He has posted all the evidence he has so far obtained on the Internet, doing so partly as insurance and partly because he wants to get the truth out. He is also realistic enough to accept it may never surface in a form suitable for a court of law.
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
It had become Mossad’s headquarters shortly after the end of the Suez War in 1956.
