Study assesses Hamas’ double-agent operations against Israeli intelligence
August 22, 2022 Leave a comment
A NEW STUDY SHEDS light on the little-studied topic of counterintelligence operations launched against Israel by the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas. Hamas is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist and nationalist organization with a 35-year history, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007. As is typically the case with Middle Eastern non-state actors, Hamas is a complex umbrella organization that combines social-service and administrative functions with armed elements. The latter include internal policing components and a full-time military wing, as well as reserve armed forces.
Although much research has focused on Hamas’ military and non-military components, the organization’s intelligence functions remain under-studied. For this reason, a new article that assesses Hamas’ double-agent operations against Israeli intelligence deserves attention. The article is titled “An Asymmetric Doubling”: A Nonstate Actor Using the Method of Doubling Sources —Hamas against Israeli Intelligence”, and was authored by Netanel Flamer, a lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University and postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. It was published last week by the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence.
In his article, Flamer explains the usefulness of double-agent operations for non-state actors engaged in asymmetric conflicts against opponents with superior resources. Non-state actors tend to place tremendous value in double-agent operations, because they offer them the opportunity to “generate achievements of the greatest impact using the most efficient means”. They can do so despite the relative poverty of their resources, as compared to their adversaries. These types of operations employ human intelligence (HUMINT) sources, who work with two opposing intelligence services, only one of which is privy to their dual role. Such sources are known in intelligence parlance as “double agents”.
Hamas’ Early Counterintelligence Efforts
Interestingly, Hamas’ first counterintelligence outfit preceded its own establishment. Upon its founding in 1987, at the peak of the First Intifada, Hamas was immediately able to rely on al-Majd, a counterintelligence apparatus that had been established a year earlier by Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. The mission of al-Majd was to uncover suspected Israeli collaborators among Palestinian communities in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The organization was also known for deploying varying levels of torture against suspected collaborators, or against their relatives.
By the early 1990s, al-Majd was in a position to launch a number of confirmed counterintelligence operations. A notable early case is that of Maher Abu Srur, a Hamas member who had been recruited by the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. At the culmination of this double-agent operation, Srur actually murdered his Israeli handler at a Shin Bet safe house in Jerusalem. According to Flamer, al-Majd is known to have launched several other double-agent operations against the Shin Bet, with varying levels of success. Importantly, it often is difficult to determine whether al-Majd double agents were deployed after they were first recruited by the Shin Bet, or whether they were originally deployed by al-Majd as “dangles”. Read more of this post
The life of Kim Philby, one of the Cold War’s most recognizable espionage figures, is the subject of a new exhibition that opened last week in Moscow. Items displayed at the exhibition include secret documents stolen by Philby and passed to his Soviet handlers during his three decades in the service of Soviet intelligence. While working as a senior member of British intelligence, Harold Adrian Russell Philby, known as ‘Kim’ to his friends, spied on behalf of the Soviet NKVD and KGB. His espionage lasted from about 1933 until 1963, when he secretly defected to the USSR from his home in Beirut, Lebanon. Philby’s defection sent ripples of shock across Western intelligence and is often seen as one of the most dramatic incidents of the Cold War.
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A court in Germany has sentenced a former officer of the country’s intelligence agency, who spied for the United States and Russia from 2008 to 2014. Regular readers of this website will recall the case of ‘Markus R.’, a clerk at the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, Germany’s external intelligence agency. The 32-year-old was 
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A Soviet double spy, who secretly defected to Britain 30 years ago this month, has revealed for the first time the details of his exfiltration by British intelligence in 1985. Oleg Gordievsky was one of the highest Soviet intelligence defectors to the West in the closing stages of the Cold War. He joined the Soviet KGB in 1963, eventually reaching the rank of colonel. But in the 1960s, while serving in the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark, Gordievsky began feeling disillusioned about the Soviet system. His doubts were reinforced by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It was soon afterwards that he made the decision to contact British intelligence.
A congratulatory letter sent by a senior Nazi official to 
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Ashraf Marwan: Israel’s ‘Angel’ or Egypt’s Double Agent?
October 13, 2025 by intelNews 3 Comments
However, a comprehensive investigation by two Israeli journalists, Ronen Bergman and Yuval Robovitz, published in the popular Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth under the title “The Angel of Lies”, presents a different picture. Based on thousands of secret documents not yet revealed and rare conversations with people involved in the operation, their report claims that ‘the Angel’ was actually the spearhead of Egypt’s deception plan before and during the war—and that he succeeded beyond all expectations.
A Spy or Double Agent?
Bergman and Robovitz examined whether Ashraf Marwan—advisor to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and a Mossad agent who died in 2007—was truly the best agent Israel had before the Yom Kippur War. Their findings indicate that a series of serious operational failures, combined with arrogance within the Israeli intelligence community, made Marwan one of the most dangerous spies ever to act against Israel.
They also investigated whether he was genuinely an Israeli agent who contributed meaningfully to Israel’s national security, as claimed by Mossad and by scholar Professor Uri Bar-Joseph, who wrote extensively about the Yom Kippur War intelligence failure and authored the well-known book The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel. Netflix later produced a film, The Angel, based on Bar-Joseph’s book.
Or, was Marwan, as the journalists argue, a double agent working for Egypt from the beginning—since volunteering for Israeli intelligence in 1970—and who managed to deceive Israel for years, particularly by delaying his warning about Egypt’s impending attack until roughly 12 hours before it began? According to Bergman and Robovitz, Marwan knew about Egypt’s plans weeks earlier but withheld that information, allowing Egypt to launch a surprise attack.
A Public Debate
Following the article’s publication, a public debate erupted between Bergman and Robovitz on one side and Professor Uri Bar-Joseph on the other, over Marwan’s true motives. Whether he was a double agent or a loyal Israeli operative, all agree he played a key role in the intelligence drama preceding the Yom Kippur War. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with 1973 Yom Kippur War, Ashraf Marwan, Avner Barnea, double agents, Egypt, espionage, HUMINT, Israel, Mossad