Most people have never heard of Military Intelligence Unit 504, the top-secret hub from which undercover agents are sent to missions overseas. Since its inception, the unit has stayed in the shadows, as required by the nature of its operations, but a recent effort to properly archive its trove of documents now allows for a partial glimpse into its inner workings.
As part of the first stage of this ambitious project, some 40,000 documents and photos have been cataloged and transferred to the IDF's archives in the Defense Ministry, with the hope that they could help future soldiers learn about past intelligence-gathering efforts and methods using undercover agents.
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Last week, Unit 504 Commander Brig. Gen. (res.) Gadi Zohar and Lt. Col. B, who oversees the classified unit's archiving project, were awarded the Military Intelligence Creative Thinking Award.
"We created a series of books that summarize operational events but imagine our surprise when we learned we're trailblazers and that no other unit – or the corps as a whole – was pursuing a similar project," Zohar told Israel Hayom.
"If you want to understand how we operate, go to the movies, to a thriller double, add some more, and you still wouldn't even come close," B. added.
Some of the items now declassified are physical, such as the first communication devices the unit used. Other documents reveal that up until the early 1970s, the unit would occasionally use carrier pigeons as a means of communication.
A particularly nostalgic document that has been declassified is the 1948 order to form the IDF's Military Intelligence Directorate, whose mission will be to gather intelligence, perform counterespionage, and oversee censorship and wiretapping. Unit 504, formed by the power of this order, was tasked with operating undercover Arab agents abroad.
According to Zohar and B., the archiving project goes beyond preserving history.
"This is about effectively learning operational methods. Technology may have changed dramatically, but at the end of the day, the nature of man hasn't," B. said.
"It is my job to prepare officers to deploy people on the ground to provide information. The new archive allows us to facilitate learning that spans past, present, and future learning processes. Technology is changing, arenas are changing, but people, for the most part, stay the same – 80% of the processes that Zohar worked by years ago are still utilized today. If anything, these materials make the officers perform their tasks better."
One advantage Zohar said was pivotal was the fact that the IDF's archive "is the world's largest database on the Middle East. Researchers may only get access to these specific materials in the future, but the very creation of this database has immense intellectual importance. This is an exclusive database of the threats against Israel throughout history."
