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Out of the shadows
(Filed: 26/03/2006)

As the head of Mossad, Efraim Halevy presided over some of the most ruthless and controversial decisions in Israeli history. Now retired from the elite intelligence agency, he tells Con Coughlin in Jerusalem about those murky years of spying and assassination - and why he has no regrets

As a boy growing up in war-time London, Efraim Halevy dreamed of becoming a train driver. He would stand on a railway bridge near his home in West Hampstead to watch great steam locomotives shoot past on their way to Scotland.

But his life moved in a very different direction once he decided to emigrate to Israel to participate in the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. After a distinguished career working for Israel's elite Mossad intelligence service, Mr Halevy rose to become the chief of Israeli intelligence, or the "Spymaster of NW6", as his local newspaper, the Ham and High, reported his appointment at the time.

Mr Halevy has presided over some of the most difficult, and controversial, decisions taken in recent Israeli history. It was under his direction that the Israeli army was ordered to lay siege to Yasser Arafat's Muqataa headquarters in the Palestinian town of Ramallah in 2002, forcing the Palestinian leader to spend the rest of his rule as a virtual prisoner in his bombed-out compound until his death two years later.

It was also Mr Halevy who devised the strategy of targeted assassinations in which scores of leaders from Hamas, the radical Palestinian Islamic group, were killed by the Israeli security forces. It was a result of this policy that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the 68-year-old spiritual head of Hamas and a blind, wheelchair-bound quadriplegic, was killed instantly when he took a direct hit from a missile fired from an Israeli helicopter gunship.

But, as with all the other highly controversial policies he implemented during his five-year stewardship of Mossad between 1998 and 2003, Mr Halevy has no regrets about the uncompromising tactics he adopted against his enemies. "This is a wartime situation, and in war you need to take drastic measures to defeat the enemy," says Mr Halevy when I meet him in Jerusalem. He is just about to publish an account of his career in Mossad - called Man in the Shadows - and is keen to set the record straight on his tenure as head of Mossad.

"No, I don't have any regrets about any of the actions that were taken during the time that I was head of Mossad," he says over coffee at the King David Hotel. "The targeted killings were undertaken to weaken the capability of Hamas to carry out operations. The people who were taken out were deeply involved in the command chain of the suicide bomb attacks against Israel. It was a military strategy and it worked."

Mr Halevy's campaign of targeted assassinations of the Hamas leadership, I pointed out, was not dissimilar to the revenge killings that Mossad carried out against the Palestinian Black September movement after the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which is now the subject of Munich, the Hollywood movie directed by Steven Spielberg. "Yes, you could say that they were similar, although the circumstances were somewhat different," concedes Mr Halevy, who has been critical of Spielberg's account of the Munich atrocity and Israel's response to it.

But Mr Halevy is adamant that the tactic of targeted killings is effective, and believes that the assassination campaign that he waged against the Hamas leadership ultimately led to the organisation's decision last summer to implement a temporary ceasefire on its suicide bomb attacks, which have been responsible for the deaths of nearly 1,000 Israelis since the launch of the second intifada in late 2000. "By the time Hamas announced its ceasefire, both sides had reached a level of exhaustion," says Mr Halevy. It was that sense of exhaustion that led Israel to undertake its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last August, an initiative that Mr Halevy personally recommended to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when he stepped down as Mossad chief in September 2003. "I told Sharon then that we should leave Gaza," he recalls.

But while he is pleased that Mr Sharon followed his advice, he is critical that Mr Sharon acted unilaterally, and did not use Israel's willingness to end its 38-year occupation of the Gaza strip to extract concessions from the Palestinians. "In the Middle East, you do not give up something for nothing," says Mr Halevy. "If you do that, the other side takes it as a sign of weakness. We should have gone to the Palestinians and said, 'We are leaving Gaza and parts of the West Bank. What are you going to give us in return?' But we got nothing, and the Palestinians see the withdrawal as a great victory for them."

Nor does Mr Halevy entertain any doubts about the ruthless campaign he waged against Mr Arafat. In his book, Mr Halevy reveals that Mr Sharon wanted to expel Mr Arafat from the West Bank and send him into exile. This was after a suicide bomber killed 19 Israelis celebrating a Passover supper in Netanya in March 2002. Mr Sharon was persuaded that sending Mr Arafat into an exile would turn him into a martyr. A better policy was to reduce Mr Arafat's effectiveness by removing all his attributes of power and confining him to his Ramallah headquarters.

For Mr Halevy, the feud with Mr Arafat was personal. He was particularly incensed at Mr Arafat's behaviour after the murder of Rehavam Ze'evi, the Israeli tourism minister, by Palestinian terrorists at a Jerusalem hotel in October 2001. "Arafat was telling everyone that Mossad had killed Ze'evi so that we could take action against the Palestinians," recalls Mr Halevy.

"Ze'evi was a personal friend of mine, and the suggestion that I had ordered his murder was odious. Arafat was an habitual liar and a compulsive manipulator of information. He was living in a world of his own. But he was also very dangerous. Israel offered him a peace deal [at Camp David in August 2002] that any man in his normal senses would not have refused, but that's what Arafat did."

As head of Mossad, Mr Halevy became used to his organisation being the target of a wide range of fantastical conspiracy theories: that Mossad was responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States to provoke Washington to declare war on the Islamic world; that Saddam Hussein was a Mossad agent; that Mossad killed Mr Arafat by injecting him with poison. Didn't all these wild and far-fetched conspiracy theories make him feel like some Middle Eastern Dr Evil? "You mean Frankenstein, more like," Mr Halevy responds with a chuckle. "But seriously, intelligence agencies spend just as much time seeking peaceful solutions to conflicts as anything else."

During the 1990s, when he was Mossad's deputy director, Mr Halevy played a pivotal role in negotiating Israel's historic peace treaty with Jordan. "Often you can only achieve major breakthroughs like this by direct, secret negotiations," he explains. "The only way to make peace with Jordan was through secret negotiations. Even the United States did not know what was going on until I told them, and that was only after the deal had been done."

Certainly, Mr Halevy's Mossad career is a world away from the happy childhood he enjoyed in north London. He was briefly evacuated to Berkhamsted during the war, and then attended Hackney Downs School where one of his contemporaries was Harold Pinter, the Left-wing writer, who is also Jewish. "He was three years older than me, so I didn't really know him," recalls Mr Halevy. "But I am sure he would not look at all kindly at the likes of me and my line of work."

Lord Levy, who doubles as Tony Blair's Middle East troubleshooter when not raising Labour Party loans, attended the school, and Mr Halevy has met him several times in Israel. Lord Levy tours the Middle East to keep Mr Blair up to date on developments, although Mr Halevy is critical of Mr Blair's support for the so-called Road Map for a lasting peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. "Tony Blair has a realistic view of the position of Israel and he has the interests of Israel at heart. But the Road Map is damaging to Israel's interests."

According to Mr Halevy, President George W Bush unveiled the Road Map on the eve of the Iraq War in 2003 to help Mr Blair defeat the growing backbench revolt among Labour MPs, which it succeeded in doing. But, in doing so, the White House formulated a policy that Mr Halevy believes is "ill-judged and ill considered".

He complains that the Road Map takes ultimate responsibility for a peace deal out of Israel's hands, and that it requires Israel and the Palestinians to move directly to a final peace treaty, whereas the Israelis would prefer an interim agreement so that the two sides can get used to the idea of co-existence. "After so many decades of hatred and bloodshed, you can't expect the sides to live in perfect harmony immediately."

But after Hamas's surprise victory in last January's Palestinian elections, the prospect of meaningful progress being made in the peace process looks remote. "Hamas has to reach an accommodation with Israel," he says. "We cannot negotiate with them if they do not recognise Israel."

Mr Halevy believes that the new Hamas leadership that has replaced Sheikh Yassin and the other victims of Israel's assassination campaign is more realistic about how much can be achieved through terrorism, although he is not convinced that they are ready to sign a permanent ceasefire. And he has an ominous warning for the current leadership if they do not renounce violence. "If Hamas fails to agree to a permanent ceasefire, we will have to create another leadership, just as we did before with Sheikh Yassin."
# Man in the Shadows by Efraim Halevy (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) is available for £16.99 (rrp £18.99) + £1.25 p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4115 or click here.
# Con Coughlin is the Defence and Security Editor of The Daily Telegraph. His new book, American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on Terror, is published by Politico's next month.