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PERSON FILE · 1912 – 18 February 2003

Isser Harel

First head of Israel's Shin Bet and director of the Mossad from 1952 to 1963, the only man to command both services at once. He ran the 1960 capture of Adolf Eichmann and resigned in a dispute with Ben-Gurion.

1912–2003

3 min read · 6 sources, 2 primary

Portrait: Isser Harel, head of the Mossad 1952–1963, photographed as a Knesset member in 1969. Israeli GPO photographer. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Isser Harel was short, intensely suspicious and a meticulous keeper of index cards, and for eleven years he controlled both of Israel's civilian secret services. No one before or since has held that combined authority. His colleagues called him "Isser the Small," to tell him apart from the taller Isser Be'eri of military intelligence1,4.

From Vitebsk to the Shai

He was born Isser Halperin in Vitebsk, in the Russian Empire, in 1912; the exact date was recorded in a family Talmud that was later lost. After the revolution confiscated the family's vinegar business they moved to Latvia, and in 1930 he reached Mandatory Palestine on papers that made him a year older than he was. He worked in the orange groves and on a kibbutz, then in packing and irrigation4,1.

In 1942 he joined the Haganah and its intelligence branch, the Shai, and took the Hebrew surname Harel. By 1944 he was in the Shai's Tel Aviv headquarters, running its "Jewish department," which watched the rival underground groups Irgun and Lehi and the communists1,4.

Running two services

When Israel became independent in 1948, Harel became the first head of the Shin Bet, the internal security service. In September 1952 Ben-Gurion moved him to the Mossad, founded the year before by Reuven Shiloah, and let him keep authority over the Shin Bet as well. From 1957 he carried the title memuneh, "the one in charge," as chairman of the committee of service chiefs1,4,2.

His record at home was mixed. The Shin Bet caught genuine Soviet agents, most damagingly Israel Beer, a military commentator with access to the defense establishment, in 1961. It also bugged the offices of the left-wing Mapam party in 1953, an operation discovered when party members caught the technicians in the act1,4.

Abroad, Harel built liaison with the CIA. The Guardian's obituary credits his friendship with the agency's counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, and records his claim that Israel was first to pass the Americans the full text of Khrushchev's 1956 "secret speech." He also pursued alliances with non-Arab states on Israel's periphery, including Iran and Turkey1.

He was skeptical early of the Israeli agent at the center of the Lavon affair, Avri Elad, and in 1980 published evidence that Elad had been turned by the Egyptians before the 1954 operation6.

Eichmann

Harel's best-known operation was the capture of Adolf Eichmann. He took the West German tip about a man called Klement in Buenos Aires, sent investigators to confirm it, and in May 1960 flew to Argentina to run the operation himself from a series of cafés. Eichmann was seized on 11 May and flown to Israel on 20 May5,1.

The field commander, Rafi Eitan, later wrote that Harel played little hands-on part and put too many officers in the field; a CIA reviewer of Eitan's memoir notes that Eitan nonetheless respected what Harel had built3. Harel told the story himself in The House on Garibaldi Street (1975)1,4.

The German scientists and the fall

In 1962 Harel turned on German engineers building rockets for Egypt. Mossad agents sent threatening letters, and some scientists were attacked. Ben-Gurion, who valued the new relationship with West Germany, ordered the campaign scaled back after two Israeli operatives were arrested in Switzerland in 1963. Harel refused to accept the decision and resigned in March 1963. Meir Amit, head of military intelligence, replaced him1,4.

He served briefly as an intelligence adviser to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol from 1965 to 1966, a post that a 1979 CIA survey of Israeli intelligence noted was left unfilled when he quit after internal disputes2,4. He was elected to the Knesset in 1969 for Ben-Gurion's State List and served one term, then wrote books on Soviet espionage, the Lavon affair and his own operations1,4.

Harel died on 18 February 20031.

Key dates

  1. 1930 Emigrates to Mandatory Palestine on forged papers.
  2. 1948 Becomes the first head of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service.
  3. September 1952 Appointed director of the Mossad, keeping authority over the Shin Bet.
  4. 11 May 1960 Directs the seizure of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires.
  5. 1961 The Shin Bet exposes Israel Beer, an adviser close to the defense establishment, as a Soviet agent.
  6. March 1963 Resigns after Ben-Gurion curbs his campaign against German rocket scientists in Egypt.
  7. 1969 Elected to the Knesset for the State List.
  8. 18 February 2003 Dies aged about 91.

Sources

  1. Other Isser Harel (obituary), The Guardian (2003-02-20).
  2. CIA Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services (March 1979), Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Operations, Counterintelligence Staff (via National Security Archive) (1979-03).
  3. CIA Review: Capturing Eichmann: The Memoir of a Mossad Spymaster (Studies in Intelligence 67, no. 1), Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence (2023-03).
  4. Wikipedia Isser Harel, Wikipedia.
  5. Wikipedia Capture of Adolf Eichmann, Wikipedia.
  6. Wikipedia Lavon affair, Wikipedia.
  7. Wikipedia English Wikipedia article (used for cross-checking).

Elsewhere in the files

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Israel · 1949 Mossad Israel's foreign intelligence and covert action service, founded in 1949 and answerable only to the prime minister. Its early record runs from the capture of Eichmann to the Lillehammer killing of an innocent man. September 1957 – 22 May 1960 The capture of Adolf Eichmann In May 1960 a Mossad team led by Isser Harel seized Adolf Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street, held him for nine days and flew him to Israel, where he was tried and hanged for his part in the Holocaust. 2 July 1954 – 31 January 1955 The Lavon affair In 1954 Israeli military intelligence had Egyptian Jews firebomb Egyptian and American buildings to keep British troops in Egypt. Two were hanged, and the fight over who gave the order shook Israel for years. 1924–1965 Eli Cohen Egyptian-born Israeli agent who lived in Damascus from 1962 as a returning émigré businessman, cultivated Syria's Ba'athist elite, and was caught at his transmitter in January 1965 and publicly hanged. 1917–1987 James Jesus Angleton CIA counterintelligence chief from 1954 to 1974. A poetry editor turned molehunter, he ran the Agency's mail-opening program, distrusted Soviet defectors and was forced out after the revelations of 1974.