Israel’s Secret Service Hit by Fierce Criticism

Even as Israel’s internal security agency plunged into the daunting task Sunday of protecting thousands of dignitaries descending on this emotionally charged capital to attend Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral, it found itself the focus of rare and fierce public criticism for his assassination.

The vaunted General Security Service--Shin Bet--will launch a formal internal investigation Tuesday, after the foreign guests leave, into what went wrong Saturday night in Tel Aviv with Rabin’s security detail, Israel Television reported.

As yet, there has been no talk of appointing an independent commission to investigate Shin Bet’s performance that night or its procedures for protecting dignitaries in general.

“Despite the almost unprecedented security forces that surrounded Rabin last night to protect him from any harm, they failed at their supreme mission--protecting his life,” Zeev Schiff, senior military affairs analyst with the independent daily newspaper Haaretz, wrote in an analysis published Sunday of the security lapses surrounding the assassination.

“It is clear that something very bad happened and that what happened was not supposed to happen,” said a grim-faced Environment Minister Yossi Sarid, emerging Sunday from an emergency Cabinet session on the shooting. “Undoubtedly, something should be fixed.”

After the mourners leave, Sarid said, “things will be examined and conclusions will be drawn.”

The security agency must explain why a lone gunman was allowed to enter the parking lot where Rabin’s armor-plated Cadillac was waiting for the prime minister as he presided over a massive pro-peace rally in Tel Aviv, Israel Television’s military affairs correspondent said. It must also explain why the man armed with a 9-millimeter Beretta was able to get within a few feet of Rabin’s back and why security agents were slow to respond when the assassin drew the gun.

But Police Minister Moshe Shahal said that no security apparatus can ever hope to fully protect leaders from the crazed acts of a single gunman.

“The problem of all the security elements is the loner,” Shahal said Sunday. “It is difficult to deal with people when you know nothing about their past.”

Yigal Amir, the 27-year-old law student who claimed responsibility for Rabin’s shooting, had no arrest record, although he reportedly participated in far-right demonstrations against the peace process.

Shahal promised that the nation’s security forces will be beefed up in the wake of the assassination.

The investigation nonetheless could destroy what many here regard as modern Israel’s “golden calf”--security in whose name Shin Bet and other agencies have been allowed to abridge basic civil rights, largely of Arabs but also of Jews, in an effort to protect the country and its people from the continuing threat of terrorism but with little oversight from political leaders.

“I, for one, will never question the request of our security services--they know what their needs are, and I think we all realize how much we rely upon them,” Benjamin Netanyahu, chairman of the opposition Likud Party, said in an interview earlier this year. “If anything, the government should give them freer rein.”

Founded in 1948 with the establishment of the modern state of Israel, Shin Bet has had many successes over the years, and they, along with the real need for security, made it and Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence organization, virtually untouchable, able to get whatever personnel, resources, funds or operating authority they wanted. That included governmental permission to torture prisoners during interrogation and to carry out what critics charged were virtual death squad hits.

Operating under the prime minister’s direct command, Shin Bet draws its authority from emergency regulations dating to the British administration of Palestine in the 1940s and secret Israeli Cabinet decisions since then. Israeli courts have until recently declined to restrict its actions, or even to inquire into the need for its sweeping powers.

And when an operation goes badly wrong, Shin Bet and its leaders have generally suffered little, for security has always been the primary issue.

In 1984, four Palestinians hijacked an Israeli bus, intending to take the passengers with them to Egypt as hostages. The bus was stopped and stormed, two of the terrorists killed and two taken prisoner. An hour later it was announced that all four terrorists had been killed, but a photographer had pictures of two being taken away alive.

This led to what, until now, has been the biggest scandal to hit Shin Bet. A commission of inquiry was told that the terrorists had been so badly beaten that they had died, thus implicating the soldiers who had taken them prisoner. The army fought back, and eventually the case wound up with Shimon Peres, then the prime minister, Yitzak Shamir, who succeeded him, and Rabin deciding not to permit prosecution of the Shin Bet officials who had killed the men in their custody.

Shin Bet won further license during the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, when its agents were a principal barrier against the spread of the fighting. Yet it had failed to anticipate the unrest, and its network of informers was decimated by Palestinian attacks on suspected collaborators.

For many Israeli analysts, the intifada “ruined” Shin Bet, because its personnel had to give up the careful infiltration and casework they had pursued in the past to seek quick results.

Others say that it lost sight of the potential for Jewish subversion--an early concern--as it focused solely on the Palestinians. “Who is the enemy?” became an unasked question.

Rabin nonetheless was one of Shin Bet’s staunchest supporters. He fought fiercely to keep in place regulations that allow Shin Bet interrogators to use “physical pressure” against suspects who might have information that could prevent terrorist attacks, and he scornfully dismissed human rights advocates who said such regulations allow the agency to torture detainees.

Rabin often said that Israelis could not fully comprehend the debt they owe Shin Bet, a secretive organization whose director’s name is never allowed to be published. Working 24 hours a day, usually in the shadows, Shin Bet keeps Israelis safe through its extensive intelligence network in the occupied territories and inside Israel, Rabin would say. Like Shin Bet, he always assumed that Palestinians should be the agency’s primary concern.

One immediate outcome of Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing Jew is that Shin Bet will now be pouring greater resources into monitoring the far right in Israel, analysts said Sunday.

Yet Shin Bet had already begun to move in that direction with the resurgence of Israel’s extreme right, especially among the Jewish settlers on the West Bank.

K, as the Shin Bet chief must be identified under Israeli military censorship, had more than a year ago ordered a full-fledged campaign against extremist organizations, including the now-outlawed Kach and Kahane Chai and the small fringe groups such as Eyal, to which Amir may have belonged.

Even as analyst Schiff criticized Shin Bet’s performance, he noted that Rabin was not an easy man to protect. Like all Israeli leaders, the former general insisted on making frequent public appearances.

“The security people tried to narrow his steps, but Rabin did not always agree,” Schiff wrote. “He said that the solution was not a reinforcement of bodyguards, but stopping the atmosphere that generates violence and hatred.”

Rabin’s attitude may have come from a combination of personal courage and a strong belief that no matter how vitriolic the political debate in Israel grew, it would never lead to one Jew shedding the blood of another.

Times staff writer Michael Parks in Los Angeles contributed to this report.