How the woman set to be Israel’s new leader earned her spurs as an agent working for a covert cell in an elite spy unit

It is an eye-catching episode on the CV of any would-be prime minister: a dangerous, youthful stint as a spy in one of the world’s most respected and feared secret services.

True to her training, Tzipi Livni, the Israeli leader-in-waiting, has maintained a Sphinx-like silence about her Mossad career in Paris in the early 1980s. Consequently, reports on her service have pegged her as anything from a frontline agent hunting down Arab terrorists across Europe to a mere house-sitter deployed to provide a respectable front for Mossad safe houses in the French capital.

Mossad does not divulge details but The Times can reveal that Ms Livni ran substantial risks as an Israeli agent operating in a covert cell in Europe.

“She was in an elite unit,” said Ephraim Halevy, the former director of Mossad, who for security reasons declined to specify which outfit Ms Livni had served in between 1980 and 1984.

“She was a very promising agent who showed all the attributes of a very promising career. She was very well thought of.”

Ms Livni, a fluent French speaker and daughter of renowned Zionist guerrillas, served her time in Paris when the city was a deadly battle-ground in Mossad’s covert war with Palestinian militant groups and Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.

One Israeli former intelligence source told The Times that the 22-year-old Ms Livni had been recruited into Mossad after her National Service by a childhood friend, Mira Gal, who herself served for two decades in the agency and who now works as her ministry bureau chief.

Like many recruits, the source said, she would have started out with so-called “student jobs”, mostly maintaining safe houses that were used by hit squads and more senior agents on assignment across Europe. Mr Halevy said that even such a rookie job was not without its risks.

“I’m not saying she was a caretaker of safe houses but people think that being a caretaker is a simple and mundane job which entails no risk,” the English-born former spymaster told The Times. “People who say that don’t know what safe houses are about. It can be very dangerous at times.”

After her apprenticeship, Ms Livni went through basic training as a field officer, learning how to recruit agents and gather information at a time of huge upheaval among Israel’s foes, as the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) relocated from war-torn Beirut to the safer shores of Tunisia.

“It was a period when the Israelis were sending strong political messages with their attacks and they did not hesitate to attract attention,” Éric Denécé, a former French intelligence service agent, said.

“Since the Six-Day War [in 1967], Paris was an important intelligence base for Mossad - first, because it had excellent relations with the French services and also because so many Palestinians were based there.”

Israeli agents operating out of Paris carried out assassinations and were also widely believed to have infiltrated Palestinian factions. Among them was Ilich RamÍrez Sánchez, alias Carlos the Jackal, and the Abu Nidal splinter group. The group perpetrated the massacre of six people at Goldenberg’s restaurant in the rue des Rosiers in August 1982 and the bombing of the Paris-Toulouse express, which killed five, the same year.

There were two Mossad stations in Paris at the time, according to Roger Faligot, author of several books on the intelligence services. One covered France and the other Western Europe.

“I only heard about Tzipi Livni being an agent in Paris quite late in the day,” he told The Times. “At that period, Israel was appointing many female agents who were not just recruited from the armed forces but because of their languages and analytical skills. When you see Livni’s career, you would conclude that she was on the political and analytical side of Mossad.”

Mossad operators in Paris were also striving to thwart Saddam Hussein from developing an atomic arsenal and shipping nuclear fuels to his new processor at Osirak just outside Baghdad. In June 1980 an Egyptian-born scientist working on the Iraqi atomic programme was found murdered in his hotel room, a killing assumed to have been the handiwork of Mossad. A prostitute who heard voices coming from his room on the night of his murder was killed a month later in a mysterious hit-and-run accident. Menachem Begin, the Prime Minister at the time, said he hoped that France had “learnt its lesson” for helping Iraq. A year later Israeli bombers blew the Osirak plant to pieces.

One French report cited experts suggesting that Ms Livni was part of an elite unit that fatally poisoned the Iraqi nuclear scientist Abdul Rasul at a lunch in Paris in 1983. “The risks were tangible,” Ms Gal was to say of those days in Mossad. “If I made a mistake the result would be arrest and catastrophic political implications for Israel.”

The risks to Israelis working in Europe were brutally demonstrated in 1982 when an Abu Nidal gunman shot the Israeli Ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, in the head, critically wounding him and triggering the full-scale invasion of southern Lebanon by the Jewish state to root out the PLO.

“It takes both courage and judgment to make the right decision at the right time,” Mr Halevy said. “You are jeopardising a whole team and can open up all sorts of other matters than go beyond the issue you are dealing with”.

Whatever the actual role Ms Livni played, Mr Halevy is convinced that her experience and training stand her in good stead for the tasks now at hand as she tries to build a consensus to govern Israel. He recalls seeing her in May 2003, when he was National Security Adviser, deploy her Mossad-honed analytical skills and tenacity in government, when, as a junior Cabinet member, she was the only minister to stand up to the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and point out key flaws on a complex security brief that had been dispatched hours before.

“This shows she knows what she is doing and is willing to stand up for it,” Mr Halevy said.

Underground war

- June 1980 head of Iraq’s nuclear programme, Yahia El-Meshad, is murdered in his Paris hote, assumed to be a victim of a Mossad hit team. Prime Minister Menachem Begin tells a journalist that he hoped France “had learnt its lesson” for helping Iraq.

- June 1981 Israel bombs a French-built nuclear reactor in Iraq, killing a French specialist. Mossad involvement is suspected.

- April 1979 explosion at CNIM Industries plant in La Seyne-sur-Mer damages nuclear reactor destined for Iraq. Mossad is suspected.

- October 1980 car bomb explodes outside a Paris synagogue killing four people

- August 1982 six people die and 22 are wounded when five men with machine guns and grenades open fire in Paris Jewish deli

Sources >  Le Figaro, BBC, Time, Reuters | sept 20

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