Tzipi Livni

Israeli Foreign Minister. The Sunday Times claimed in June 2008 that she is a former Mossad agent.

Irgun background

Both her parents were arrested for terrorist crimes in the 1940s. Her mother Sarah, who died recently aged 85, was a leader of Irgun, the militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine at the time of the British mandate and whose exploits included train robbery.

“I was disguised as a pregnant woman and robbed a train carrying £35,000,” she said in an interview shortly before she died. “Then we blew up another train en route from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.”

Livni’s father, Eitan, was sentenced to 15 years in jail for attacking a British military base. He escaped.

Mossad career

Livni joined Mossad after leaving the army with the rank of lieutenant and completing a year at law school. From her base in Paris she travelled throughout Europe in pursuit of Arab terrorists.

“Tzipi was not an office girl,” said an acquaintance. “She was a clever woman with an IQ of 150. She blended in well in European capitals, working with male agents, most of them ex-commandos, taking out Arab terrorists.”

The frontrunner to become Israel’s next prime minister, Tzipi Livni, was a Paris agent for Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence agency, in the early 1980s when it ran a series of missions to kill Palestinian terrorists in European capitals, according to former colleagues.

They say Livni, now foreign minister, was on active service when Mamoun Meraish, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was shot dead by a Mossad hit squad in Athens on August 21, 1983. She was not directly involved in the killing, in which two young men on a motorcycle drew alongside Meraish’s car and opened fire, but her role in Mossad remains secret.

Shortly afterwards Livni resigned and returned to Israel to complete her law studies, citing the pressures of the job.

Following the Sunday Times report, the Israeli Website Ynetnews stated: "Livni’s past as a Mossad agent is a well-known fact, but the ‘Times’ adds a few other details that have never been published."

An interview published in 2009 revealed Livni had been a member of Mossad's Bayonet 'hit squad' for four years, and had travelled to Lebanon on an undercover mission during the 1982 Israeli invasion.

External resources

• Ben White, A very special mission, The Staggers, new statesman.com, 8 October 2011.
• Livni: A lawyer 'against law'?, aljazeera.com, 24 January 2011.