'It Is Ownership': The Five Doors Israel Walks Through to Make a Spy
From $50-a-month payments to inherited stigma and unaddressed grievance, an examination of why recruitment succeeds — and why the failure is rarely just personal
The question of spies took on new weight in Palestinian and Lebanese resistance thinking during the 1970s, particularly after Israel answered the Munich operation with a wave of assassinations. The logic was inescapable: assassination depends on intelligence, and intelligence depends on people. At every stage of an operation — planning, execution, and after — someone is supplying information.
Agents had always existed. What changed in that decade, according to specialists, was scale and structure. What had been scattered became organised, systematic, and embedded.
The confrontation also widened. It moved beyond a contest between Israeli agencies and their Egyptian and Syrian counterparts into a field that included non-state actors: Palestinian factions such as Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, operational arms like Black September, later Islamic groups including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and then the formations that emerged during the Second Intifada.
That forced Israel to adapt. Its intelligence work could no longer rely on familiar hierarchies or centralised structures; it was dealing with fluid networks — some local, some external, some both — which demanded a different distribution of roles and a different reading of how recruitment works in fragmented environments.
‘I need him to be mine’
Former Mossad director Yossi Cohen sets out the methods in his book The Sword of Freedom. In both its older and newer forms, recruitment turns on identifying vulnerability, exploiting it, and sustaining leverage over time.
Cohen describes it as establishing complete control over a source. “It is ownership,” he writes. “I need his intel. I need him to be mine ... I will use him.” Elsewhere he argues that “betrayal must be a conscious act.”
Palestinian and Lebanese sources often reduce the matter to money, women, and blackmail. Field accounts suggest something broader — five recurring pathways.
Gaps in awareness
Despite efforts to build security awareness during recruitment and training, understanding remains uneven. Military cadres tend to concentrate on operational roles, while media, cultural, and institutional sectors often receive limited exposure to security discipline.
The vulnerability that creates is subtle. It is not that individuals underestimate the seriousness of a message or a contact, but that they do not recognise the process by which an interaction becomes a recruitment. Those doing the recruiting are trained to read behaviour quickly and locate weak points.
One Lebanese security source put it bluntly to The Cradle: “A small mistake can lead to disaster. The first mistake in this world may be the last. Fear of scandal or ignorance of the corrective step – let alone preventive measures – can quickly drag the target into the swamp.”
Curiosity does its part. Browsing certain platforms, engaging unknown contacts, or experimenting with remote work offers can all become entry points, with recruiters constructing entire scenarios that guide a target step by step until the line is crossed. Some try to outmanoeuvre their handler — taking money without delivering, intending to report themselves later, or to turn double agent. The outcomes are not guaranteed. As the source notes, “the Israeli is neither naive nor simple.”
Money, and the trap inside it
Most cases begin with money — either the pursuit of quick income or the pressure of need. In many of the environments concerned, economic conditions are severe: limited opportunity, weak labour markets, prolonged instability. These conditions help explain vulnerability without legitimising it in the eyes of the surrounding society.
Handlers, multiple sources say, are selective rather than generous. Payments may start high and then taper; in some Palestinian cases they fall to between $50 and $100 a month, with larger sums reserved for specific roles, higher-value information, or long-term operatives. Some agents remain active for decades, a few reaching the end of their operational life after more than 25 years.
The turning point tends to come when someone tries to step away. Payment starts to matter less than pressure, the relationship tightens, and threats and exposure follow, leaving little room to disengage. For some the only exit is to reverse course and cooperate with resistance structures — though even then the outcome is uncertain, with trust problems on both sides, particularly where lethal operations were involved.
Blackmail, and a weakening barrier
In many cases blackmail both pulls recruits in and holds them in place. Individuals are drawn into financial traps, debt networks, or compromising relationships, which are then used to secure compliance. The method depends less on persuasion than on eliminating alternatives.
In Palestinian society, social conservatism once acted as a barrier. That barrier has weakened under economic pressure, particularly after the disruptions of the COVID period and continuing financial decline. Similar dynamics are visible across the region — Syria’s prolonged conflict, Lebanon’s economic collapse, and the strains in Iraq, Iran, and Yemen all create conditions in which recruitment becomes easier and resistance to it harder.
A particularly sensitive issue concerns Palestinian workers entering the areas occupied in 1948, whether legally or not; both situations open recruitment opportunities, often through threats involving work permits or legal penalties. Resistance groups have at times used the same channels for couriers and information gathering. Since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in October 2023, Israel has sharply restricted labour access on security grounds.
Proximity, and inherited paths
How Palestinian and Lebanese societies deal with collaborators has itself become a subject of debate. In Palestine, harsh measures — including the social ostracism of families — have sometimes produced a cycle in which the children of collaborators are pushed toward the same path by stigma and the absence of reintegration. Unresolved cases resurface years later as revenge or renewed accusation. The lack of consistent legal or social frameworks has allowed the problem to persist. Lebanon presents a different model, where consequences have generally been less severe, though still real.
Israel has also instructed existing agents to nominate others from their social or organisational circles, building recruitment networks out of trust and proximity. One documented case involved an infiltration of Hamas before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, in which an individual inserted a flash memory device into an isolated server and extracted more than a decade of sensitive data within minutes. The breach depended less on technology than on access and position.
Grievance — the most dangerous door
In the most damaging cases, individuals initiate contact with Israeli handlers themselves, sometimes with no financial motive at all. The impulse ranges from personal grievance against a superior or an organisation to broader feelings of marginalisation, jealousy, or resentment. Structural problems — weak internal accountability, limited rotation in leadership positions, the absence of democratic process — sharpen these dynamics.
According to sources, some of the most serious breaches have come from precisely such people: highly experienced, operating in sensitive areas, and typically discovered only after significant damage is done. Investigations often reveal deeper psychological factors, but only once the consequences have unfolded — entire networks exposed, senior figures assassinated. In one case, an individual’s personal grievance shaped his conduct toward trainees under his authority, contributing to repeated fatalities before the pattern was recognised and traced back to him.
Why it endures
Across all five pathways, a consistent pattern emerges: espionage begins through coercion, access, and timing.
The environments in which resistance movements operate are defined by constraint — economic hardship, social strain, internal division, and constant surveillance. In such conditions, small gaps carry large consequences.
What looks at first like an individual failure usually reflects a wider structural weakness. Recruitment succeeds not simply because of what one person does, but because of what the surrounding system allows. That is what gives the intelligence war its persistence.
Reference: The Cradle