ISIS stands for Israeli Secret Intelligence Service

▶️ ISIS stands for Israeli Secret Intelligence Service - July 20, 1990
▶️ In an excerpt from a 1990 C-SPAN interview with Brian Lamb, Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, authors of the book, Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community, discuss and describe how the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office officially refers to its subordinate organization “the Mossad” as the “Israeli Secret Intelligence Service,” or ISIS.

The book focused on the five branches of the Israeli intelligence community and the role of each branch. It also speculates on the future roles of the intelligence community in a potentially explosive area with the possibility of chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare.

Dan Raviv:
I thought it was a reasonable question, but the trouble is you can't pick up the phone book. There's no Langley in Israel that you can look up, you know, CIA or, in our case, the Mossad. We thought we should ask, "What shall we call it in English?" We can translate the Hebrew words, and like I said, Mossad is "institute." But when they write a letter to their friends in the CIA or the British intelligence, what do they call themselves? It took a while. It was a matter of asking the prime minister's spokesman -- the best you could do because officially the Mossad is under the prime minister's office. And I think he sort of wondered, "Why do you want to know?" and all that, so we explained, and he came up with the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service. And if it were to have initials it would be ISIS, just simple words like that -- interestingly enough, though, kind of a British model. The British don't really like the names MI5 and MI6 for their foreign service. They prefer SIS, Secret Intelligence Service. [Excerpt from 1990 interview]

Transcript Source: http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/13424-...

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c458636...
Transcript