His first book was billed a work of non-fiction, his latest as fiction. But it's an open question which one is closer to the truth.
SHELI TEITELBAUM
When Victor Ostrovsky published "By Way of Deception," in 1990, indignant Israeli critics - principally government officials and columnists - dismissed him as a charlatan and his exposé of the Mossad as fiction. Although their efforts may have wreaked havoc on his credibility, they ultimately proved no more effective in foiling the book's success than legal attempts to stop its publication or attach the author's earnings. At Yitzhak Shamir's insistence - severely misguided, it can be seen in retrospect - the Mossad took a book possibly fated to a Canadian remainder bin and turned it into a raging international best selle r by providing it with a million dollars' worth of free publicity.
In "Deception," co-written with Canadian political correspondent Claire Hoy, Ostrovsky, in addition to chronicling the recruitment and training procedures of a Mossad agent, made a number of sensational claims about the service. One of the most outrageous of these was that the Mossad had refused to warn the United States of an impending Shi'ite suicide attack on its Beirut marine barracks (an attack that took 241 American lives) in October 1983 (a contention dismissed by Shamir's media adviser Avi Pazner as "a baseless lie"). He alleged a Mossad role in engineering the downfall of American U.N. envoy Andrew Young in 1979, and argued that even after the Pollard affair, the Mossad systematically recruited operatives from the world Jewish community in general, and American Jewry in particular (an accusation that was contrary to stated Israeli policy).
There were officials who called the book completely fictitious and there were glaring contradictions between Ostrovsky's account of his career and the official one, but some observers noted that there were parts of what Ostrovsky described (particulary those sections dealing with his recruitment and instruction) that rang true, even if his saying it, as a former Mossad employee, could be considered a completely irresponsible act. And in acting to suppress the book, the government's North American lawyers claimed that the book "could have dire consequences for many people," which seemed to be a tacit admission that there was something to the book.
At age 42, Ostrovsky, Edmonton-born and Israel-raised, now leads the life of a Canadian squire in a golf community near Ottawa. He and his wife Bella live in a 4,000-square-foot house complete with pool and tennis court. They have two daughters, 24 and 19, the elder of whom is studying at Carleton University. Having lived much of his life in Holon, a lower-middle class suburb of Tel Aviv, Ostrovsky isn't complaining. But three years after crossing into the cold, until now he still hasn't ventured out from the Great White North, fearful that if he left his native land, Israel might try to have him extradited.
"They'd like to put me in a hole," says Ostrovsky, speaking by phone from his home. "Once a year they would lift up the lid for Mossad recruits to show them what happens to whistle-blowers."
Beyond the Mossad operations he described - some of which had already been documented elsewhere, some of which to this day remain purported - Ostrovsky also painted a general picture of Mossad officials as venal, corrupt and lascivious. It is this aspect of "Deception" that he believes inspired a viscerally emotional response by Mossad officers, some of whom, he says, followed him around Canada for weeks, and others of whom supposedly offered him $ 1 million to withhold publication of the book. (On the other hand, if