The Gatekeepers

Most of the people in my immediate environment have lived with a sense of fatalism and complete acceptance of our state of existence from that day to the current one. We are doomed to live by the sword for the foreseeable future, and must get used to the suffocating sensation of hopelessness. “One hand on the spear, and the other on the plow,” as the forefathers of Zionism decreed—this is how we will live for the foreseeable future. Whole sectors of Israeli society have given up on the possibility that there is indeed a chance to ever resolve the conflict with our Palestinian neighbors. We have grown so accustomed to the terrible price that Israeli society pays in return for continuing to live by the sword that we nearly fail to see this cost. This feeling, and the desire to understand how we’ve arrived at this point, motivated me to make The Gatekeepers—my Academy Award–nominated 2012 documentary that offers revealing portraits of the men responsible for Israel’s national security.

Ref. FA3C-A

tried to understand, through interviews with the people closest to the former Israeli prime minister, what led Ariel Sharon to the disengagement plan. What led the father of the Jewish settlements to uproot seventeen settlements in Gaza and four more in the West Bank, settlements which he himself initiated and established? As Dov (Dubie) Weissglass, who was bureau chief for the prime minister between the years 2003 and 2006, explained in the film, it was only after a series of profound events in Israel that Sharon began to change his thinking. In 2003, Alex Fishman published an interview in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot with several Shin Bet directors, who warned that if Sharon continued to run the country in the same aggressive way, Israel would hit a dead end. In September of that same year, twenty-seven Israeli Air Force pilots published a letter objecting on moral and legal grounds to the air operations that they were being ordered to carry out in Gaza and the West Bank. And in December, thirteen Israeli soldiers publicly declared that they would refuse to serve in the Israel-occupied Palestinian territories. This series of highly publicized conscientious objections to Israeli policy, observed Weissglass, “This wasn’t exactly protest[ed] by the traditional groups which we usually identify as objectors or as draft resisters or as the extreme left, to which, honestly, we don’t pay much attention. From Arik’s [Sharon’s] perspective, this protest was a matter to contemplate seriously. He was familiar with some of the names, he knew these were people for whom not only was Israel’s security precious, but who had also contributed to and made sacrifices for Israeli security, perhaps more than anyone else. All these things, juxtaposed, made him change his perspective, and see that the problem is not only a diplomatic one. It starts to build up as an internal problem.”

Ref. 40C8-B

After the movie was released, I was asked many times what was the most painful aspect of the history to which I was exposed while interviewing the Shin Bet directors. My answer was the number of opportunities for peace that were missed—mostly due to short-sighted leadership that preferred its personal, petty, temporary agenda over creating a better strategic reality for the future. I was filled with a grim recognition of how many thousands of casualties, how many horribly scarred families—on both sides—had resulted from this ineptitude.

Ref. 77C2-C

In the interview Ayalon told me: “When I meet young people, and I do it a lot, I tell them the following—when I was born in Jordan Valley, I had a wonderful childhood, and I knew that in Jerusalem there was a house and on the second floor there’s a long corridor and at the end of the corridor there’s a door and behind the door there’s a wise man who decides, who makes decisions. He’s a thinker. My parents called him ‘the Old Man.’ And years later, after the Yom Kippur War, I came to Jerusalem, and I went to that building, and I was on the second floor, and I saw that at the end of the corridor, there was no door. And behind the no-door there’s no one who thinks for me. “Now the question is, what do we do with that. I have to admit that for me, something happened that in retrospect I see as very positive. I suddenly understood that if there was no one there, the responsibility placed on me is multiplied numerous times. I know the weakness of the leadership and also, to a great extent, the impotence limiting the ability to lead in taking action even when you already know it’s necessary. And we have a role, we have to get up every morning, and realize we have the capacity for change, we have the tools for change, and in moments of crisis we have the duty of initiating change. “This is an understanding that began with the Yom Kippur War for me, but that’s something personal. It’s possible that for my children it began, I don’t know, maybe for one of them after Rabin’s assassination, and for the third one in the Second Lebanon War. Every one has a moment in which they understand that they bear extra responsibility.”

Ref. B9AA-D

The most humiliating thing isn’t being beaten up, it’s the contempt. The contempt was overwhelming. Even the butcher and the doctor—everyone was contemptuous of you. If you stood in line, you always had to be last. People who came after you went in before you. All kinds of little things like that. You’d see Jews in front of their store, washing the sidewalk or the road. JUDEN was written on the shop window. Or a sign in a coffee shop: NO ENTRY TO JEWS AND DOGS. Those were the humiliating things. You’re constantly viewed as sub-human. And that reminds me of the situation here [in Israel].

Ref. 88C3-E

read—nothing. Being a refugee doesn’t enhance your life. He couldn’t manage here. All the guys he talked to spoke German to him, and when he needed to make deals with Israelis, they cheated him, and he didn’t catch on. My father died of sorrow when he was sixty-four. He had five heart attacks in one week and died.

Ref. FD08-F

The declaration of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, found us in the north, in Malkia. The whole Lebanese army swarmed our hill, and for me, that was the most horrible day in the war. I thought I wouldn’t get out of there. Three thousand Lebanese soldiers attacked us in armored vehicles. We, on the other hand, had nothing. I had a tiny two-inch mortar, and I shot it like a pistol. They attacked us and conquered meter after meter after meter. Most of the guys from our platoon, which was also my settlement training group, died in Malkia. They conquered it from us, and we ran. I remember I ran with the mortar on my back after I couldn’t see anyone alive next to me, just dead people, and I ran into the valley below. When I got to the bottom, I fainted.

Ref. 2539-G

“How would you feel in a Spanish-speaking country?” he asked. I told him I didn’t know anything. He said, “So go to Argentina. We might have a chance to catch Eichmann* there.” I knew they’d been looking for him for a long time with no results, but we had sent a Service man named Zvi Aharoni, who had a really persitent ability to find something he was looking for. Isser showed me a photo and told me, “Let me know if we can conduct an operation. To bring him here, to abduct him. Send me just a word or two—possible, impossible.”

Ref. BA39-H

We rehearsed the operation itself three hundred times on a sand table in some yard. We worked on it and did abduction exercises in all kinds of safe houses. I think it took two or three weeks. Rafi practiced with the team, and I practiced with Rafi, and in the end we put together two teams. One team which actually picked up Eichmann and another team driving behind them in case the car breaks down and diverting suspicion to themselves in case we ran into one of the many police blockades.

Ref. 47E0-I

Two people jumped him, pulled him into the ditch, and got him in the car. They took off, with me following them. His first sentence was in the car I wasn’t in. He told them, “I’m already resigned to my fate.” He understood these were Israelis or Jews. The next sentence he said to us was, “Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamaim ve’et ha’aretz.” [Hebrew for “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”] We were frightened. We thought he spoke Hebrew. But he only knew one sentence, taught to him by the chief rabbi of Budapest. From then on, they barely spoke to him.

Ref. 1D3C-J

wanted him to get to know me and let me walk through without

Ref. 5C8C-K

“What will you give the Arabs and what will you take from them?” the minister of defense, Lieutenant General Moshe Dayan, was asked yesterday, and replied: “We will give peace, and we will take peace.” (Yohanan Lahav, Yediot Ahronot, June 8, 1967)

Ref. C544-L

We started working in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, in the anti-terror field, without knowing exactly what it was because terrorism still wasn’t an issue. The population wasn’t hostile. In the Bank we had replaced the Jordanian conqueror, who was more brutal than us. I remember after the Six Day War, the first thing Anwar Nuseibeh [a Jerusalem-born Jordanian politician and diplomat] told me was, “Listen, you have wonderful soldiers. They’re not like the Jordanian soldiers who go to the grocery store and take ten crates of Coca Cola without paying. You do pay. You don’t rape women or anything.”

Ref. E894-M

The goal was to understand what motivates this business, the Palestinians. Originally we wanted to make peace with Jordan, not with the Palestinians, because who thought the Jordanians weren’t coming back? Noel Khatib was the West Bank governor on behalf of Jordan. You came to his house, and he’d host you like he was the king of England. He sat on this armchair, he was fatter than me, and he talked like he was the ruler on behalf of the king, and I’d sit opposite him like a clerk. And then the idea of a Palestinian state popped up. The Arabs didn’t come up with the idea. It was us. Like we invented Hamas and Hezbollah. We didn’t actually invent them. We contributed to it happening, thanks to all kinds of “Arab experts.” There’s actually no such thing as an expert on Arabs, just like there are no experts on Jews. Maybe the Arabs are experts on Arabs; the Jews aren’t.

Ref. E825-N

I got enthusiastic about it, even though it wasn’t in my occupational turf as head of the Operations Department. I gradually caught the Palestinian State bug, without being aware of it. I was convinced it was a part of the solution we could live with. Why did the idea of a Palestinian state grab me? I don’t know, but I thought it was more logical than conquering them. What did we want to achieve? We didn’t know ourselves, because we didn’t get any guidance from…

Ref. 599D-O

The minute you’re dealing with specific things, you forget about strategy. So we stopped messing around with the Palestinian state. The minute we stopped messing around with the Palestinian state and started dealing with terrorism, terrorism got more sophisticated,…

Ref. 3F71-P

And the operatives liked to work with us, because the army was rigid and we talked to them in their own language. And so we had lots of operatives and lots of success and, generally, we controlled the war on terror. We could contain the flame at such a level that the country could do whatever it wanted to, which is important. But it didn’t solve the problem of the occupation. It only made it so that…

Ref. C05B-Q

Once, in ’74, I was at some meeting at the Ministry of Defense, and they were talking about Hebron. A day earlier, they had declared it “the City of Our Forefathers.” So, I said, “Guys, how can it be ‘the City of Our Forefathers’ when there are a hundred thousand Arabs there and not one Jew?” Rabbi Moshe Levinger [a leader of Gush Emunim, the settler movement] was already in the city of Hebron, and I thought letting him in there was a mistake, but after they’d made that mistake, we had to get out of it somehow. I also said it was impossible for one people to control another people in the…

Ref. 9D5A-R

A security officer has to be extraordinarily alert. It’s very hard to be alert one hour, two, three. You have to relieve them. The whole secret is not to demand something that’s beyond human capacity from them. You have to be so alert that you can fire the second shot. Only rarely do you get to fire the first one—when the other guy makes a mistake, takes out his gun and doesn’t shoot. But you have to have extraordinary, brutal discipline.

Ref. 3F8C-S

remember that in Brussels there was an attack at the airport, and the security officer there took care of the incident. Or Leila Khaled in the plane,* which was a very difficult event. She or her boyfriend was already holding a hand grenade. Think for a minute of a hand grenade exploding in a plane in mid-flight. So we invented methods that let you toss a hand grenade into a reinforced box in the plane, and when it exploded, nothing would happen.

Ref. C9AB-T

To maintain alertness and discipline, you conduct drills all the time. That’s basic stuff. How can you maintain the tension within such a complex system, involving thousands of people, when you’re alone, sitting in some chair in Tel Aviv? Only through simulations and drills, and more drills. I fly a lot and I see [the security precautions at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport].

Ref. CC71-U

In Tel Aviv, it’s excessive. Suddenly you suspect someone, and then he’s done for, he won’t extract himself for an hour. Especially if he’s Arab. I don’t understand how they take it; I wouldn’t get through it. It’s humiliating. But what can you do? Once you have to protect a prime minister with twenty to thirty people simultaneously, it’s a lost cause.

Ref. 9195-V

You didn’t see them in person, these people? Shalom: I didn’t see them. Later I authorized executing them, after they’d already almost been beaten to death. I had general authorization from Prime Minister Shamir, giving me the authority to decide myself whether to do a thing like that or not. I said to Ehud Yatom, who was then head of the Operations Division, “What condition are they in?” They told me, “They’re almost dead,” or the soldiers said, “almost dead.” I said, “So hit them one more time and that’s it.” But that’s not what he did. He did what he described, which I found out maybe a year later. If I had known what he was going to do, I wouldn’t have approved it, but that’s wisdom in retrospect. What did he do? I don’t know. I think he just took a rock and broke their heads open. But they weren’t conscious. I don’t know what state they were in. If I’d known he was doing it like that, I wouldn’t have authorized it. But he was the head of a department. He should have known himself what to do and what not to do. He also could have said no. If he didn’t agree. There were a few more heads of departments there, and no one said a word.

Ref. B7F4-W

You gave the command to kill them. But I gave that after I was told they were already dead. What’s with you, Avrum? That doesn’t make sense. You wouldn’t give a command to kill them after they were already dead. No, I’m saying they were already dead using their language, you can’t, you can’t interrogate them. That’s how you should understand it. You mean, they were already almost done for physically, like that? Yes. I found out about the fiasco only the next day, when I saw the photos in the paper. And then I said, “How does that happen?” So one of the guys in the photo told me he had said to me in the field that he’d been photographed. But I didn’t realize that he’d been photographed with the terrorists. And there’s that photo where they’re leading one terrorist who’s alive. Why did you instruct that they be killed, anyway? I didn’t want them to get out alive. This was the first terrorism incident within Israel after a long time. Instead of killing all four, the army only killed two. They screwed up. I didn’t want more live terrorists in court. It would increase terrorism. There was no longer any terrorism. Almost. Excluding Lebanon, hardly any. There were no intelligence subjects. No one standing trial. Nothing. They were only in jails. But with two people like that, you stir up a trial like that, you get two more heroes. And that stirs up a whole new wave. We didn’t want that. I didn’t want that. So I thought we should finish the job. And I had no accomplices other than Prime Minister Shamir. The prime minister was a full-fledged accomplice. And him, I was acting according to his orders. He gave me authorization to kill them, a year in advance. What do you mean? What did the authorization say? That terrorists, if I saw fit that they should be made to disappear, they disappeared. The prime minister gave you authorization? Yes, not for this, generally speaking. There was a general authorization that any terrorist—if he was caught—could be killed? No. Not that. If I assessed that it served us well, he could be killed. I reported to Shamir how it happened, so he told me, “Great, it’s a good thing you did it. A good Arab is a dead Arab.” He had this slogan, “It’s a good thing we did it.” He conveyed to me that he was very pleased with this outcome, and I forgot about it.

Ref. B366-X

Until Bus 300, the Service didn’t acknowledge the concept of “an illegal command”? Avraham Shalom: I couldn’t answer that definitively. That’s a bad question. Why? Because it can’t be answered honestly. I don’t understand your answer. It’s … That’s your problem. I’m done explaining.

Ref. A134-Y

But it happened. And if it happened, people weren’t disciplined? I’m not answering that. You’re asking questions that are harmful to the State of Israel; I’m not answering them.

Ref. 117B-Z

Today I try to explain it to young managers in the Service as well—that the end is very important, we are a mission-based organization, we have to produce results, but if you attain the goal in an unworthy way, you end up destroying yourself as an organization. When things have no clear moral framework, ultimately you get hurt as an organization, as a person, and even if you attained that goal, it’s not worth it.

Ref. B0F4-A

But in this case, on the one hand, there’s a Service director who forbids his people from hitting, but then says, “Kill people who surrender.” These things aren’t related to one another. That’s exactly the point with a commander—to know how to distinguish between things you can do, should do, have to do, and can’t do. Killing the Bus 300 terrorists was something you should do? Based on the result, no. Only based on the result? Only based on the result. Meaning if there hadn’t been a reporter there, it would have been okay? If he hadn’t come, we wouldn’t even know about it. And the moral aspect of the thing? There’s no morality in terrorism. First of all, look for morality in the terrorist. And if he puts his hands up and surrenders? That’s not a moral problem. So what kind of problem is it? It’s actually a tactical problem. Not strategic. Explain it to me. I don’t know how to explain it any better. You need an intelligent enough person to distinguish between something that to you supposedly looks like a cruel thing, compared with the same person who, the next morning, or five minutes later, releases a long line of Arabs because they … they have kids at home. What do I know? Something like that. Anyone who’s responsible for something faces dilemmas like that every day, if he thinks about them. It’s the same thing with us.

Ref. 318A-B

why did you say to me, “Terrorists who get caught, I believe they should be killed”? I believe they should be killed because they’ll come back again and again and again. Their children, their cousins. But not every terrorist, and not in every case. I think terrorists—who are the scum of the Earth, all the ones who commit suicide—can’t live alongside normal society. So I don’t want to help them. There’s a saying Ben Gurion told us once: “You do the country’s dirtiest jobs because you’re the cleanest people.” What does that mean? That you can do things that are a bit on the edge of the law, not killing, but we’re the only ones who can do that because our hands are clean—we don’t take bribes; we don’t gain any kind of personal benefits from it. They still say that in the Service to this day, I think. I don’t know if it’s still true today; I hope so.

Ref. 92F3-C

He was once the strongest man in the country, with a weak minister of defense (Moshe Arens), and an apathetic prime minister (Yitzhak Shamir). A man who controlled people’s fates. Who could move villages from their locations, spies from their mistresses, prime ministers to action. The man who was sitting on the largest information bank in the Middle East. The strongest man in the country. And then, one day, came the fall. Within less than two years, the man left his job, his friends, and in essence, his country and homeland. Since then he’s been wandering the world. Less poetically, you can say: the man didn’t find appropriate work in Israel, so he traveled abroad. He tried his luck in New York, in London and in other European capitals. And there he works and wanders and lives alone. (Ronit Vardi, Ma’ariv, 1992)

Ref. 4426-D

No. I don’t even think about it. It wasn’t especially difficult. I actually came out of it okay. I was glad I didn’t transition to the semi-governmental sector but to the private sector, and that’s it. You need controls, you need discipline, and you need to tell yourself, this is prohibited and this is permitted, and you have to pay the price. I paid the price for my stupidity. It happened to me. That’s life.

Ref. DD84-E

But what fascinated me, I’d say almost on the level of a drug, was intelligence activity. I was also very swept up in the importance of the role I attributed to the Security Service in strengthening and stabilizing Israel’s security. Very much so.

Ref. 81C9-F

After three months in Baqa al-Gharbiyye, I took an Arabic language lab. We’d study from early Sunday morning till Thursday late at night, leave for Friday-Saturday, and come back Sunday. We studied, very intensively, spoken Arabic, literary Arabic, reading articles, reading handwriting. People who graduated from the Service’s language lab, and did it seriously, know Arabic. Know how to listen to Arabic, know how to read between the lines, know how to read a note from an operative. And these things are an asset. There were periods when I’d identify very accurately which city or which area a person came from, based on hearing alone. In the last seventeen to eighteen years, it’s eroded a little.

Ref. EEEE-G

When IDF can’t eliminate them on the waterfront, you have to conduct a chase. Arik Regev, Gadi Manela, and Tzvika Ofer, rest in peace, all of them are no longer with us. I have a photo of my second son’s Brith ceremony.* In the photo, everyone except my son and me, they’re all no longer with us. You lose lots of friends, lots of friends lose their lives.

Ref. 7350-H

Is there hatred in this war? Without a doubt. Not on our side. I can say we have educated and still educate Shin Bet personnel not to hate. I think that the minute you feel true hatred toward your rival, your senses get blurred. Meaning, you’re not acting in a professional, balanced way like you should. There’s a large distance between love and hate. But I think that in the thirty years I’ve spent in the Service, I’ve learned to generally like the Palestinian population. I think they might be “the Arabs’ Jews.”… Talented people, including the refugees. They’re nice people, they’re people who like to live well, to eat well, to kick back and relax. I’m generalizing here, of course. There are menaces among them. No doubt. The Palestinian movement, from the day it was established to this day, including the whole Yasser Arafat saga, is a massive Palestinian mistake. They’ve had countless opportunities to improve their situation, in every way, politically and financially, and they missed out on them. On the other hand, we’re not complete saints, either.

Ref. 429F-I

The personal cost is very high. You actually have no life. We were all completely dedicated to the cause. Everything else was less important. But the cost, when it hits you, you become aware of it. When you begin divorce proceedings. When you start to see you don’t know your children, when you start to pay the price health-wise. There are complicated costs.

Ref. D1E5-J

You start to implement everything you’ve learned in the courses, and everything you’ve learned in the limited experiences of the previous year. You’re assigned an office in the Military Governorate in Nablus, and start doing what’s called “basic coverage” of that territory. First of all you’re assigned a territorial area, and start to learn it village by village, mountain by mountain, trail by trail. Whether through area patrols, or through lots of interviews with the people who arrive in masses at the Military Governorate. You sit down with people and ask, “Tell me about the village, tell me about the clans, tell me everything…”—from the number of village residents, through the division into clans, through the institutions in the village, through its access roads.

Ref. BE52-K

You take an area cell—a village or a town or a neighborhood—and you analyze it street by street, house by house, character by character. You look at the negative security elements there, who the marked targets are. In the Service, you eventually get to marking who you want to recruit. You don’t walk down the street saying, “Guys, who’s with us and who’s against us?” After you locate the person or the group that you want to use as a source of information, you do the work. You inquire about him, you check up on him. Eventually, you know you want X, since you assess that X’s status, his ability to infiltrate the places you want to keep an eye on, make him the person you want to recruit.

Ref. 5FEA-L

She was a young woman, twenty-nine years old, single, a lawyer. In their culture, in Jenin, a twenty-nine-year-old single woman lawyer is almost a whore. What do you mean, “Twenty-nine years old, not married yet, and a lawyer on top of that!” It’s an irregular event, which for us would not attract any attention. And then you know to take these cases and try and hone in on these misfits. That’s the role of basic coverage. And if coordinators do basic coverage well, they can stay on top of these incidents.

Ref. C1AD-M

Sometimes you can get a smidgen of information, practically nothing, and ultimately you have to connect these things correctly, and to constantly know how to link them quickly, so as to relay it to whoever needs to take action—to whoever needs to make an arrest or a hit. These short lines are a very significant advantage of the Shin Bet. For example, you get a report about John Doe, who’s a pretty pathetic character, down and out, walking around with a beard. You get a report that John Doe suddenly looks like he walked out of a billboard, which is a very problematic indicator. When you’re in a wave of suicide bombers, you understand it’s an indicator. It doesn’t mean he’s a suicide bomber yet, but it’s an indicator. You say—let’s hang a balloon over him and make sure it floats. We won’t lose him until we dispel the suspicions. For example, if it turns out he’s getting married, we understand why he cut his hair.

Ref. 64E3-N

So there were all kinds of approaches that developed, and some of the first were basic coverage approaches—how do you approach an area cell, how do you approach the population in an area cell, how do you study it, how do you determine where you want to have agents. Over time, it became more sophisticated, and we switched to a combination of basic coverage of the geography and the demographics of a certain area cell, and more targeted coverage, where you work only according to targets. Meaning, a target is the Hamas organization, a target is the Islamic Jihad organization, Global Jihad. You have a target somewhere, in a specific area, and your role is to infiltrate that target, or to introduce agents into that target, or to recruit an agent from that target and handle him.

Ref. 471D-O

The trick on the topic of handling sources is cross-referencing. If you have a single piece of information that’s a doozy, you need to try and cross-reference and verify it. You can’t run around from morning to evening arresting people and interrogating people. In certain periods, the Service would interrogate tens of thousands of people. You can’t sustain that. To hit the mark, you have to verify that the intelligence you got from X is reliable.

Ref. 2415-P

There are whole books about handling live sources. You study them and you acquire experience over time, because there’s no substitute for experience in these subjects.

Ref. 6ACF-Q

The detainees receive a respectful welcome in the Service’s interrogation branch, where the interrogation unit starts to question them, and then “roll up the carpet,” as it’s called, go out later to collect weapons of war in their possession, arrest additional people, and write interrogation reports. Interrogation reports are also distributed to desk people and to research units, and that’s how you know how Hamas is built. It’s a massive collection system, a giant warehouse of information, and the trick is not to lose yourself inside it.

Ref. AF89-R

To a certain extent, the intelligence profession is not insulated. It’s not mathematics. It’s far from precise, and so your analysis and assessment capability is critical. The experience amassed is critical. The more you recruit, the more you fail at recruiting, the more sources you handle, the more meetings you attend, the more you experience what happened as a result of the information you brought in, that’s how you become a better intelligence professional, and your assessment capability improves. I define this work as an art. The art of making a connection, creating trust, ultimately convincing a person to become a traitor. Betray his surroundings, his friends, sometimes even his family. That’s not a trivial thing.

Ref. B8C5-S

Yuval Diskin: To identify when a person is lying, it’s much more than language. It’s reading the whole human being. You need to read his body language. A person doesn’t only speak with his mouth. A person speaks in a lot of ways. He has body language, his eyes talk, his body postures talk, his hands talk, his pose talks—there are a lot of things that talk in a person. His reactions, his sweat, there are lots of little things that you learn to read. Sometimes you make a kind of “checklist” for yourself, sometimes it works automatically. Some kind of traffic signal jumps up for you—“Something seems off, not like usual… .” There are a lot of situations like that on the job.

Ref. 0ABB-T

But you also have to develop a certain chill, as much as possible. A kind of detachment despite all that. Since you can’t get emotionally attached, and it happens. We’re all people, after all, we’re flesh and blood, and it happens sometimes that you get attached to a certain source and you like him. He almost becomes your friend, in this limited sense of these meetings.

Ref. FF5E-U

Can you explain to me how the Israeli intelligence, the Shin Bet, manages to recruit so many collaborators or sources among the Palestinians? I don’t know if there’s any parallel to something like that. First of all, we’re talented people… . Okay… . But beyond the talented people… . Look, it’s a system that’s very well-oiled and highly planned and very efficient. And I don’t know how to assess the failures, but there are probably more failures than successes. You work according to a system. It’s not improvised work, where you wake up in the morning and say, “Oh, we need some kind of agent here… . Let’s go see how we get out of this one.” Do you think if the situation was reversed, if we were under occupation, they’d be able to obtain so many sources from us? Look, that question isn’t fair to the Israeli people, but I want to tell you that the Arab intelligence service organizations—for example, the Jordanian Service, parts of the Syrian Service and the Egyptian Security Service—are intelligence organizations that should not be underestimated. They know how to conduct work which is certainly professional, worthy, with different methods, of course.

Ref. 342A-V

Is there a moment where you face an area cell you’re responsible for and say, “That’s enough, I’ve gotten all I can here”? It doesn’t work in an “I’ve gotten all I can here” way, since life, especially the life of terrorist and underground organizations, has a certain dynamic. There are always secondary circles of families, of fans, of those who feel the pain of their arrest; you need levels of supervision. It’s like throwing a stone in the water and getting ripples. You need to track these ripples until they really disappear. You can’t talk at all in terms of total elimination. It’s endless. The Security Service is actually known among world intelligence organizations as an organization that successfully prevents terrorist attacks. Meaning, in the sense that you clean out the terrorist cell almost completely. But there were periods, especially in the early ’90s, when the amount of wanted fugitives on the Security Service’s list might have been the largest that any intelligence organization in the world has ever had. Dozens in any area. Hundreds in any area. Thousands. And fugitives are the product or the result of failing to close the circle you asked about.

Ref. 1FD3-W

What you’re saying is that actually, the organization continues to dry out the swamp, but the swamp refills constantly. That’s the nature of terror. That’s the nature of guerrilla warfare. Even the largest nations in the world, which actively work and try to eliminate terrorist organizations, can never declare victory, except for those countries where the terrorist organizations became the country itself. And it’s Sisyphean work that never ends, unless there’s a political treaty. And even then there are always buds of opposition by those who object to the treaty. The good thing about it is that once you establish a state entity, then dealing with it is the state entity’s own problem, as the opposition is against it. But based on the nature of our lives here in the Middle East, Israel will always be a target as well. The arrows will always be aimed at us as well, and not only at themselves.

Ref. 25DD-X

Ya’akov Peri: The Security Service’s interrogation apparatus is one of the main elements in the collection system. A terrorist’s or terror cell member’s interrogation report is first-class collection material, not only for the purpose of carrying out additional arrests. Tens of thousands were interrogated in the Security Service, if it hasn’t already surpassed the hundreds of thousands. That’s a huge apparatus. The Service has a system of first-class professional interrogators. A sophisticated, creative system that knows its work, that knows how to plan. Every interrogation involves planning an operation. It’s not some kind of slapped-together thing where someone comes in the morning and says, “You’ve got misters A, B, and Z today. Go in, they’re waiting for you.” When you get to a Security Service interrogation, you’re stepping into a very professional, very determined, and dedicated interrogation system. They work for hours non-stop. The interrogators know their job well. All that notwithstanding, there are interrogees who to this day have apparently not told us everything. This is a battle of the minds, which is among the most sophisticated ones I know. You have to bring the interrogee to a state in which he understands you know he’s guilty. You don’t always have the information he has, but you have to convince him that you possess that information anyway. You also have to cause him to experience some sort of stress, some pressure, some mental state in which he understands that eventually he’ll have to hand over the information he has, and the sooner he does it, the better off he’ll be. There’s no torture in the General Security Service, but there’s definitely employment of methods such as sleep deprivation, such as using expressions which are very far from diplomatic. The Israeli people have to understand that the atmosphere in the interrogation room is not that of a luxury hotel like Mizpe Hayamim or Yearot HaCarmel. These are little rooms within prisons, full of interrogees, and the interrogators who ultimately have to expose terrorists, including the most vicious and brutal terrorists we’ve ever known. And the atmosphere isn’t one of mutual appreciation where one person pats another on the shoulder and waits till he sings for him.

Ref. 51C8-Y

I once saw an interrogator kill an Arab. Not by beating him. He was throwing him from wall to wall, from wall to wall, from wall to wall. I was in Operations, and I said, “Guys, you’re breaking his head!” So he grabbed his head and almost broke the wall with this Arab’s head. And I said, “Stop it,” and Yehuda Arbel stopped it. They’re both dead. Both Yehuda Arbel and the guy supposedly conducting the interrogation. He wasn’t conducting an interrogation, he just hit him so he’d talk. A week later, the Arab died from a brain hemorrhage. It got covered up. So Bus 300 is nothing in comparison with these things. And this was a vegetarian head of Service who has a street named after him in Tzahala. Harmelin.* Everybody did it. It’s impossible that I go into a room and they’re breaking some guy’s fingers there, and go into another room—maybe a year later—and they’re breaking somebody’s head and he dies later. It got covered up. You won’t find mention of it. I remember which village he was from.

Ref. 3805-Z

Ami Ayalon: I can’t break a law in the State of Israel because I’m a member of the Shin Bet. In the ’80s, when Shin Bet employees gave false testimony under oath in courts, and violated the law in the State of Israel, they didn’t understand this simple thing, that there’s no law you can violate in order to attain the Service’s goals. Not only did they not understand it, but the state attorney didn’t understand it and the cabinet didn’t understand it and the prime minister didn’t understand it. This was the reality of a different State of Israel.

Ref. 03DD-A

That’s not abandoning. Ultimately, people violated the law, and they knew they’d violated the law. The fact was, they didn’t come tell me on their own. This was after the Service had been pummeled from every direction on subjects like these. If you want to continue operating an interrogation branch, and you want to continue operating a Service that’s healthy and legal and pure, you have to pay the price. That’s the bottom line. These aren’t easy leadership decisions, and sometimes you have to make the call. I think if I hadn’t acted the way I had, I’d have harmed the Service more than I helped it. So the fact that people paid the price … that’s not exactly like leaving them behind in combat. After Landau and after all the stories, after everything we’ve been through, it was unacceptable that an interrogator could come and take the law into his hands, even if he was pissed off and even if the guy was a son of a bitch. You have to make a decision that has implications, and you have to stand by it.

Ref. 4355-B

At this stage, a very specific set of methods is introduced into the interrogation. A special, approved set, presented to the state attorney general, presented to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. The Service director is the only one permitted to authorize use of methods as a part of necessity protection. For any interrogee. That authority is limited to the Service director only.

Ref. 6772-C

There was a harsh argument with Ami Ayalon, who was head of the Service at the time. As far as Ayalon was concerned, it was a hundred percent clear to him that it’s the Service director’s responsibility. Period. And if anyone bears responsibility, it’s only the Service director. We told him that he hadn’t convinced us. And then Ayalon calls me the morning after the man was arrested and says to me, “What’s happening, are you already interrogating this man as a ‘ticking bomb’?” and I tell him, “No.” So he tells me, “But I gave the instruction.” I told him, “I understood your instruction, but your instruction is inadmissible, as far as I’m concerned, since you can’t guarantee with certainty that the interrogator would not bear responsibility for a situation like that.” So he says, “But I’m instructing you.” So I told him, “You can instruct, but I don’t accept the instruction, because I think it’s an impossible situation.” He said to me, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I’m on my way to the facility and I’ll see what the situation is over there, and, if necessary, I and the head of the interrogation department will employ the required measures and take responsibility. But I don’t intend to instruct one of my interrogators to do it, and I don’t think you can order me to do something like that.”

Ref. FAD9-D

I wanted to understand from which aspect you don’t want to go into it. From the moral perspective of the thing? Moral debate is always very elusive. What is morality? People don’t understand that any one of us, and I’m speaking as a head of Shin Bet and as commander of Shayetet 13 [the Israeli Navy’s special forces unit] and as commander of the navy, as someone who’s taken part in dozens of operations and fired endless rounds of ammunition and killed in many operations—when we go to sleep at night, we need to go to sleep with everything we carry with us. We need to go to sleep with the fact that we employed pressure on an interrogee which the High Court of Justice thinks is unjustified and inappropriate. But, no less than that, we have to go to sleep with those cases in which we decided not to employ pressure, and as a result Israeli citizens were killed. Any one of us can point out those moments. I’m not sure I’d include them in my memoir, and I probably won’t exactly tell you about those moments now, but you know and I know that they exist.

Ref. 81B3-E

So, if you ask me with which of those I’d rather go to sleep, I’ll tell you—if I could erase some moments from my personal history, I’d erase the moments where I didn’t do enough, and as a result Israeli citizens died. So if we’ve decided, if I’ve decided, that this or that Shin Bet interrogee will suffer more so that we can save Israeli citizens from death, I have no problem with that. I can go to sleep peacefully.

Ref. 95B1-F

Previously you’ve described a grand intelligence apparatus that controls almost all aspects of Palestinian life, that knows everything, that manages to control how high the flames go. But the Intifada caught you by complete surprise. How does that happen? First of all, almost all intelligence organizations worldwide have failed at predicting major historical events. Which major intelligence organization in the world predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall? So to complain today and say, “The Service should have predicted… .” In a formal, hypothetical way—yes, that’s the expectation. That’s why you pay systems, you pay people, you maintain huge information warehouses. That’s true. It’s possible that if the Security Service had massively expanded its collection efforts, it might have received signals indicating the breakout of the Intifada. But even then, I doubt if we could have received a focused warning that on a certain date a popular uprising would break out. There’s no intelligence organization for spontaneous events; no security service in the world can anticipate them.

Ref. BCCC-G

There were periods, particularly in the early ’90s, when the amount of fugitives the Security Service was searching for might have been the largest amount any intelligence organization in the world has ever dealt with. Dozens, in every area. Hundreds in every area. Thousands.

Ref. C82D-H

Dichter: I think that any institution, any state, has to understand that there are processes that you can’t read. You don’t have the tools to read them in advance. Definitely not on this scale. I think the Soviet Union couldn’t predict its own dismantlement, and Germany couldn’t predict what happened there. I think we couldn’t predict in advance the First Intifada and the Second Intifada in the version in which they developed and grew to such awful proportions.

Ref. EECD-I

And it’s all carried out from a control room, what’s called a war room, which is a really fascinating story. It was built during the Second Intifada, because you need all the factors dealing with intelligence collection and all the factors dealing with executing the mission together. Meaning, you need Shin Bet collection elements, representing all agencies; you need the representatives from the special unit, if there is a special unit. It could be Yamam, Shaldag [the Israeli Air Force’s elite commando unit], Matkal, the Flotilla, and so on; you need a representative from the command who wants to be there; an Air Force representative if they’re involved in the topic; Unit 8200 [the Military Intelligence Directorate’s surveillance and electronic monitoring unit] if they’re involved in the topic. Everyone sits there, and each agency streams its information into that room.

Ref. 48FD-J

The original room was a small, crowded room, which was just awful. And I remember, the Americans came after the invasion of Iraq to learn how this miracle, as they called it, works. How does this Israeli miracle where the Shin Bet talks to the Air Force work. Apparently in the United States it’s more complex. They came to this room, a general with “stars” from here to eternity came in, and they conducted an introductory presentation for him, and he’s sitting in the little room and asking, “You do all the work from here?” The guy who was giving him the explanations there didn’t really know what to say. He said, “No, this is just the drill room. But later on, we’ll really build a model room, with very impressive human engineering.” And ultimately this whole armada is conducted by a manager, and not an especially senior one. It can be a head of branch, it could be a deputy department manager, and he’s in charge of the subject. The head of the Service and the chief of general staff and the minister of defense might attend, and they stand in the back. The person commanding the mission is that manager, and he can also give commands to a brigadier-general, to the Air Force commander, to the head of a Shin Bet district. He’s in charge of the operation.

Ref. E972-K

Ami Ayalon: The targeted prevention was originally intended to provide security for Israeli citizens. If there’s a person who we know on a high intelligence level is going to manufacture a terrorist attack and we have no other way of stopping him, we hit him, injure him, or even kill him. That’s targeted prevention. Now, I believe it’s morally justified, operatively justified and justified, in any context. The saying, “He who rises to kill you, kill him first” was true thousands of years ago and is also true today. My life takes precedent over another’s life. The life of an Israeli citizen whom I’m responsible for takes precedence over the lives of those who rise to kill us.

Ref. C910-L

Avi Dichter: Targeted prevention is a work technique opposite terror-generating saboteurs. Mass-murderers or master terrorists or people with special capabilities such as a bomb manufacturer, a missile manufacturer, and so on. You go for them the first opportunity you get. He doesn’t have to be on his way to a terrorist attack for you to hit him. He could carry out the attack tomorrow or in a week, but you know he’s one of the terror generators. That’s the condition for being included in the category of an object for targeted prevention. It’s not something that needs to happen now. If he’s planning the Twin Towers attack for a year from now and you have no other way to hit him, then he fits the criterion of a “ticking bomb.” But you need to have something concrete, not a general intention.

Ref. 75A2-M

The truth is that in targeted preventions, there’s mostly a lot of mischievous thinking by the handlers. HUMINT handlers who are really supposed to read the way these murderous terrorists think, and get a grasp on it in order to get to them. These HUMINT guys, the handlers, sometimes they have a very cheeky approach to these things. They really build beautiful scripts, really. So Sharon really loved these things. He’d come to the Service every time, or they’d come to him to authorize plans, but it was really to give him the entire narrative. Arik, he had extraordinary cynical capabilities. He’d ask questions which could be understood from an operational aspect: “How can you ensure he doesn’t open it in the presence of his wife and children?” So they’d tell him, “Look, this is an intimate item sent to him by his lady friend, and it’s not likely that he would open it in the presence of his wife… .” So he’d say, “All right, so how do you ensure that the children won’t be hurt?” And you saw he wanted to get to know the whole story. There was one time when he was skeptical. He said, “There’s no chance that this thing is going to work!” And by the way, two days later it worked beautifully. So there’d always be a phone call from him: “Yes, Avi, I see the guy was really hot and bothered about opening the package…

Ref. 9A34-N

It’s a business that causes extraordinary deterrence. A week after Yahya Ayyash blew up with the cell phone, one of the Palestinian leaders who were sitting in a meeting with us took the cell phone of the man next to him, which was in Regular mode, took advantage of an opportunity where that guy wasn’t paying attention, switched it to Vibrate mode, and returned it to the table. Then that man put the cell phone in his pocket—and everyone’s sitting down, the Americans and the Palestinians and the Israelis—and the other guy dialed him, and suddenly this man feels the cell phone vibrating in his pocket, and he jumps up as if a snake had just bitten him. No one understood what was happening, and we all knew what it was, and started laughing. That’s deterrence.

Ref. CA8A-O

Avi Dichter: There’s no basis in reality to the claim that Fatah started fighting terror; quite the opposite. Raed Karmi is considered a highly dominant factor in manufacturing terror. If he took a month off now and will return in a month, and you can hit him in that month, is that fair play? I constantly claimed, “There is no fair play when it comes to terrorism.” You don’t shoot with an M-16 when he’s shooting at you, and throw a grenade at him when he throws one at you. You use a tank even if he’s shooting caps, or with a BB gun. You use a one-ton bomb even if he sends a suicide bomber with five kilo (eleven pounds). Why? Because you’re a state. A state makes use of stately tools. There’s no point even thinking in terms of fair play. And if you strategically decide to fight terror, fight it with all your might. Terror is a barrel which has a bottom, but you can get to the bottom of it only if you have a clear strategy. And you don’t live off all kinds of whims and all kinds of statements about quiet periods. What’s a quiet period? Is last year a quiet period? Who manufactures the quiet period for you? If they’re now getting ready for a new phase of terrorism, do you interrupt it, chop it down, or do you let it develop?

Ref. 0BEA-P

And what does that strategy say? Dichter: That strategy says: military infrastructures of terror in Gaza—grind them to a pulp, either through military means or through diplomatic means, such as a bloc of Arab countries which will help the Palestinian Authority dismantle the infrastructures in Gaza. If that doesn’t happen, Israel will have to go into Gaza, for a military action of dismantling the military infrastructures of terror in Gaza, and listen to me, that’s a step that will take years. Gaza is a classic model of what’s happening in Afghanistan. For those who don’t understand, Afghanistan is here, ten kilometers (six miles) from here.

Ref. 5548-Q

When do you include the political echelon, such as Rantisi and Yassin, for example, in the lists?* That’s one of the most severe mistakes people make, including, unfortunately, the political echelon, mostly abroad, when they try to portray Hamas or the Islamic Jihad as an institution which has a political branch and a military branch. There’s no such thing. Sheikh Yassin was the Hamas chief of general staff and prime minister. There’s no division there. He’s involved in everything. Ramadan Shalah [leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad] or [senior Hamas official] Khaled Mashal are not political officials. They’re deeply involved in the military aspect. I had very intense arguments with the Americans, who said—“look, in Northern Ireland there was the IRA and there was the Sinn Féin, the military part and the political part.” I said, “Listen, that doesn’t exist, not in Hamas and not in the Islamic Jihad. There’s no difference.” The truth is that Sheikh Yassin was just a menace. That man is, to me, one of the most misleading people I’ve met in my life. When you first see him, you think he’s the most pathetic person on the face of the earth. In a wheelchair, contorted, emaciated, hardly talks, problems breathing, Mother Theresa looks like a gladiator next to him. And this man is responsible for the death of so many Israelis. And more than that, he’s responsible for the death of innocent Palestinians murdered due to suspicion of collaboration, whose execution he authorized. And always in code, of course. Not “Kill him,” God forbid, but he’d always say, “Treat him according to religion…” and everyone understood Sheikh Yassin’s terminology. Always in lectures, when the Americans would say, “The late Yassin,” I’d say, “The too late.”

Ref. 5685-R

Happily, I was not brainwashed in either direction, and I think that’s something that has greatly influenced me to this day. It’s very important to me to have the ability to think independently about things, and not through slogans. And it’s also very important to me to have the ability to express my opinion—from professional subjects to ideological subjects.

Ref. 72B8-S

didn’t read well enough, and they told me, “Listen, we’re sorry, but you can’t be in the operations unit.” I said, “Too bad.” Zvika continued on, I went back home, and a few days later they invited me back and told me, “We have something else to offer you. What do you think of going to Arabic language lab?” I asked, “What’s Arabic language lab?” And they said, “It’s a language lab where you learn Arabic.” I said, “Okay, and then what?” They said, “It’s an interesting position. Afterwards you’ll be independent, you’ll have a vehicle, your own work in the field, operations, and all kinds of things. But we can’t tell you too much at the moment.” I thought about it for a day or two, and told them, “I’m ready.”

Ref. 4E4B-T

In the Arabic language lab I was the youngest trainee. I started at age twenty-two, a very long and interesting course, with a great bunch of people, and only then did I start to understand I was in the Shin Bet. First of all I find out I don’t know Arabic. That’s the first thing. In the language lab you actually meet Arab culture, you meet this world. Customs. Tradition. Language. It’s a whole new world.

Ref. 42C1-U

The relationship between a coordinator or a handler and an agent is a very interesting relationship. At the time they didn’t really teach us psychology, but I think you become, as they say, a psychologist without certification. By the way, a lot of times when we tried to insert formal psychology into the world of handling, many psychologists failed there. There were sometimes big gaps between their recommendations and their forecasts and what actually happened there. I also saw other cases, but in the great majority of times, at least in my experience, there wasn’t a whole lot of success there.

Ref. C70A-V

In handling, and in general in the coordinator role, you see people at possibly their ultimate low point. And you find out that ultimately, with people, the very basest instincts come into play: jealousy, revenge, money, greed, romanticism. Ego, of course. These base instincts motivate people a lot more than the more philosophical things. Ultimately, when you take a person apart, even someone who’s the salt of the earth, flesh of our flesh, and try to explain why he did this thing or that thing, some horrendous thing that you can’t even believe, you find out that it goes to the most primal place, the most base place, the lowest place possible. And that’s how people are, to a large extent. Of course, people are a lot more than that, but that’s the basic infrastructure. Sometimes we don’t really like to admit that about ourselves, but I think that’s really what we are.

Ref. 95E6-W

back home. And what bothered me very much was what would happen with my son, with the kid. I hadn’t had a chance to see him yet or anything, and it’s possible I wouldn’t return from here. And then you start—I don’t know whether to call it being scared—but suddenly you become more measured in what you do. It’s a process that deepens gradually through the years. I don’t remember anything I ever didn’t do, if it was something I had to do, but suddenly there are thoughts that didn’t accompany me before.

Ref. BB6A-X

Unfortunately, targeted prevention took on a volume that was larger than what it really deserved. Because targeted prevention came about to resolve for us, during the years of the Second Intifada, the almost impossible situation where, up to Defensive Shield in March 2002, we’re really not in control of all the “A Areas.”* We respected Palestinian sovereignty despite the incessant waves of terror that originated from there, and, in fact, in those cities of refuge reside suicide bombers, their launchers, explosives labs, and all they’re doing is preparing the next attack and launching it at you. You know that at any given moment, someone is currently being launched from Point A to Point B, or that in this or that structure someone is currently sitting in a sabotage lab where they manufacture the explosive charges. You have to actually act proactively. And that’s essentially the whole idea of the targeted prevention. It’s a tool that isn’t intended to defeat terror. It’s a tool intended to prevent emergency situations and brutal attacks that can’t be handled any other way.

Ref. 1F52-Y

When we constructed this doctrine, we examined ourselves thoroughly, including with legal experts, in order to make sure that we were doing things that were in accordance with Israeli law and with international law. And as evidence, Justice Aharon Barak, former president of the Supreme Court, in his last ruling, which was the “Targeted Prevention High Court of Justice Ruling,” analyzed in depth the do’s and don’ts of what he defined [as] “preventive hits.” Of course, you can’t determine precise standards in a court ruling, but it turned out there wasn’t a large gap between the principles that guided us and Justice Barak’s ruling.

Ref. 8B4D-Z

We can’t only look at the “pure and easy” ticking bomb, because that may be good in court, but life is a lot more complicated. In life there are also ticking infrastructures. The only way we had of dealing with this lethal bunch was solely through precise intelligence and all kinds of methods of sophisticated targeted preventions, not necessarily just the ones you’re familiar with. Usually, with targeted preventions, people think it’s a plane or a helicopter bombing a house or shooting at a car. We also did things that were a lot more sophisticated and focused and “sterile” in terms of collateral damage. Meaning, they hit only the person who was supposed to be hit, and no one around them. I can prove that we saved a great many citizens in the State of Israel as a result of this activity.

Ref. 27CE-A

Really, anyone who thinks you can thwart terror from a distance and win a war against terror organizations is making a serious mistake. I don’t know a trick like that. There’s no way to just stay put and shoot at them with planes, or with other means, and by hitting X people dismantle a terror organization or annihilate its abilities and decrease its motivation and cause the roots of terror to stop growing. It doesn’t work. The only way I know, and that, too, is only partly effective, so long as it’s not accompanied by a diplomatic course that completes it, is the way we dealt with terror in the West Bank after Defensive Shield. We reconquered the A Areas, we reached all the nests of terror, all the fugitives, the explosives labs, in a series of very complex operations and over a very long period. It’s just amazing to see the dramatic decrease since Defensive Shield. You can see the data, but the decrease in the amount of injuries and terror attacks comes to about fifty percent every year. And that, to me, is a very significant achievement.

Ref. 1541-B

was told that in the organization, you’re considered the originator of the “combined prevention.” Can you explain to me what that is? I didn’t develop the “combined prevention” doctrine. I helped it develop and I aimed it in certain directions and I had a lot of influence on it, but it’s something that developed over a very long period in the organization. It started developing to a large extent when I was head of the Jerusalem and West Bank District, through an approach that managers in the organization and I led, when we understood we should already start to combine abilities at the employee level—I call it the “organization manufacturing floor”—not at the executive level. Meaning the workers at the end, who ultimately hold the “stick” in their hand, would cooperate, and we’d combine all the disciplines we have in the organization—collection from live sources, collection from the media, our interrogations, our operations desk, and our interface with external organizations. If we know how to approach all these capabilities per each individual mission and per work plan, and everyone is contributing their relative advantages in order to, for example, arrest a fugitive in Hebron, then those handling sources, those who know how to conduct surveillance, those who know how to process the information, and those who know how to conduct operations will sit together and think how they can succeed in this mission. And then each of them would understand that if he can utilize the other’s relative advantage, then maybe a breakthrough can be made more efficiently than with each worker acting alone. It’s the old cliché about the whole being more than the sum of its parts. We managed to do it in a very neat process that started, by my assessment, twelve to thirteen years ago, and intensified greatly during the years of the Second Intifada. We constructed work processes, tools, and methods that in effect elevated the combined prevention into an art form. People leave their egos outside the door, which is the hardest part, and understand they’re now being assessed by how they manage to get to a fugitive who we didn’t manage to get to, by cooperating, without each of them trying to win the war alone. We took this thing and later applied it to our interfaces with other organizations—with the Army and the police and all kinds of other organizations. And here, too, we discovered that not only people but organizations as well have an ego. And we learned, mostly in the difficult days when there’s a lot of pressure, a lot of terror attacks, to leave our ego outside the door. And you discover it’s better that way. Give me an example. Look, I can say that almost every one of our war rooms is a classic example of the combined prevention doctrine. The minute information starts to come in, say, about a terror attack in progress, representatives of all our disciplines arrive, sit down in the same war room, and say, “Okay, that’s the terror attack, what can we do in response?…

Ref. E97E-C

I’m trying to enter the mind of people in the operations unit who pursue a person like that, and know that if they stop him, he’ll commit suicide next to them. How do they function? Yuval Diskin: Look, the guys in that unit are very high-quality people, and I also think that during the operation, you don’t have a lot of time to think, to even be scared. You’re scared between operations. When you’re inside the operation, I believe you don’t have too much time to think.

Ref. 66AE-D

And we’ve had more than one case like that. For example, the story of the terrorist from the Jenin area who had a Jewish Russian girlfriend, and they put the explosive charge in a kiosk on [Tel Aviv’s] Allenby Street. We pursued him, understood he was returning from Tel Aviv to the Jenin area through Wadi Ara, and we’re chasing after him, and in the end succeed in isolating a few vehicles, and the people in our operations unit conducted a chase there that I think even thrillers haven’t featured a lot of chases like that, in terms of the risks they took along the way, until they managed to go around the suicide bomber and block him, and then the guys came over and started to search the cars. Understand, you’re searching a car that has a suicide bomber in it, and it’s very probable that you open the door and he presses the switch at that moment and goes up, and you’re gone along with him. And then one of our guys, one of our commanders there, arrived and poked his head into the vehicle, and the terrorist took a gun he had and shot the charge to activate it and blew up the explosives. Our man, luckily, was not killed, because he only poked his head in and didn’t go into the vehicle with his whole body. He was injured, but relatively lightly. That’s really putting your head into the maw of the lion. Later, we enhanced the tools and the methods in order to minimize the risks to the force. You can write thrillers based on these things. Also very brutal stories based on these things.

Ref. 487D-E

In the case of Sha’alavim, in one of the cars we did manage to locate the suicide terrorist with the explosive belt or the explosive bag, I don’t remember right now exactly what he was carrying, but of course this drama captivated the Israeli media, and they applauded the Shin Bet and gave us all kinds of accolades. It was really nice to read it in the papers, but within the organization, I gave the instruction to conduct a very thorough investigation, because as far as we’re concerned, we should have blocked him long before he entered Israeli territory. And the fact that we stopped him in the last minute in Sha’alavim, we perceived it as failure on our parts. Not as success. Let’s say that same suicide bomber, instead of turning on Highway 1, would have said—hold on, why should I drive all the way to the Check Post in Haifa? I’ll go into Jerusalem here and blow myself up on King George Street, exactly in the middle of the city… . We couldn’t have prevented the attack.

Ref. F1B5-F

As far as the public is concerned, what’s more dramatic than our good men from the Shin Bet and the Yamam catching a terrorist before he reaches his destination? They really are good men from the Shin Bet and the Yamam, and they did do a fantastic job, only we should have done it fifty kilometers (about thirty miles) earlier. And it’s not the problem of those good men, but ours, the decision makers in the organization, who were a little rusty, as I said, and it took us too long to reach a decision to summon our special team, and to take all required action. That’s why, in a lot of management courses, I also tell the people in the Service, “Don’t believe what they write about you in the papers. Believe what you really know about yourselves.”

Ref. 30FA-G

can tell you that in the Service, we didn’t have a story like the Pilots’ Letter and the insubordination that took place in the Air Force. I’ve always been wary and asked myself, could something like that happen in the Service, where people would stand up and say, “We don’t want to do what we’re doing”? And it’s not because I had doubts regarding the rightness of our path. It was very easy for me to justify the actions we were taking. Your question as a commander or as a manager is, do your subordinates really understand what you understand? Do they have enough tools to deal with these very complex situations in which they find themselves? And at least according to what I’ve heard from people, the fact that we all sat down, including the commanders of that executing force, and discussed in depth all aspects of the operation—not just the operational ones but also the ethical and moral aspects—and clarified and sharpened the “do and don’t do” rules, this very process was very helpful to people in dealing with the very complex situations they were in. According to what I understood from a lot of people, the fact that they’re a part of the deliberations and the dilemmas, and state their opinion, and also hear the decision maker debating on these questions, helped them deal with this matter and maintain their mental health in the midst of very tough situations and very dangerous conditions.

Ref. A818-H

I’m among those who believe that the way is often more important than the destination. Because sometimes you can do something and attain the goal once, twice, three times, five times, but you’re destroying yourself, you’re destroying the organization, and you’re destroying your people. So it’s important that the way is one whose implications you can live with, sometimes more than with the results.

Ref. 30AA-I

You’ve actually said that at critical points, ultimately what matters is the person in their entirety. Isn’t that a dangerous thing? Because you said that every person is composed of the personal baggage he carries. You’re not like Dichter, and the person who will replace you is not like you. Isn’t that dangerous? Dangerous, of course. That’s just an indication why in places like the Service, like the Army, like the Mossad, like the police, you primarily need quality people. Quality not just in terms of their professional and operational abilities, but in regard to education and values and norms. Good people. Now, it’s perfectly clear that mistakes also happen, and sometimes less appropriate people show up, or they’re appropriate but don’t end up in the situations they’re qualified for, and then mistakes can happen. But because this world is ultimately run by people, and no one has come up with some other trick to manage things, apparently that’s what will continue to happen in the future, too.

Ref. 8707-J

Legal professionals can help here, but they can’t solve the problem for you. Because in a lot of these situations, you’re ultimately with yourself, not with the law book and not with the legal advisor and not with anyone; it’s you with the decision. And there are no clear answers here. At least I haven’t found clear answers. Maybe there are people who have clear answers. I’ve heard some people say, “Guys, don’t quibble, if you’ve got him—hit him.” I’ve also heard the other heroes who say, “No way, you don’t shoot in situations like that.” So I can’t say where the truth is located. I can say where my dilemmas were located. When you get to these situations, usually it comes down to one person and funnels down to him. He doesn’t have the ability to stop and conduct ethical, value-oriented, and philosophical debates with those around him. In the end, as I’ve said, it’s you and the situation, and a lot of forces are acting upon you, as the result of the command position you’re in, of the environmental pressure you’re under sometimes, because people expect you to make a decision. And usually they mean a decision that states, “Do it”—because that’s a “decision.” Saying you won’t do it always looks easier, but sometimes it’s a lot harder. And you actually have to deal with the full impact of these pressures, and there’s no time here. A lot of times these situations last between several seconds and a few minutes, and during that time you have to process a lot of data, continue to track the situation, process all the pressures around you, and make the decision. And I say, apparently they still haven’t invented a brain that knows how to do all these things in such brief intervals, so it’s a lot of intuition, and intuition doesn’t come out of nowhere. Intuition, at least the way I see it, is built on experience and exposure and knowledge you’ve accumulated, and on a lot of other things like values, education, the sum total of things that build you up as a human being. And sometimes, even after you’ve carried out a “super-clean” job or operation—no one was hurt except the terrorists themselves—even then there are sometimes situations where later you, or at least I, stop for a moment. It doesn’t happen to you during the events themselves because you have no time to think while it’s going on, but suddenly life stops during the night, during the day, while you’re shaving, on vacation, everyone has their own story. You suddenly tell yourself, okay, I was in this situation, I made a decision and X people were killed, three or four terrorists who were definitely on their way to carry out a brutal attack were killed. No one was harmed around them, the most “sterile” you can get, supposedly, and still, when an operation like that ends, and actually successfully, you say to yourself, there’s something unnatural about this situation. And that unnatural thing is actually the power you have to take from three people—terrorists, right?—but to take their lives like that…

Ref. 4B6F-K

Where do you discharge these things? You personally? I share some of these things with Etty. Not everything, because I’m not sure she can process and understand the whole situation, the one I was in. A lot of times it’s mostly with myself. And I, personally, have two kinds of therapy. In recent years, I’ve gone back to exercising. There are days when I push myself into very high effort, and those are the stages where I discharge tension like that. I finish something like that, and I already feel a little more balanced. The second thing is I write poems for myself, usually poems about exactly those kinds of situations. That’s my private therapist. I discharge a lot of those experiences and pressures there. There was a period when it was at a level where I would write them and I had a kind of ledger, like I’d walk around with the therapist right next to me, it was with me all day. When I’d ride in the car, when I’d be sitting like this, when no one would see, I’d open it, read it, sometimes write all kinds of things to myself, but that was my method. That’s where I’d let out all these pressures.

Ref. D124-L

In the poems you describe the situations… . Yes. My feelings about all kinds of situations, which are hard for me. There were periods where I wrote a lot and periods where it suddenly went dormant. It’s some kind of internal need. It’s the psychologist. Apparently my clinical psychologist is poetry. Can we see the poems? No.

Ref. 7B08-M

The prime minister traveled almost every day to his ranch from Jerusalem. Arik Sharon didn’t like to fly in a helicopter to the ranch and always preferred riding in a vehicle. You try to make adjustments in accordance with the person being secured, and try to disrupt the routine, but between you and me, how much can you really break up the routine in the route between Jerusalem and Shikmim Ranch in the south? We activated our operations unit to secure the motorcade from the outside. Including using planes occasionally. And we invested in a lot of new, creative measures in order to give this bubble called “the prime minister’s convoy” much greater security. The thought was that the closer you get to the disengagement date, the more the threat to the prime minister gradually increases.

Ref. DF9F-N

that’s where I, as the Shin Bet, have to be. When Avigdor Eskin performs a “Pulsa diNura” curse ceremony before the prime minister’s residence, do you have to issue an alert? I don’t believe in “Pulsa diNura,” so I don’t get excited. Also, I don’t have to deal with what’s done on the public level. But I do have to know about it, because sometimes it starts with events like this and switches to other tracks. Were there concrete

Ref. C6FA-O

Good question. That’s our biggest challenge. We always make a distinction between situational surprises, to use a professional term, and basic surprises. A situational surprise is some tactical event that happened and I didn’t manage to predict it. A basic surprise is a dramatic turn of events for which I had no indicators or ability to provide advance warning. By the nature of things, the whole predictive field in research is complex, because that’s already prophecy. And usually we lean on past experience and hope the future will unfold similarly. Today we try to develop more innovative models and more sensitive sensors, in order to really be able to monitor dramatic changes. I can say we have yet to go through a real, major test.

Ref. 3E88-P

Avi Dichter: The event of Hamas’s military coup is on a scale without any precedent. Think about it, sixteen thousand [Palestinian National Authority] security personnel in Gaza in June 2007; within three days they lose the Gaza Strip, but mainly all their assets, the archive. Do you know what that means, the archive of an entire organization passes, as is, into the hands of Hamas? Think about it, their [version of] Shin Bet transfers its archive, their Mossad transfers its archive, the police transfers its archive… what losers. I don’t know how to define it, just lack of leadership. When in June 2007, none of the security apparatus commanders in Gaza are in Gaza. You understand, that’s a total lack of faith of every command level in the level above it. They lost Gaza. Lost it because they didn’t care about themselves, because of considerations of “every man for himself.” I come first, and then the state or the agency.

Ref. 822B-Q

One of the problems of the political echelon, all over the world, is that they usually really like binary options. They don’t like you to come to them with three or four alternatives. They want you to tell them 0 or 1. “Do” or “don’t do.” When you present them with four alternatives, it takes time, they need to analyze them, read them, think. Almost all prime ministers prefer not to deal with too many alternatives. Come with a binary option: 0 or 1. “Just tell me, and we’re done.” That’s the reason why I’m among those who think that beside the prime minister there must be a staff that can create those options for him. If you like, the National Security Council. At the moment it exists in theory, but doesn’t really do these things.

Ref. FBAF-R