The investigative journalist has more tools at his disposal than ever before. WikiLeaks and the darker recesses of the Internet offer information and sources hitherto unreachable, yet rumour, baseless speculation, and misinformation abound. Rafael Epstein, an experienced, Walkley-winning investigative journalist, reportedly spent nearly a year researching this book, and it shows in the flashes of insight he extracts from unlikely sources: Zygier’s acquaintances in Australia and Israel, former colleagues, neighbours, other reporters. It is hard not to feel, though, that too little of this research found its way into the final product. There are fewer than three pages of notes in total, many of them hyperlinks to news articles and press releases.

The disappointment is that Epstein doesn’t provide nearly as much context and nuance as he could. He is undoubtedly the right person to write this book: Epstein knew Zygier when both were involved in Melbourne’s Jewish youth groups, and he ably explains important facets of Zionism and Jewish culture that motivated Zygier’s move to Israel and career with the Mossad. However, there are difficulties associated with Epstein’s position within the Jewish community, and he notes that ‘there are many people in Israel and Australia who would vehemently oppose’ the book’s publication. This might explain why Prisoner X still feels as though it has been written too quickly and too superficially, despite Epstein’s extensive research.

Readers are left with numerous questions. What exactly is ‘hasood  ’ (‘the secret’), the crime of which Zygier was accused? Why did previous reports suggest that he gave information to Hezbollah in Lebanon, when Epstein argues it was to an Iranian in Melbourne? Why was it alleged that Zygier might have been a double agent? These lingering doubts probably stem largely from Epstein’s need to protect his sources, on the one hand, and other parties’ refusals to speak with him at all, on the other. However, whether or not such questions are even capable of being answered is never quite clear, and this is the book’s biggest frustration. Has Epstein withheld information for the sake of confidentiality, or is it simply unobtainable?

One of the casualties of this uncertainty is detailed discussion of Zygier’s legal situation, which is largely absent until the book’s final pages. We learn little of the Mossad, beyond what is directly pertinent to Zygier’s career. We are given just enough information, though, to glimpse the mockery of justice towards which the Israeli legal system is evolving. Zygier’s imprisonment and trial flouted almost all the rules of natural justice: while his jailers were excluded from ordinary prison regulations, his case was heard before a secret, possibly illegal, court, and he was only permitted a lawyer over the prosecutor’s strenuous objections. Even after Zygier’s death, Israeli news reports concerning the case were censored by the military – censorship that continues to the present day.

Has Epstein withheld information for the sake of confidentiality, or is it simply unobtainable?

Despite its occasionally frustrating scarcity of detail, Prisoner X is rescued by the smoothness of Epstein’s prose and the judicious deployment of captivating but loosely related stories of assassinations, passport fraud, and electronic warfare. These tales – much like the books painting Mossad as ‘the protectors and avenging angels of a defiant nation’ given to young Jewish boys around the world, including Epstein – are why Prisoner X was necessary, and why the book could never fully succeed.

The author as a young man holding an AR-15 assault rifle (photograph by Rafael Epstein)

Epstein insists that Zygier’s fall from grace and subsequent death were the result of a moment of immoderate candour, an underlying mental illness, administrative negligence, and a broken surveillance camera: not nearly so gripping a story as murder, assassination, or double agency. Indeed, in some ways Ben Zygier’s end was shockingly ordinary – just another death in custody – and it now seems likely that the sheer banality of this fact, more than anything else, will protect the Mossad from its critics in the long run.

Still, the Tel Aviv daily Haaretzrecently argued that the Israeli government’s negligence has been ‘so outrageous that an investigation is needed to disprove it’, a suggestion that – like so much else in this story – can be read in more than one way. Epstein is to be commended for having contributed to the only investigation that will matter, even if the most we can expect it to do is uncover the questions we should have been asking all along.