In 1995, two Israeli generals — both recently retired from the military — were travelling in Asia when they learned that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated. They immediately returned to Israel, ending their sightseeing trip. One of them, General Meir Dagan, also ended his retirement, accepting an appointment to head the Counterterrorism Bureau. Several years later, in 2002, Daganhe was named director of the Mossad, Israel’s legendary foreign espionage agency.
In this biography, Samuel M. Katz traces Dragon’s life and career. The capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960 was a spectacular and daring operation, and to the teenaged Meir Huberman (who would eventually Hebraicize his surname to Dagan), it was inspirational. In whatever position he held, from a soldier serving his three-year mandatory military service, to his appointment as head of the Mossad, Dagan’s mission was to safeguard the Jewish state. Jewish history, notably the Holocaust, helped define that mission for him. It was made visible by a photo he kept of his grandfather in Poland, taken moments before he was shot to death by laughing Nazi officers — one of hundreds of his family members who perished in the Holocaust. He determined to do everything he could to prevent it from happening again.
Dragon was a man of action, and throughout his term as Mossad head (which ended in 2011), his main priority was to halt Iran’s nuclear development and to join the US-led war on terror. In 2016, at the age of seventy-one, he died of liver cancer.
In the author’s assessment, Meir Dagan “was the most remarkable and impactful” of all thirteen directors of the Mossad. An important component of his leadership was the “special brand of defiant chutzpah” which accompanied his creative and innovative approach to various issues.
Not every Mossad operation was a success, and Katz describes some of the failures as well. There was, for example, the botched assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in 1997 in Jordan, in which two agents were captured. Shortly after that, an operative was arrested in Switzerland. It was as if the Mossad was “racing from one debacle to another.”
In writing the story of the man he has titled “the architect of espionage,” Katz offers historical context as well as detailed descriptions of some of the daring operations that have made the Mossad respected, admired, and feared the world over. These details also narrate the development of Israel’s intelligence and espionage operations, and their increasing sophistication, with the role Dagan played in that development.
The story of Meir Dagan, a hero whose life was an integral part of the history of Israel, is awe-inspiring. Katz relates it with the nuance, detail, and drama it deserves.
