Foreword
by Jacob Perry, former Director of Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet
You and me, my family and yours – we are all targets. My house and yours, your bus terminal and my train station, our children’s schools – all of them and all of us are on a terrorist hit list.
Some people are starting to realize just how great – how imminent – the threat of terrorism is to life as we know it. September 11th brought a glimpse of that reality to the Western world. Haggai Carmon’s novels – more than anything else I have read – are what will, if you care to find out, give you the most realistic glimpse into the intricate machinations of a secret world of fighting terrorism. Secret because it has to be if it has any hope of succeeding. Its sole purpose? Security. And right now, that means security against the threat of terrorism.
Terror, death and injury, destruction and mayhem are the tools terrorists use to make clear their hatred of our culture, of our religion – be it Christian, Muslim or Jewish – and to infect it with a poisonous zeal that knows no rest. Israel, the United States and the rest of the free world are now more committed than ever to facing the challenge of defeating the evil doers in our midst.
The role of any intelligence organization is to be one step ahead of the enemy. Discover his plans, identify his capabilities and know his weaknesses. Then comes the frustration of their sinister plans, the attack – whether by combat or by deceit.
Hezbollah, an internationally-recognized terrorist group harbored in Lebanon, is one of the world’s most closely knit and secretive organizations. It is also one of Israel’s arch enemies…and biggest challenges. Most of Hezbollah’s members have known each other since childhood, have grown up together, and no new kid on the block can infiltrate their inner circle.
Reading Haggai Carmon’s Triangle of Deception, I was in awe of how accurately he depicts the methods intelligence services employ to penetrate secretive hostile organizations. Haggai has assured me that the book is largely fictional, but still, I find instances where his word-weaving is so vivid, so realistic, that I have to remind myself that it is not reality that captivates me. Haggai is a master of the tradecraft and with each twist and turn of this, his fourth thriller, my appreciation for his fictionalized reality has grown.
Apart from the riveting read, Haggai is doing a great public service. His novels may be fiction, but the threat of terrorism is more real than ever, and we can’t alert the world enough to the perils terrorist organizations pose; they have no borders, no morals and no code of ethics, and we are not safe until they are stopped in this battle for survival, fought largely undercover and by deception.
Jacob Perry
Tel Aviv, Israel 2009
Jacob Perry joined the Israeli SHABAK (Internal Security Service, commonly known as the Shin Bet) in 1966 as a field agent operating undercover in the Arab sector. In 1978 he became chief of the Service’s Northern Command and in 1981 he was appointed the Service’s chief of the Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria command. In 1988 Israel’s Prime Minister appointed Perry the Director of the Service, a position he successfully held until he retired in 1995. The SHABAK uses human intelligence to gather information on planned attacks and the location of terrorists; at the same time, it’s assigned with counterintelligence duties to foil foreign attempts to spy on Israel or incite sedition. The Service enjoyed overwhelming success under the directorship of Jacob Perry, during which time his agents penetrated and destroyed Palestinian terrorist cells and captured or killed their leaders.
