Background
Uri Bar-Joseph was born on the 18th of July 1949 in Israel.
Uri Bar-Joseph was born on the 18th of July 1949 in Israel.
He earned his PhD in 1990 from Stanford University, under the supervision of Alexander George.
He specializes in national security, intelligence studies and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Bar-Joseph is best known for his studies of the intelligence failure of the Yom Kippur War. His book, The Watchman Fell Asleep (SUNY, 2005), is the first detailed academic study of the subject and is considered the most important study in this field. The Israeli made docudrama, "The Silence of the Sirens", which is based on this book won the Israeli Academy award for the best television feature film in 2004 .
In 2016, Bar-Joseph published 'The Angel:The Egyptian spy who saved Israel'(HarperCollins), which recounts the story of Ashraf Marwan (code-named by the Mossad "The Angel"), who was President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s son in law, and an Israeli spy. Marwan’s early warning, on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, that war will break the following day, convinced Israeli leaders to order the mobilization of the reserve army and this early mobilization prevented the complete occupation of the Golan Heights on the second day of the war. Marwan continued working for the Israeli intelligence services till 1998. His true identity as an Israeli spy was leaked to the press by the former Chief of Military Intelligence Eli Zeira, who had served in this capacity during the Yom Kippur War. The document written by Bar-Joseph about this leak served as the basis for the official charges pressed by senior Israeli intelligence officers against Zeira, charging him with leaking the identity of the most important spy in Israel’s history whose warning had effectively saved the country in 1973. A judicial inquiry proved that Zeira had leaked the name.
Bar-Joseph most recent book (co-authored with Rose McDermott) titled Intelligence Success and Failure: A comparative Study will be published by Oxford UP towards the end of 2016.