Efraim Halevy

Halevy was born in London in 1934 and immigrated to Israel with his family in 1948.[1][4] His father, Eliezer, was London-born, active in the Jewish community, and ran a large Talmud Torah; his mother, Rivka, was a Latvian-born librarian who had worked at a Jewish school in Berlin.[5] In his recollections of childhood, Halevy connected the family’s decision to leave Britain to an experience of antisemitic violence: schoolboys beat him because he was Jewish following the Irgun’s execution of two British sergeants.[5] He recalled returning home bloodied, after which his parents decided to move to Israel; the family obtained permits and immigrated by ship.[5]

After high school, Halevy was declared unfit for military service because of a heart murmur.[5] He studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later told an audience of Jewish students in London that he had completed his studies with distinction.[4] He subsequently joined the Israel Defense Forces as a civilian employee, describing his acceptance into the Mossad as a research assistant as coming four years later.[5]

From 1955 to 1957, Halevy served as general secretary of the National Union of Israeli Students.[1] In that capacity, he traveled to countries behind the Iron Curtain to establish and maintain connections with Jewish students in Eastern Europe.[1] Before entering intelligence work, he also spent several years in journalism and edited Monthly Survey, a journal published by the Chief Education Officer.[1][6] These activities preceded his recruitment into the Mossad in 1961.[1]

Halevy joined the Mossad in 1961 after being recruited by David Kimche, identified in an account of his recruitment as the agency’s deputy chief.[3] His early work included headquarters assignments and operations in distant and difficult countries, followed by senior command responsibilities in Israel and abroad.[1] Much of his career was spent in Tevel, the division responsible for clandestine foreign relations, and his positions included Mossad attaché in Washington, head of the Bitzur branch, and head of Tevel.[6] Bitzur’s responsibilities included protecting Jews in dangerous countries and facilitating their immigration to Israel.[6]

In 1970, Halevy was posted to Washington as Tevel’s representative, where he developed a lasting relationship with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yitzhak Rabin.[3] His overseas service also included positions at Israel’s embassies in Washington and Paris.[7] Beyond contacts with established diplomatic partners, he helped develop relationships with intelligence services in countries that did not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, including Arab countries.[1] Recalling one such relationship, Halevy said that he met Oman’s late ruler in 1975 and described himself as the first person to have a meaningful relationship with him.[3]

From 1980 to 1985, Halevy headed the division responsible for bringing Ethiopian Jews to Israel as part of Operation Moses.[1] He later cited commanding an Ethiopian rescue from Sudan among the missions he considered important in his career.[3] His other activities included participation in the search for the child Yossele Schumacher, although his later public account supplied no further operational details about that work.[8] These assignments placed the rescue and protection of Jewish communities alongside the international liaison responsibilities that occupied much of his Mossad service.[1][6]

Halevy served as deputy to Mossad director Shabtai Shavit from 1990 to 1995.[1] During this period, Rabin used him as an emissary and negotiator in secret discussions with Jordan’s King Hussein, which eventually led to the peace agreement signed in October 1994.[1] His relationship with Hussein rested on years of clandestine contacts and close personal ties.[3] Halevy recalled that, even before the 1991 Gulf War, the king regularly met Israeli intelligence officials and that a relationship of confidence had developed.[9]

In Halevy’s account, Hussein warned his Israeli interlocutors that Western observers misunderstood Saddam Hussein’s standing among Arab publics.[9] Whereas Western governments emphasized Saddam’s dictatorship and invasion of Kuwait, the king explained that many Arabs regarded him with a combination of fear and respect.[9] Halevy also recalled a personal dinner in Amman attended by Hussein, Queen Noor, Halevy, and his wife, Hadassah, at which the king told them he had decided to pursue a peace treaty with Israel.[8]

His work as deputy director also brought him into discussions about the boundary between intelligence assessment and political authority.[7] Halevy recalled that he and Military Intelligence chief Uri Saguy asked Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to examine whether Syrian president Hafez al-Assad wanted peace with Israel.[7] Shamir instructed them to concentrate on indications of war, explaining that deciding whether to pursue peace, and determining the price worth paying for it, were responsibilities of the political leadership.[7]

After retiring from the Mossad in 1995, Halevy became Israel’s ambassador to the European Union institutions in Brussels in 1996.[1] In a later interview, he dated his arrival to January 1996 and recalled that Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister a few months afterward, following numerous terrorist attacks in late 1995 and early 1996.[10] Halevy’s assessment was that Netanyahu accepted the Oslo Agreement while pursuing a different policy toward the Palestinians from that of his predecessors.[10]

One undertaking during the Brussels posting was securing European Parliament approval for Israel’s participation in a European Research and Development program.[10] Halevy recalled a vote of 265 in favor and four against, with almost half the approximately 500 members absent, followed by approval from national parliaments.[10] He regarded the result as a major Israeli achievement and argued that European interest in Israeli science and technology helped build support for the agreement.[10]

Halevy’s recollections of European diplomacy also included a 1997 meeting in Luxembourg between Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy and Yasser Arafat, organized during a crisis in Israeli–Palestinian relations.[10] He said the meeting produced no substantive result and recalled that Arafat fell asleep during Levy’s speech, was not awakened, and left Palestinian Authority foreign minister Nabil Sha’ath to respond eventually.[10] The episode appeared in his retrospective account of his Brussels years and in material drawn from his book.[10]

In September 1997, the failed Mossad attempt to poison Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Amman caused a severe crisis with Jordan.[11] King Hussein was shocked by the operation and initially refused to speak with Israeli emissaries.[11] Netanyahu brought Halevy from Brussels to help resolve the confrontation, drawing on the confidence Hussein placed in him.[3][11] The crisis threatened the peace treaty that Halevy had helped bring about.[12]

Halevy recalled that he proposed releasing Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin because the gesture would be tied to the incident and enhance King Hussein’s standing in the Arab world.[8] He said Netanyahu initially rejected the idea, then called him the next day and instructed him in English, “I understand, do it.”[8]

Two Mossad agents had been captured, while four others were confined in the Israeli embassy.[8][12] Halevy recalled asking Hussein to show “royal mercy” toward the four.[8] The settlement included administering an antidote to Mashal and releasing Yassin and scores of Palestinian and Jordanian prisoners.[11] Halevy’s intervention helped resolve the immediate confrontation.[11]

The failed operation also produced an internal Mossad crisis.[3] Halevy later described damaged morale and months of negative press coverage, and said Netanyahu chose him to lead the agency because he would be broadly acceptable to Israel’s political leadership under those circumstances.[3] In March 1998, Netanyahu announced his appointment to replace Danny Yatom, subject to the necessary approvals.[13] The prime minister also said he would recommend that Halevy implement the Ciechanover committee’s findings concerning the failed operation in Jordan.[13]

Halevy was 63 when appointed and served as the Mossad’s ninth director from 1998 to 2002.[1][3] His directorship spanned the premierships of Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon.[1] Among his personnel decisions was promoting Tamir Pardo to head one of the agency’s major operational units.[14] Speaking in 2010, Halevy praised Pardo’s leadership, dependable reporting, judgment under pressure, and ability to remain calm and balanced in difficult situations.[14]

On September 11, 2001, Halevy was meeting Sharon when the prime minister received a note reporting that the first aircraft had struck the World Trade Center.[15] Halevy recalled Sharon telling him to return to his office.[15] He said Israeli intelligence had an understanding with the United States to share relevant information and initiate intelligence collection after the attacks.[15] Reflecting on their consequences, he described a turn toward preventing terrorism rather than punishing it, with different priorities and rules of combat.[15]

At a conference shortly after September 11, Halevy criticized Western intelligence services for excessive dependence on signals intelligence at the expense of human sources.[16] “Sigint has become the high priest of intelligence,” he warned, arguing that the attacks demonstrated the importance of a human source and the vulnerability an adversary could exploit when such intelligence was absent.[16] He also emphasized that imagining possible threats needed to remain connected to a factual basis, while acknowledging that the attacks had caught everyone by surprise.[15]

Following his retirement from the Mossad in 2002, Sharon appointed Halevy national security adviser and head of the National Security Council.[1] His service in that role ran from October 2002 to June 2003.[2] He was the first incumbent of the post who did not come from the military establishment and had a close personal relationship with Sharon.[17] He resigned in 2003 after disagreements with the prime minister.[6]

Halevy described the national security adviser’s task as supplying trusted advice, not making political decisions or necessarily forecasting events.[7] One assignment arose after Sharon made the National Security Council the staff of a ministerial committee concerning non-Jewish citizens.[7] Before preparing recommendations about Israel’s Arab minority, Halevy asked whether Sharon understood that minority in national, religious, cultural, or individual terms.[7] In Halevy’s recollection, Sharon responded by asking him to recommend how to build a soccer field in Sakhnin.[7]

In a 2006 policy discussion, Halevy argued that intelligence had become increasingly influential in policymaking, particularly in Israel, where assessments and initiatives by intelligence agencies had preceded important political decisions.[9] He offered the security fence as an example, recalling that Sharon initially opposed it but accepted the plan after security-service leaders argued it was necessary to protect Israelis from Palestinian attacks.[9] His discussions of both Shamir and Sharon addressed the relationship between professional security advice and decisions reserved to elected leaders.[7][9]

Halevy’s contribution to Israel–Jordan relations brought him Jordan’s first-class Istiqlal medal.[1] His other honors included a special medal from the CIA director and the Chaim Herzog Award for contributions to Israel’s security and foreign relations.[1] His work on the Jordanian peace agreement, the rescue of Ethiopian Jews, and clandestine international relationships formed prominent parts of his retrospective accounts of public service.[1][3]

After government service, Halevy headed the Shasha Center for Strategic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and held academic positions and advisory roles with international organizations.[1][6] A 2006 biographical note identified his university position as head of the Center for Strategic and Policy Studies.[9] His later activities also included membership on the advisory board of the Athlone homeland-security fund.[18]

Explaining his involvement with Athlone, Halevy said his intelligence and national-security work had required finding innovative technological solutions to operational needs.[18] He considered his experience as a technology consumer useful in assessing companies’ development prospects and market potential, while his international contacts could help give the fund credibility.[18] He presented this advisory work as an application of experience gained while evaluating technologies for practical security purposes.[18]

Halevy published Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis with a Man Who Led the Mossad in 2006.[1][3] It is a retrospective, partly autobiographical account of his public service.[1]

The memoir was translated into nine languages.[1] Its Arabic edition was published jointly by publishers in Beirut and Cairo, with the words “Know thy enemy” on the outer cover.[1] In a public interview about intelligence work, Halevy remarked that “life is much stranger than fiction” and that “the Mossad is much better than James Bond.”[3] Recalling his own integration into the organization, he said he eventually ceased to feel that he was regarded as a new immigrant and remembered receiving a departure plaque describing him as “a Mossad within the Mossad.”[5]

Halevy continued to advocate diplomatic flexibility in public discussions of Israeli security.[19] In a 2011 address, he argued that neither Israelis nor Palestinians then possessed the political consensus or practical capacity to implement a permanent agreement.[19] He pointed to mutual mistrust, divisions within Israeli society, and the Palestinian Authority’s lack of control over all Palestinian society and territory, proposing an interim arrangement as more feasible than either a permanent settlement or no agreement.[19]

His public assessments also addressed the security fence and Operation Defensive Shield.[19] He characterized the 2002 operation as having “essentially broke the back of the Palestinian resistance” in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria.[19] He argued that Israel’s defense establishment had concluded that the security level it sought could not be maintained without a fence, despite Sharon’s initial opposition.[19] These arguments accompanied his broader emphasis on the influence of intelligence and security professionals on policy formation.[9][19]

Halevy sharply criticized the Oslo Accords at a conference on Yitzhak Rabin’s strategic legacy, calling them “full of holes as Swiss cheese” and saying Shimon Peres had “force-fed” them to Rabin.[20] Scholar Efraim Inbar offered a contrasting interpretation at the same conference, arguing that Rabin had been willing to try new approaches to the Israeli–Palestinian dispute cautiously.[20] Halevy also rejected the view that Arafat had preplanned the Second Intifada, arguing instead that Arafat prepared reactions after the failure of the Camp David talks but did not anticipate events escaping his control.[19]

His assessments of Jerusalem included the argument that Israelis could not accept the city’s division and Palestinians could not accept certain forms of Israeli presence in its eastern areas or Israel’s historic claim to the Temple Mount.[19] Recalling a clandestine visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, he alleged that ancient columns he saw at Solomon’s Stables were subsequently destroyed by Muslims to undermine Jewish rights at the site; the account and attributed motive remain his claims.[19] Similarly, his recollection of a European Commission meeting, involving a telephone call about $25 million intended for Arafat being transferred to the Palestinian Authority’s general rather than private account, is a retrospective allegation rather than an independently established finding.[10]

In 2011, Halevy argued that an Israeli strike on Iran should be a last resort and could affect Israel and the region for a century.[21] While supporting prevention of an Iranian nuclear weapon, he distinguished that danger from an existential threat to Israel and described growing ultra-Orthodox extremism as a greater existential danger.[21] During a July 23, 2015, Senate hearing, John Kerry quoted Halevy as welcoming the Iran nuclear agreement and arguing that military strikes would deepen regional insecurity and probably fail; this was Halevy’s policy judgment relayed by Kerry, not an established prediction of outcomes.[22]