Within hours, Danny Yatom had resigned. His career was over and Mossad’s reputation even more in tatters. In his last moments as director, he surprised staff who had assembled in the Mossad canteen. The cold Prussian image was replaced by an emotional tone: he was sorry to be leaving them at such a time, but he had tried to give them the best possible leadership. They should always remember Mossad was bigger than anyone. He ended by wishing whoever took over his place the very best of luck; he would need it. It was the nearest Yatom came to saying what he thought about a prime minister who continued to believe Mossad could be ultimately controlled from his office. Yatom walked out of the silent canteen. Only when he was in the corridor did the applause start, and it died as swiftly as it began.
A week later Efraim Halevy agreed to take over the service after Benyamin Netanyahu publicly acknowledged, the first time any Israeli prime minister had done so, “that I cannot deny that Mossad’s image has been affected by certain failed missions.”
Ever the consummate politician, Netanyahu made no mention of the role he had played.
Efraim Halevy became the ninth director general of Mossad on Thursday, March 5, 1998. He broke with tradition and did not summon his senior staff to hear his views on how the service should be run for the next two years. In appointing Halevy, Netanyahu had also announced that, on March 3, 2000, the new deputy director of the service, Amiram Levine, would take over running the service. The news was greeted with some surprise. No other director general had been given a fixed tenure; no other deputy had been assured he would step into the top job.
By 1999, Yatom had found himself a niche in Israel’s thriving arms industry. He became a salesman for one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of arms; the company not only provides a range of weapons for internal use but has a thriving export industry to Third World countries. Yatom makes regular visits to African countries and South American nations. From time to time he turns up in Washington.
Like Meir Amit, Levine had no previous intelligence experience, but he had commanded with distinction the Israeli army in northern Israel and south Lebanon.
Halevy’s first task was to reduce the tremendous tension and resentments inside Mossad that had so seriously damaged its image both within Israel and beyond. In routine congratulatory telephone calls from both the CIA and MI6, the new director had been told those services would prefer to wait and see how he dealt with the crisis within Mossad before wholeheartedly committing their own services to no-secrets-based collaboration. One factor would be how Halevy dealt with the hard-liners in the Israeli government, especially its prime minister.
Would the urbane Halevy, only a year away from his pension and, by many years, the oldest to be given the office, be able to keep Netanyahu at a proper distance? And for all Halevy’s undoubted diplomatic skills—he had played a central role in the negotiations that led to the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan—he had been away from the coalface of intelligence for several years. Since his time with Mossad the agency had increasingly shown signs of being out of control as senior officers had tried to stake their own claims for promotion. Most of those middle-aged men remained in office. Could Halevy deal firmly with them? Would the new director have the essential hands-on skills to raise morale? Mingling on the cocktail circuit in Brussels had hardly been the best preparation for the task of leading agents away from the brink of resignation. Critically, Halevy had no personal operational field experience. He had always been a desk man in his previous time with Mossad. And what could he really achieve in two years? Or was he really there to rubber-stamp what Netanyahu wanted done, or, for that matter, what Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, wanted done? Speculation continued within the Israeli intelligence community over the part she had played in the removal of Yatom, a man to whom she had never warmed.
Halevy found a way to charm her. He presented Sara with a microchip that Mossad research scientists had developed. It could be implanted under her skin and allow her to be rescued in the unlikely event she ever fell into the hands of terrorists. Using natural body energy, the bleep was linked to one of Israel’s new space satellites, enabling a person who wore it to be swiftly tracked to his or her hiding place. No one knows if Sara has had the implant inserted in her body.
