The Volunteer: A Canadian's Secret Life in the Mossad.

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

Ross’s memoir covers his time in the secret service with the Mossad, Israel’s fabled intelligence agency. In the early 1980s, when he was in his 20s, Ross left Canada on a backpacking tour and drifted into a kibbutz in Israel. He found a welcoming home in the country, and soon converted to Judaism, married a local woman, and was eventually recruited by the Israel Defense Force. After proving his competence and patriotism, Ross moved on to work in covert operations for nearly eight years, becoming involved in espionage operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The Volunteer is a fast-paced, revealing insider’s look at the Mossad. Ross provides a good deal of precise, colourful information about the challenges and excitement involved in high-stakes spying. With only slight exaggeration, he argues that Israel has been placed “at the eye of every [20th-century] ideological storm,” and his narrative makes the case convincingly. He takes us through the most interesting of his assignments, from tracking arms dealers in the Mediterranean to rooting out Iranian agents in Africa, as well as the more mundane realities of spying. Also excellent is Ross’s description—often quite critical—of the relationship between Israeli and American intelligence agencies (he worked for a time as a liaison between the Mossad and the FBI and CIA). Less compelling are Ross’s superficial attempts to explain the motivation behind Islamic terrorism—typically, he writes off such antagonists as vicious anarchists, “bad guys” who inexplicably resent Israel’s existence. Though his decision to publish a book on the Mossad cannot have thrilled his former bosses, Ross is clear about his unwavering belief in the organization’s mandate and the means it employs to achieve its various aims. Ross’s participation in the beating, torture, and even execution of enemy combatants is always justified by him—understandably, perhaps, but sometimes a little glibly—as the necessary cost of battling evil. Ross’s experiences are, no doubt, likely to be of particular interest to those curious about the ways in which terrorist threats are “unofficially” countered.