INTERVIEW
Nearly 1,000 pages and multiple revelations. Ronen Bergman, New York Times journalist and Israeli investigator, publishes at Grasset Arise and Kill the First: The Secret Story of Targeted Assassinations Sponsored by Israel , an Event Book Revisiting the Many Mossad Executions, l intelligence agency of the Hebrew State. In "It happened tomorrow", the journalist tells on Europe 1 how the Israeli secret services helped the Moroccan government to eliminate Mehdi Ben Barka, one of the main opponents of King Hassan II in the 1950s.
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"In the intelligence world, there is nothing free"
"It's not just that the Mossad worked, it's much more than that," says Ronen Bergman. "The Moroccan intelligence service has done a tremendous service for the Israelis by giving the Mossad the ability to listen to the most secret conversations of Arab leaders," said the New York Times reporter. "But they wanted something in return, because in the intelligence world, there is nothing free."
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If the French were already involved in the elimination of the anti-colonialist Mehdi Ben Barka, Morocco also asked the Mossad to help him, says Ronen Bergman. On October 29, 1965, the Pan-African leader went to an appointment at the Lipp brewery in Paris, but the Israeli secret services tracked him down so that the Moroccans kidnapped him. The socialist opponent to King Hassan II was then tortured and killed by the Moroccan secret services. "The Mossad helps the assassins to get rid of the body and bury it under what is today the Louis Vuitton museum, in the Bois de Boulogne", continues Ronen Bergman.
"The almost systematic use of eliminations has changed history many times for the better"
Asked by Patrick Cohen about the consequences of eliminations sponsored by the Mossad, Ronen Bergman wants to be nuanced. "It changes history, sometimes good, sometimes bad," he says. "But after eight years of research, I can say that the almost systematic use of eliminations has changed history many times for the better," said Ronen Bergman, taking as an example the eliminations that followed the Munich bombings.