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and his operational units.
    Zamir spent much of his first year on the job systematically studying the central areas of the Mossad’s activity. He spent hours going over the dossier of every Mossad operative, held ongoing consultations with Vardi and the heads of Tzomet branches, learned all about how sources were valued, recruited, and handled, their potential maximized, and more. He also went over the files of operatives who had stopped working with the agency and, in at least one case, convinced the people in Tzomet to reengage an agent, resulting in some veryhigh-value intelligence for Israel. Along the way, Zamir learned just how fragile the relationship between a handler and his operative could be, and how crucial was the handler’s ability to recognize and meet the agent’s psychological needs in determining the fate of their relationship. Money was, of course, a central motive for most of the agents who worked for the Mossad, but it was far from being the only one.
    Zamir also ordered a shift in the Mossad’s intelligence-gathering priorities. He wanted the agency to work harder on supporting the operational needs of the IDF. When he was IDF Southern Commander in the early 1960s, he felt that the Mossad had offered him no support whatsoever. Now with the War of Attrition heating up, the agency would dedicate its best efforts to helping the IDF, especially in getting reliable advance warning of attacks and gathering whatever intelligence would help the IDF take timely defensive action. In 1968, when Zamir first took the post, the question of a sneak attack was less urgent because the Arab armies, especially Egypt’s, were still licking their wounds from the Six-Day War. The question became much more acute after the War of Attrition ended in 1970 and Sadat started publicly threatening to restart hostilities. MI estimated that this time the Egyptians wouldn’t make do with a static war of attrition but would instead try to cross the Suez Canal and advance into Sinai.
    A second major change in priorities concerned intelligence gathering from technological sources (Signal Intelligence, or Sigint) rather than just human ones (Human Intelligence, or Humint). From its inception, the Mossad had been created solely as a web of human intelligence sources. Under the direction of Meir Amit, the agency began employing various forms of technological surveillance, such as wiretapping and bugging. Now Zamir decided to take the emphasis on Sigint much further, including the creation of a division called Keshet (“Bow”). Even though this was, in essence, encroaching on areas that until now had been handled exclusively by MI, the close friendship between Zamir, IDF chief of staff Chaim Bar-Lev, and MI chief Aharon Yariv kept the relations among the intelligence branches on a healthy footing.
    Before Zamir’s arrival, successive Mossad chiefs had suffered from complicated relationships with Israel’s prime ministers. Isser Harel was one of David Ben-Gurion’s greatest admirers but he found himself clashing with Ben-Gurion and ultimately resigning his post in the wake of the affair of the German scientists in Egypt in 1963. In the years that followed, relations between Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and Mossad chief Meir Amit were tense as well. The Mossad’s problematic involvement, apparently without Eshkol’s knowledge, in the kidnapping and killing of the leader of the opposition in Morocco, Mehdi Ben Barka, in 1965 made things even more difficult. With the establishment of Ben-Gurion’s Rafi Party as Eshkol’s greatest political rival, and the prime minister’s concern that the Mossad chief was in cahoots with Ben-Gurion, Amit had little choice but to step aside.
    As opposed to his predecessors, Zamir lacked any serious political entanglements. As a former Palmach officer, he did keep close ties to his brothers-in-arms from pre-statehood days, but both in his IDF career and in