Israeli Mossad Chief, Hailed for Peace With Jordan, Passes
Former Mossad head Shabtai Shavit, who led the Israeli intelligence agency through some of the most significant events of the 1990s, died on Tuesday while on a vacation with his wife in Sicily. He was 84.
No official statement gave a cause of death, but news reports said he died of a heart attack.
Mossad chief David Barnea and senior politicians issued statements expressing their condolences to Shavit’s family and praising him and his work.
“Shabtai Shavit, the seventh head of the Mossad, was a pillar of the world of operations, intelligence, and strategic security of the State of Israel,” Barnea said.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Shavit had been one of “the best sons of the State of Israel” and had always been “measured, cool-headed, and balanced.”
National Unity party leader Benny Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff, said, “The State of Israel owes him a great debt, part of which will never be told.”
Born in Nesher, in the Haifa district, in pre-state Israel in 1939, Shavit served in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit and obtained a degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later a master’s degree from Harvard University. He joined the Mossad in 1964 and served as an intelligence-gathering officer in Iran, and later carried out other operational and command roles.
Shavit became the agency’s deputy director between 1986 and 1989, and then its director general from 1989 to 1996. His tenure covered numerous dramatic events, including the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians and the 1994 peace deal between Israel and Jordan, which he was credited with helping to achieve.
“During his tenure as head of the Mossad, Shavit worked to expand and strengthen the secret relations between the Mossad and organizations and countries in the regional and global arena, chief among them his contribution to the establishment of the peace agreement signed between Israel and Jordan,” the agency said in a statement.
Shavit also guided Israeli operations on foreign soil during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1991 Gulf War. During his tenure, other significant events included the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the mass-casualty bombings in Buenos Aires, attributed to Hizbullah, of the Israeli Embassy in 1992 and the AMIA Jewish center in 1994, and various targeted assassinations of terrorist operatives.
After his retirement from the Mossad, Shavit spent five years as CEO of the Maccabi Health Services Group, continued to advise the government on security matters, and wrote a number of newspaper columns.
In recent years, he emerged as a staunch critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, breaking with Netanyahu on how to respond to Iran’s nuclear program and saying Israel could not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons but could deter it from using them.
“Netanyahu is endangering the security of Israel,” he famously said in 2015.
“Mr. Netanyahu, you are at the head of the pyramid and you cannot throw blame on others. It is not others who are responsible for the failure against Hamas and the Iranian threat, you have turned the United States into an enemy,” he told a press conference.
In 2020, Shavit said that Netanyahu’s decision-making appeared to be linked to his ongoing trial on corruption charges.
“I’m saying something terrible. I’m saying our prime minister is not statesmanlike. He is not making decisions as a statesman,” he said.
Earlier this year, Shavit joined several hundred former Mossad employees in signing a statement opposing the government’s controversial judicial reform plans, saying they held Netanyahu “directly responsible for the serious harm” that the proposal could inflict on Israel’s national security.
