Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 3 ENGRAVINGS OF GLILOT

Exiting the highway north of Tel Aviv, Meir Amit continued to maintain his speed at a little above the speed limit. Discreetly bucking the system had continued to be part of his life since, almost forty years before, he had masterminded the theft of an Iraqi jet.

He put down blindly refusing to follow the rule book as stemming from his Galilean background: “We are a stubborn lot.” He had been born in King Herod’s favorite city, Tiberias, close to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and spent most of his early life on a kibbutz. Long ago all traces of the region’s flat accent had been smoothed away by his mother, an elocution teacher. She had also instilled her son’s sense of independence, his refusal to tolerate fools, and a barely concealed contempt for city dwellers. Most important of all, she had encouraged his analytical skills and ability to think laterally.

In his long career he had used those qualities to discover an enemy’s intention. Often action could not wait for certainty, and motive and deception had been at the center of his work. At times his critics in the Israeli intelligence community had been concerned at what they saw as his imaginative leaps. He had one answer for them all: Read the case file on the stolen MiG.

On this March morning in 1997, as he continued to drive out of Tel Aviv, Meir Amit was officially on the retired list. But no one in Israeli intelligence believed that was the case; his vast knowledge was too valuable to be put in cold storage.

The previous day Meir Amit had returned from Ho Chi Minh City, where he had visited former Vietcong intelligence officers. They had swapped experiences and had found common ground over besting superior opposition: the Vietnamese against the Americans, Israel fighting the Arabs. Meir Amit had made other trips to places where his secret maneuvers had once created havoc: Amman, Cairo, Moscow. No one dared to question the purpose of these visits, just as during his five momentous years as director general of Mossad—1963–68—no one had mounted a successful challenge over his sources or methods.

In that period he had turned humint, human intelligence gathering, into an art form. No other intelligence agency had been able to match his agents on the ground in collecting information. He had placed spies in ever greater numbers in every Arab country, across Europe, down into South America, throughout Africa, and in the United States. His katsas had penetrated the Jordanian Mukabarat, the best of the Arab intelligence services, and Syrian military intelligence, the most cruel. They were men of cool nerve and steel resolve that no novelist would have dared to invent.

Soon after he became director general, Meir Amit circulated within the service a memo stolen by an agent from Yasser Arafat’s office:

“Mossad has a dossier on each of us. They know our names and addresses. We know there are two photographs with each of our files. One is a copy of how we look without a kaffiyeh and the other wearing one. So the Mossad have no difficulty tracking us down with or without our headdresses.”

To create further fear, Meir Amit had recruited an unprecedented number of Arab informers. He worked on the principle that by the law of averages he would discover a sufficient number who would be useful. Bribed Arabs had betrayed PLO gunmen and revealed their arms caches, safe houses, and travel arrangements. For each terrorist killed by Mossad, Meir Amit paid an informer a bonus of one U.S. dollar.

In the run-up to the Six Day War in 1967, there was either a Mossad katsa or an informer inside every Egyptian air base and military headquarters. There were no fewer than three in the General High Command headquarters in Cairo, staff officers who had been persuaded by Meir Amit. How he had done so had remained his closely guarded secret: “There are some matters best left that way.”

To each informer and agent in place he had given the same instruction: as well as “the big picture,” he wanted “the small details. How far did a pilot have to walk from his barracks to the mess for his meals? How long was a staff officer held up in the notorious Cairo traffic jam? Did a key planner have a mistress?” Only he fully understood how such disparate matters would be used.

One katsa had managed to get himself a job as a waiter in the officers’ mess in a frontline fighter base. Every week he provided details of aircraft readiness and the lifestyle of pilots and technicians. Their drinking habits and sexual pleasures were among the information secretly radioed to Tel Aviv.

Mossad’s newly created Department of Psychological Warfare, Loh Amma Psichologit (LAP), worked around the clock preparing files on Egyptian fliers, ground crew, and staff officers: their flying skills, whether they had achieved their rank through ability or influence, who had a drink problem, frequented a brothel, had a predilection for boys.

Well into the night, Meir Amit pored over the files, looking for weaknesses, for men who could be blackmailed into working for him. “It was not a pleasant task but intelligence is often a dirty business.”

Egyptian families of servicemen began to receive anonymous letters posted in Cairo giving explicit details of their loved one’s behavior. Informers reported back to Tel Aviv details of family rows that led to aircrew going on sick leave. Staff officers had anonymous phone calls giving information about a colleague’s private life. A teacher at school was called by a sympathetic-sounding woman to be told that the only reason a pupil was doing badly was because her father, a senior officer, had a secret male lover; the call led to the officer shooting himself. This relentless campaign caused considerable dissension within the Egyptian military and brought great satisfaction to Meir Amit.

By early 1967, it became clear from all the evidence his Egyptian network was producing that the country’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was preparing for war against Israel. More informers were recruited by fair means or foul, helping Mossad to know as much about the Egyptian air force and its military command as did Cairo.

By early May 1967 he was able to give Israel’s air force commanders the precise time of day they should launch a knockout strike against the Egyptian air bases. Mossad’s analysts had produced a remarkable blueprint of life on all Egyptian air bases.

Between 7:30 A.M. and 7:45 A.M. airfield radar units were at their most vulnerable. In those fifteen minutes the outgoing night staff were tired after their long shift, while their incoming replacements were not yet fully alert, and were often late in taking over due to slow service in the mess halls. Pilots breakfasted between 7:15 A.M. and 7:45 A.M. Afterward they usually walked back to their barracks to collect their flying gear. The average journey took ten minutes. Most fliers spent a further few minutes in the toilets before going to the flight lines. They arrived there around 8:00 A.M., the official start to the day. By then ground crew had begun to roll out aircraft from their hangars to be fueled and armed. For the next fifteen minutes the flight lines were crammed with fuel trucks and ammunition trucks.

A similar detailed itinerary was prepared for the movements of staff officers in the Cairo High Command. The average officer took thirty minutes to drive to work from his house in one of the suburbs. Strategic planners were often not at their desks before 8:15 A.M. They usually spent a further ten minutes settling in, sipping coffee, and gossiping with colleagues. The average staff officer did not properly start studying overnight signals traffic from the fighter bases until close to 8:30 A.M.

Meir Amit told the Israeli air force commander that the time their aircraft must be over their targets should be between 8:00 A.M. and 8:30 A.M. In those thirty minutes they would be able to pulverize enemy bases, knowing that the Cairo High Command would be without many of its key personnel to direct the fight back.

On June 5, 1967, Israel’s air force struck at precisely 8:01 A.M. with deadly effect, sweeping in low over the Sinai to bomb and strafe at will. In moments the sky turned reddish black with the flames from burning fuel trucks and exploding ammunition and aircraft.

In Tel Aviv, Meir Amit sat looking out of his office window toward the south, knowing his intelligence analysts had virtually settled the outcome of the war. It was one of the most stunning examples of his extraordinary skills — and even more remarkable given the numerical size of Mossad.

From the time he took over, Meir Amit had resisted attempts to turn Mossad into a version of the CIA or KGB. Those services between them employed hundreds of thousands of analysts, scientists, strategists, and planners to support their field agents. The Iraqis and Iranians had an estimated ten thousand field agents; even the Cuban DGI possessed close to a thousand spies in the field.

But Meir Amit had insisted that Mossad’s permanent total staff would number little more than twelve hundred. Each would be handpicked and have multiple skills: a scientist must be able to work in the field should the need arise; a katsa must be able to use his specialist skills to train others.

To them all he would be the memune, which roughly translates from Hebrew as “first among equals.” With the title came unfettered access to the prime minister of the day and the annual ritual of presenting his budget for the Israeli cabinet to rubber-stamp.

Long before the Six Day War he had established Mossad’s ability to strike mortal terror into Israel’s enemies, penetrating their ranks, vacuuming up their secrets, and killing them with chilling efficiency. He had soon made Mossad mythic in stature.

Much of that success came from the rules he laid down for selecting katsas, the field agents who, ultimately, were at the cutting edge of Mossad’s success. He fully understood the deep and complex motives that allowed them, upon selection, to shake his hand, the gesture that acknowledged they were now his to command as he wished.

While much else had changed in Mossad, Meir Amit knew on that March morning in 1997 that his recruiting criteria had remained intact:

No katsa is accepted into Mossad who is primarily motivated by money. The overly zealous Zionist has no place in this work. It gets in the way of a clear understanding of what the job is all about. It is one that calls for calm, clear, farsighted judgment and a balanced outlook. People want to join Mossad for all kinds of reasons. There is the so-called glamour. Some like the idea of adventure. Some think joining will enhance their status, small people who want to be big. A few want the secret power they believe being in Mossad would give them. None of these are acceptable reasons for joining.

And always, always, you must ensure your man in the field knows he has your total support. That you will look out for his family, make sure his kids are happy. At the same time you must protect him. If his wife starts to wonder if he has another woman reassure her he has not. If he has, don’t tell her. If she goes off the rails, bring her back on the straight and narrow. Don’t tell her husband. You want nothing to distract him. The job of a good spymaster is to treat his people as family. Make them feel he is always there for them, day, night, no matter what the time. This is how you buy loyalty, make your katsa do what you want. And in the end what you want is important.

Each katsa underwent three years of intensive training, including being subjected to severe physical violence under interrogation. He, or she, became proficient in the use of Mossad’s weapon of choice — the .22-caliber Beretta.

The first katsas stationed outside the Arab countries were in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany. In the United States there were permanent katsas in New York and Washington. The New York katsa had special responsibility for penetrating all UN diplomatic missions and the city’s many ethnic groups. The Washington katsa had a similar job, with the additional responsibility of “monitoring” the White House.

Other katsas operated in areas of current tensions, returning home when a mission ended.

Meir Amit had also considerably expanded the organization to include a Collections Department responsible for intelligence-gathering operations abroad and a Political Action and Liaison Department, working with so-called friendly foreign intelligence services, mostly the CIA and Britain’s MI6. The Research Department had fifteen sections or “desks” targeting Arab states. The United States, Canada, Latin America, Britain, Europe, and the Soviet Union all had their separate desks. This infrastructure would, over the years, expand to include China, South Africa, and the Vatican. But essentially Mossad would remain the same small organization.

A day did not pass without the arrival of a fresh sheaf of news stories from overseas stations. These were circulated throughout the drab gray high-rise building on King Saul Boulevard. In Meir Amit’s view, “If it made someone walk a little taller, that was no bad thing. And, of course, it made our enemies that more fearful.”

Mossad’s katsas were coldly efficient and cunning beyond belief — and prepared to fight fire with fire. Operatives incited disturbances designed to create mutual distrust among Arab states, planted black counterpropaganda, and recruited informers, implementing Meir Amit’s philosophy: “Divided, we rule.” In all they did, his men set new standards for cold-blooded professionalism, moving like thieves in the night leaving a trail of death and destruction. No one was safe from their retaliation.

A mission completed they returned to be debriefed in Meir Amit’s corner-window office overlooking the broad thoroughfare named after Israel’s Old Testament warlord. From his office he personally ran two spies whose bravery would remain without equal in the annals of Mossad. Recalling their contributions, his voice became tentative, the occasional smile one of apologetic self-protection, as he began by recounting biographical details.

Eli Cohen was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on December 16, 1924. Like his parents, he was a devout Orthodox Jew. In December 1956 he was among Jews expelled from Egypt after the Suez crisis. He arrived in Haifa and felt himself a stranger in his new land. In 1957 he was recruited into Israeli military counterintelligence, but his work as an analyst bored him. He began to inquire how he could join Mossad, but was rejected. Meir Amit recalled, “We heard that our rejection had deeply offended Eli Cohen. He resigned from the army and married an Iraqi woman named Nadia.”

For two years Cohen led an uneventful life as a filing clerk in a Tel Aviv insurance office. Unknown to him, his background had surfaced in a trawl through Mossad’s “reject files” by Meir Amit, who was looking for a “certain kind of agent for a very special job.” Finding no one suitable in the “active” files, he had gone to the “rejects.” Cohen seemed the only possibility. He was put under surveillance. The weekly reports by Mossad’s recruiting office described his fastidious habits and devotion to his wife and young family. He was hardworking, quick on the uptake, and worked well under pressure. Finally he was told that Mossad had decided he was “suitable” after all.

Eli began an intensive six-month course at the Mossad training school. Sabotage experts taught him how to make explosives and time bombs from the simplest of ingredients. He learned unarmed combat and became a first-class marksman and an accomplished burglar. He discovered the mysteries of encoding and decoding, how to work a radio set, use invisible inks, and hide messages. He constantly impressed his instructors with his skills. His phenomenal memory came from memorizing tracts of the Torah as a young man. His graduate report stated he had every quality needed by a katsa. Still Meir Amit hesitated.

“I asked myself a hundred times: can Eli do what I want? I always showed him, of course, my confidence was always in place. I never wanted him for a moment to think he would always be one step from the trapdoor which would send him to kingdom come. Yet some of the very best brains in Mossad put everything they knew into him. Finally I decided to run with Eli.”

Meir Amit spent weeks creating a cover story for his protégé. They would sit together, studying street maps and photographs of Buenos Aires so that Cohen’s new background and name, Kamil Amin Taabes, became totally familiar. The Mossad chief saw how quickly

“Eli learned the language of an exporter-importer to Syria. He memorized the difference between waybills and freight certificates, contracts and guarantees, everything he would need to know. He was like a chameleon, absorbing everything. Before my very eye, Eli Cohen faded and Taabes took over, the Syrian who had never given up a longing to go home to Damascus. Every day Eli became more confident, more certain and keen to prove he could carry off the role. He was like a world champion marathon runner, trained to peak at the start of the race. But he could be running his for years. We had done all we could to show him how to pace his new life, to live the life. The rest was up to him. We all knew that. There was no big good-bye or send-off. He just slipped out of Israel, the way all my spies went.”

In the Syrian capital, Cohen quickly established himself in the business community and developed a circle of high-level friends. These included Maazi Zahreddin, nephew of Syria’s president.

Zahreddin was a boastful man, eager to show how invincible Syria was. Cohen played to that. In no time he was being given a guided tour of Syria’s Golan Heights fortifications. He saw the deep concrete bunkers housing the long-range artillery sent by Russia. He was even permitted to take photographs. Within hours of two hundred T-54 Russian tanks arriving in Syria, Cohen had informed Tel Aviv. He even obtained a complete blueprint of Syria’s strategy to cut off northern Israel. The information was priceless.

While Cohen continued to confirm Meir Amit’s belief that one field agent was worth a division of soldiers, he eventually began to become reckless. Cohen had always been a soccer fan. The day after a visiting team beat Israel in Tel Aviv, he broke the strict “Business only” rule about transmissions. He radioed his operator: “It is about time we learned to be victorious on the soccer field.”

Other unauthorized messages were translated: “Please send my wife an anniversary greeting,” or “Happy Birthday to my daughter.”

Meir Amit was privately furious. But he understood enough of the pressures on the agent to hope Cohen’s behavior was “no more than a temporary aberration often found in the best of agents. I tried to get inside his head. Was he desperate and this his way of showing it by dropping his guard? I tried to think like him, knowing I’d rewritten his life. I had to try and weigh a hundred factors. But in the end the only important one was: could Eli still do his job?”

Meir Amit decided that Cohen could.

On a January night in 1965, Eli Cohen waited in his Damascus bedroom ready to transmit. As he tuned his receiver to go, Syrian intelligence officers burst into the apartment. Cohen had been caught by one of the most advanced mobile detection units in the world — supplied by the Russians.

Under interrogation he was forced to send a message to Mossad. The Syrians failed to notice the subtle change of speed and rhythm in the radio transmission. In Tel Aviv, Meir Amit received news Eli had been captured. Two days later, Syria confirmed his capture.

“It was like losing one of your family. You ask yourself the questions you always ask when an agent is lost: Could we have saved him? How was he betrayed? By his own carelessness? By someone close to him? Was he burned-out and we didn’t realize it? Did he have some kind of death wish? That, too, happens. Or was it just bad luck? You ask, and go on asking. You never get the answer for certain. But asking can be a way to cope.”

At no stage did the Syrians succeed in breaking Eli Cohen — despite the torture he endured before being sentenced to death.

Meir Amit devoted almost all his time trying to save Eli Cohen. While Nadia Cohen launched a worldwide publicity campaign for her husband’s life — she approached the pope, the Queen of England, prime ministers, and presidents — Amit worked more secretly. He traveled to Europe to see the heads of French and German intelligence. They could do nothing. He made informal approaches to the Soviet Union. He fought on right until, on May 18, 1965, shortly after 2:00 A.M., a convoy drove out of El Maza Prison in Damascus. In one of the trucks was Eli Cohen.

With him was the eighty-year-old chief rabbi of Syria, Nissim Andabo. Overcome by what was to happen, the rabbi wept openly. Eli Cohen calmed the old man. The convoy reached El Marga Square in the center of Damascus. There Eli recited the Vidui, the Hebrew prayer of a man about to face death: “Almighty God forgive me for all my sins and transgressions.”

At 3:35 A.M., watched by thousands of Syrians and in the full glare of television lights, Eli stood on the gallows.

In Tel Aviv, Nadia Cohen watched her husband die and tried to kill herself. She was taken to a hospital and her life was saved.

Next day, in a small private ceremony in his office, Meir Amit paid tribute to Eli Cohen. Then he went back to the business of running his second prized agent.

Wolfgang Lotz, a German Jew, had arrived in Palestine shortly after Hitler came to power. In 1963 Meir Amit had selected him from a shortlist of candidates for a spying mission to Egypt. While Lotz underwent the same rigorous training as Cohen, once more, Meir Amit thought carefully about his agent’s cover. Amit decided to make him a riding instructor, an East German refugee who had served in the Afrika Korps in World War II and had returned to Egypt to open an equestrian academy. The job would readily give him access to Cairo’s high society, which was built around the city’s riding fraternity.

Soon Lotz had developed a circle of clients that included the deputy head of Egyptian military intelligence and the chief of security for the Suez Canal zone. Emulating Cohen, Lotz persuaded his newfound friends to show off Egypt’s formidable defenses: its rocket launchpads in Sinai and on the Negev frontier. Lotz also obtained a complete list of Nazi scientists living in Cairo who were working in Egypt’s rocket and arms programs. Soon they were systematically executed by Mossad agents.

After two years under cover, Lotz was finally arrested and convicted. The Egyptians, sensing he was too valuable to kill, kept him alive in anticipation he could be traded for Egyptian soldiers captured in a future war with Israel. Once again, Meir Amit was deeply concerned over Lotz’s capture.

Meir Amit wrote to Egypt’s then president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, asking him to exchange Lotz and his wife in return for Egyptian POWs Israel had captured. Nasser refused. Amit applied psychological pressure.

“I let the Egyptian prisoners know they were all being held because Nasser refused to hand over two Israelis. We allowed them to write home. Their letters made their feelings very clear.”

Meir Amit wrote to Nasser again saying Israel would publicly give him all the credit for recovering his POWs and would keep quiet about the return of Lotz and his wife. Nasser still did not agree. So Amit took the matter to the United Nations commander responsible for keeping the peace in the Sinai. The officer flew to Cairo and obtained the assurance that Lotz and his wife would be set free “at some future date.”

Meir Amit “understood the coded language. A month later Lotz and his wife left Cairo in complete secrecy for Geneva. A few hours later they were back in my office.”

Meir Amit recognized his katsas would need support in the field. He created the sayanim, volunteer Jewish helpers. Each sayan was an example of the historical cohesiveness of the world Jewish community. Regardless of allegiance to his or her country, in the final analysis a sayan would recognize a greater loyalty: the mystical one to Israel, and a need to help protect it from its enemies.

Sayanim fulfilled many functions. A car sayan, running a rental agency, provided a katsa with a vehicle without the usual documentation. A letting agency sayan offered accommodation. A bank sayan might unlock funds outside normal hours. A sayan physician would give medical assistance — treating a bullet wound for example — without informing the authorities. Sayanim only received expenses for their services.

Between them they collected technical data and all kinds of “overt” intelligence: a rumor at a cocktail party, an item on the radio, a paragraph in a newspaper, a half-finished story at a dinner party. They provided leads for katsas. Without its sayanim Mossad could not operate.

Again, Meir Amit’s legacy would remain, though vastly expanded. In 1998 there were over four thousand sayanim in Britain, almost four times as many in the United States; while Meir Amit had operated on a tight budget, Mossad, to maintain its worldwide operations, now spent several hundred million dollars a month maintaining its “assets,” paying the expenses of sayanim, running safe houses, providing logistics and covering operational costs. He had left them one other reminder of his time as their chief: a language of their own. Its report writing system was known as Naka; “daylight” was the highest form of alert; a kidon was a member of Mossad’s assassination team; a neviot was a specialist in surveillance; yaholomin was the unit that handled communications to katsas; safanim was the one that targeted the PLO; a balder was a courier; a slick was a secure place for documents; teuds were forgeries.

On that March morning in 1997, as he drove to keep a rendezvous with the past, Meir Amit knew so much had changed in Mossad. Pressured by political demands, most notably from Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, Mossad had become dangerously isolated from the foreign intelligence services Meir Amit had so carefully courted. It was one thing to live by the credo “Israel first, last, and always. Always.” It was quite another, as he put it, to be caught “going through the pockets of your friends.” The key word was “caught,” he added with another bleak smile.

An example had been Mossad’s increased penetration of the United States through economic, scientific, and technological espionage. A special unit, code-named Al, Hebrew for “above,” prowled through California’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 for high-tech secrets. In a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA had identified Israel as one of six foreign countries with “a government-directed, orchestrated, clandestine effort to collect U.S. economic secrets.”

The president of Germany’s internal intelligence organization, the Bundesamt Fur Verfassungschatz (BFD), had recently warned his department heads that Mossad remained a prime threat to steal the republic’s latest computer secrets. A similar caution was issued by France’s Direction Générale de la Sécurité Exterieure (DGSE) after a Mossad agent had been spotted near the Satellite Imagery Interpretative Center at Creil. Israel had long tried to increase its capability in space to match its nuclear capability on earth. Britain’s counterespionage service, MI5, included in its briefing to newly elected prime minister Tony Blair details of Mossad’s efforts to obtain sensitive scientific and defense data in the United Kingdom.

Meir Amit did not object, as such, to these adventures, only that they often appeared to have been carried out with a lack of planning and disregard for long-term consequences.

The same applied to how LAP’s psychologists conducted their campaigns. In his days the department had built up a global network of media contacts and used them with great skill. A terrorist incident in Europe would produce a call to a news organization contact with “background” that was of sufficient interest to be worked into the story, giving it the spin LAP wanted. The unit also created information for press attachés at Israeli embassies to pass on to a journalist over a drink or dinner, when a “secret” could be quietly shared and a reputation discreetly tarnished.

While the essence of that black propaganda still remained, there was a crucial difference: the choice of a target or victim. It appeared to Meir Amit that the decision was too often predicated on political requirements: a need to divert attention from some self-serving diplomatic maneuver Israel planned to make in the Middle East, or to regain its fluctuating popularity, especially in the United States.

When Trans World Airlines Flight 800 crashed off the southeastern coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 people on board, LAP began a campaign to suggest the tragedy was masterminded by Iran or Iraq, both Israel’s bêtes noires. Thousands of media stories quickly perpetuated the fiction. Almost a year later, after expending some five hundred thousand dollars and ten thousand work hours, the FBI’s chief investigator, James K. Kallstrom, ruled out a terrorist bomb or any evidence of a forensic crime. Privately he told colleagues, “If there was a way to nail those bastards in Tel Aviv for time wasting, I sure would like to see it happen. We had to check every item they slipped into the media.”

LAP struck again after the bombing of the Atlanta Olympic Games. The fiction was spread that the bomb had “all the signs” of being manufactured by somebody who had learned his skills from the bomb makers of Lebanon’s Bekáa Valley. The story took off — and LAP brought the specter of terrorism home to an understandably fearful American public. The only suspect was a hapless security guard at the Games — a man who manifestly had no connection with international terrorism — and when he was cleared, the story died.

Again, Meir Amit understood the importance of reminding the world about terrorism. But the warning “needed to be copper-fastened, something I always insisted upon.” The admission was followed by a shrug, as if some inner fire blanket had doused his spark of irritation. Long ago he had learned to hide his feelings and to be vague about details; for years his strength had been in concealment.

In his mind the downward spiral of Mossad had begun when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv in November 1995. Shortly before Rabin was gunned down by a Jewish extremist — a further sign of the deepening malaise Meir Amit saw in Israeli society — Mossad’s then director general, Shabtai Shavit, had warned Rabin’s staff that there might be an attempt on his life. According to one staffer the possibility was ignored as being too vague “to constitute a definite threat.”

Under Meir Amit’s command Mossad still had no mandate to operate within Israel, any more than the CIA could do so within the United States. Yet, despite his criticisms, Meir Amit liked to say that Mossad had shared the destiny of Israel. Under his tenure the impact of what it did had often reverberated around the world. Much of that he put down to loyalty, a quality that now seemed to have become passé. People still did their work — as dangerous and dirty as it had always been — but they wondered if they would be held accountable not only to some superior, but to some political figure in the background. That interference could account for the paranoia that regularly surfaced and challenged the concept that Israel is a true democracy.

Beside the highway between the resort of Herzliyya and Tel Aviv is a compound bristling with antennae. This is Mossad’s training school. Among the first things a new political officer, a spy, at a foreign embassy in Tel Aviv learns is the location of the dun-colored building. Yet, for an Israeli publication to reveal its existence is still to run the risk of prosecution. In 1996 there was a furious debate within the country’s intelligence community about what to do when a Tel Aviv newspaper published the name of Mossad’s latest director general, the austere Danny Yatom. There was talk of arresting the offending reporter and his editor. In the end nothing happened when Mossad realized Yatom’s name had by then been published worldwide.

Meir Amit was firmly against such exposure: “Naming a serving chief is serious. Spying is a secret business and not a pleasant one. No matter what someone has done, you have to protect him or her from outsiders. You can deal as harshly as you think fit with him or her inside the organization. But to the outside world he or she must remain untouchable and, better yet, unaccountable and unknown.”

In his tenure as director general his code name had been Ram. The word had a satisfying Old Testament ring for a boy raised in the unquenchable spirit of the early pioneers at a time when the whole of Arab Palestine was in revolt against both the British Mandate and the Jews. From boyhood he had trained his body hard. Physically slight, Meir Amit became strong and fit, sustained by a belief that this was his land. Eretz Israel, the land of Israel. It did not matter that the rest of the world still called it Palestine until 1947, when the United Nations proposed its partition.

The birth of a nation, Israel, was followed by its near annihilation as Arab armies tried to reclaim the land. Six thousand Jews died; no one would ever be certain how many Arabs fell. The sight of so many bodies all but completed the maturing of Meir Amit. What deepened the process was the arrival of the survivors of the Nazi death camps, each bearing a hideous blue tattoo branded into his or her flesh. “The sight was a reminder of the depth of human depravity.” From others the words would sound inadequately banal; Meir Amit gave them dignity.

His military career was the biography of a soldier destined for the top: a company commander in the 1948 War of Independence; two years later a brigade commander under Moshe Dayan; then, within five years, army chief of operations, the second-ranking officer of the Israel Defense Forces. An accident — the partial failure of his parachute to open — ended his military career. The Israeli government paid for him to go to Columbia University, where he took a master’s degree in business administration. He returned to Israel without a job.

Moshe Dayan proposed Meir Amit should become chief of military intelligence. Despite initial opposition, mostly on the reasonable grounds that he had no intelligence experience, he was appointed: “The one advantage I had was that I had been a battlefield commander and knew the importance of good intelligence to the fighting soldiers.” On March 25, 1963, he took over Mossad from Isser Harel. His achievements had become so many they needed a shorthand of their own: the man who introduced Mossad’s policy of assassinating its enemies; who set up a secret working relationship with the KGB at the very time millions of Jews were being persecuted; who refined the role of women and the use of sexual entrapment in intelligence work; who approved the penetration of King Hussein’s palace shortly before the Hashemite ruler became a CIA spy in the Arab world.

The techniques he created to achieve all that remain in use. But no outsider will ever learn how he first developed them. His jaw muscles tightening, all he would say was: “There are secrets and there are my secrets.”

When the time had come when he felt Mossad could benefit from a new hand at the helm, he had departed with no fuss, called his staff together and reminded them that if ever they found being a Jew and working for Mossad created a problem between their personal ethics and the demands of the state, they should resign at once. Then, after a round of handshakes, he was gone.

But no incoming chief of Mossad failed to call upon him for coffee in his office on Jabotinsky Street, in Tel Aviv’s pleasant suburb of Ramat Gan. On those occasions, Meir Amit’s office door remained firmly closed and the phone switched off.

“My mother always said a trust broken is a friend lost,” he explained in English, smiling an old man’s wily smile.

Outside his immediate family — a small tribe of children, grandchildren, cousins, kith and kin stretching over generations — few really know Meir Amit. He would have it no other way.

On that March morning in 1997, behind his car wheel, Meir Amit looked surprisingly young, closer to sixty than his actual age of seventy-five. The physique that once enabled him to complete a stress test at an Olympian pace had softened; there was a hint of a belly beneath the well-cut blue blazer. Yet his eyes were still sharp enough to startle and impossible to fathom or penetrate as he drove toward an avenue of eucalyptus trees.

How many times he had made this journey even he could no longer count. But each visit reminded him of an old truth: “that to survive as a Jew still means defending yourself to the death.”

The same reminder was on the faces of the soldiers waiting for rides under the trees outside the boot camp at Glilot, north of Tel Aviv. There was a swagger about them, even an insolence; they were doing their compulsory service in the Israel Defense Forces and imbued with the belief they served in the finest army on earth.

Few gave Meir Amit a second glance. To them he was another of the old men who came to remember at a war memorial close to where they waited. Israel is a land of such memorials — over 1,500 in all — raised to the paratroops, the pilots, the tank drivers, and the infantry. The monuments commemorate the dead of five full-scale conventional wars and close to fifty years of cross-border incursions and antiguerrilla operations. Yet, in a nation that venerates its fallen warriors in a manner not seen since the Romans occupied this land, there is no other monument in Israel, indeed the world, like the one Meir Amit helped to create.

It stands just within the perimeter of the boot camp and consists of several concrete-walled buildings and a mass of sandstone walls assembled in the shape of a human brain. Meir Amit chose that shape because “intelligence is all about the mind, not some bronzed figure striking a heroic pose.”

The memorial commemorates so far 557 men and women of Israel’s intelligence community, 71 of whom served in the Mossad.

They died in every corner of the world: in the deserts of Iraq, the-mountains of Iran, the jungles of South and Central America, the bush of Africa, the streets of Europe. Each, in his or her own way, tried to live by Mossad’s motto, “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.”

Meir Amit knew many personally; some he had sent to their deaths on missions he conceded were beyond the “cutting edge of acceptable danger, but that is the regrettable unavoidability of this work. One person’s death must always be weighed against our nation’s security. It has always been so.”

The smooth sandstone walls are engraved only with names and the date of death. There are no other clues to the circumstances in which someone died: a public hanging, the fate of all convicted Jewish spies in Arab countries; a murderer’s knife thrust in an alley that had no name; the merciful release after months of prison torture. No one will ever know. Even Meir Amit could often only suspect, and he kept those dark thoughts for himself.

The brain-shaped memorial is only part of the memorial complex. Within the concrete buildings is the File Room, holding the personal biographies of the dead agents. Each person’s early life and military service are carefully documented; the final secret mission is not. Each agent has his or her memorial day commemorated in a small synagogue.

Beyond the synagogue is an amphitheater where on Intelligence Day families gather to remember their dead. Sometimes Meir Amit addresses them. Afterward they visit the memorial’s museum, filled with artifacts: a transmitter in the base of a flatiron; a microphone in a coffeepot; invisible ink in a perfume bottle; the actual tape recorder that secretly recorded the critical conversation between King Hussein of Jordan and President Nasser of Egypt, the precursor to the Six Day War.

Meir Amit had burnished the stories of the men who used the equipment to the brightness of heroic myth. He would point out the disguise Ya’a Boqa’i wore when he slipped in and out of Jordan until he was captured and executed in Amman in 1949, and the crystal radio Max Binnet and Moshe Marzuk used to run Mossad’s most successful network in Egypt before they died painful, lingering deaths in a Cairo prison.

To Meir Amit, they were all “my Gideonites.” Gideon was the Old Testament hero who saved Israel against superior enemy forces because he had better intelligence.

Finally, it was time for him to go to the maze, accompanied by the museum’s curator. They paused before each engraved name, gave imperceptible little head bows, then moved on. Abruptly it was over. No more dead to respectfully acknowledge — only ample space for more names on the sand-colored tombstone.

For a moment Meir Amit was again lost in reverie. In whispered Hebrew the old Mossad chief said to the curator: “Whatever happens, we must ensure this place lives on.”

Apropos of nothing that had gone before, Meir Amit added that on his office wall in Damascus, President Hafez al-Assad of Syria only has one picture, a large photograph of the site of Saladin’s victory against the Crusaders in 1187. It had led to the Arab reconquest of Jerusalem.

For Meir Amit, Assad’s fondness for the photograph “has a significance for Israel. He sees us the same way Saladin did — someone to be eventually vanquished. There are many who share that aspiration. Some even purport to be our friends. We have to be especially watchful of them ….”

He stopped, said his good-bye to the curator, and walked back to his car as if he had already said too much; as if what he had said would further energize the whispers beginning to circulate within the Israeli intelligence community. Another crisis in the nowadays uneasy alliance between Mossad and U.S. intelligence was about to surface — with potentially devastating effects for Israel.

Already caught up in the brewing scandal was one of the most colorful and ruthless operatives who had once served under Meir Amit, a man who had already secured his place in history as the capturer of Adolf Eichmann, yet still liked to play with fire.