herzliya, israel | On a stormy night in 1950, 5-year-old Holocaust survivor Meir Huberman perched atop the bucking stern of an immigrant ship and prayed to reach Israel’s shore safely. He did.
Now renamed Dagan and toughened by almost a half-century of defending the Jewish state, that son of Russian refugees heads one of the world’s most fearsome secret services: the Mossad.
Evidence is mounting that Dagan has restored the Mossad’s reputation for deadly derring-do — despite the diplomatic risks for Israel.
Since Dagan was made spymaster in 2002 by his old army buddy, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, at least four Arab terrorists have died in foreign operations widely attributed to the Mossad.
Most recently, Hamas military strategist Izzadin Sheikh Khalil was killed in Damascus in a car bombing for which Israeli security sources admitted responsibility — the first time Jerusalem had mounted an assassination in Syria’s capital.
It was an attitude that, to many, seemed warranted after al-Qaida blew up an Israeli-owned hotel and tried to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet in Kenya in November 2002. Sixteen people died in the hotel bombing, but the toll easily could have been hundreds more had the plane been hit. Sharon gave Dagan a new mandate to hunt down Israel’s enemies abroad.
“As someone who is privy to the facts, but is not at liberty to divulge them, I can say this with complete authority: The Mossad under Meir Dagan has undergone a revolution in terms of organization, intelligence and operations,” Ehud Yatom, a member of the Knesset Subcommittee on Secret Services, wrote in the Ma’ariv newspaper. “And he is far from done.”