In his cell Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, the fine-boned Israeliborn son of a kosher butcher of Yemeni heritage who had served as a combat soldier in the Golani Brigades and studied law at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law, asked the police guards for a glass of schnapps to toast his deed. From his perspective, killing Rabin, which The New Yorker called one of “history’s most effective political murders,” was cause for celebration.
Amir had been present at the funeral of Baruch Goldstein, the doctor who gunned down Muslims in Hebron, and had vowed in writing to undertake the radical surgery needed to prevent the loss of Israeli control over Judea and Samaria. He based his decision on the ancient theological principle of din rodef, the “law of the pursuer,” that condemns to death anyone classified as a “pursuer.” In Amir’s twisted mind and the mind of extremist rabbis, din rodef applied to Rabin because the Oslo agreement involved handing over parts of the Land of Israel to terrorists who would then kill Jews.
The Shabak had all this on file but still failed to stop the man agents dismissed as “a little Yemenite who said in the restroom that he would murder Rabin.”
I didn’t yet know any such details. But newspaper accounts of settlers offering up prayers of thanks for Rabin’s murder while millions of Israelis, including settlers, lit candles in memory of their martyred leader made clear just how divided the country was. I had always assumed Israel, like ancient Israel, or Sparta, was a society united behind a settler-warrior class motivated not by greed or self-interest but by our nation’s shared ideals. Despite the divisions that only deepened year after year since 1967, it never entered my mind that a Jew could murder a prime minister. It was only now, for the first time, I understood that our country was made up of competing tribes. Nor were we kibbutzniks, the reincarnated Maccabees who served in the elite units and settled the most exposed and dangerous lands, any longer the vanguard. Israel had changed and was now an apocalyptic place splintered into warring factions.
Rabin’s funeral in Jerusalem brought the world’s heads of state to Israel, including President Clinton and former head of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev. As commander of the navy I drove to the home of Rabin’s widow, Leah, in Tel Aviv to offer my condolences during the shiva, the traditional weeklong period of mourning. While I was there Arafat turned up in his green field uniform. Out of respect, he left his “freedom fighter’s gun” back in Ramallah and removed his keffiyeh. With his bald head the ex-terrorist looked small and harmless, like a retired postal worker. Teary-eyed, he said to Leah of her dead husband, “He was a hero of peace, and he was my friend.” Underneath Arafat’s multiple masks — revolutionary, gangster, nation-builder — was apparently an emotional man.
“My husband,” she replied, “regarded you as his partner in peace.”
Meanwhile my retirement from the navy was in less than two months, and I had no idea what I’d do next. What I didn’t want to do was become an arms dealer or military adviser to some junta leader in Africa or Latin America like so many other retired officers; in fact, I wanted to get away from the military altogether. By temperament, I’d never fit comfortably into the hierarchies and conformity of military life, and I’m not the type to relive my glory days by donning the old uniform for parades and reunions. I had been in the war business long enough to prefer my family, or for that matter porpoises and dolphins and other creatures of the sea, over men with weapons. So on January 1, 1996, I packed up the uniform, stuck my citations in a shoebox, and replaced my khakis with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I could finally be a good husband and father and join Biba in walking the dogs and pruning our olive trees and reading books about scuba diving in the Seychelles.
This sublime freedom lasted precisely one week.
At around ten in the evening, I got a phone call from Avi Gil, a friend I first met when we studied at the Kennedy School together and one of the negotiators of the Oslo Accords.17 In those days Avi was the director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, which meant he worked for Shimon Peres, who had taken over from the murdered Rabin and served as interim prime minister until new elections slated for the end of May. Like Truman after Roosevelt’s death, or LBJ after Kennedy’s, he was the man in charge. Peres had already ordered the IDF to withdraw from Nablus, in keeping with the terms of the Oslo Accords. While Palestinians already controlled Jericho and parts of Gaza, handing over Nablus was fraught with risks: The Tomb of Yosef, a Jewish holy site, was located in the center of the city, and the refugee camps surrounding Nablus were Hamas hotbeds and launching pads for suicide bombers.
From Avi’s tone of voice, I braced myself for something unpleasant. “What’s up?” I asked.
“Ami, Peres wants to talk to you.”
“Peres?
“That’s right. The prime minister.”
“Talk to me about what?”
“You’ll find out once you get here.”
“First thing in the morning.”
“Come now.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
No longer having the use of a government driver, I hopped in the car and sped off. On the steep uphill drive to Jerusalem, I tried not to speculate on the reasons for the summons. Whatever it was, I sensed it wouldn’t square with my newfound freedom.
Avi was waiting with the acting prime minister at the official residency of the foreign minister, where Peres was still living, the shelves of which were filled with books in the variety of languages the polyglot Peres spoke. Peres, who belonged more to my father’s generation than mine, had a long and checkered career. Before becoming a driving force behind Oslo, he had been a major backer of the settlement movement within the Labor Party. The architect of what he called a “new Middle East” was now scared. As a fifty-year veteran of Israeli politics, he knew the suicide bombings that continued apace would play into the hands of those opposing peace, which was the reason for the summons. He began by telling me that the head of the Shabak had resigned out of a sense of responsibility for the slack security that had enabled Yigal Amir to kill Rabin. He then repeated nearly word for word what Rabin had asked me a year earlier about taking over the Shabak. Peres was well aware of the main objection I raised when Rabin offered the job — why me? — and had an answer prepared. The Service needed a different mind-set, he said, someone who could see Palestinians as not just terrorists but also partners in the political process. It needed an outsider like me.
With the Shabak reeling from its failure to protect both the prime minister and Israeli civilians from terrorism, this time around I felt it was my duty to accept.
“Mr. Prime Minister,” I said in the most solemn voice of my life. “I’ll need to ask my family. Can you give me twenty-four hours to decide?”
“Of course. Take a day.”
It was still dark out when I returned to Kerem Maharal. Biba was waiting up, and our three sons were asleep. One by one I woke them and asked them to meet me down in the kitchen. As I brewed a pot of tea and listened to my sons’ footsteps on the stairs, my heart ached. I wanted more than anything to become a family man for the first time in my life. But I knew I couldn’t.
Once everyone had a hot drink in their hand, I told them about Peres’s request.
Biba, with the same stoic spirit she displayed when I would disappear for long missions at sea, said she would support whatever decision I made. My youngest son, Roy, not yet in high school, was nodding off — he just wanted to get back to bed. The only thing that bothered him about the job offer was that we might have to cancel a ski trip we had planned.
My attention turned to our oldest son, Nir, just finishing up his four years in Shaldag, a top-secret air force commando unit. “Forget it, Abba,” he said, a hint of bitterness in his voice. “It’s like you’ve just crawled into your tent after finishing a forty-mile march with all the gear on your back, and now they ask you to get up and set off on another mission. Tell Peres to find a different sucker.”
Our second son, Guy, months away from beginning his own military service, piped up with an emphatic counterargument to his brother’s. “They,” he said in a voice that seemed to come from deep inside his gut, “they murdered Rabin.” He didn’t say who he meant by “they,” but it was clear to me that “they” were all the Jewish and Palestinian terrorists determined to destroy a better future for both peoples. “Abba, you can’t allow them to get away with it. Abba, you have no choice.” I felt the same way.
Although I was already retired from the navy, I needed a month to tie up loose ends there. As a parting gift from the chief of staff, I was presented with the 9mm Browning pistol a Fatah terrorist once pointed at my head during the takeover of his ship in the open sea. For some mysterious reason, he didn’t pull the trigger.
Preparing for the new post was a process fraught with the uneasy sensation that I no longer understood my own country. How could someone raised to believe that we, not God, led ourselves out of captivity in Egypt understand religious Jews interpreting Rabin’s murder as an act of divine intervention?
Following a tradition dating back to the 1940s within the Shabak — sometimes referred to as the Service — my code name was supposed to be my first initial, in my case the Hebrew letter alef. The only reason I didn’t become Alef, and hence maintain my privacy and that of my family, was that several Israeli newspapers bypassed the censors and published my name in an announcement of my nomination to the post. Within an hour a stream of photographers stood on the street outside our home waiting for me to show my face.18 Biba called out from the living room that there was someone on the phone.
“Who is it?”
“How should I know?” she snapped. She was still fuming about the plague of paparazzi across the street.
“Ami here.”
The man on the other end introduced himself as Noam Livnat. His sister, Limor Livnat, was a well-known Likud political leader. Livnat, who lived in the settlement of Yitzhar, was a self-declared “radical right-wing messianist” and a follower of Rabbi Ginsburgh.19 Yigal Amir was an avid admirer of his. He asked if we could speak “before the Shin Bet brainwashes you about us.” I figured I had nothing to lose, and possibly something to gain, by sitting down with a member of a community I would soon be tasked with infiltrating.
Right after hanging up, I got a second call, someone from the Shin Bet who asked me not to leave the house or to talk to strangers on the phone. “Sure,” I said. I knew immediately that my conversation with Livnat had been tapped.
For years I had been the absentee husband and father who occasionally walked his dog at daybreak. With my name made public, people in the grocery store across the street looked at me sideways. Now I was the man standing between them and terror. Quite different stares hit me at the vegetable stand in the neighboring Arab town of Fureidis. Opinion polls among Israeli Arabs showed that for them the Shin Bet was like the East German Stasi — an instrument of state terror.
I was so conspicuous that after Biba refused to have a bodyguard posted in front of our house, the government insisted on building a high white fence around the yard to create a closed compound. An agent turned up one day to give us instructions on how to open and close the gate. We weren’t supposed to get our own mail from the mailbox or walk outside to scoop up the morning edition of Haaretz. Makeup artists instructed me on how to go incognito; to this day I’ve held on to the box of wigs, glasses, makeup, fake beards, and ridiculous hats I used while on the job.
I met Livnat at one of the roadside cafés along the Tel Aviv–Haifa highway. The man was tall, with inky-black eyes and a bushy reddish-brown beard. He wore the standard Orthodox uniform of a knitted kippah, dark slacks, and a white button-down shirt with tzitzit — prayer strings — peeking out below the hem. Sitting in a wheelchair, he pushed himself to my table in the back of the restaurant. He conspicuously lacked the pistol many settlers carry.
As Livnat spoke it became clear immediately that he had asked for the informal chat out of concern the Shabak would unleash its vengeance against settlers. I made a point of locking my eyes on him, listening respectfully to what I considered dangerous nonsense. He told me there were two Shin Bets, the good one that fought the Arabs, and the bad one that persecuted him and his fellow believers doing God’s work. He seemed to think I was about to start dropping black hoods over the heads of thousands of fellow Jews and dragging them into interrogation rooms.
Livnat told me I should reserve the dungeons for the Arabs. “As a Jew, your job is to defend us against them.”
Reading about settlers and their mind-set was one thing; sitting across the table from someone who truly believed that God had given him power over Arabs was something entirely different. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone defend what can only be described as apartheid: two sets of laws, rules, and standards, and two infrastructures. If Arabs behaved themselves and acquiesced to our dominion, we’d allow them access to water and a bit of electricity. The fact that we hadn’t yet driven them over the Jordanian border was, to his mind, a sign of our benevolence.
“Hold on a second,” I told Livnat, though I wasn’t sure it was worth trying to talk sense into him. “My job is to stop people, Jews as much as Arabs, from committing violence.” I also threw in some comments about international law and basic morality. He wasn’t at all happy with my refusal to go along with the idea that a thumb belonged on the cosmic scale tipping the balance in favor of the Jews because, according to God and history, the Land of Israel belonged to us.
Days before my nocturnal meeting with Prime Minister Peres about taking the Shin Bet job, our agents booby-trapped a cell phone used by Yahya Ayyash with three ounces of explosives. The so-called Engineer was one of the founders of Hamas’s underground Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades and responsible for the deaths of about a hundred Israelis in terrorist attacks. Blowing off his head was my predecessor’s swan song.
During the swearing-in ceremony, all I could think about were Hamas’s inevitable plans to avenge the attack. I was so on edge that when President Ezer Weizman ribbed me, joking that it was the first time he’d ever seen me in a jacket and tie, I could barely muster a chuckle.
Also humbling was how little I understood about the Shabak. To quote Avigdor Feldman, the human rights lawyer who took the Shabak to court in 1999 for torturing prisoners: “In the interrogation facility, the Shin Bet is king, and no one, not the Prison Service and not the Israeli Police, is allowed in without permission from the Shin Bet person in charge.” What was true for an interrogation facility was even more so for the organization as a whole. Every other director had risen up through the ranks. Until now, it had been a closed network, its secrets jealously guarded. I was an alien, an outsider hired to be a change agent.
On the first day of my service, a Friday, I convened all the division heads at Shin Bet headquarters in northern Tel Aviv. I’d met only a couple of members of the senior command, all of whom were men, during joint military operations with the navy. By this point I had pored over the history of the Service. While I understood that our interrogators and handlers weren’t by default sadistic bone-breakers but in fact highly trained professionals, they had also been trained to work in what I came to call the sewer — the shadow world of terror groups — where anything goes. “In the war against terror,” Avraham Shalom, my predecessor at the Shin Bet, declared in The Gatekeepers, “forget about morality.”20
Reading about some of our past misdeeds made my skin crawl, even if we wore kid gloves when compared with similar organizations in the United States, France, and England.
I opened the staff meeting by telling those present the truth as I saw it. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I do not know this organization. I don’t know how to recruit agents, and I don’t have a clue how to gather intelligence. But paradoxically, I am responsible for everything that happens here, and all of us will have to work together to bridge the gap between my lack of knowledge and experience and the degree of responsibility I have. If you think I am wrong about something, I want you to tell me.
“But old strategies have failed,” I continued. We were no longer fighting the PLO, I reminded them, stating the obvious: Our enemy was now Islamic terrorists.
More specifically, to prevent Hamas from murdering Israeli civilians, we needed to infiltrate its military wing, the Qassam Brigades. Our failure until then was the consequence, I was convinced, of not having the right sensors. “So we’ll examine everything: the methods of intelligence collection, the methods of recruitment, the methods of prevention. We’ll question every single convention and axiom. What works, we’ll keep; what doesn’t, we’ll ditch. The one thing I’m not willing to hear,” I went on, “is, This is the way we’ve always done things. We will turn over every stone in this organization. We may find out at the end of the process that most of the stones are where they should be, but the house will look different.”
I concluded my remarks by reminding the men sitting upright and alert in their seats that Israeli lives, and the fate of the peace process, depended on us doing our jobs.
Three days later, shortly after six in the morning, I waited behind the white fence surrounding our house — it was forbidden for me to wait outside on the street — for the driver to pick me up and whisk me off to Tel Aviv. With one ear I listened to the army radio station while my thoughts turned to the work I would need to do. The fact that a Jew had gunned down Rabin meant I had to pay a lot more attention to Jewish terrorism than my predecessors had, not a pleasant prospect given that Hamas posed as great a threat as ever. In all my years in Flotilla 13 hunting down PLO guerrillas I never could have imagined that one day I’d be tapping settlers’ phones. For years I had seen in settlers the continuation of my parents’ Zionism, and now here I was seeding their groups with informants.
At around 6:45 on my way to Tel Aviv, I was about to make a phone call when a news alert of a suicide bomb attack came over the radio. “Hold on a second,” I told the driver, who pulled over to the side of the road. The target had been the Egged Line 18 bus on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Jaffa Road has been one of Jerusalem’s busiest arteries, with shops, falafel stands, cafés, the bus station, and the Mahane Yehuda vegetable market.
“Jerusalem,” I told the driver, who flipped on the siren and flashing lights and sped up the steep mountain highway. Even with sirens blaring, we made slow progress through the heavy traffic. Rusted brown half-tracks from the 1948 War of Independence sat along the side of the road. Beyond those, just over the forested hills, was Tel Gezer, the supposed site of Joshua’s decisive battle against the Canaanite king Horam of Gezer.
Once in the city, we raced down Jaffa Road past lines of cars blocked by police and crowds of Israelis. I jumped out of the car into a scene of carnage. Smoke billowed from the roof of the scorched bus, peeled away by the blast. The dead and wounded had already been cleared from the scene, which was still drenched with blood. One dazed man on the street later told a journalist: “It was like entering the gates of hell.”
My team was now tasked with identifying the murderers of twenty-four people; two more died from their wounds within days. From the charred head and ID card collected at the scene, police forensics experts working with us determined the bomber to be Ibrahim Farahneh, a nineteen-year-old from the al-Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron, a kid dispatched by Hamas, whose charter declared at the time, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.”
Survivors recalled that Farahneh, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap — an outfit bought in the market on Selah a-Din Street in East Jerusalem to make him look like a student — had sat quietly in the back of the bus holding a black duffel bag on his lap. Just as the Line 18 bus approached the central station, he sprang to his feet, shouted Allahu akbar — God is great — and pressed the button attached to the strap of his backpack to detonate twenty pounds of explosives.
It was our job to penetrate and uproot the Hamas terror network, a daunting challenge because Hamas, like insurgent groups from the Vietcong to the Algerian FLN, was organized into cells. Because most individual members of a cell didn’t know the identity of the people pulling the strings, there was no way to track an individual bomber, dead or alive, back to the mastermind.
What added to the challenge was that, until the beginning of Oslo, most terrorists belonged to Fatah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or the Popular Front. Hamas, a marginal charity, wasn’t on our radar, and we had almost no agents inside the organization. We lacked the requisite sensors to detect the activity below the surface — in basements, garages, and mosques. It would be our job to develop them, a process I knew would take months if not years.
Within a couple of days we received information pointing us to a Hamas student group at a teachers’ college in Ramallah, whose members had been recruited from a mosque in the al-Fawwar refugee camp just south of Hebron. Our information also told us that the same cell behind the Mahane Yehuda bombing was planning further attacks, and soon. The operational plan that ended up on my desk was to capture the students on Friday when they returned home to the village of al-Fawwar near Jerusalem.
But the terrorists didn’t go home that Friday.
On Sunday, a week after the first attack, I was once again in the backseat of the government car on my way to Shin Bet headquarters when I heard the radio report of a fresh attack on another Line 18 bus in Jerusalem. This time a young suicide bomber murdered nineteen civilians near the Generali Building on Jaffa Road.
On the way to Jerusalem, between telephone calls, I felt to my bones that one of the students from the teachers’ college had carried out the bombing. We had all the intelligence we needed to pull them out of their classroom in Ramallah, but we hadn’t acted fast enough. This, my first major failure as director of the Service, made me dizzy with frustration. I’d had lost friends in combat, I’d lost fighters under my command, but never had I felt such a deep sense of failure.
Back at Shin Bet headquarters, I asked my team why we had failed to scoop up the students before they could act. The answer they gave me was that there hadn’t been enough time to plan an operation and capture them inside the college before Friday. Typically, they said, launching an operation required several days of planning, from putting the team together to consulting various experts, and so on.
“Stop!” I insisted, slapping my hand on a nearby table. “I don’t know how to recruit agents and gather intelligence,” I fumed, “but I know operations. That’s what I did for thirty years. To tell me that twenty-four hours isn’t enough time to plan this kind of operation is bullshit.” In the commandos, if we could receive information on a terrorist cell on Tuesday, and by Wednesday put a bullet through someone’s head in a terrorist camp in northern Lebanon, why couldn’t the Shabak, an organization with a hundred times the resources, arrest a couple of kids in the same amount of time?
My recriminations came as a shock to people accustomed to seeing themselves as the blue bloods of the Israeli security system. But too much was at stake for me to care about their feelings.
It seemed as if the eyes of the entire country were on me. The next day, which was Purim, I was summoned to appear before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee to give a report. How could I guarantee an end to such atrocities? Why hadn’t I already arrested or killed the terrorists?
At a cabinet meeting of the government ministers I was again asked when the attacks would end. My frank response, based on intelligence reports I’d been reading deep into the night and on my intuition, was that I could not guarantee that there weren’t dozens of suicide bombers on their way to explode in the streets of Israel.
My gut had been right. While on my way back from Jerusalem, I received news of a fresh attack at a crosswalk outside of Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv. A suicide bomber sent by Fathi Shikaki’s terror group, wearing a twenty-kilogram explosive belt packed with nails, killed 13 civilians and wounded 125, some severely. Many of those killed were girls in Purim costumes. I would later learn that Bat-Chen Shahak, the daughter of my friend Zvika, a decorated soldier who’d finished an officer’s course with me and who fought under my command during the Yom Kippur War, was among the dead. It was her fifteenth birthday. Just as with the Jerusalem attacks, I raced to the Dizengoff Center to meet the survivors in person.
That July, on the Beit Shemesh–Beit Guvrin road, close to the old cease-fire line between Jordan and Israel, terrorists began opening fire on passing cars, killing thirteen Israelis in a series of sniper attacks. Our agents traced the attacks to an Islamic Jihad cell from the village of Beit Zurif. Our people were right about the village, but we were watching the wrong terrorists. Hamas, not Islamic Jihad, had carried out the killings. We were still not smart enough.
When I asked the department heads about this intelligence failure, and how we could correct it in the future, one fellow referred me to the “files.” “Everything,” he said, was in the “files.”
“Where are these files?” I snapped. “Show them to me.”
An embarrassed silence filled the room. As in a Kafka story, we went down corridors, descended several flights of stairs, and finally entered a cavernous room filled to the ceiling with large cabinets jammed with cardboard binders. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Each time an agent met with an informant, the information would be duly typed up and filed away. Even if our mountains of inert files contained potentially useful intelligence on quick, highly adaptive, and disciplined terrorists, we’d never find it in time to prevent tomorrow’s bus bombing. The Shabak seemed to be stuck in the Dark Ages. To quote Yuval Diskin, the man I appointed to direct counterintelligence for the West Bank, the Shabak had plenty of “muscle” and an “underdeveloped brain.”
Part of the problem was that most of the files were filled with materials on Arafat’s secular PLO supporters, not on the hundreds of teenagers waiting in line to strap on a suicide belt for the sake of Islam. Even if our mountains of dusty files contained potentially useful intelligence on militants, we’d never find it in time to prevent the next bus bombing.
I decided that this was the moment to put our operational capabilities on a radically new footing, an especially urgent task because fresh attacks kept coming. Looking back, I can say that that decision led to a dramatic shift in the Shin Bet’s approach to information. Information, hitherto often lost in rooms of files, became a vital part of its operational decision-making process. We went from being a muscular organization to a thinking organization, a smart organization.