Powerful spy tale thrilling, although mysteries remain

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This article was published 12/12/2014 (4314 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AS readers of spy fiction know, every secret agent has a handler, the person to whom the undercover operative reports. We’ve read about it in novels by Graham Greene and John le Carré, but how might it work in real life? If the intense and fascinating The Green Prince is any indication, it takes unforeseen turns even the best of novelists would have trouble imagining.

Compelling enough to win Sundance’s world documentary audience award, the film goes into the psychological and power dynamics of one specific spy/handler relationship. Though it’s set in the context of a highly combustible international situation, its emphasis is always on the personal, on these two men and what they came to mean to each other.

Nadav Schirman, The Green Prince’s director, has experience getting difficult people to talk on camera: his last film, In the Dark Room, centred on the wife and daughter of notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal.

Here, the protagonists are Gonen Ben Yitzhak, an agent for the Shin Bet, Israel’s super-secret version of the FBI, and Mosab Hassan Yousef, who spied on Hamas for Israel for 10 years.

But as his Green Prince code name indicates, Hassan Yousef was not just any informant. He was the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of Hamas’s founders and current leaders, and having him spying for Israel was beyond shocking. As the secret agent himself dramatically says: “To collaborate with Israel was the most shameful things you could do, worse than raping your mother.”

Both Hassan Yousef and Ben Yitzhak sit down for extensive interviews, which are most of what we see onscreen. This is not great filmmaking, but their story is so involving it doesn’t matter as much as it might.

Unaware that, as the son of a Hamas leader living in the West Bank, he is under constant Shin Bet surveillance, Hassan Yousef is arrested after an arms purchase and the attempt to turn him begins.

Only 17 when he was arrested, Hassan Yousef was an especially complicated figure with numerous vulnerabilities. As a child, he had been molested by a family friend, a shame he had never revealed, and, though barely into his teens, as the eldest son he had been left in charge of the family during his father’s years in Israeli detention.

As to the reasons Hassan Yousef agreed to become a spy, they feel a bit muddled. He initially says he agreed just to get out of prison, with no thought to actually keeping his promise, but the atrocities he saw Hamas commit against its own people while he was behind bars horrified him enough to follow through.

Despite the preponderance of talk in The Green Prince, not a huge amount of time is spent on analysis or trying to figure out why what happens happens. We are welcome to speculate on the reasons things took the unbelievable turns they did, but we will never know for sure. Which, given how strange this whole story is, seems exactly right.

 

— Los Angeles Times