Israeli Security Chief Quits Over Rabin Slaying

JERUSALEM —  Three days after the covert assassination of Israel’s most-wanted Palestinian terrorist, the head of Israel’s Shin Bet secret service resigned over his failure to prevent the slaying of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin more than two months ago.

Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, on Monday accepted the resignation, which the chief of the General Security Service, or Shin Bet, had first submitted a few days after the Nov. 4 assassination of Rabin by a Jewish extremist. Peres rejected the resignation then, saying the agency could not sustain another blow in the middle of a crisis and continue to effectively confront its main enemies, Palestinian terrorists.

While Israel does not admit responsibility for the Friday slaying of Yehiya Ayash, the militant Islamic Hamas movement’s master bomb maker, clearly his death--which occurred when his cellular telephone exploded--has restored some of the country’s faith in the Shin Bet’s ability to fight terrorism, and it allowed the agency’s chief a face-saving resignation.

The name of the Shin Bet chief is a state secret. Under military censorship, he may be identified only as “K.”

In his resignation letter, offered Sunday and accepted Monday, K said: “I feel that the GSS [Shin Bet] is on the right track. I have complete faith in the ability of the GSS’ staff and members, and I hope they will be permitted to carry out their difficult work in secret--’the unseen protector.’

“I believe that I can now end my work with a sense of total satisfaction that the GSS is recovered and able to carry out all its mission.”

Last month, K and five other former and current Shin Bet operatives received warning letters from the state commission investigating the security gaps that preceded Rabin’s assassination. The letters stated that they could be harmed by the commission’s eventual findings, implying that commission members held them at least indirectly responsible for the prime minister’s death.

K said he had suffered “the most difficult days of profound, personal mourning” over the death of Rabin. But he soundly rejected the blame inherent in the warning letter from the commission and said he had instructed his lawyer to continue defending his stewardship of the agency.

Rabin was killed at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv by Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Jewish law student who opposed the prime minister’s 1993 peace accord with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Although Amir had participated in several anti-government demonstrations and admitted he had planned to assassinate Rabin on at least two previous occasions, he had no arrest record and was unknown to security forces. Days after the assassination, Shin Bet conducted its own investigation into the security failure and determined that there had been too few bodyguards with Rabin and unauthorized people too close to him.

Following the internal investigation, the chief of the Shin Bet security branch resigned, and the head of VIP security was suspended. The head of Rabin’s bodyguard unit was transferred.

Peres’ office made public K’s resignation letter and the prime minister’s response, in which he thanked K for staying on the past two months and for his “professionalism” and “significant contribution to the security of Israel and its citizens.”

Following the assassination, Peres repeatedly warned that harsh criticism of Shin Bet for its failure to take seriously the threats by right-wing Jews against government officials was damaging the organization’s esprit de corps and ability to defend the nation.

A Peres spokesman said the prime minister “really believes [K] was not personally responsible as the committee has tried to insinuate.”

Israeli radio and television reported that the commission’s questioning of K and other witnesses behind closed doors in the past weeks had convinced the chief that the panel had already made up its mind to charge him with negligence. One member apparently charged that K had failed to keep a close enough eye on the day-to-day operations of the agency.

Opposition Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu lauded K, and Israeli Internal Security Minister Moshe Shahal said Shin Bet had “lost one of its best men, one of the most serious and one of the most sensitive.”

The 45-year-old K was a controversial appointment when Rabin named him as head of the Shin Bet nine months ago, because of his emphasis on the Jewish ultra-right at an agency that had been focused for decades on the Palestinians.

K was recruited to the agency in 1970. 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.

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

The extreme right saw K as an enemy. To embarrass him and mock the secrecy that surrounds Shin Bet, ultra-right activists included his full name, address and phone number in leaflets published around the time of his appointment.