The American Spectator

In the meantime, Halevy urges Americans to create a “fully-fledged security service.” He thinks the FBI is not up to the job, since its principal task is to prosecute crimes after they are committed, while the main job of a security service is to prevent a terrorist act from occurring in the first place. Halevy acknowledges that many Americans would oppose, on libertarian grounds, the creation of the kind of agency he advocates, but he is adamant: “As long as there is no security service in the United States, there shall remain a yawning gap in the defenses of that great nation.O That could well be one of the reasons for the success of any future attack on American territory.”

But if Halevy does not hesitate to offer Americans advice on how best to protect themselves against their enemies, he is silent on other matters of great topical interest, such as Saddam’s alleged possession of WMD, or the extent of the ties between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. Since Halevy was at the helm of the Mossad in the run-up to the Second Gulf War, he is uniquely qualified to address these issues, and his failure to do so is disappointing. (Other prominent Israelis have not been so reticent. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s former military chief-of-staff, recently stated that Saddam did possess WMD, which he transferred to Syria on the eve of the war.)

Still, Man in the Shadows is an important book. Efraim Halevy sat at the right hand of power in Israel during one of the most fateful and significant periods in Middle East history, and if he does not reveal all that he knows, what he does choose to tell us about his own exploits, and about the organization he once headed, is enough to remind us that today, as in the past, brains and courage are still the decisive forces of human history.