Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (22 page)

Though the relationship between the two men would eventually improve, at this early stage it remained awkward. Rabin had deliberated for months between Gillon and Gideon Ezra for the position of Shabak chief. Ezra had come from the Arab Affairs Department—it had been his idea to check car rental companies that led Shabak to Wachsman’s captors. In a way, the choice between them mirrored the broader questions facing Israel: Was it genuinely ending its rule over the Palestinians or merely repositioning its occupation? Did domestic threats now require as much attention as external ones? Ezra had been considered extremely effective at antiterrorism but the agency’s
new roles included coordinating with former enemies in the West Bank and Gaza. Rabin wasn’t sure Ezra could make the transition. Still, terrorism had not subsided. On the contrary, it had mutated into something deadlier and more fanatical. So torn was Rabin that he offered the job to a third candidate, navy chief Ami Ayalon. When Ayalon turned it down, Gillon finally got the call. But he entered the job with the dispiriting knowledge that he wasn’t Rabin’s only candidate—or even his preferred one.

The entire debate, of course, was concealed from the public. Shabak’s culture was so secretive, it kept the very identity of the man who ran the agency hidden. The Israeli press referred to Gillon only by the first initial of his first name—Kaf, in Hebrew. Still, somehow the settlers knew his résumé and complained about his appointment.

The matter of body armor was on Amir’s mind as well: he wondered whether Rabin would be wearing a vest when he finally caught up to the prime minister. Though Amir now regarded his plan as a suicide mission, he still feared failing—and dying for nothing. Over the spring semester, he and his brother went to a shooting range at an isolated beach several times to test bullets Hagai had modified to make them armor-piercing. He’d learned the technique from a book about guns and ammunition. In his shed behind the house in Herzliya, Hagai had drilled into the top of a bullet and pressed a small steel pellet into the groove he’d created. The extra weight would give the projectile more force. Over the course of several weeks, he made some forty of these bullets and gave half to his brother.

As part of the experiment, the brothers shot both hollow points and modified rounds at a thick aluminum plate Hagai had attached to a large telephone book—the equivalent of the American Yellow Pages. The plate stopped the hollow points. But with Hagai’s rounds, the steel pellet pierced the aluminum and tunneled well into the phone book. After additional modifications, Hagai was satisfied that his homemade ammunition would penetrate a vest. From that point on, Amir kept several stacked in his magazine, alongside the regular casings and the hollow points. With the July deadline drawing near, he felt an almost constant restlessness, a compulsion to put himself close to the prime minister.

In April, Amir spotted an opportunity. At the end of the weeklong Passover holiday, leaders of the Moroccan Jewish community would hold a banquet in Jerusalem to mark the end of the ban on eating
chametz
, or bread products—a Maghreb tradition known as Mimouna. Rabin would be there. In Israel’s ethnically charged political climate, the Moroccans were a rising force, a group politicians regularly courted.

The event at the Nof Yerushalayim banquet hall fell on a Saturday night, April 22. Amir waited until after sunset, then drove to Jerusalem in Hagai’s Volkswagen. He planned to talk his way in and sit as close to Rabin as possible. This would be his opportunity to reprise the wedding-hall encounter eighteen months earlier, when Amir could have killed Rabin but hesitated. But after a long wait at the entrance, organizers turned him away. The hall, perched on a hill overlooking the neighborhood of Bayit VeGan, could accommodate no more than twelve hundred people. Only ticket holders would get past the door.

Outside, Amir sized up his options. The banquet hall had two stories, its façade made almost entirely of glass. Rabin’s Cadillac stood on the street abutting the entrance. Amir contemplated waiting near the car, hoping he could spot Rabin through the glass and charge at him when the prime minister emerged. But bodyguards congregated around the Cadillac and more security men sat with Rabin inside the hall. The protection procedures had clearly changed since the wedding. Amir recalled thinking at that early point, months after the Oslo signing, that he would regret not seizing the opportunity. And here he was, awash in regret. He spent one more minute considering whether he could force his way into the hall. But the lack of opportunity felt like a divine signal. “If God wants a person to commit an act, He lets him commit the act.”

Amir slipped into the Volkswagen and drove back to Herzliya.

By the following month, Kalo at the Jewish Affairs Department had decided to sound another alarm over the possibility of a political murder. The prospect of a broader pullback in the West Bank had created more agitation in the settlements. YESHA Council rabbis were now drafting a new ruling calling on soldiers to refuse to evacuate
army bases, an even more galling challenge to the sovereignty of the elected government than their effort to impede the dismantling of Tel Rumeida a year earlier. In early June, Kalo issued a “strategic warning” to agency officers and law-enforcement officials effectively saying that a Jewish assassin was out there, searching for an opportunity. To Kalo, the document reflected the increasingly dire picture his informants had been painting of radical settlers desperate to halt what they saw as a sacrilege against God. Intelligence analysts measured extremists in terms of their propensity for violence. Few were more dangerous than the religiously aggrieved.

But to others in the agency, it was one more intelligence assessment among many, one more document to read and file away. Analysts were paid to provide worst-case scenarios. Sometimes their reports pointed to real dangers and sometimes to what Israelis called
kisui tachat
, the ass-covering common to bureaucrats everywhere.

Kalo was certainly doing effective intelligence work—the kind he’d been trained to do against Palestinians. He had figured out that someone might try to kill Rabin and he had an informant, Avishai Raviv, watching the guy who was actually plotting murder. But the two ends weren’t meeting. In part, it was Raviv’s faulty estimation of Amir as nothing but a blowhard. But the agency itself had a too-narrow mental picture of the assassin based on its experience with Jewish terrorism. He would come from one of the hardcore settlements, as did Goldstein and members of the Jewish Underground. And his pedigree would be national religious, not ultra-Orthodox. The law student from Herzliya did not register as a threat.

In June 1995, a piece of information came in that should have helped the agency connect the dots.

Amir had continued bragging to people about his thwarted plot to kill Rabin at Yad Vashem, even five months after the event. One of them was Hila Frank, a twenty-three-year-old master’s student in Bar-Ilan’s history department. Frank had met Amir at one of the protests on campus and helped him organize the settlement weekends. She thought of him as a committed activist, smart and friendly, more radical than she was but certainly not a potential killer. Now, in the hallway of a building on campus, she stopped to talk to him about
Rabin. Alongside the things she’d heard him say before—that
din rodef
applied to the prime minister and he needed to be killed—he added the fact that he’d said
vidui
on the morning of the protest at Yad Vashem. The detail caught her attention. Religious Jews don’t say the confessional prayer unless they really believe they’re going to die.

Frank considered going to the police. If Amir was serious, the authorities needed to know. But if he said it just to impress her—he clearly liked flirting with women—she would land him in trouble over nothing. She shared the story with her boyfriend, Shlomi Halevy. A philosophy student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Halevy had served in an army intelligence unit and still did stints there as a reservist. He had also studied at Bar-Ilan before transferring to Jerusalem and knew Amir from the
kolel
. As she recounted the details, Halevy shot her a skeptical look. Lots of people on the religious right were wishing aloud that Rabin would die. “He didn’t think it was a real threat,” Frank would recall later.

Still, the two of them kept coming back to the
vidui
, a detail that seemed to give the story more credibility. Amir had a gun; everyone knew that. And there was an intensity to his anger at the government that set him apart. Could he be the kind of braggart who also followed through on his threats? Halevy proposed a compromise. He would convey some of the information to his commanding officer in the intelligence unit without naming Amir. On his own later, Halevy prepared his story. He would say that he overheard two young men talking in a public bathroom at the Tel Aviv central bus station, among the most teeming spots in the city. In their conversation, he would recount to his officer, one of the young men claimed to know a person who planned to kill Rabin and had already said the
vidui
. Halevy would claim no names were mentioned but that the young man described the would-be assassin as a short Yemeni guy with curly hair.

If Halevy had intended to test the efficiency of the separate intelligence agencies in Israel at sharing information, the bureaucracy scored well. After hearing the story, his officer wrote a report and sent it to Shabak, where it made its way to the Jewish Affairs Department. But officers in the department—the people more keenly attuned than
anyone in the country to the possibility of a political assassination—found it unremarkable. The details were vague and there was no reason to believe the source had more to tell. “It didn’t raise any red flags because this was a guy from inside the intelligence community. If he was a guy from Kiryat Arba, we would have interrogated him right away,” Kalo would say later. “There was a lot of intelligence noise. This was one more item.” Instead of summoning Halevy to Shabak for questioning, the agency asked the police to handle it.

At Jerusalem’s police headquarters, Halevy stuck to his story, claiming he sat in one of the stalls while the two young men spoke to each other over the urinal. To the two investigators in the room, it should have seemed improbable. Witnesses who claimed to have overheard bits of information in random circumstances were often hiding something, so often that Israeli security officials had a name for their stories. They called them
yediot halon
, roughly translated as “under-the-window tales,” as in: I was standing under a window when I heard someone above me say something incriminating. In real life, assassination plans are not overheard in public bathrooms. But instead of pressing further, the investigators made the mistake of assuming an intelligence officer would not withhold information. They took down Halevy’s story and released him after a friendly exchange. Halevy told Frank later that he would have named Amir had police pressured him even slightly.

Shabak interrogators would surely have pressed harder—they were known to be thorough. But Kalo’s department had waived the opportunity to have its own men sit with Halevy. Still, even with that misstep, it now had a pertinent bit of information. A short Yemeni guy with curly hair planned to kill the prime minister and had already said the
vidui
. Finding him might have been just a matter of circulating the tip among agency informants along with a question—does this description match anyone you know? The profile lacked the specificity required for tracing a suspect from a population of 5.5 million. But right-wing extremists numbered no more than a few thousand, and many of them operated under the gaze of Shabak informants. Avishai Raviv knew a short Yemeni guy with curly hair. By now, that guy had endeavored twice to kill the prime minister.

SOMEHOW, THE JEWISH
Affairs Department saw no way to make use of the information. It did, however, relay the report to Dignitary Protection, the unit within Shabak responsible for guarding the prime minister and other VIPs. If Arab Affairs occupied the top rung on the agency ladder, the protection unit lingered at the bottom. Its senior officers had no role in intelligence gathering—the agency’s core function—and met with the head of Shabak on average only once every two years. Guarding dignitaries at their offices and in their homes, as they made their way from one public event to another, involved complicated planning. But to outsiders it could seem like mere muscle work. It helped little that recruits often resembled nightclub bouncers, with gorged biceps and wraparound glasses. In Shabak’s early years, the department had been known as the Escort Unit, a name some in the agency’s other branches still invoked with a sneer.

Several people in the unit read the report, including Dror Mor, the officer in charge of Rabin’s security detail. Though his job entailed more planning than actual guarding, Mor had served as a regular on Rabin’s detail in the 1980s, picking him up from his home on Rav Ashi at five in the morning on many days and staying with him until midnight. With all those hours together—more than Rabin spent with his closest advisers or even family members on a given day—Mor came to know him intimately. How this man who had been a public figure for most of his life remained so painfully shy baffled him. Rabin seemed to relish the interaction with soldiers at dusty military bases while dreading the small talk at dinners and cocktail parties—and the attire as well. When Mor came to pick him up one evening in a jacket and tie for a formal event, Rabin groused softly. “If you’re wearing one, I’m going to have to wear one,” he said, and retreated to the bedroom to change.

Mor found the detail about the short Yemeni guy determined to kill Rabin noteworthy. For decades, the protection unit was certain of only one thing when it came to assassination scenarios: the shooter
would be an Arab. But Mor and others knew that assumption no longer applied. After Oslo, the unit had introduced a new drill for coping with right-wing protests at events attended by Rabin. Known as
keren zavit
(translated roughly as “secluded corner”), the drill specifically factored the possibility of Jews perpetrating violence at or around Rabin. “We took it into consideration; we understood it could happen,” Mor recalled later. Halevy’s statement to police seemed to substantiate the threat. Mor conveyed the vague profile to the rest of the detail. At a meeting sometime later, he asked members of the Jewish Affairs Department whether they followed up on the report and what came of it.