the field of intelligence and national security, Van Puyvelde convincingly argues that there has been little effort to address methodological questions related to the engagement with narrators as primary sources, as well as notions of bias and validity. This article builds on this argument and seeks to start filling this gap and to examine Israel's role in this research puzzle. Within the 15 per cent of articles published in INS that Van Puyvelde refers to as making use of interviews, the most notable examples are the works of Israeli scholars on Israeli case studies, particularly those of Shlomo Shpiro, Uri Bar-Joseph, Itai Shapira,and Robert F. Coulam. 18 However, none of these works address the methodological and epistemological issues mentioned above.
Much of the extant work on Israel's intelligence and national security lies in the realm of policy advice, a semi-academic field. It is dominated by scholars with extensive backgrounds as practitioners, such as Chuck Freilich, Kobi Michael, Gallia Lindenstrauss, Yoel Guzansky, Dan Shiftan, Gilead Sher, Efraim Inbar, Ori Wertman and many others. 19 The primary publication that facilitates this trend is the academic journal Strategic Assessment, published quarterly by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University, which provides readers with a comprehensive overview of Israel's national security, focusing on the current affairs side of this field. With a few exceptions, this school of Israel's national security and intelligence studies frequently focuses on examining contemporary problems and providing policy advice. 20 It often gives less attention to the role of the past, considering neither any historical episodes in Israel's national security nor the extent to which the latter are entrenched in Israel's diplomatic history.
A second group of works that needs to receive attention in this short debate is non-academic in nature: the investigative journalistic work of Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman,Ronen Bergman and Eitay Mack. 21 Each of these important contributors has used elite interviews to bring to light hidden dimensions of Israel's national security and many dramatic behind-the-scenes stories, with books covering topics that are both extremely sensitive and of great contemporary value. Bergman even went as far as noting that the Israeli security community requested its employees not to cooperate with research for his book, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations. 22 Bergman conducted more than 1,000 interviews with the Israeli intelligence and diplomatic elite and he, as well as Melman, could provide a wealth of insights about their fieldwork, even though their outputs, methodology and target audience as journalists all differ from those of historians. Bergman's ability to access so many interviewees for his books is impressive and of importance to the main argument of this article. It goes to show that the Israeli elite, especially the retired state elite, is both accessible and willing to contribute towards creating an oral history collection about the history of the country's national security and intelligence. No less impressive is Bergman's self-reflective note in Rise and Kill First about the process of conducting some of these elite interviews. 23 There is also a third group of scholars of Israeli diplomatic history and national security who should receive attention: those who use interviews as a supplemental research method to complement the main primary archival sources. Scholars like Amnon Aran, Avi Raz, Avi Shlaim, Azriel Bermant, Eli Podeh, Lior Lehrs, Ofra Bengio, Seth Anziska, Sharon Pardo, Yitzhak Mualem, and others have interviewed the Israeli national security elite for their respective publications. 24 This group of scholars have demonstrated how Israel's intelligence and diplomacy history are deeply entwined, and their use of interviews allows them to challenge the artificial separation of these two strands by the arbitrary censorship regulations that hamper archival research. Typically, the elite interviews used by this group of scholars focus on highlighting the voice of the Israeli national security community in the study of particular diplomatic episodes. In one of the only notes of selfreflection to be found among this scholarship, Seth Anziska rightly points out that some of the interviews he conducted served as background for pursuing various avenues of archival research for his award-winning book Preventing Palestine. 25 This goes to show the interplay between elite interviews and archival research: the degree to which interviews can cross-fertilize as well as more straightforwardly help to fill in where gaps exist within the archival research.
Yet, in these extensive publications, it is nevertheless quite striking that so far there is no single account -at least not more than a very brief note -providing scholars in the field with some critical reflections and insights from the extensive fieldwork that has been carried out over the last three decades. This is surprising, given that there is quite a significant body of knowledge on how to conduct interviews with the Israeli diplomatic and national security elite and on the particular demands they place on the researcher. This significant, yet not systematically organized, knowledge is built on the experience of a diverse group of scholars. Nevertheless, there is no single account that addresses these issues and connects them to bigger questions and contemporary debates in the field of intelligence and national security. 26 Such an account could engage more critically with the literature on elite interviews and could equally contribute to knowledge of the role of Israel as a linking chain between the Anglosphere, the Middle East and the Global South. This striking lacuna in the literature has gone almost unnoticed.
In contrast to the latter two groups of scholars discussed above, is a fourth group of scholars: those working within Israel's Zionist historiography, who mostly reject the use of elite interviews despite frequently tackling questions related to national security and intelligence. Thus, one would expect that this group would use oral sources more often than most of the categories of scholars referenced in this section. The work of scholars like Uri Bialer, Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, Aharon Kleinman, Benyamin Neuberger, Shlomo Avineri, Avraham Sela, Zack Levey, Gadi Heimann and many others should receive special attention in this category. 27 Yet, Israel's diplomatic and militaristic posture, the complex civil-security relations, its powerful security sector, and the massive involvement of the intelligence community in diplomatic decisionmaking cannot be studied purely with reference to the fragmented archival records. Scholarship of this type often highlights the institutional dimension of Israeli diplomacy, and from a positivist point of view that shows how formal archival records frame the institutional 'top down' decision-and policy-making.
It is beyond the scope of this short article to engage with the claims of this school of works, but it will suffice to discuss Uri Bialer's point of view as quite representative as he has written about methodological issues. 28 As a pioneering historian of Israel's diplomatic history and a leading authority of this group of scholars, he has made a few notable remarks about sources and methodology. In his most recent book, Israeli Foreign Policy, Bialer asserted that, 'the new historiography of Israel's foreign relations rests largely, as noted, on gradually released official documentation that allows us to cast an ever-wider thematic net and discover previously unknown aspects of these relations'. 29 In fact, the Israeli archives are far from uncovering systematic documentation about Israel's diplomacy and national security. This problem is not unique to Israel, but certainly to argue that Israel is gradually releasing official documentation is an understatement: as Bialer noted, in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) archives, only about 50,000 documents have been de-classified out of about one million. Documents in the Israeli State Archives (ISA) are also only partially accessible: only about one-sixth of the documents are open for review. 30 Bialer even goes so far as to assert that: 'my efforts to present a historical analysis and tell a story based on archival documents did not always bear fruit. In one instance I had to rely on material that I always hesitate to use -oral testimony'. 31 And yet, Bialer was surprised at how fruitful this approach turned out to be, as evidenced by his 2012 article about a Jewish American citizen stationed in Tehran in the late 1940s -Gideon Hadary, also known as 'Adam'. Hadary was a State Department intelligence officer who was later assigned to work behind the scenes for the Jewish Agency and the State of Israel. 32 The article was based on Hadary's memoir, which he completed towards the end of his life and which his family deposited with Bialer after his death but also on his conversations with Hadary years before his death, and with archival records that mentioned 'Adam's' operation. 33 These oral accounts as well as Hadary's memoir presented Bialer with a rare opportunity that demonstrated to a former sceptic the potential of taking a constructivist approach to the history of Israeli diplomacy and national security. These restrictions do not only limit research on certain topics or particular diplomatic/national security institutions. As rightly noted by Oded Heilbronner, who recently re-examined the selective and arbitrary declassification of archival documents, it also imposes significant limitations on studying later periods of Israeli historiography and thus Israel's role in global history. 34 Heilbronner also noted that to this day [2021], Zionist and Jewish historiographies, which seek to rely on archival research, serve as the foundation for building fundamental narratives in modern Israeli history. 35 The Zionist historiography of Israel's foreign policy is also going through this narrative-building process, as seen in the work of Bialer et al., listed above. The Israeli state censorship policy effectively means that the history written about political and socio-economic processes in Israel differs in nature from that of other countries. 36 This point is relevant to the discussion in this article as well as to Israel's diplomatic/national security history and to global intelligence history.
Relevant to this discussion are the methodological and epistemological reflections of Amir Lupovici. His work explores the limitations of securitization theory on Israeli case studies, as well as its lack of use in constructivist research methods. Lupovici notes that these limitations partly stem from the 'sociology of knowledge', 37 basing this assessment on a study by Richard Jordan et al, who reported that the vast majority (88 per cent) of Israeli scholars consider realism the most effective theoretical lens through which to consider Israeli foreign policy. Also noteworthy is that 0 per cent of Israeli scholars consider constructivism to be a paradigm with insights to offer in the field of IR. 38 This statistic goes some way to explaining why the Zionist school of historiography does not consider elite interviews a reliable research method, as the latter uses a constructivist lens that at times offers explanations that challenge those found in official archival records.
With this data in mind, it should be noted that the latter group of scholars carries substantial weight in the argument against using elite interviews and embedding them into inquiry about Israel's national security history in a more systematic fashion. This group, while making immense contributions to knowledge on the first two decades of Israeli diplomatic history, through its disapproval of elite interviews effectively hinders scholars in the field from building a systematic account that draws on this source. Moreover, although this school of thought is not the biggest in the sector, it is disproportionately more influential on debates in the field compared to other groups of scholars. It frequently rejects the need for and the utility of elite interviews in its scholars' work and holds the ISA to be the gatekeeper of Israeli Zionist historiography and the sole authority with regards to the country's diplomatic and intelligence history. As a result, this approach hinders the progress of Israeli historiography -and more specifically its intelligence history -towards an authoritative assessment of its role in global history.

Elite interviews: the merit of FPA and a constructivist approach to the study of Israel's national security
An excellent example that shows how elite interviews and the constructivist approach in general can help build an innovative argument is the recent book by Elie Podeh, which offers new insights into Israel's national security history that challenge the realist doctrine of Israeli Zionist historiography. 39 Podeh's book offers an original argument: Israel was not isolated in the Middle East to the extent often presented in Zionist historiography. It is true that Arab and Muslim counties in the region had to publicly denounce Israel and boycott it on economic and political grounds, yet the Jewish state was able to build complex relationships that relied on clandestine diplomacy. This is a well-studied phenomenon that is framed under the periphery doctrine. However, Podeh's innovative work argues that over the course of Israel's history many of these periphery actors (Arab and Muslim nations but also minorities) 'outed' their relationships with Israel. As Podeh notes, this transitioned Israel from a 'mistress' to a publicly acknowledged, established partner. Israel's relations with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco in the 2020 Abraham records demonstrate this point very well.
Importantly, Podeh notes that in writing a historical account of Israel's clandestine diplomacy and national security, it would be impossible to undertake a thorough investigation of the Mossad and the Israeli General Security Service [Ha-Shabak] using the national security archives, as much of the relevant material is unavailable to scholars. 40 To overcome this problem, Podeh conducted over 100 oral interviews with key Israeli intelligence and national security personnel, including key individuals such as prime minister Ehud Olmert, Uzi Arad, Reuven Merhav, Shabtai Shavit, Tamir Pardo and Efraim Halevy. 41 This approach forms the basis for the premise of this article: there is an acute need to take on a constructivist approach that emphasises FPA. Elite interviews not only hold great promise for unveiling important information about a wide range of topics that situate Israel's role within the field of world history, but also imbues intelligence scholarship with a sense of humanity, emotion, and feeling, and highlights individuals' experiences. As a research tool, it was instrumental in producing the ground-breaking argument in Podeh's book.
Another recent work that shows the great promise of using elite interviews and a constructivist approach of FPA is the new book by Amnon Aran. This book offers an in-depth examination of how domestic factors shape foreign policy. 42 Aran's approach emphasises, from the bottom up, how some issues in Israel's foreign policy and national security 'are filtered, understood and interpreted by the domestic actors, which then [shape] Israeli foreign policy towards a range of issues, in significant ways'. 43 This actor-focussed approach allows Aran to re-examine Israel's foreign policy towards the Middle East in the context of its relations with the European Union (EU), USA, China and India in the post-Cold War period. Similarly to Podeh, in order to penetrate Israel's informal 'security network', Aran interviewed around 30 Israeli chief policymakers, leading political activists, heads of Israel's security services and foreign ministry, such as Moshe Arens, Carmi Gillon, Tzipi Livni, Yitzhak Mordechai, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Although this is fewer than the number of interviews Podeh carried out, they nevertheless allowed Aran to cast new light on and add essential complementary material to other primary sources, including Israeli Knesset protocols, USA Congressional reports, and documents retrieved from WikiLeaks.
This section has offered a snapshot of the utility and use of elite interviews to the field of Israeli diplomatic and security studies. It is not surprising that more than a handful of scholars use it, even quite frequently, as a research tool. Yet, it is to the detriment of the scholarship that the method is not utilised with a sufficient amount of self-reflection, and that there persists a lack of awareness about the importance of elite interviews and the scope of what they can achieve beyond merely filling gaps in archival records. This situation seems to stem from the way in which scholars in the field of Israeli's national security, especially historians of Israeli diplomatic and security studies, perceive and approach elite interviews: at best, as a supplementary research tool. This approach underlies the apparent scepticism of a central group of Zionist scholars towards elite interviews. Other factors at play are the fact that elite interviews are considered to be primarily a journalistic methodology; the emphasis on the male perspective in Israeli diplomatic and intelligence history; the potential challenges that material gleaned from interviews can pose to the national histories represented by the archival records; and a lack of awareness about elite interview methods and the international scholarly debates that surround them in the 'Five Eyes' alliance literature.
Nevertheless, there are some recent publications that aptly demonstrate the argument of this article: the two recent books by Podeh and Aran respectively; Lupovici's reflections on sectorization theory on sectorization practices in Israel; and, most importantly, Bialer's work on Gideon Hadary's secret diplomacy, mentioned above. These publications encapsulate the main argument of this article: they herald a new trend that promises to showcase the vast potential of interviews and demonstrate the need for a constructivist approach (as it is understood in IR theory) with an emphasis on FPA. As shown above, even Bialer, who previously displayed much scepticism about utilizing oral sources, benefited greatly from this method when compiling his work about Gideon Hadary -and other scholars have the potential to be persuaded to this way of thinking as well. Moreover, the vast body of knowledge already offered by scholars in the field holds the possibility of scaling up the usage and dissemination of elite interview output. At first, the method should be grounded by specific knowledge based on the experience of scholars in the field and by systematic dissemination of interview outputs. A more advanced phase could even work towards building an archive of oral history that contains the recordings and transcripts of these interviews and offers open access to anyone who is interested in this valuable knowledge.

Lessons from the field: epistemological approaches to interviewing the Israeli elite
The interview output that makes up the final part of this article was conducted in 2016 as part of my four years (2015-2019) of field research in Israel for my doctoral dissertation. In this dissertation, I used qualitative research that enhanced my empirical work based on archival research. Already aware of the limitations of oral history, from the time spent on my field work as a young historian of Israel's foreign policy and national security, I have also become more aware of an asymmetry in the use of elite interviews within the Anglosphere in comparison to the Middle East, specifically Israel. Meanwhile, my reading of a vast amount of formal Israeli archival sources has led me to inquire about the missing records in some of the themes I have studied, which relate to a relatively late period in the Cold War (the 1970s and 1980s). Records from this period are often censored on the basis of their being too recent. Accordingly, I needed to find an alternative method to bridge some of these gaps. That method is elite interviews.
Beyond the special -and understudied -role that a case study of Israel can play in bridging the Anglosphere and the Middle East, it also represents fertile ground for field research. While there is clearly a realistic danger in conducting field research and elite oral history in Middle Eastern countries characterised by authoritarian regimes, Israel offers a relatively different experience with regards to field research. Within the context of the region, there is certainly a degree of selfcensorship among the Israeli state elite, but Israel is -for the most part -safe for both foreigners from western universities and local scholars, presenting no danger of being arrested or arbitrarily prosecuted for alleged 'spying'. 44 This point should be made with great caution as there are exceptions to this, but generally speaking, the state elite could initially be suspicious about the purpose of the interview, and will certainly negotiate the terms of the encounter, but that is common to any elite interview process. The interviewer needs to be familiar with the ethical as well as the practical requirements of the field, both of which are easily accessible in the flourishing literature on elite interviews and oral history more generally. 45 The interview that follows later in this article was conducted in the first year of my doctoral studies and thus reflects the relatively limited knowledge I had at that time on the research problem. Yet, it shows the immense potential of elite interviews to both research students and senior scholars alike for studying the shadows of Israel's diplomatic and intelligence history. For me, it opened new avenues of inquiry early on in my PhD research.
The main insight gleaned from the interviews I conducted was that the deeper one goes into Israel's diplomatic and intelligence history, the more one realises how limited and arbitrary access to certain segments of these histories actually is, and the more confident one becomes about the need for alternative research methods that can explore these hidden dimensions. Taking all of this into account, as well as the relative accessibility of Israel's elite, it is clear that this research method should be more mainstream in the field, and that the academic community would greatly benefit from an open-access archive of interview output. I offer this article as a humble first contribution towards this goal.
There are a few epistemological approaches to elite interviews. One common approach is the use of a positivist lens, which aims to create knowledge of 'pure' substance; the interview product is conceived as being enacted in a sterile context and as an external reality. This approach, as noted by Van Puyvelde, has been adopted by most intelligence scholars, who '[tend] to consider interviews as sources of witness accounts'. 46 In the context of this article, and specifically the case study of Israel, interview output with the Israeli elite will reflect the reality of Israel's national security and foreign policy, which is conceived as a reality that is 'out there' to be discovered yet is not available to scholars by means of archival research. A second approach, constructivism, takes a more balanced view towards the interview output and the relationship between the researcher and the elite interviewee, noting that the interplay of power relations and hierarchy between interviewer and interviewee may obscure the content of the interview. 47 Thus, here scholars aim to co-produce data with their interviewees rather than simply extracting information from them. The questions the scholar has formulated influence and shape the answer the elite interviewee gives about their experience of the topics at hand.
My PhD field research included interviews with about 30 state officials. In terms of an epistemological approach to these interviews, given the seniority of the narrators on the one hand and, by contrast, my small experience as a PhD candidate on the other, the data gleaned from the interviews was viewed through a positivist lens. That is to say, the answers to my questions were interpreted as 'pure' reality with regards to Israel's diplomacy and national security. However, this positivist approach was balanced out by three factors: firstly, the interview data was cross-referenced with large amounts of data gleaned from archival material. The interview data not only helped deepen my knowledge and provided new avenues for research, but also helped to fill the gaps among the fragmented archival material. Two, interview data from each interview was analysed in tandem with the oral accounts of a significant number of Israeli elite personnel with similar experiences and different ranks. This effectively tempered the positivistic nature of each interview. However, clearly, the more experienced and senior the interviewer, the more the epistemological approach will tend to skew away from positivism and towards constructivism. A third and final balancing element: for most of the interviews, I also composed constructivist questions that included bits of self-reflection, directing interviewees to discuss their feelings and interpretations of certain topics all of which relates to their professional experience.
In terms of ranks and experience, the officials I have interviewed can be grouped into four main clusters. Firstly, Israeli intelligence elite who, on the whole, did not serve as official diplomats and worked throughout their careers in the intelligence community. A very small number of these elite personnel did act for short periods as official diplomats. The second cluster comprised professional diplomats who had no close engagement with the intelligence world and did not serve at any point of their career in Israeli intelligence institutions. The third cluster consisted of diplomats who served most of their career as ambassadors overseas, but also worked as intelligence officers at the Israeli MFA Center for Policy Research (Hamrkhz Lmkhkar Mediny in Hebrew). The final fourth group was made up of elite personnel who split their professional careers between the intelligence world and the Israeli MFA.
A separate discussion should be devoted to elaborating on the experience of interviewing these four groups of elites over the course of four years. Yet, a brief note will have to suffice to contextualise the interview output that follows in Part II. The interviews I carried out add meaningful substance and texture to the enormous number of official documents that I studied in the course of my research. In this context, the contribution of this article lies in the following three points: firstly, it fulfils the need for an in-depth account of how to conduct elite interviews that is specifically tailored with Israeli culture in mind. Secondly, it elaborates on how to approach the interview outputs from a methodological, positivist and epistemological perspective. Lastly, the contribution of this piece, and this section specifically, is to think further about how to elevate the knowledge that scholars in the field of oral history have been gathering, and to recode it in a way that can benefit the research community.

Efraim Halevy, The 9th director of Mossad: a short biography
Halevy is currently a retired Mossad senior official. He is a member of the first category of interviewees mentioned above, and the most experienced member of the group. He was born in London and immigrated to mandatory Palestine with his parents in 1948, just a month before the establishment of the state of Israel. He joined the Mossad in 1961 and his professional trajectory includes more than 33 years in the Mossad and serving in cities such as Paris, Washington, andBrussels. Between 1990 and1995, under the directorship of Shabtai Shavit, he served as deputy director and as head of the headquarters branch of the Mossad. In 1996, he became the Israeli ambassador to the European Union. He was subsequently appointed as the 9th director of the Mossad. After his tenure in this position, he served as head of the Israeli National Security Council. Halevy is also a prolific writer. He continues to contribute to both study and practise in the national security realm, and to influence Israeli public debate on a range of issues. Along with op-eds published in the New York Times and Haaretz, he has published both academic articles and his autobiography, The Man in the Shadows (2006). 48 He is also a frequent correspondent at academic conferences, and with online and print media. Halevy's extensive experience combines intelligence and diplomacy and gives him a deep and profound understanding of Israel's intelligence history and diplomatic posture, as well as Jewish diaspora-Israeli relations among much more.

EBA : Mr Halevy, could you tell me a bit more about your views, from both historical and operational standpoints, on the role Mossad plays in protecting Jews in exile?
EH: The Zionist narrative of the state of Israel centres on Aliyah [a Hebrew word that refers to the immigration of diaspora Jews to the state of Israel. It also translates as the verb 'to ascend']. It is a narrative about the gathering of the exiled, but it is also a narrative of saving lives. We [Mossad] began with saving the lives of Jews in exile at the end of World War II. We could not prevent the Holocaust, unfortunately. The state of Israel did not exist; there was only a Jewish community [Yishuv] in Eretz Israel [the Hebrew term for mandatory Palestine], and that was threatened by an invasion from Egypt in the south. The Nazi armed forces moved east along the North African coast and threatened Cairo, and then there was an intention to target the Jewish community in Eretz Israel. The Yishuv elite planned very practical steps in case the Nazi armed forces should invade mandatory Palestine, whereby the Yishuv elite would concentrate the Jews on fortifying Haifa and Mount Carmel and so on.
The state of Israel was established within three years of the end of World War II. We had to overcome two issues: firstly, the Jewish communities in Arab countries could not continue to live there, especially in Iraq and Yemen. The state of Israel planned an extensive operation to help about 100,000 Iraqi Jews to flee the country. This was a very large and significant operation, which not only saved the lives of these Jewish communities, but also helped us to bolster the Jewish demographics of the young state of Israel. After the establishment of the state, the Jewish population amounted to only 600,000 Jews. Secondly, we tried to bring to Israel as many European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust as we could.
Thereafter, in the early 1950s, the government, led by David Ben-Gurion, took the decision that our main national security interest would be to protect and save Jewish communities in exile. The execution of this was entrusted to Mossad. We began to organize immediately afterwards in the 1950s, and Mossad started planning how to defend the Jewish communities in North Africa, with special emphasis on Morocco.
At the same time as needing to save Jews in exile, there was also the possibility that Jews needed to be defended. And here it was necessary to establish complete systems within the Jewish communities that would allow Jews to be trained to defend themselves as well as to gather intelligence on their opponents within their countries of residence. And as these efforts intensified, you find that Israeli prime ministers (not the current one, [2016] Benjamin Netanyahu, but the formers'), talk about the fact that we have a duty to ensure there are no more Holocausts. They talk about this at events such as the national Memorial Day and so on. Preventing another Holocaust is a public promise made by Israeli prime ministers, but the execution is always in the hands of the intelligence community, and Mossad specifically.
Another factor that the state of Israel dealt with as an issue was keeping in touch with the Jews behind the Iron Curtain. There did not seem to be a realistic option here to save any Jews because of the nature of the regime there. I am talking about the entire Eastern Bloc. There were a few isolated cases where Jews were allowed to leave, such as Jews from Poland in 1956-1960 andalso in the 1970s, and there was a willingness on the part of the Russians to allow small flights of Jews to Vienna, who were then absorbed by the Jewish Agency. Most of the effort was aimed not at aiding immigration but at keeping in touch.
All I can talk about is my worldview. After the great wave of immigration from Soviet Union in the late '80s and early '90s, the gates opened and over a million people immigrated to Israel. This was a critical mass, which determined the strength of the state of Israel in terms of population -we were already four million plus -something like that -up to five million. It was the transition point between a country whose existence was still endangered and a country that is no longer in danger.

EBA : In the context of Jews in exile, what particular experience did you have with the Iranian Jews and the 1979 Islamic revolution?
EH: This question bothered us mostly after the regime change in 1979, after the [Islamic] revolution. What should we do with the Jewish community in Iran? The only way to smuggle them [to Israel] was through the border with Turkey. We took actions to create operational conditions there that would allow this. However, a situation arose over time whereby some of those Jews who survived the journey to Israel later returned to Iran. Then after they went back, they asked to leave again, and then again we took them out. And a philosophical, both practical and principled, question should be asked here: how many times should Jews be saved? Is this a free pass, that every time one says I want out, one presses a button and we go into rescue mode? These operations involve extremely high risks.

EBA : How would you define the relationship between Israel and the Jewish diaspora?
EH: Israel today [2016] is the largest Jewish community in the world. This is a statistical fact. However, even before we were the largest Jewish community in the world, in many respects the Israeli prime minister was seen as the leader of the Jewish people. There were people like Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Menachem Begin, who were treated as leaders of world Jewry. Then the matter dissolved for two reasons: firstly, because we did not take on the task of representing the Jewish world. There was also a political impediment, because diasporic Jews are primarily foreign citizens, who should identify first and foremost with their nation state.
Secondly, our [Israel's] policy on the issues of Judaism and Jews has gone through a crisis. The state of Israel interpreted Jewish religion through an Orthodox lens, and that is a crucial point. Marriage and divorce, personal status, etc. Here there is a sharp conflict with the perception that we want all Jews to immigrate to Israel, because of the question 'who is a Jew?' The state of Israel is a country that is in internal conflict when it comes to immigration issues.

EBA : You served in various senior intelligence positions during the Cold War. What was Israel's grand counter terrorism strategy?
EH: I'll give you my account of combating terrorism. When we started this journey, it was our struggle against the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1970s. The prime example of this was the murder of 11 athletes in Munich in 1972 and how we responded to the perpetrators. Within the intelligence community, there has been a perception that the most important thing is to not turn terrorism into a strategic threat to the state, i.e., to approach terrorism as something that needs to be addressed and tackled, but not as a strategic threat to the state of Israel. The working assumption was: if we turn terrorism into a strategic threat, we raise the status and capacity of terrorism to a point where it would be difficult to counter it. However, we have failed in that. During the Cold War we combatted terrorism, but back then it was not considered and perceived as a strategic threat to the state of Israel. In 2016 [at the time of the interview], terrorism is indeed a strategic threat.
The current (2016) state is both a perceptual and an operational mistake. To turn terrorism into an operational and existential threat to the state of Israel, even if only to a certain extent, that's a mistake. Because then we have turned our 'war on terror' into a symmetric war between two parties, with a terrorism component. It's not that we're going to destroy terrorism. Terrorism in any case has limited means, capacity, manpower, and so on, and has been a rival of the state of Israel for a long time.
At the moment, we deal with Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. Two non-state actors. And we think we deter both, but the truth is that there is mutual deterrence here. This is the problem. When you are in an asymmetric conflict and a state of mutual deterrence in the face of two actors, one of which you label terrorists, you are both perceptually and psychologically defensive. This is the wrong mindset.

EBA : During the 1950s and deeper into the Cold War, Israel's 'alliance of the periphery' with non-Arab Muslim states in the Middle East included Iran, Turkey, Sudan and Ethiopia. This was a vital component of Israel's survival in this hostile region. From an intelligence point of view, what was Turkey's role in the periphery doctrine?
EH: We have developed the triangle -Turkey, Iran, Israel. Unfortunately, Iran is no longer relevant to this triangle, although it may yet be. It is impossible to know what will happen there [in Iran]. With Turkey -I think that both countries have a lot of real interests in common and this is something that needs to be maintained and promoted on a regular basis.
With regards to the periphery doctrine, it was not such a significant triangle. For Israel, it was important because it largely removed our feeling of loneliness in the Middle East, and the common notion of 'us against the world'.

EBA : Do you know or were you aware of any specific cooperation between Israel and Turkey against terrorism?
EH: On the practical side, I do not think there has been much cooperation between us and the Turks on the terrorism front. However, there have been a few isolated events where there was communication about these issues. It was not systematic cooperation, rather a few isolated events, and it was not any form of long-term cooperation. I do not want to talk about it, not because I have nothing to say, but because I think it is a distortion of what actually happened, it is a very big distortion, and a Turkish arrogance that I think caused more harm than good.
In our relations with Turkey, two periods must be distinguished: the period before Erdogan and that since he came to power. There is one very important thing to remember here: the first Israeli diplomatic mission in the Muslim world in the Middle East was our embassy in Ankara. And it was a very important embassy: it was the only place we had an open embassy with an Israeli flag. In the 1950s, it was even more important than that, because it was a listening post where you really could hear a lot of things and find out what was going on in the Muslim and Arab world. The Israeli diplomats who served in Turkey were our very best and most competent personnel. Turkey has always been an important country to us. I also think the relationship has evolved a lot over the years commercially. Then came Erdogan's period. He is first and foremost a Turkish problem.

EBA : What is your assessment of the emergence and trajectory of Jewish terrorism?
EH: Jewish terrorism is a whole different story. There are two aspects to this issue. Firstly, there is the Israeli American and Meir David Kahane dimension. 50 Kahane was not a dominant factor in terrorism, rather he was an important figure in Judea and Samaria. He was important to American Jews there, which is a very connected and cohesive community. Secondly, there was the terrorism against the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories of the late 1970s and 1980s that was carried out by settler extremists, such as the attack on the mayor of Hebron, who had his legs cut off, and the terrorist acts against symbols, such as the destruction of the Temple Mount.
Moreover, one can also identify the assassination of the prime minister [Rabin] along these lines even though it was not purely an act of terrorism but an individual operation. Thus, Jewish terrorism has been pretty limited so far in terms of its scope, even though we should not undermine this phenomenon at all.
Specifically, the individuals [Jewish terrorists] are usually very cautious people, who served in the IDF [Israeli Defense Force]. They are people with understanding, with intelligence, and they know how to conduct themselves. The biggest problem on the front of Jewish terrorism is the theological aspect of it, i.e., it's not the perpetrators, but rather the rabbinate, who in very large numbers approve these operations. These are people who have status and authority, and they use it.
EBA: Thank you very much for the cooperation and your time.
Notes argument of this article. Last but not least, the author wishes to thank Efraim Halevy, the 9th director of Mossad, for his kind cooperation with this interview and in facilitating permission to publish this transcript in INS.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.