Meir Dagan
Based on Wikipedia: Meir Dagan
The Photograph on the Wall
In the private office of Israel's most powerful spy, a single photograph hung on the wall. It showed an elderly Jewish man kneeling in the dirt, Nazi soldiers standing over him, moments before his execution. The man in the photograph was Ber Erlich Sloshny. The spy who kept this image as a daily reminder was his grandson, Meir Dagan, Director of the Mossad.
This photograph tells you everything you need to know about what drove one of the most controversial and effective intelligence chiefs in modern history.
Born Between Worlds
Meir Dagan entered the world in 1945 on a train rumbling through the chaos of wartime Europe. His Polish Jewish parents were fleeing westward, caught between the collapsing Nazi regime and the advancing Soviet forces. The train was somewhere near Kherson, a city that would later become famous for entirely different reasons during Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The family survived the Holocaust. Many of their relatives did not.
In 1950, when Meir was five years old, his family joined the great wave of Jewish migration to the newly established State of Israel. They traveled by cattle ship—the cheapest passage available to desperate refugees. As the ship approached the Israeli coast, a violent storm threatened to sink them. Young Meir stood at the stern, praying to reach the shore.
He made it. And he would spend the rest of his life ensuring that the Jewish state would never again be caught vulnerable.
The family settled first in an immigrant absorption camp in Lod, a city near Tel Aviv's airport, before moving to Bat Yam, a working-class coastal town. His parents opened a laundry business. It was a humble beginning for a man who would one day command one of the world's most feared intelligence agencies.
The Making of a Warrior
Israel's compulsory military service takes most young people at eighteen. Dagan was conscripted in 1963, and the military quickly identified his potential. He was considered for Sayeret Matkal, the elite special forces unit that would later produce several Israeli prime ministers, including Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu.
But Dagan ended up in the Paratroopers Brigade instead. It hardly mattered. War would find him regardless of which unit he served.
In 1967, just a year after completing his compulsory service, Dagan was called up as a reservist. The Six-Day War had begun. Egypt, Syria, and Jordan had massed their armies on Israel's borders, and the tiny nation faced what many feared would be its destruction. Dagan commanded a paratrooper platoon on the Sinai front as Israel launched its preemptive strike that would reshape the Middle East.
The war lasted six days. Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. The map of the region was permanently altered.
The Wolf Hunter of Gaza
Three years later, in 1970, Dagan caught the attention of a man who would become one of the most consequential—and controversial—figures in Israeli history: Ariel Sharon.
Sharon, then a general, was facing a serious problem. Palestinian militants had established a network of terrorism in the Gaza Strip, launching attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers. The conventional military couldn't root them out. Sharon needed someone willing to fight in the shadows.
He chose Dagan to command a new unit called Sayeret Rimon. The unit's mission was straightforward, if brutal: hunt down suspected terrorists in Gaza and eliminate them. Sharon later described Dagan's specialty with characteristic bluntness, saying he was skilled at "separating an Arab from his head."
This was the era before suicide bombings became common, before the security barrier, before the complex web of checkpoints that would later define life in the occupied territories. It was a time of direct, violent confrontation.
In 1971, Dagan received Israel's Medal of Courage for an act of extraordinary bravery. He had tackled a wanted terrorist who was holding a live grenade—a decision that could have killed him instantly. It didn't. The grenade didn't explode, or Dagan moved fast enough, or perhaps he was simply lucky. In any case, he survived to fight many more battles.
Three Wars, Thirty Years
The 1973 Yom Kippur War found Dagan again on the Sinai front. This time, Israel was caught by surprise. Egypt and Syria attacked on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, when much of the Israeli military was on leave. The early days were catastrophic. Israeli forces were pushed back, suffering heavy casualties.
But the tide turned. Dagan participated in one of the war's decisive moments: the Israeli crossing of the Suez Canal into Egypt proper. This bold counterattack encircled the Egyptian Third Army and brought the war to a conclusion favorable to Israel, though at an enormous cost in lives on all sides.
Nine years later, in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. The stated goal was to push back the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had been launching attacks on northern Israel. Dagan commanded the Barak Armored Brigade and was among the first Israeli commanders to enter Beirut.
The Lebanon War would become one of the most controversial in Israeli history. What was planned as a limited operation expanded into a full-scale invasion. Israeli forces became entangled in Lebanon's complex civil war. The Sabra and Shatila massacre—in which Christian Lebanese militiamen, allies of Israel, slaughtered Palestinian refugees while Israeli forces controlled the area—created international outrage and led to an Israeli commission of inquiry that found Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore "personal responsibility."
Dagan continued rising through the ranks despite, or perhaps because of, the controversies that seemed to follow the conflicts he served in. By the 1990s, he held high-level positions in the Israel Defense Forces command structure. He retired in 1995 as a Major General, after thirty-two years in uniform.
Into the Shadows
Retirement from the military did not mean retirement from the world of security. Dagan became a counterterrorism adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term in office in the late 1990s. When Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister in 2001, Dagan initially served as National Security Adviser.
Then came the appointment that would define his legacy.
In August 2002, Sharon made Dagan the Director of the Mossad, Israel's legendary intelligence agency. The Mossad—the name is Hebrew for "the Institute"—is responsible for intelligence collection, covert operations, and counterterrorism activities outside Israel's borders. It's roughly equivalent to the American Central Intelligence Agency combined with parts of the Special Activities Division, but with a reputation for more direct action.
The timing was significant. The Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising that had begun in 2000, was at its bloodiest. Suicide bombings in Israeli cities had become almost routine. And in the background, Iran was accelerating its nuclear program.
Dagan transformed the organization.
Revolution at the Institute
When Dagan took over, the Mossad had developed a reputation for caution. Previous directors had emphasized intelligence gathering and analysis over direct action. Dagan reversed this approach dramatically.
Ehud Yatom, a member of the Knesset Subcommittee on Secret Services—one of the few people authorized to know what the Mossad was actually doing—later stated: "As someone who is privy to the facts but not at liberty to divulge them, I can say this with complete authority. The Mossad under Meir Dagan has undergone a revolution in terms of organization, intelligence and operations."
Reports indicated that Dagan diverted much of the agency's annual budget—estimated at around three hundred fifty million dollars—away from traditional intelligence gathering and toward what were delicately termed "field operations" and "special tasks."
In plain language, this meant targeted killings.
Israel exists in a peculiar legal situation regarding such operations. The country has no death penalty for ordinary crimes—a deliberate choice made by a nation founded by Holocaust survivors. Yet it permits its intelligence services to target and kill individuals deemed threats to national security, provided they are outside Israeli territory. This isn't a secret; it's acknowledged policy, though specific operations are never officially confirmed.
As Mossad veteran Gad Shimron explained: "Israel is in the paradoxical situation of not having a death penalty but allowing itself to target Arab terrorists outside its borders with almost complete impunity. Meir Dagan fully subscribes to this thinking, unlike some of his predecessors."
By November 2004, just two years into Dagan's tenure, at least four foreign terrorists had been killed in suspected Mossad operations, and three major terrorist attacks planned against Israeli civilians abroad had been foiled.
The Iran Obsession
While counterterrorism operations continued, Dagan's Mossad increasingly focused on what he saw as the existential threat: Iran's nuclear program.
Iran had been working on nuclear capabilities since the 1950s, initially with American support under the Shah. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the program continued in secret. By the 2000s, Western intelligence agencies believed Iran was working toward the capability to build nuclear weapons, though the exact state of the program remained—and remains—a subject of intense debate.
For Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran represented an intolerable danger. Iranian leaders had repeatedly called for Israel's destruction. The country funded and armed Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. A nuclear umbrella would make Iran's regional aggression far more dangerous.
Under Dagan's leadership, the Mossad reportedly conducted a sustained campaign of sabotage against Iran's nuclear program. Scientists involved in the program were assassinated. Computer viruses—most famously Stuxnet, developed jointly with the United States—destroyed centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Supply chains were disrupted. The program was delayed by years.
None of this was ever officially acknowledged. But the pattern was clear to anyone paying attention.
The Longest Tenure
Dagan was reconfirmed as Mossad director repeatedly. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert extended his term in 2007 and again in 2008. When Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, he kept Dagan on through 2010.
This longevity was remarkable. Intelligence chiefs typically serve relatively short terms to prevent them from accumulating too much power. Dagan served for eight years, making him one of the longest-serving directors in the agency's history.
But by 2010, the relationship with Netanyahu had soured. Reports emerged that Netanyahu had denied Dagan's request for another year in the position. The Prime Minister's office quickly denied this, but in November 2010, Tamir Pardo was announced as Dagan's replacement.
Dagan was out. But he was not silent.
The Public Break
What happened next shocked Israeli politics.
Dagan, the quintessential man of secrets, began speaking publicly. His target: Benjamin Netanyahu's apparent eagerness to launch a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
At a conference in May 2011, Dagan called the idea of an Israeli military attack on Iran "stupid." This was extraordinary. Former intelligence chiefs in Israel typically maintain discretion about policy disagreements. Dagan threw that tradition aside.
He was asked to return his diplomatic passport before its expiry date—a pointed rebuke.
Dagan didn't stop. In March 2012, he gave an interview to Lesley Stahl of CBS News' 60 Minutes program, one of the most-watched news programs in America. He called an Israeli attack on Iran before other options were exhausted "the stupidest idea." He went further, describing the Iranian regime as "very rational."
This last point was crucial. The argument for military action against Iran rested partly on the premise that Iran's leaders were irrational—that they might use nuclear weapons even knowing it would result in their own destruction. Dagan, who had spent eight years studying Iran more closely than almost anyone else in the world, was saying this premise was wrong.
"A rational regime," he insisted, would respond to incentives and deterrence, just as other nuclear powers had during the Cold War.
The former spy was now a public advocate for diplomacy over war.
The Painter and the Vegetarian
Throughout his career in violence, Dagan maintained an unexpected private life. He was a vegetarian—unusual for a man whose profession involved so much death. He was an amateur painter who had studied painting and sculpture at Tel Aviv University. He was married to a woman named Bina, and they had three children.
These details seem almost jarring against the backdrop of his professional life. How does a man who orders assassinations come home to paint landscapes? How does someone who directed the killing of terrorists across multiple continents maintain a philosophy of not eating animals?
Perhaps these weren't contradictions at all. Perhaps they were how he maintained his humanity while doing what he believed was necessary to protect his people. Or perhaps they simply remind us that people are complicated, that those who do terrible things in war can also appreciate beauty and hold principled positions on seemingly unrelated matters.
The Final Battle
In 2012, Dagan was diagnosed with liver cancer. He began chemotherapy, but the cancer spread. His liver began to fail.
Israeli medical criteria at the time prohibited liver transplants for patients over sixty-five. Dagan was sixty-seven. So the man who had spent his career operating outside Israel's borders went abroad one more time—this time to save his own life rather than to take others'.
He flew to Belarus, of all places, where a French-Jewish surgeon named Daniel Azoulay—considered one of the world's leading liver transplant specialists—performed the operation. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman helped arrange the logistics.
The transplant was successful. Dagan returned to Israel in October 2012 and was immediately hospitalized for recovery. He was accompanied throughout his ordeal by Rabbi Avraham Elimelech Firer, with whom he developed a close relationship. Later, Dagan reciprocated by helping Firer raise funds for a new rehabilitation center.
Another unexpected detail: the feared spymaster and the rabbi, bonding over illness and recovery.
Black Cube and After
After recovering from his transplant, Dagan kept busy. He served as director of the Israel Port Authority. He was appointed chairman of Gulliver Energy Ltd., a company that announced plans to mine uranium near the Dead Sea and search for gold near Eilat.
Most intriguingly, he served as honorary president of Black Cube, a private intelligence agency staffed largely by former Mossad officers. Black Cube would later become internationally notorious for its work on behalf of Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer who hired the firm to investigate women who had accused him of sexual assault. This was after Dagan's death, but the connection illuminates the shadowy world where former intelligence officers operate after leaving government service.
Dagan received Israel's Haim Herzog Award in April 2011 for his "unique contribution to the State of Israel." A month later, he won the Moskovitz Award for Zionism.
The End
Despite the transplant, the cancer remained in his body. On March 17, 2016, Meir Dagan died at the age of seventy-one.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin eulogized him: "Meir was one of the greatest of the brave, creative and devout warriors that the Jewish people ever had. His devotion to the State of Israel was absolute."
Prime Minister Netanyahu, despite their public falling out, acknowledged his contributions: "In his eight years as the head of the Mossad, he led the organization in daring, pioneering and groundbreaking operations. A great warrior has died."
Legacy of Contradictions
Meir Dagan's life embodied the contradictions of Israel itself. A Holocaust refugee who became a killer. A vegetarian who ordered assassinations. A painter who studied at university while leading one of the world's most aggressive intelligence services. A loyalist who publicly broke with his prime minister over matters of war and peace.
His career raises uncomfortable questions that have no easy answers. When is violence justified? How far should a state go to protect its citizens? Can someone who does terrible things still be called a good person? Is there a meaningful difference between terrorism and counterterrorism when both involve killing people?
Dagan would likely have had clear answers to these questions. The photograph of his grandfather, kneeling before his Nazi executioners, provided all the justification he needed. Never again, the picture said. Whatever it takes.
Whether that philosophy made the world safer or more dangerous, whether it protected Israel or created new enemies, whether the methods were justified by the results—these questions remain contested long after his death.
What's certain is that the boy who prayed on the storm-tossed ship approaching Israel's shores in 1950 grew up to shape his adopted country's security in ways that will be felt for generations. For better or worse, the world that Meir Dagan helped create is the one we still live in today.