Shabtai Shavit, who as director-general of the Israeli intelligence agency the Mossad in the 1990s helped broker a peace agreement with Jordan, oversaw the assassinations of Islamic terrorists and navigated the global fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union, died on Tuesday during a vacation in Italy. He was 84.
His death was announced by the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. No cause was identified.
David Barnea, the Mossad’s current director, described Mr. Shavit as “a pillar of the world of operations, intelligence, security and strategy of the state of Israel.”
While the Mossad was credited with, and criticized for, numerous clandestine operations — among them targeted assassinations of terrorists, which Mr. Shavit defended — he and the agency were widely praised for their role in bringing Israel and Jordan to the table to sign a treaty in 1994, ending a state of war between the two countries that had existed since 1948, when Israel was founded.
The treaty — Israel’s first with an Arab country since the pact with Egypt in 1979 — provided for the establishment of diplomatic relations and assurances that neither Israel nor Jordan would allow another country to use its territory as a staging ground for military strikes.
“In the cases of Egypt and Jordan, intelligence identified their willingness to negotiate peace,” Mr. Shavit wrote in a memoir, and served “as an active participant in the negotiations right up to the signing of the peace treaty in the case of Jordan.”
The day after he signed the declaration of peace with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in a White House ceremony joined by President Bill Clinton in July 1994, King Hussein of Jordan, on a flight from Washington, called Mr. Shavit at home. “The king wished to thank me personally for my role in achieving peace,” Mr. Shavit wrote. The peace treaty was signed that October.
If Mr. Shavit was a peacemaker, however, he was even more a spymaster who was accused of ordering deadly retaliations for terrorist attacks and staging pre-emptive strikes.
During Mr. Shavit’s term, Atef Bseiso, a top intelligence aide to the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, was fatally shot outside a hotel in Paris in 1992, an assassination that Mr. Arafat accused the Mossad of orchestrating. Israeli officials denied they were involved. And Fathi Shiqaqi, the leader of the militant group the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was killed in Malta in 1995 in what was widely believed to be a Mossad operation.
Also during Mr. Shavit’s tenure, the Mossad was caught unawares by attacks on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and on a Jewish community center there in 1994 that left scores dead. An internal Mossad inquiry later concluded that the attacks had been carried out by a secret Hezbollah unit, The New York Times reported last year, and were widely considered to be in retaliation for Israeli’s strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The attacks demonstrated the militant…
2023-09-08 16:12:17
Link from www.nytimes.com