Born in Ukraine, Meir Dagan adopted his Hebrew name in 1972, when he was serving as a captain in the Israeli Defense Forces. He rose to the leadership of Mossad, Israel’s vaunted intelligence service, in 2002, and he instituted immediate reforms meant to make the agency an instrument of “actionable intelligence,” meaning that Mossad agents would not react but instead, as spycraft expert Katz writes, do “everything in their power and their bag of dirty tricks to preempt, forewarn, and punish before the fact.” This strike-first policy was controversial, of course, but Dagan enjoyed the full support of then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in creating the IDF’s first counterterrorism unit, infiltrating Gaza and Lebanon. When he rose in rank, with all the wetwork that involved, Dagan kept most of his small but lethal dealings out of sight of government leadership, including the head of A’man, the military intelligence branch, who was “opposed to rogue enterprises across the border that had the potential of enveloping the region in full-scale war.” As Mossad head, Dagan also cultivated strong ties with Vladimir Putin and the heads of numerous Middle Eastern governments, all of whom, Katz writes, would be delighted to see Hamas disappear but couldn’t say so publicly. For his freewheeling ways, Dagan was heartily disliked by Benjamin Netanyahu, who “was jealous that being the gatekeeper of vital aspects of Israel’s national security made Dagan in many ways the most important man in Israel.” Even though Katz believes that Dagan would have approved of the coordinated killing-by-pager campaign of 2024, following Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, the author holds that Dagan “viewed the planned taking of another life as a measure of absolute last resort”—if one often resorted to.
English (US) · 