After four years of his release in a deal between Cairo and Tel Aviv, the spy Azzam in an interview with Yisrael Hume yesterday disclosed some details of his newly published book: Are you a Mossad Agent? The book tells the story of his arrest in Egypt on charges of spying for Israel, and the eight years he spent behind bars after having been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. It also tells of the Israeli political and intelligence efforts for his release. It reveals new information that was not published before and that cannot be validated, perhaps most notably the claim that Egyptian intelligence tried to recruit him, and that a special unit of Israeli army officers and agents of the Mossad were trained to break him out of Tora Prison. Azzam's publisher Dodo Oren divided the book into several chapters, the first of which claims that he was tortured in prison and that he attempted suicide because the Egyptian officials and the inmates were stifling him. Another chapter said that Prime Ministers Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon demanded his release in exchange for the resumption of negotiations with the Palestinians. In the last chapter, Azzam talks about the suffering he went through after he returned to Israel. For although he raised the Israeli flag and sang the anthem upon his arrival to his home village in the north, he had to face the problem of getting close to his son who was just 12 months old when he last saw him . He also talks about how he was ignored by all, and how he was out of a job for many months, which made him feel that he was betrayed. But the book deliberately did not answer the question that the Israeli public opinion poses: Was Azzam an agent of the Mossad?
