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charge for over two years, and he saw Vardi as a man he could rely on. The situation was similar with Goren, whom Zamir had handpicked to head up operations in Western Europe. He knew them both well and had tremendous faith in their professional judgment about how best to take advantage of an enormous opportunity. Moreover, responsibility taking and improvisation had always been pillars of the agency’s ethos. So the question of whether they had been authorized to initiate the meeting with Marwan didn’t evencome up. The central concern in this meeting was what the next steps ought to be. The chief of the Mossad led the discussion.
    ZVI ZAMIR WAS born in 1925. Until he joined the Mossad in 1968, his entire adult life had been spent in the military. When he was seventeen, he volunteered for the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine; by the end of the British Mandate he had spent ten months in a detention camp for illegally smuggling Jewish immigrants into Palestine across the Syrian border. During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, at the age of twenty-three, he was chosen to command the 6th Battalion of the Harel Brigade, which was tasked with keeping the route open from the coastal plain to besieged Jerusalem. After the war, he filled a number of senior positions in the newly created Israel Defense Forces, including chief of the training division and commander of the Southern Command. In 1966 he was appointed military attaché in Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries. In 1968, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol surprised him with the request that he replace Meir Amit as chief of the Mossad. The appointment came against the backdrop of Eshkol’s increasing frustration with Amit, who, despite being formally under the direct command of the prime minister, had been showing an increasing loyalty to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, with whom Amit had worked closely in the IDF. Eshkol wanted a Mossad chief who was less politically invested and was referred to Zamir, who was considered more independent and politically impartial.
    When Zamir started out at the Mossad, senior agency officials raised concerns that he had been brought in mainly to pave the way for the appointment of another man, Yosef Yariv, to the same position. Beginning in 1957, Yariv had been commander of the IDF’s Military Intelligence unit 188, which was focused on running operatives deep in enemy territory. In 1963, when Meir Amit,who served as the MI chief, was appointed to simultaneously head up the Mossad, MI’s unit 188 was shifted into the Mossad, and Yariv went with it. When Zamir reached the Mossad in 1968, Yariv was the head of the Caesarea branch, the Mossad’s main operations division that included both unit 188 and another unit headed by the future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Yariv saw himself as a candidate to head up the entire agency; his friendship with IDF chief of staff Chaim Bar-Lev and Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon meant that he had a serious shot at it. But other senior Mossad officials did not think he was right for the job and came to believe that Zamir, an IDF major general and a friend of Bar-Lev and Allon, had been brought in in order to calm the opposition to Yariv and make it easier for him to become a Mossad chief later. Some of them, including Rehaviah Vardi, made it clear that they would leave the Mossad if that happened.
    Zamir moved quickly to dispel the suspicions. As opposed to his predecessors, he did not appoint a deputy, a decision that reflected less a political calculus than his understanding of the job. The main purpose of a deputy, he felt, was to take over if something happened to the director. But as he explained to anyone who asked, the head of the Mossad was not at the front lines and therefore not at serious risk of assassination. So there was no need for a deputy who could complicate his own job by becoming a buffer between the director