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Journalist, writer and ex-spy. He belonged to Unit 8200, the secret service of the Israel Defense Forces , the best military intelligence corps in the world. Much of what he saw there has been captured in A Very Long Night (Salamander), a fast-paced spy novel.

In your book there is corruption, ambition, espionage with the highest technologies, power struggles ... Is the world at high levels as terrible as you describe in your book? Yes. We live in an era of incredible cynicism. I think that politicians are very cynical and that they move more out of cynicism than out of ideology, empathy or morality. And I know this not from reading it in the newspapers but firsthand, because I have been the head of Unit 8200, the secret service of the Israel Defense Forces, and I met with politicians, not just Israelis. And, to my surprise and dismay, they were all deeply cynical. So I decided that my first novel should tell how power works, how it corrupts. Because I have a feeling that people don't know. There are people around me who tell me that they have seen this or that politician on television and that have given them the impression of being honest, upright ... The people are very naive, including the Israelis, including the Spanish. No, politicians are not like that at all. Not because I say so, you just have to look at his record. In this book I wanted to tell the cynicism of the powerful, starting with that of the politicians. His novel also reveals how politicians manipulate and control the media ... Yes, that is just the second thing I wanted to denounce with this book. . But the truth is that this manipulation works more with television networks than with newspapers. The problem is that websites act more like television channels than newspapers, it even happens on newspaper websites and of course on Twitter, on Facebook ... What politicians do is decide the approach, lie to the public. .. And that strategy works very well for them on television and quite well on the internet, but not so well in printed newspapers. But that influence exists and that is why it is important to talk about it. In her book she describes very sophisticated high technologies capable of spying on anyone anywhere in the world. Do they really exist? Yes. They have existed for years. Edward Snowden (a former CIA and US National Security Agency employee who in 2013 released documents classified as top secret with the aim of uncovering the surveillance state existing in the US) was in that sense quite inspiring, revealing the many things that secret services know about people. When you live in that world, as I lived, you think that everyone knows it. But it's not like that. To my mother, for example, I tell her not to use the supermarket's loyalty card, with which they give her a euro discount every time she spends a sum, I think 100 euros. Are you saying that they can spy on us? through a supermarket customer card? Yes. With that card you can know when you leave the house, when your child is not at home through what you buy, when you decide to become a vegetarian, even when someone in your home has died through the products you buy. Many people, when I tell him, tell me that he doesn't care, that he has nothing to hide, that he has no secrets, that he doesn't have a lover or an account in Switzerland, that he doesn't participate in radical political activities and that he doesn't care But they don't think it doesn't matter, do they? It doesn't matter. Civil rights and liberties were not invented for a few, they were invented for humanity. If you consider that you have nothing to hide and that they can spy on you, what you are doing with that attitude is to sabotage the rights of an Iranian poet, a young Palestinian or anyone, perhaps also those of a middle-aged man who has aaffair with his secretary, for taking the lowest example. It is not possible to cooperate with the surveillance by the states, even if someone thinks it is good to be spied on because they think they have nothing to hide. If they can spy on us through mobile phones, credit cards, even With supermarket cards, how can we prevent states from snooping in our lives? The first is to be aware that they do, and the second is to oppose it politically. We need to convince our parliamentarians that it is an issue that concerns us as citizens, so that they incorporate it into their political agendas and demand that the secret services be regulated. That's the first thing, convincing our representatives that the power of states to spy on their own citizens has to be regulated. And there can also be demonstrations and other democratic methods of protest. It is about more and more people demanding that the state apparatus, the secret services, the commercial firms that spy on us be regulated ... And if this is done, things will change. And on a practical level, what can we do? to prevent them from accessing our personal information? Right now, and until things change, there is not much you can do. If I had to give you one piece of advice I would definitely tell you to leave your mobile phone at home. If you are going to meet someone and you want to keep that meeting private, listen to me and leave the phone at home. That way, you are avoiding 90% of the chances of being spied on. There are other ways that they spy on you: through cameras, satellites, credit cards ... But they are difficult and very expensive methods. Of course, if the Chinese or Israeli secret services decide to find you, you do not have the slightest chance, they will succeed. But if you simply want the police in your country or commercial companies to not follow you, leaving the mobile at home is the safest method. Even spies are spied, right? Yes. It is one of the great principles of spy literature. We see him in Graham Greene, probably the first author of internationally renowned spy novels with books like "Our Man in Havana", "The Comedians" and "The Human Factor", surely the most important of all his books. And we also have John Le Carré, Len Deighton and, of course, Ian Fleming, the father of James Bond, and many others ... The world of espionage and spy literature has rules, and its main rules are the fidelity and mirrors. Loyalty to the state or colleagues. And the game of mirrors refers to the fact that, if you are spying on someone, it is very likely that you are also being spied on. Even if you are a spy with very sophisticated technology, surely someone is following you. It was important for me to follow in this sense the steps of the genre masters. So in my book there is fidelity and there are always the mirrors. All the authors that you have cited were spies in real life, like you ... Do you have to have been a spy to write spy novels? Spy literature were spies, they all wrote based on their own experiences and feelings. In addition, each time I wrote a chapter of my book I would give it to two friends who hold important positions in Unit 8200, one of them a general who died before the book was published and another, also a general, who was Deputy director of the entire unit, because I left the Secret Service of the Defense Forces a long time ago and I wanted them to check if everything he said was correct. I wanted my book to be credible, I didn't want any reader to feel that there was something wrong. And how has your book been received in Unit 8200 and by the rest of the Israeli secret services? Those two friends who reviewed the manuscript they thought it was a very important book for the 8200, because in the end that unit does the right thing. The problem is the apparatus: the top bosses of the secret services, the politicians ... They did not like the book. At first they did not say anything, but the book became a great super sales in Israel, it was the best-selling novel in both 2016 and 2017, so they could not continue ignoring it. They invited me to lunch and then some sent me emails emotionally blackmailing me, saying type things: "My son is 8 years old and at school they tell him that his father is surely corrupt, as they tell in his novel." Nonsense, because I don't think 8-year-olds talk about my novel. In any case, everyone has to ask himself whether or not he is corrupt, and has there been any reaction to his book by Netanyahu? Your novel does not leave you in a very good place ... The Prime Minister's office one day called my editorial to ask for a copy of the book, because, as is well known, Mr. Netanyahu never buys anything with his own money. He didn't have the grace to send someone to a bookstore to buy the book, he asked for a free copy. I guess you wouldn't like it. But the important thing is that most people have found it to be an important book because of what is told in it, and that is fundamental to me When you were in Unit 8200, did you ever experience a situation similar to the one you describe in your book? several times. I have participated in several similar operations. But the book does not talk about those specific operations, firstly because the confidentiality agreement that I signed upon entering 8200 prohibits me and also because it did not seem important to me. The story of the book is made up, it is fiction, but I still wanted the book to be very realistic, and I think it is. The bad guys in the book are like the bad guys in reality, the Israeli prime minister is very similar to some Italian and Spanish prime ministers, and the French interior minister looks like hundreds of European politicians. I wanted it to be a universal book, because in the end this is a book about power and freedom, important issues in all democratic countries. How much is there in this book from your own biography? I think a lot. Of course, the descriptions I make in the book of the military bases, of the meetings, of the military apparatus and of the technologies absolutely reflect my vision, they are the result of what I have seen with my own eyes. And Colonel Zeev Abadi (protagonist of the book as head of the special section of Unit 8200) is quite like me. He is 10 years younger than me, it is true, but because he is subjected to a lot of physical action and it would not be credible that a person of my age did certain things. But apart from that, his whole biography is based on mine: Abadi is a Sephardic Jew, like me, and that is somewhat problematic in Israel, because Sephardic Jews frequently suffer racism and discrimination. Even my mother appears in the book as Abadi's mother ... The powerful, do they misuse the information they have about us? Yes. That is the main message I wanted to convey with this book, and it is a message that is based on facts. The most transparent secret services are those of the United States, a country that is not very transparent but has very precise democratic rules. There is a secret service commission in the US Congress, and every year the NSA, the National Security Agency, the US equivalent of Israeli Unit 8200, is accountable to that commission. And one of the facts he presents is that every year there are more than a thousand infractions within the NSA, which means that every year a thousand NSA members check something, look for something, or listen to something (a telephone conversation, for example) they shouldn't. And what do they spy on? Usually their exes. In Israel that is very difficult, there are very strict rules regarding spying on the civilian population. The most frequent infractions in Israel have to do with listening to conservations and reading messages and emails from celebrities. Members of the secret services in Israel are very young, kids of 18, 19, 20 years. And at that age they are interested in knowing what Justin Bieber is doing, for example. And they have super computers at their disposal, which if you give the supervisor approved search instructions for considering them legitimate, they let them know where Justin Bieber is at the moment, what he is doing and what messages he has sent to whom. On 8200 there was a very famous infraction in which a group of soldiers were monitoring an area of ​​the Gulf and listening to telephone conversations, and by accident they ended up listening to a quite ardent conversation from Tom Cruise, who was in the area shooting one of the sagas ofMission Impossible , with his wife. Supposedly they should have stopped listening, but when you are on a base in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the night, and Nicole Kidman whispers wonderful things to you, it is very difficult. After four days the person in charge of the 8200 found out what had happened and the five soldiers involved were punished and signed documents in which they promised never to reveal the content of that conversation. This reveals an absolutely real problem: spy states and their secret services are made up of people, thousands of people, who have access to emails, video conferences, text messages, and phone calls. And this is the real problem, as Graham Greene already points out in "The Human Factor", and as I write in my book. In his novel there is a spy who begins by listening to what he should not out of curiosity and ends up blackmailing a tycoon. .Yes. It is something that the NSA reports also show. There are cases, for example, where people from the secret services have tried to find out, through senior Wall Street officials, whether or not a company's shares were going to rise. Imagine that a company is going to hit a sharp rise in Wall Street: it is very good to know in advance. You do not need to be a millionaire to cover yourself, with which you buy 2,000 dollars in shares you can get rich. And yes, there are cases of this type: people who listen to conversations of managers, of banks, to try to get rich.

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