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.”
