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
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.
