Kimche was given one of the most difficult tasks in Mossad: he was put in charge of the service’s “Lebanese account.” The country’s civil war had begun two years after the Yom Kippur War, and by the time Kimche took charge of “the account,” the Lebanese Christians were fighting a losing battle. Just as years before Salman had gone to the Israeli embassy in Paris to initiate the first steps in stealing the Iraqi MiG, so in September 1975 an emissary from the Christians had gone there asking Israel to supply arms to stop them being annihilated. The request ended up on Kimche’s desk. He saw an opportunity for Mossad to work its way into “the Lebanese woodwork.”
He told Hofi that politically it made sense to “partly support” the Christians against the Muslims who were vowed to destroy Israel. Once more his interpretation was accepted. Israel would give the Christians sufficient arms to deal with the Muslims, but not enough to pose a threat to Israel. Mossad began to ship arms out of Israel into Lebanon. Next Kimche placed Mossad officers within the Christian command. They were ostensibly there to help maximize the use of the weapons. In reality the officers provided Kimche with a continuous flow of intelligence that enabled him to constantly chart the overall progress of the civil war. The information enabled Mossad to launch a number of successful attacks against PLO strongholds in southern Lebanon.
But the service’s relationship with the Christians soured in January 1976, when Christian leaders invited in the Syrian army to lend additional support against the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. That group was seen in Damascus as a threat. Within days thousands of battle-hardened Syrian troops were in Lebanon and moving close to its borders with Israel. Too late the Christians found they had, in Kimche’s words, “behaved like Little Red Riding Hood, inviting in the wolf.”
Once more the Lebanese Christians turned to Mossad for help. But Kimche realized his carefully constructed network to supply arms was insufficient. What was needed was a full-scale Israeli logistical operation. Scores of IDF tanks, antitank missiles, and other weapons were sent to the Christians. Lebanon’s civil war began to rage out of control.
Under its cover, Kimche launched his own guerrilla battle against Israel’s bête noire, the PLO. Soon that had extended to fighting the Lebanese Shiites. Lebanon became a practice ground for Mossad to perfect its tactics, not only in assassinations, but in psychological warfare. It was a halcyon time for the men operating out of the featureless high-rise on King Saul Boulevard.
Inside the building, relations between Kimche and Hofi were deteriorating. There were whispers of violent disagreements over operational matters; that Hofi feared Kimche wanted his job; that Kimche felt he was not properly appreciated for the undoubted contribution he was making. To this day, Kimche will not discuss such matters, only to say he “would never give a rumor respectability by commenting.”
On a spring morning in 1980, David Kimche used his unrestricted access card, which had replaced the two keys, to access the headquarters building. Arriving in his office, he was told that Hofi wished to see him at once. Kimche strolled along the corridor to the director general’s office, knocked, and entered, closing the door behind him.
What happened there has passed into Mossad legend, a tale of increasingly raised voices, of accusation and counteraccusation. The row lasted for twenty electrifying minutes. Then Kimche came out of the office, tight-lipped. His career in Mossad was finished. But his intelligence activities on behalf of Israel were about to enter a familiar arena, the United States. This time it would not involve the theft of nuclear materials, but the scandal that eventually became known as Irangate.
After a period of considering his future, David Kimche had accepted the director generalship of the Israeli foreign ministry. The post was ideally suited to his ability to think his way into, and out of, a situation. It offered Kimche an opportunity to bring his skills to bear on the international stage far beyond Lebanon.
In the United States the saga of President Nixon and Watergate had moved to an inescapable finale, leaving the CIA tarred with suspicion, the likes of which had not been seen since the death of President Kennedy, as more and more revelations emerged about the Agency’s activities during the Nixon years.
Kimche studied every facet of the drama, “absorbing the lessons to be learned from a debacle that should never have happened. The bottom line was that Nixon should never have kept those tapes. Without them he would still probably have been president.”
