MICHAEL BAR-ZOHAR

A fascinating man, Mr. Bar-Zohar, who also wrote under the pseudonyms of Michael Hastings and Michael Barak, was born in Bulgaria but moved to the new country of Israel when he was 10 years old in 1948. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and eventually earned a doctorate from the University of Paris. For several years he was a reporter and an editor at a couple of publications but changed careers to become the spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Defense. In time he would serve in the Israeli Knesset for over a decade. Besides his several fiction novels, he has penned a fair number of highly regarded non-fiction books about the early conflicts in Israel and the spies who were a part of it.