Avraham Ben-Dor
Avraham (Shalom) Ben-Dor was director of Israel's Shin Bet security agency from 1980 to 1986.[1]
Early Life
Ben-Dor was born in 1928 in Vienna, Austria, immigrated to Israel in 1939, and moved to Tel Aviv. In 1946 he was recruited to the Palmach and served in the maritime force in Kibbutz Yagur and Kibbutz Ma'oz Hayyim. He fought in a number of battles in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He was discharged from the IDF at the end of 1949 and in 1950 he was recruited into the Shin Bet.[1]
Shin Bet
In 1950, he was posted to the Operations Division in Haifa. In 1951, he took a leave of absence in order to complete his matriculation exams. He returned to the ISA a few months later in order to command the operations unit in the south until its closure. He was appointed commander of the Jerusalem Operations Division in 1952.[1]
In 1954, he was sent by Isser Harel on a mission to Europe, where he was stationed for three years. He spent an additional two year of leave of absence as operations officer and deputy director of a division in the Mossad.[1]
In 1959, he returned to the Shin Bet as head of the Operations Division.[1]
In 1959-1960, he was part of the team of Mossad and Shin Bet operatives that tracked and kidnapped Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.[2] according to Yossi Melman, he was running a joint Mossad/Shin Bet operations department with Rafi Eitan during this period.[3]
Ben-Dor was part of a four man Israeli delegation which visited Zalman Shapiro's Numec plant on 10 September 1968, along with Avraham Hermoni and Rafi Eitan. Eitan and Ben-Dor applied for US clearance as chemists working for the Israeli defence ministry. In fact they were working with Lakam, and gave the green light for a covert uranium shipment for Israel's Dimona reactor.[4]
He was appointed commander of the Security Division following the Munich Olympics Massacre in 1972.[1]
He was appointed Shin Bet Director in 1980.[1] The appointement was regarded as a boost for Ariel Sharon because of Ben-Dor's longstanding friendship with Rafi Eitan.[5]
Shin bet moved into Lebanon in 1982 in the wake of the Israeli invasion.[6] Ben-Dor was among the Israeli intelligence chiefs who accompanied Ariel Sharon on a visit to the country on 15 September 1982, following the assassination of Bashir Gemayel.[7]
Under Ben-Dor, Shin Bet planted agents in the right-wing 'Jewish underground', something his predecessor had not been permitted to do. This led to a series of arrests in 1984.[8]
Bus 300 Affair
In November 1983, Ben-Dor had a meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir which discussed ways of dealing with captured terrorists. No notes were taken, and Shamir would later deny that he had ordered Ben-Dor not to take prisoners.[9]
In 1984, two Palestinian bus hijackers were killed after being captured and handed over to Shin Bet in April 1984.[10] Three senior Shin bet officers, Reuven Hazak, Peleg Radai and Rafi Malka, later claimed that they had been ordered by Ben-Dor to lie to the agency's own internal court about the episode.[11]
Shalom told a subsequent police investigation that he had been acting "with the authority" of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir during the episode. On 23 June 1986, a cabinet meeting agreed to sack Ben-Dor and the three senior officers opposed to him, and to grant a blanket pardon to eleven Shin Bet officers. A subsequent commmission of inquiry headed by Yehudit Karp found that Ben-Dor had lied to a number of investigations and his subordinates had been telling the truth. The Karp Commission also found that Ben-Dor had used Yossi Ginossar, the Shin Bet representative on the previous Zorea Commission, to deflect the blame for the Bus 300 affair onto the military.[12]
Later career
In August 1986, only two months after his departure from Shin Bet, Ben-Dor was part of a six man delegation to Washington in a failed attempt to resolve the case of Aviem Sella, an Israeli Air Force nuclear expert implicated in the Jonathan Pollard affair.[13]
Int the wake of his dismissal, Prime Minister Shimon Peres helped Ben-Dor get a new job working for Shaul Eisenberg in New York. It was at this time, he reverted to using the surname Ben-Dor rather than Shalom, to evade the notoriety of the Bus 200 affair. Nevertheless, the Port Authority of New York cancelled a $75,000 contract with Eisenberg-owned Atwell Security when it learned that Ben-Dor was president of the company.[14]
External resources
- NameBase SHALOM AVRAHAM
- AVRAHAM SHALOM / 1980-1986, The Gatekeepers.
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Avraham (Shalom) Ben-Dor, Israel Security Agency, accessed 9 May 2013.
- ↑ AVRAHAM SHALOM/1980-1986, thegatekeepersfilm.com, accessed 9 April 2013.
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p.114.
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, pp.198-199.
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, pp.258-259 .
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p.270.
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p.272.
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p.249c.
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p.289.
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p.281.
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p.284.
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p.288.
- ↑ Seymour M. Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel, America and the Bomb, Faber and Faber, 1993, p.304.
- ↑ Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Every Spy a Prince: The Secret History of Israel's Intelligence Community, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, pp.290-291.
