Aviva Guttmann – författare

In this unprecedented history of intelligence cooperation during the Cold War, Aviva Guttmann uncovers the key role of European intelligence agencies in facilitating Mossad's Operation Wrath of God. She reveals how, in the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, Palestinians suspected of involvement in terrorism were hunted and killed by Mossad with active European cooperation. Through unique access to unredacted documents in the Club de Berne archive, she shows how a secret coalition of intelligence agencies supplied Mossad with information about Palestinians on a colossal scale and tacitly supported Israeli covert actions on European soil. These agencies helped to anticipate and thwart a number of Palestinian terrorist plots, including some revealed here for the first time. This extraordinary book reconstructs the hidden world of international intelligence, showing how this parallel order enabled state relations to be pursued independently of official foreign policy constraints or public scrutiny.

This book develops a new framework for conducting postmortems guided by a normative model of anticipatory foreign policy. It is the first assessment of the performance of three leading European polities in providing estimative intelligence during an era of surprise. The comparative analysis focuses on how the UK, the EU and Germany handled three cases of major surprises: the Arab uprisings, the rise to power of the Islamic State (ISIS), and the Russian annexation of Crimea. It considers government intelligence assessments, diplomatic reporting and expert open sources, and how organisational leaders received these assessments. The book tests and develops new theories about the causes of strategic surprises, going beyond a common focus on intelligence versus policy failures to identify challenges and factors that cut across analyst and decision-maker communities. Drawing on insights and chapters provided by former senior officials, the book identifies lessons to learn from European polities to better anticipate and prepare for future surprises.

This book provides the first assessment of the performance of three leading European polities in providing estimative intelligence during an era of surprise. It develops a new framework for conducting postmortems guided by a normative model of anticipatory foreign policy. The comparative analysis focuses on how the UK, the EU and Germany handled three cases of major surprises: the Arab uprisings, the rise to power of the Islamic State (ISIS), and the Russian annexation of Crimea. It considers not just government intelligence assessments, but also diplomatic reporting and expert open sources and how these assessments were received by organisational leaders. The book tests and develops new theories about the causes of strategic surprises, going beyond a common focus on intelligence versus policy failures to identify challenges and factors that cut across both communities. With the help of former senior officials, the book identifies lessons yet to be learnt by European polities to better anticipate and prepare for future surprises.