K’s Identity Is Secret, but His Life Is Hardly a Closed Book

Although the name of the chief of Shin Bet is an Israeli state secret, the security service has provided an unprecedented amount of information about K, and military censors have approved its publication--as long as he is identified only by the initial of his first name.

Now 44, K is a sixth-generation Jerusalemite who grew up in Rehavia, an upper-class neighborhood of professionals, intellectuals and European immigrants. His father was a judge, as were several other members of the family. K is married with three daughters.

Wounded during the 1968-70 war of attrition along the Suez Canal, K did not enroll in the Israeli army’s officers course, the usual training ground for Israel’s elite, but studied political science and international relations at Hebrew University. He was recruited by Shin Bet in 1970 and served for a number of years as a security officer at Israeli embassies in Europe.

During the 1980s, he headed Shin Bet’s “Jewish section,” exposing the Jewish Underground, a terrorist group based in the West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba. He later broke up the leftist Derech Hanitzotz, which was working with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

In his 175-page thesis for a 1990 master’s degree in political science at Haifa University, K wrote about the radical right in Israel--and his views are now being studied closely.

“The ideological transgressions of the extreme right are a threat to the existence of Israel as a democratic society,” K warned.

One newspaper profile described K as a modest family man, not given to the flamboyant lifestyle of his partying, trumpet-playing predecessor, Yaacov Perry, the Shin Bet chief for seven years, who now heads a cellular telephone company.

“When things are not hectic,” Ronit Vardi wrote in Maariv, “(K’s) idea of a good day out is to take his family . . . and head for the hills to inspect wildflowers.”