Business Innovation from Israel's Masters of Espionage

Chapter 11. Soldiering On

Tel Aviv, the Twenty-first Century…

At the turn of the Millennium, the IDF and its select technological intelligence agencies, particularly unit 8200, went into battle. The elite vanguard of the nation's security went to war—over talent. The unit had done such a stellar job of shaping the raw potential of some very smart men and women that it now found itself in the position of having to compete to retain its soldiers, who despite the unit's deliberate policy of ambiguity were now in high demand by investors and companies both in Israel and around the world. Having produced the foundation of the nation's high-tech sector by honing generations of its innovators, it had become an unqualified hamemah, or greenhouse, and ...