Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 7 THE GENTLEMAN SPY

On a damp spring morning in 1997, David Kimche instructed Arab landscapers how he wanted his garden rearranged in a Tel Aviv suburb. His manner was diffident, the mellifluous voice more suited to a college campus than dealing with manual workers, suggesting Kimche was descended from generations of administrators who had once raised Britain’s Union Jack over far-flung lands. The English-born son of middle-class Jews, Kimche’s impeccable manners deepened the image of the quintessential Englishman. Expensively tailored clothes emphasized a figure kept trim with regular workouts and a strict diet.

Kimche looked twenty years younger than his close to sixty years and there was a boyish quality about him. His every gesture while briefing the gardeners — the flicking away of hair from his forehead, the lengthy pauses, the thoughtful stare — suggested a lifetime spent cloistered on a college campus.

In reality, David Kimche had been what Meir Amit called “one of the intellectual powerhouses” behind many Mossad operations. His reasoning skills had been accompanied by breathtaking nerve, catching even the wariest with some totally unexpected move that had quickly earned the respect of even cynical colleagues. But his very intellectualism had often made them keep their distance; he was too remote and abstract for their earthy ways. Several felt like Rafi Eitan, “that if you said ‘good morning’ to David, his mind would already be deciding how ‘good’ it was and how much of the morning was left.”

Within Mossad, Kimche was widely regarded as the epitome of the gentleman spy with the cunning of an alley cat. His journey into the Mossad fold began after he left Oxford University with a First in Social Science in 1968. A few months later he was recruited by Mossad, then newly under the command of Meir Amit, who was seeking to introduce into its ranks a sprinkling of university graduates to complement the ruthlessness of men like Rafi Eitan who had learned their skills in the field.

How, where, and by whom Kimche was recruited was something he would forever keep under lock and key. The rumor mills of the Israeli intelligence community offered several scenarios: that he had signed on over a good dinner with a London publisher, a Jew who had long been a sayan; that the proposition came in a rabbi’s office in a Golders Green synagogue; that a distant relative had made the first move.

The only certainty is that one spring morning in the early Sixties, Kimche walked into Mossad’s headquarters building in Tel Aviv, the newest member of the Planning and Strategy Department. To one side was a branch of the Bank of Israel, several business offices, and a café. Uncertain what to do or where to go, Kimche waited in the cavernous lobby. How different it was from the imposing entrance of the CIA he had read about. At Langley the agency proudly proclaimed its existence in marble on the floor with an inlaid sixteen-pointed star on a shield dominated by the head of a bald eagle in profile, accompanied by the words “Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America.” Set in a wall were the words of the apostle John about people being set free by the truth. Beyond the plaque were banks of elevators, guarded by armed guards.

But here, in the somewhat shabby lobby of the building on King Saul Boulevard, were only bank tellers at their stations and people seated on the café’s plastic chairs. Not one of them looked remotely likely to be a Mossad employee. In the far corner of the lobby an unmarked door opened and a familiar figure emerged, a consular officer at the Israeli embassy in London who had supplied Kimche’s travel documents. Leading Kimche back to the door, he explained that his own diplomatic status protected his real work as a Mossad katsa in Britain. At the door he handed Kimche two keys and said that from now on they would be his only means to enter Mossad headquarters. One key opened the door, the second the elevators that rose through Mossad’s eight floors. The headquarters was “a building within a building” with its own utilities — power, water, sanitation — separate from the rest of the tower block.

It had become Mossad’s headquarters shortly after the end of the Suez War in 1956.

That year, in October, British, French, and Israeli forces had launched a joint invasion of Egypt to recapture the Suez Canal, which Egyptian president Gamal Nasser had nationalized. The invasion had the hallmark of the “gunboat diplomacy” that for so long had dominated the region. The United States had almost no prior warning of an invasion that had turned out to be the last gasp of both British and French domination of the Middle East. Washington had exerted massive diplomatic pressure to stop the fighting, fearing that it would draw the Soviet Union into the conflict on the side of Egypt, creating a superpower confrontation. When the fighting ended on the banks of the Suez Canal, Britain and France found they had been replaced by the United States as the dominating foreign power in the Middle East. But Israel insisted on retaining the land it had captured in the Sinai Desert. Richard Helms, a future director of the CIA, flew to Tel Aviv and was received by senior staff in Mossad’s headquarters. They struck Helms “like a bunch of Realtors, proudly pointing out the amenities.”

Riding up in the elevator, Kimche’s guide explained that the lower floor housed the listening and communications center; on the next floor came the offices of junior staff. Upper floors were given over to analysts, planners, and operations personnel. Research and Development had a floor to itself. On the top floor were the offices of the director general and his senior aides.

Kimche was given space among the planners and strategists. His office was equipped like all the others: a cheap wooden desk, a steel filing cabinet with only one key, a black telephone, and an internal directory stamped “Do Not Remove.” A strip of carpet completed the furnishings. The office was painted olive green and offered a fine panoramic view over the city. Thirteen years on, the headquarters showed signs of wear and tear; paint had cracked on some walls and carpeting needed replacing.

But, despite these failings, David Kimche sensed he had arrived at an eventful time. Meir Amit was about to leave, shortly to be followed by Rafi Eitan and other senior Mossad officers.

Kimche soon came to recognize the quirks of colleagues: the analyst who invariably prefaced a judgment with the words “this is a European maneuver, classic as Clausewitz in its way”; the head of department who signaled an action by stuffing black flakes of tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, and when the smoke came out white, he had made a decision; the strategist who always ended a briefing by saying espionage was a continuous education in human frailty. These were all men who had earned their dues and they welcomed Kimche’s enthusiasm and his ability to turn a problem on its head. They also sensed he fully understood that solving an enemy’s deceptions was as important as perpetuating Mossad’s own.

Part of his work included monitoring events in Morocco; there were still a substantial number of Jews living there under the repressive regime of King Hassan. In an attempt to make their lives easier, Meir Amit had established a “working relationship” with the monarch’s feared security service, finding common cause in trying to remove Egypt’s President Nasser, whose own hatred of Israel was only equaled by what he felt for the king. Nasser saw the monarch as a stumbling block to his dream of establishing a powerful Arab coalition stretching from the Suez Canal to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The potential threat to Israel of such a coalition had persuaded Meir Amit to train the king’s men in counterintelligence and interrogation techniques that stopped little short of sophisticated torture.

Within Morocco, a small but equally ruthless opposition survived, led by Mehdi Ben-Barka. Kimche had charted Ben-Barka’s career: the king’s loyal tutor; onetime president of Morocco’s national consultative assembly, a virtually toothless parliament that merely rubber-stamped Hassan’s increasingly oppressive decrees against his people. Finally Ben-Barka had become the one authentic voice of opposition to Hassan. Time and again Ben-Barka had barely escaped being captured by the king’s men. But knowing it was only a matter of time before he was arrested, the charismatic former schoolteacher had fled to Europe. From there he continued to plot the downfall of Hassan.

Twice Ben-Barka’s small but efficient resistance movement in Morocco had come close to launching successful bomb plots against the monarch. The enraged Hassan ordered Ben-Barka tried in absentia and sentenced to death, and Ben-Barka responded by ordering fresh attacks against the king.

In May 1965, Hassan asked Mossad to help deal with Ben-Barka. The task of evaluating the request was given to David Kimche. Later that month he traveled on his British passport to London. Ostensibly he was on vacation. In reality he was finalizing his plans. Equipped with a perfectly doctored second British passport provided by a sayan, and with a Moroccan visa, Kimche flew to Rome; he spent a day there sightseeing — a move to make sure he was not being followed — and then traveled on to Morocco.

He was met at Rabat Airport by Muhammed Oufkir, the country’s fearsome minister of the interior. That night, over a dinner enlivened by the presence of some of the country’s best belly dancers, Oufkir spelled out what the king wanted: Ben-Barka’s head. Displaying both a crude sense of humor and an appreciation of Jewish history, Oufkir had added: “After all, your Jewish Salome asked your King Herod for the head of a troublemaker.”

Kimche said that while that was indeed correct, it really was not a matter for him. Oufkir would have to come back with him to Israel.

Next day the two men flew to Rome and caught a flight to Tel Aviv. Meir Amit met them in a safe house. He was polite but cautious. He told Kimche he was “not very excited” at the prospect of doing Oufkir’s dirty work and insisted our “involvement would be confined to preparatory work.”

Unknown to Meir Amit, Oufkir had already made an arrangement with a faction within France’s intelligence service, SDECE, to murder Ben-Barka if he could be lured out of his fortresslike home in Geneva and across the Swiss border into France. Still reluctant, Meir Amit had insisted that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol must personally sanction Mossad’s involvement. The prime minister gave it.

Mossad set to work. A Moroccan-born katsa traveled to Geneva and infiltrated Ben-Barka’s circle. Over several months, the agent carefully planted the idea that he had access to a sympathetic French millionaire who would like to see King Hassan topped and genuine democracy come to Morocco. Kimche had created this fiction. On October 26, 1965, he learned that Ben-Barka, “like the Scarlet Pimpernel of old,” was about to travel to Paris.

Mossad’s communications center sent a coded message to Oufkir in Morocco. The following day the minister and a small team of Moroccan security men flew to Paris. That night the minister was briefed by the SDECE faction. Concerned he had been excluded from the meeting, the Mossad agent who had accompanied Ben-Barka to the French capital called Kimche on a secure line for instructions. Kimche consulted Meir Amit. Both agreed, in Amit’s later words, “that something nasty was cooking and we should stay well clear.”

Next evening an SDECE surveillance van was positioned outside when Ben-Barka arrived for dinner at a restaurant in the St. Germaine district. He believed he had come to meet the millionaire. After he waited an hour and still no one had showed, Ben-Barka left the restaurant. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, he was grabbed by two SDECE agents and bundled into the van. It was driven to a villa in the Fontenay-le-Vicomte district that the SDECE used from time to time to interrogate its own suspects. Throughout the night, Oufkir supervised Ben-Barka’s questioning and torture until, at dawn, the broken man was executed. Oufkir photographed the body before it was buried in the villa’s garden. The minister flew home with the film to show the king.

When the corpse was discovered, the outcry in France reached all the way to the president’s palace. Charles de Gaulle ordered an unprecedented investigation that led to a massive purging of the SDECE. Its director, anxious to maintain interservice collegiality, struggled to keep Mossad’s name out of the affair. But de Gaulle, no friend of Israel, was convinced that Mossad was involved. He told aides that the operation bore the “hallmark of Tel Aviv.” Only the Israelis, he had fumed, would show such total disregard for international law. A once-close relationship between Israel and France, established in the 1956 Suez War, was over. De Gaulle promptly ordered that arms supplies to Israel should stop, along with all intelligence cooperation. Meir Amit would “remember the body blows from Paris raining down.”

For Kimche, “It was heroic to see the way Meir Amit handled the situation. He could have tried to blame me or the others involved in the operation. Instead he insisted on taking full responsibility. He was a true leader.”

Prime Minister Eshkol’s government, battered by the reaction from Paris, distanced itself from Mossad’s chief. More criticism came from an unexpected source. The more Meir Amit protested that Mossad’s role had been “marginal,” no more than “supplying a few passports and hiring some cars,” the more his predecessor, Isser Harel, insisted the Ben-Barka affair would never have happened in his day. Meir Amit warned the prime minister they would both sink under such sniping. Eshkol responded by setting up a committee of inquiry, headed by the then foreign minister, Golda Meir. The committee concluded Meir Amit should resign, but he refused until Eshkol did the same. Stalemate followed. It was not until a year later that Meir Amit accepted that the death of Ben-Barka was no longer going to trouble him. But it had been a close-run call.

By then Kimche had other matters to concern him. The Palestinians had secretly trained a commando unit to exploit a security weakness not even Mossad had anticipated: midair aircraft hijacking. Once a plane was seized between destinations, it would be flown to a friendly Arab country. There the passengers would be held for ransom — either for substantial sums of money to buy their freedom, or to be exchanged for Arab prisoners held by Israel. An additional bonus would be the worldwide publicity for the PLO cause.

In July 1968, an El Al flight from Rome was hijacked to Algeria. Mossad was stunned at the simple audacity of the operation. A team of katsas flew to Algeria while Kimche and other planners worked almost around the clock to devise a strategy to free the terrified passengers. But any attempt to storm the aircraft was hampered by the presence of the world’s media crews covering the story. Kimche recommended playing for time in the hope the story would lose its momentum and the katsas could move. But the hijackers had anticipated that and began to issue bloodcurdling threats unless their demands were met: the freeing of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The Algerian government supported the hijackers. Kimche realized: “We were between the proverbial rock and a hard place.” He was one of those who reluctantly recommended the prisoners should be exchanged for passengers, knowing “full well the consequences of such action. It would pave the way for further hijackings. It would ensure the PLO cause would receive from now on maximum coverage. Israel had been put on the defensive. So had Western governments who also had no answer to hijackings. Yet what could we do except to wait grimly for the next hijacking?”

And come they did, each one better prepared than the last. In a short time half a dozen more passenger aircraft were overpowered by hijackers who were not only expert in concealing weapons and placing explosives on board, but had been trained to fly the actual aircraft or know the actual workings of a flight deck crew. In the Libyan Desert, they practiced exchanging fire in the confined area of an airplane cabin, knowing that El Al had now introduced armed guards on its flights — one of the first moves Kimche had recommended. He had also correctly predicted that the hijackers would know the laws of the various countries they would be flying in and out of so that if they were captured, their colleagues could use those laws to obtain their freedom by bargaining or threatening.

Kimche knew that Mossad urgently needed an incident that would enable the service to overcome the hijackers through the two skills for which it was justifiably renowned: cunning and ruthlessness. And, just as the hijackers effectively used publicity, Kimche wanted an operation whose outcome would match the universal praise for Israel that had followed the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann. The incident Kimche needed must have high drama, considerable risk, and an against-all-the-odds outcome. Those elements would combine to show Mossad leading the fight back.

On June 27, 1976, an Air France plane filled with Jewish passengers, en route to Paris from Tel Aviv, was hijacked after a stopover at Athens Airport, which was notorious for lax security. The hijackers were members of the extreme Wadi Haddad faction and they made two demands: the freeing of forty Palestinians in Israeli jails, together with a further dozen held in European prisons; and the release of two German terrorists arrested in Kenya when they tried to shoot down an El Al jet with a Sam-7 rocket as it took off from Nairobi Airport.

After a stopover in Casablanca, and being refused permission to land in Khartoum, the plane flew to Entebbe in Uganda. From there the hijackers announced the aircraft would be blown up along with all its passengers unless their demands were met. The deadline was June 30.

In Tel Aviv, in closed cabinet sessions, the vaunted public image of “no surrender” to terrorism wilted. Ministers favored freeing Israel’s PLO prisoners. Prime Minister Rabin produced a Shin Bet report to show there was a precedent for releasing convicted criminals. Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur announced he could not recommend military action due to insufficient intelligence from Entebbe. While their anguished deliberations continued, news came from Entebbe that the Jewish passengers had been separated from the others on board — those passengers had been released and were on their way to Paris.

That had been the opening Mossad needed. Yitzhak Hofi, Mossad’s chief, in what was to be his finest hour, argued powerfully and passionately for a rescue to be mounted. He dusted down the plan Rafi Eitan had used to capture Eichmann. There were similarities: Rafi Eitan and his men had worked far from home in a hostile environment. They had improvised as they went along using bluff — the renowned Jewish chutzpah. It could be done again. Soaked in sweat, his voice hoarse from pleading and arguing, Hofi had stared around the cabinet room.

“If we let our people die, it will open the floodgates. No Jew will be safe anywhere. Hitler would have won a victory from the grave!”

“Very well,” Rabin had finally said. “We try.”

As well as Kimche, every other strategist and planner in Mossad was mobilized. The first step was to open a safe communication channel between Tel Aviv and Nairobi; Hofi had nursed the unpublicized intelligence link between Mossad and its Kenyan counterpart introduced by Meir Amit. The link started to bear immediate results. Half a dozen katsas descended on Nairobi and were installed in a Kenyan intelligence service safe house. They would form the bridgehead for the main assault. Meantime Kimche had overcome another problem. Any rescue mission would require a fuel stop at Nairobi. Working the phone, he obtained Kenya’s approval in a matter of hours, granted “on humanitarian grounds.”

But there was still the formidable problem of reaching Entebbe. The PLO had established the airport as their own entry point to Uganda, from where the Organization ran its own operation against the pro-Israeli white supremacist regime in South Africa. Idi Amin, Uganda’s despotic dictator, had actually given the PLO the residence of the Israeli ambassador as a headquarters after breaking off diplomatic relations with Jerusalem in 1972.

Kimche knew it was essential to know if the PLO were still in the country. Their battle-hardened guerrillas would be a formidable force to overcome in the short time allowed for the actual rescue mission: the Israeli forces could only be on the ground for minutes, otherwise they ran the risk of a powerful counterattack. Kimche sent two katsas from Nairobi by boat across Lake Victoria. They landed near Entebbe and found the PLO headquarters deserted; the Palestinians had recently moved on to Angola.

Then, with the stroke of luck any operation needs, one of the Kenyan security officers who had accompanied the katsas discovered that one of his wife’s relatives was actually one of the men guarding the hostages. The Kenyan inveigled himself into the airport and was able to see that the hostages were all alive, but he counted fifteen very tense and nervous guards. The information was radioed to Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, two other katsas, both qualified pilots, hired a Cessna and flew from Nairobi, ostensibly to photograph Lake Victoria for a holiday brochure. Their aircraft passed directly over Entebbe Airport, enabling one katsa to obtain good photographs of the runway and adjoining buildings. The film was flown to Tel Aviv. There, Kimche recommended yet another strategy to confuse the hijackers.

During several telephone conversations with Amin’s palace, Israeli negotiators in Tel Aviv made it clear their government was ready to accept the hijacker’s terms. A diplomat in a European consulate in Uganda was used to add credibility to this apparent surrender by being called “in confidence” to see if he could negotiate suitable wording the hijackers would accept. Kimche told the envoy, “It must be something not too demeaning to Israel but also not too impossible for the hijackers to accept.” The diplomat hurried to the airport with the news and began to draft suitable words. He was still doing so as Operation Thunderball moved to the final stages.

An unmarked Israeli Boeing 707 to be used as a flying hospital landed at Nairobi Airport, flown by IDF pilots who knew Entebbe Airport. Meantime six Mossad katsas had surrounded that airport; each man carried a high-frequency radio and an electronic device that would jam the radar in the control tower. It had never before been tried under combat conditions.

Fifty Israeli paratroopers, under cover of darkness, left the hospital plane and went full speed to Lake Victoria. Inflating their rubber boats, they rowed across the water to wait close to the Ugandan shore, ready to storm into Entebbe Airport. In Tel Aviv, the rescue mission had been rehearsed to perfection; when the time came, a force of C-130 Hercules transporters crossed the Red Sea, headed south, refueled at Nairobi, and then, flying just above the African treetops, swept down on Entebbe Airport.

The radar jammer worked perfectly. The airport authorities were still trying to work out what had happened when the three Hercules transporters and the hospital plane landed. Commandos raced into the building where the hostages were held. By then they were only Jews. All other nationalities had been freed by Amin, enjoying his moment of strutting the world stage. The paratroopers waiting in support were never called into action. They rowed back across the lake and returned to Nairobi. There they would be picked up by another Israeli transporter and flown home.

Within five minutes — two full minutes less than the time allowed — the hostages were free and all the terrorists were killed, along with sixteen Ugandan soldiers guarding the prisoners. The attack force lost one officer, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, the elder brother of the future prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu. He would say that his own hard line against all terrorists came as a result of the death of Yonatan. Three hostages also died.

David Kimche’s wish for a headline-making riposte to hijackers had been more than met. The rescue at Entebbe was an episode that, even more than the capture of Adolf Eichmann, came to be seen as Mossad’s calling card.

Increasingly, Kimche found himself ever more immersed in Mossad’s efforts against the PLO. This deadly struggle was fought beyond the borders of Israel, on the streets of European cities. Kimche was one of the strategists who prepared the ground for Mossad’s own assassins, the kidons. They struck in Paris, Munich, Cyprus, and Athens. For Kimche, the killings were remote; he was like the bomber pilot who does not see where the bombs fall. The deaths helped to foster within Mossad a continuing mood of invincibility: the superior information coming from its strategists meant the kidons were always one step ahead of the enemy.

One morning Kimche arrived at work to find his colleagues in a state of near shock. One of their most experienced katsas had been assassinated in Madrid by a PLO gunman. The assassin had been a contact the katsa was developing in an effort to penetrate the group.

But there was no time to mourn. Every available hand was turned to the task of fighting fire with fire. For Kimche it was a time when “we did not expect to be shown any mercy and showed none in return.”

The relentless pressure continued to find new ways to get close to the PLO leadership and discover enough about its inner workings to assassinate its leaders. For Kimche, “cutting off the head was the only way to stop the tail wagging.” Yasser Arafat was the first head on the kidon target list.

Another and more serious threat had begun to focus Kimche’s mind: the possibility of a second full-scale Arab war, led by Egypt, against Israel. But Mossad was a lone voice within the Israeli intelligence community. Kimche’s concerns, echoed by his superiors, were flatly rejected by Aman, military intelligence. Its strategists pointed out that Egypt had just expelled its twenty thousand Soviet military advisers, which should be interpreted as a clear-cut indication that Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, was looking for a political solution in the Middle East.

Kimche remained unconvinced. From all the information crossing his desk, he grew more certain that Sadat would launch a preemptive strike — simply because Arab demands would be impossible for Israel to accept: Egypt wanted back conquered land and the creation of a Palestinian homeland within Israel. Kimche believed that even if these concessions were granted, the PLO would still continue its murderous campaign to drive Israel to its knees.

Kimche’s alarm grew when Sadat replaced his war minister with a more hawkish figure whose first act was to reinforce Egypt’s defenses along the Suez Canal. Egyptian commanders were also making regular visits to other Arab capitals to enlist support. Sadat had signed a new arms-purchasing deal with Moscow.

To Kimche the signs were all too ominous: “It was not a question of when war would come, only the day it would start.”

But the intelligence chiefs of Aman continued to downplay the warnings coming from Mossad. They told the IDF commanders that, even if war looked like starting, there would be “at least a five-day warning period,” more than enough time for Israel’s air force to repeat its great success in the Six Day War.

Kimche countered that most certainly the Arabs would have learned from past mistakes. He found himself branded a member of “a warobsessed Mossad,” an accusation that did not sit well with a man so careful of his every word. All he could do was to continue to assess the Egyptian preparations and try to judge a likely date for an attack.

The broiling heat of that 1973 August in Tel Aviv gave way to a cooler September. The latest reports from Mossad katsas on the Sinai side of the Suez Canal showed that Egyptian preparations had gathered momentum. Army engineers were putting the final touches to pontoons for troops and armor to cross the waterway. When Mossad persuaded the Israeli foreign minister to raise the definitely worrying preparations at the United Nations, the Egyptian representative said soothingly, “These activities are routine.” To Kimche the words had “the same kind of credibility” as those uttered by the Japanese ambassador in Washington on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Yet the Egyptian explanation was accepted by Aman. All the more incredible to Kimche was that by October, wherever his probing eyes settled, there were yet more signs of brewing trouble; Libya had just nationalized Western oil companies; in the oil-producing Gulf states there was talk of cutting off all supplies to the West.

Yet the strategists in Aman continued to lamentably misread the intelligence picture. When Israeli air force jets were attacked by MiGs over Syria — resulting in victory for the IDF due to their pilots’ tactical knowledge learned from the MiG stolen from Iraq — the downing of twelve Syrian aircraft was seen by Aman only as further evidence that, if the Arabs ever did go to war, they would be beaten just as soundly.

On the night of October 5–6, Mossad received the most stark evidence yet that hostilities were imminent, perhaps only hours away. Its katsas and informers in Egypt were reporting that the Egyptian Military High Command had gone to red alert. The evidence could no longer be ignored.

At 6:00 A.M. Mossad’s chief, Zvi Zamir, joined Aman intelligence chiefs in the defense ministry. The building was almost deserted: it was Yom Kippur, the holiest of all Jewish holidays, the day even nonpracticing Jews rested, when all public services, including the state radio, shut down. The radio had always been the means used to mobilize reserves in the event of a national emergency.

Finally driven to action by the incontrovertible evidence Mossad presented, alarm bells began to sound all over Israel that a two-pronged attack — from Syria in the north and Egypt in the south — was about to engulf Israel.

War began at 1:55 P.M. local time while the Israeli cabinet was in emergency session — assured by Aman’s strategists that hostilities would still only start at 6:00 P.M. The time turned out to have been pure guesswork.

Never in the history of the Israeli intelligence community had there been such an inglorious failure to predict an event. The mass of impeccable evidence that David Kimche and others had provided had been totally ignored.

After the war ended, with Israel once more snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, there was a massive purging of Aman’s upper echelons. Mossad once more ruled supreme over the intelligence community, though there was a key change there too: Zamir was removed as director general on the grounds he had not been sufficiently assertive against his Aman counterpart. His place was taken by Yitzhak Hofi.

Kimche viewed his arrival with mixed feelings. In some ways Hofi was from a similar mold to Meir Amit: the same erect bearing, the same proven battlefield experience, the same incisive manner and total inability to suffer fools at any price. But Hofi was also blunt to the point of rudeness, and the tension between him and Kimche dated from the days they had instructed recruits, between their other duties, at the Mossad training school. Hofi, with his no-nonsense kibbutz mentality, had shown no patience with Kimche’s languid intellectualism and his refined English accent when addressing students. But Kimche was not only now a seasoned operative but Hofi’s deputy. He had been promoted to deputy director general shortly before Zamir left. Both Hofi and Kimche accepted they must put aside their personal differences to ensure Mossad continued operating with maximum efficiency.

Kimche was given one of the most difficult tasks in Mossad: he was put in charge of the service’s “Lebanese account.” The country’s civil war had begun two years after the Yom Kippur War, and by the time Kimche took charge of “the account,” the Lebanese Christians were fighting a losing battle. Just as years before Salman had gone to the Israeli embassy in Paris to initiate the first steps in stealing the Iraqi MiG, so in September 1975 an emissary from the Christians had gone there asking Israel to supply arms to stop them being annihilated. The request ended up on Kimche’s desk. He saw an opportunity for Mossad to work its way into “the Lebanese woodwork.”

He told Hofi that politically it made sense to “partly support” the Christians against the Muslims who were vowed to destroy Israel. Once more his interpretation was accepted. Israel would give the Christians sufficient arms to deal with the Muslims, but not enough to pose a threat to Israel. Mossad began to ship arms out of Israel into Lebanon. Next Kimche placed Mossad officers within the Christian command. They were ostensibly there to help maximize the use of the weapons. In reality the officers provided Kimche with a continuous flow of intelligence that enabled him to constantly chart the overall progress of the civil war. The information enabled Mossad to launch a number of successful attacks against PLO strongholds in southern Lebanon.

But the service’s relationship with the Christians soured in January 1976, when Christian leaders invited in the Syrian army to lend additional support against the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. That group was seen in Damascus as a threat. Within days thousands of battle-hardened Syrian troops were in Lebanon and moving close to its borders with Israel. Too late the Christians found they had, in Kimche’s words, “behaved like Little Red Riding Hood, inviting in the wolf.”

Once more the Lebanese Christians turned to Mossad for help. But Kimche realized his carefully constructed network to supply arms was insufficient. What was needed was a full-scale Israeli logistical operation. Scores of IDF tanks, antitank missiles, and other weapons were sent to the Christians. Lebanon’s civil war began to rage out of control.

Under its cover, Kimche launched his own guerrilla battle against Israel’s bête noire, the PLO. Soon that had extended to fighting the Lebanese Shiites. Lebanon became a practice ground for Mossad to perfect its tactics, not only in assassinations, but in psychological warfare. It was a halcyon time for the men operating out of the featureless high-rise on King Saul Boulevard.

Inside the building, relations between Kimche and Hofi were deteriorating. There were whispers of violent disagreements over operational matters; that Hofi feared Kimche wanted his job; that Kimche felt he was not properly appreciated for the undoubted contribution he was making. To this day, Kimche will not discuss such matters, only to say he “would never give a rumor respectability by commenting.”

On a spring morning in 1980, David Kimche used his unrestricted access card, which had replaced the two keys, to access the headquarters building. Arriving in his office, he was told that Hofi wished to see him at once. Kimche strolled along the corridor to the director general’s office, knocked, and entered, closing the door behind him.

What happened there has passed into Mossad legend, a tale of increasingly raised voices, of accusation and counteraccusation. The row lasted for twenty electrifying minutes. Then Kimche came out of the office, tight-lipped. His career in Mossad was finished. But his intelligence activities on behalf of Israel were about to enter a familiar arena, the United States. This time it would not involve the theft of nuclear materials, but the scandal that eventually became known as Irangate.

After a period of considering his future, David Kimche had accepted the director generalship of the Israeli foreign ministry. The post was ideally suited to his ability to think his way into, and out of, a situation. It offered Kimche an opportunity to bring his skills to bear on the international stage far beyond Lebanon.

In the United States the saga of President Nixon and Watergate had moved to an inescapable finale, leaving the CIA tarred with suspicion, the likes of which had not been seen since the death of President Kennedy, as more and more revelations emerged about the Agency’s activities during the Nixon years.

Kimche studied every facet of the drama, “absorbing the lessons to be learned from a debacle that should never have happened. The bottom line was that Nixon should never have kept those tapes. Without them he would still probably have been president.”

Closer to home, what was happening in Iran, ever a matter of abiding interest to Israel, also occupied him. With Khomeini and his ayatollahs firmly in control, it came as a genuine shock to Kimche to see how badly the CIA and the State Department had failed to correctly judge the situation.

But there was a new president in the White House, Ronald Reagan, who promised a new dawn for the CIA. The Agency, Kimche learned from his own contacts in Washington, would become Reagan’s “secret trump” in foreign policy. Heading the CIA was William Casey. Instinctively, Kimche sensed he was no friend of Israel — but someone who could be outmaneuvered should the need arise.

As part of his work, Kimche closely followed CIA operations in Afghanistan and Central America. Many of them struck him as “babe-in-the-wood stuff, old-fashioned intelligence gathering, mingled with some pretty ruthless killing.”

Then, once more, Kimche’s attention was brought to focus on Iran — and what had happened in Beirut.

A few months after Kimche took up his duties at the foreign ministry, Israel had begun to arm Iran with the tacit support of the United States. Israel had provided the help to weaken the Baghdad regime — part of Jerusalem’s long-established tactic of what Kimche called “playing at both ends.”

Three years later, two events had affected matters. There had been the car-bomb massacre in Beirut of 241 U.S. Marines and the growing U.S. suspicion that Mossad not only had prior knowledge of the attack, but that Iran’s intelligence service had helped to prepare it. Pressure was put on Israel to stop supplying Tehran. It increased with the kidnapping, torture, and subsequent death of William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut. In quick succession, seven other Americans were taken hostage by Iran-backed groups.

For the tough-talking Reagan administration, which had come into office with its promise to crack down on terrorism, the idea of American citizens languishing deep beneath the rubble of Beirut demanded action. But retaliation was out of the question; to bomb Tehran, as Reagan suggested, was ruled out by even his hard-line aides. A rescue mission would also likely fail, said Delta Force chiefs.

There then occurred a conversation between the president and Robert McFarlane, a gung ho former marine who was national security adviser. Kimche was to recall that McFarlane told him that the conversation went like this:

“What do the Iranians need most, Mr. President?”

“You tell me, Bob.”

“Weapons to fight Iraq.”

“So we give them what they want. And we get back our people in return.”

Reagan and McFarlane — against the advice of Casey and other U.S. intelligence chiefs — took the simplistic view that arming Iran would not only result in the mullahs bringing pressure to bear on the Beirut group to free the hostages, but would improve the administration’s relations with Tehran. There could also be the added bonus that it was bound to weaken Moscow’s position in Iran. The seeds were sown for what became known as Irangate.

Marine colonel Oliver North was put in charge of supplying the arms. North and McFarlane decided to exclude the CIA from their plans. Both were action-oriented men. Their push-and-shove mentality had served them well in Vietnam, and from all they had heard, Israelis were similar men of action. So, in North’s words, “it was time to bring Israel into the fold.” There was also the personal prospect of visiting the Holy Land; a committed Christian, North relished the thought of treading in the footsteps of Jesus.

Israel’s new prime minister, Yitzak Shamir, decided there was only one person capable of handling the request from Washington for help — and making sure Israel’s interests were fully protected. On July 3, 1983, David Kimche flew to meet with McFarlane in the White House. Kimche said he believed the arms-for-hostages deal could work. He asked if the CIA was “actively involved.” He was told the Agency was not.

In turn, McFarlane asked Kimche how far Mossad would be involved: “After all,” he stated, “they are the guys who do all your secret work overseas.” Kimche told him that Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, and Shamir had decided to exclude Mossad and leave the entire matter to him. McFarlane said that was fine by him. Kimche had not told him that Mossad’s chief, then Nahum Admoni, shared Casey’s fears that the arms-for-hostages deal was fraught with operational hazards.

McFarlane drove to Bethesda Naval Hospital to present Kimche’s views to Reagan, who was recovering from a colon operation. The president had one question: Could Kimche ensure that Israel would keep the deal secret? A leak could harm U.S. relations with more moderate Arab states already fearful of the growing radicalism of Tehran. Kimche claims that McFarlane reassured Reagan that Israel would “batten down the hatches.” The deal was on. Kimche flew back to Israel. Two weeks later Kimche was back in Washington. Over dinner, he laid out his game plan to McFarlane. Kimche was to recall the conversation went like this:

“Do you want the good or bad news first?” Kimche asked McFarlane.

“The good.”

“We’ll ship the arms for you, using the same routes we used before.”

McFarlane said “no problem.”

Kimche’s method would ensure that the United States had no direct contact with Iran, and so the administration’s bellicose attitude about being tough on terrorism would not be compromised: the U.S. arms embargo on Iran would be intact and the hostages, when freed, would not have been directly exchanged for weapons.

“And the bad news?” McFarlane prompted.

Kimche said his own well-placed contacts in Iran were uncertain the mullahs could actually manage to procure the release of the Beirut hostages.

“The radicals there are getting beyond Tehran’s control,” he told his host.

If McFarlane was disappointed, he did not show it. The next day, Secretary of State George Shultz told Reagan, back in the Oval Office, the risks were too high. Supposing the Iranians took the arms and then revealed the deal to embarrass “the Great Satan,” the mullahs called the United States? Wouldn’t that draw Iraq further into the Soviet camp? And what about the hostages? They could be even worse off. All morning the arguments continued. By lunchtime Reagan was visibly tired. The decision, when it came, was sudden. The president agreed to support the proposition that the United States would replace all arms Israel sold to Iran. Once more Kimche returned home with a green light. Nevertheless, Shamir insisted that all possible steps should also be taken so that he “could deny any connection with the matter should there be a problem.”

To ensure this, Kimche assembled a colorful cast of characters to initiate the operation. There was Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi petrobillionaire, with a habit of eating caviar by the pound and an eye for the current cover girls; Manacher Thorbanifer, a former agent in the shah’s notorious SAVAK secret service who still behaved like a spy, calling meetings for the middle of the night. There was the equally mysterious Yakov Nimrodi, who had run agents for Aman and had once been Israel’s military attaché in Iran during the shah’s regime. He was invariably accompanied by Al Schwimmer, the closemouthed founder of Israel Aircraft Industries.

Khashoggi brokered a deal that was to be a precursor for all that followed. He would head a consortium that would indemnify the United States if Iran failed to live up to its obligations, and would similarly protect Iran if the arms were not acceptable as specified. For these guarantees the consortium would receive a 10 percent fee from the purchase of all the arms with cash provided by the United States. In return it would also act as a buffer to ensure that plausible deniability would remain intact for both the Iranian and U.S. governments if anything went wrong. Everyone understood that the consortium would essentially be working outside any political control and would first and foremost be driven by the profit motive.

In late August 1985, the first planeload of arms landed in Tehran from Israel. On September 14, a U.S. hostage, the Reverend Benjamin Weir, was freed in Beirut. As the pace quickened, still more raffish players joined the consortium, including Miles Copeland, a former CIA officer who, on the eve of the shah falling from power in what was soon to be renamed the Islamic Republic of Iran, had sent CIA agents into Tehran souks distributing hundred-dollar bills to anyone who dared shout “Long live the shah!” Other shadowy figures also became involved, such as a former Special Air Services officer who ran a company in London that had once provided nonspecific services to Mossad. Meanwhile, the policymakers in Israel and Washington looked the other way. All that mattered was that the operation had taken off under the noses of an unsuspecting world — at least for the moment.

In all, Iran would receive 128 U.S. tanks; two hundred thousand Katysha rockets captured in south Lebanon; ten thousand tons of artillery shells of all calibers; three thousand air-to-air missiles; four thousand rifles; and close to fifty million rounds of ammunition.

From Marama Air Force Base in Arizona, over four thousand TOW missiles were airlifted to Guatemala to begin their long journey to Tel Aviv. From Poland and Bulgaria, eight thousand Sam-7 surface-to-air missiles were shipped, together with one hundred thousand AK-47s. China provided hundreds of Silkworm sea-to-sea missiles, armored cars, and amphibious personnel carriers. Sweden provided 105-mm artillery shells, Belgium air-to-air missiles.

The weapons were shipped with certificates showing Israel was the end user. From IDF military bases in the Negev Desert, the consortium arranged for chartered transport aircraft to fly the weapons to Iran. The consortium received a “handling fee” for each consignment, Iran paying the money out of funds in Swiss bank accounts. The sum eventually totaled $7 million. Israel received no financial reward — only the satisfaction of witnessing Iran improve its capability to kill more Iraqis in the long-drawn-out war between both countries. For David Kimche it was a further example of the “divide and rule” policy he strongly advocated.

Nevertheless, his well-honed instincts told him that what had started as “a sweet operation” was now in danger of running out of control. In his view: “The wrong men now had too much power in the consortium.”

In creating it, he had again demonstrated Israel’s realpolitik: Israel had been ready to help the United States because it recognized it could not survive without Washington’s support in other areas. It was also a way to demonstrate that Israel could perform decisively on the world stage and keep matters secret.

But the longer the arms-for-hostages operation continued, Kimche sensed, the greater was the chance of discovery. In December 1985, he told the consortium that he could no longer remain involved in its activities — using the old saw of being overworked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The consortium thanked him for his help, gave him a farewell dinner in a Tel Aviv hotel, and told him that he was being replaced as the Israeli link by Amiram Nir, who was Peres’s gung ho adviser on terrorism. That was the moment, Kimche would later admit, when the arms-for-hostages deal was firmly on the fast track to self-destruction. If anyone could derail it, then Nir was the man. A former journalist, Nir had shown the alarming trait of regarding real-life intelligence as being part of the same world occupied by the James Bond thrillers he so liked. He shared that fatal weakness with men in Mossad who had also decided that journalists could also serve their purpose.

In April 1999, David Kimche showed he had not lost his skills to correctly read the current political situation in the Middle East. Yasser Arafat, the man he had once plotted to murder, “because he was my blood enemy, certain that his demise would be a great victory for Israel,” had now, in Kimche’s view, become “Israel’s best hope for long-term peace. Mr. Arafat is still hardly my idea of a perfect neighbor, but he is the only Palestine leader capable of making concessions to Israel while retaining power and domestic support.”

Kimche believed he had found common ground with Arafat. He was convinced the PLO leader had finally come to recognize what Kimche had seen a quarter of a century earlier, “the real threat Islamic fundamentalism posed for the new millennium.”

Sitting in his small study looking out over the garden he had seen come to fruition, Kimche was able to deliver a balanced judgment. “I cannot forgive my old enemy for endorsing the murder of my countrymen decades ago. But it would also be unforgivable to deny Arafat — and the Israelis — the chance to end the bloodshed once and for all.”