THE AUSTRALIAN
A Group of Israeli Arab women flown to Paris in 1964 were met by a Mossad officer who told them that their husbands were not who they thought they were.
Ten young Jewish immigrants from Iraq were trained for a year before being sent into Israeli Arab communities, posing as refugees from the war who had escaped to a neighbouring Arab country and had now infiltrated back.
It quickly became apparent that in order to maintain credibility the men would have to marry. “It would have been suspicious for young, vigorous men to remain alone, without a spouse,” said Shmuel Moriah, the security officer who headed the operation. “We didn’t order them to marry, but there was such an expectation.”
By the early 1960s, it was clear that the intelligence benefits from the operation were marginal and it was decided to dismantle the unit. The dilemma confronting Moriah was whether to simply pull out the agents, leaving the women and children behind, presumably with compensation, or to transfer the families to Jewish communities where the children would be raised as Jews. The agents themselves insisted on the families remaining together.
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via 3 Quarks Daily