Lebanonwire, September 17, 2002

The Daily Star

There were no newspapers Monday in Israel because of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement.
Yediot Ahronot, in its Sabbath supplement, looks into the controversial appointment of ex-General Meir Dagan, a close associate of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and an active Likud member, as head of the Mossad. The paper quotes several former Mossad people praising the man and the appointment, but runs two fairly critical parallel commentaries.
Veteran political commentator Nahum Barnea distinguishes between the old swashbuckling Sharon and the new more judicious prime minister and says: “Dagan is one of the old Sharon’s assets. They got to know each other 33 years ago when Sharon, then head of Southern Command, cleared Gaza of ‘terrorists.’ Dagan led a commando unit called ‘Rimon’ which was known, how shall I put it, for its unconventional methods.”
In Barnea’s view, the problem with Dagan is not his open political association with the Likud, which “shouldn’t prevent him from being an excellent head of the Mossad.” The real questions, he says, are different: “Is the Mossad so lacking in good people that you have to parachute in a candidate from outside? Is Dagan’s controversial record what the Mossad needs right now? Is he not too rusty and too old-fashioned to learn a complex new system that operates according to the rules of the 21st century? Is it a good thing for someone so close to the prime minister, personally and politically ­ and especially mentally ­ to serve in this sensitive post?”
Barnea says Sharon hesitated before making the appointment but was finally convinced “because he saw himself in Dagan ­ in the daring, no-holds-barred days of the 1950s. Dagan is the old Sharon, less a few centimeters.” The question, he says, “is would the old Sharon have been appointed to head the Mossad?”
He sees an hint of the kind of Mossad chief Dagan might be in a letter he sent Sharon outlining his ideas for dealing with the violence in the territories. “The plan is well written, with a practiced hand, and reads like a retroactive prophesy. Much of it was put into practice. Nevertheless, if you compare the plan to what happened, it transpires that Dagan was more restrained, more considerate of the Palestinians and less aggressive than the (Israeli Army) turned out to be in practice. What Dagan’s recommendations did not do, the terrorist bombings and the green light the Bush administration gave to Sharon in the wake of Sept. 11 did.”
In a second article in Yediot Ahronot, left-wing columnist Yigal Sarna paints an ambivalent portrait of the designated new Mossad chief, whom he met for a long interview five years ago. “He is an avid reader, loves classical music, and was an excellent field operative with a license to kill ­ a combination that would have fired the imaginations of writers and critics in the 1950s and 1960s.
“There are people who have seen him in his armchair, under a collection of swords and narghiles, reading a philosopher like … Spinoza or a book on military doctrine; and there are those who have seen him sending men on deadly missions. One of his friends described him as a ‘guided missile,’ while another said he needed someone to restrain him, otherwise he might become dangerous.”
Sarna quotes “a veteran terror expert who got to know Dagan well when they both served in Lebanon, who stressed Dagan’s logical mind, but also the power of his emotions: ‘He is an intelligent, rational man, but the security thing with him is visceral ­ the need to be a strong Jew.’”
He says Dagan told him that, in the “war on terror,” “the targets are always people. He said there are spotlights that focus on a target for a brief moment and if you don’t act immediately, the target disappears. Therefore, the best time to strike is when there are no terror attacks, because the target is not expecting it.”
Sarna surmises: “Perhaps that explains why whenever there is movement toward a cease-fire we suddenly get a targeted killing that upsets the quiet.”
He says Dagan was a candidate to head the Mossad once before, but then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned by a former head of military intelligence against him.
Giving an account of what he sees as Dagan’s problematic past, Sarna writes: “Dagan is the wily field operative with a bundle of tricks who set up many of the ‘activist units.’ Others called them ‘liquidation units.’”
“The rationale for such units is that they act on the basis of accurate intelligence. People don’t understand what a ‘war on terror’ is all about,” he told Sarna. “Today we are operating against a new kind of terror and the only targets in countering terror are people.”
Sarna recalls that in Lebanon, where very little of his modus operandi has been revealed, Dagan carried a small Scorpion submachine gun and was commander of the South Lebanon “security zone” and afterward of the liaison unit in Lebanon.
“Those were the most exciting posts I held,” Dagan told him. “Lebanon is a place where people don’t believe in the state ­ they believe in the individual. I had several nicknames there, including Abu-Jabal.”
“There were those who called him the ‘King of the Shadows,’ because in Lebanon there were 100 armies and 500 political convictions, and the fog of battle was very thick,” one of his officers there said. “With Dagan, I felt like a demigod. He knew how to find good people and make the best use of their talents. He was a talented bastard and a skillful operator. He hated sycophancy and bore grudges. He knew how to lead people and to divest authority to people who understood the spirit of what had to be done without getting formal orders.”
Sarna concludes with a warning. “This week, people praised Dagan’s courage, his daring and his operational ingenuity. But there were also other voices. A former senior Mossad man, from the organization’s foreign relations branch, described the appointment as a recipe for disaster and said it could destroy the organization’s ties with secret services all over the world.”
“In the prevalent post-Sept. 11 mood,” the Mossad man told Sarna, “Dagan will get a hearing. But the spirit of what he says and his views on targeted killings during lulls worry me. An organization like the Mossad must not get into that frame of mind, because, if it does, it becomes a gang. If Dagan brings his morality to the Mossad, Israel could become a country in which no normal Jew would want to live.”

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