Mossad spy chief on 9/11: We realized rules for fighting terror had to change
Efraim Halevy was meeting the PM when the news came in: ‘Sharon told me something has happened. You should be in your office’
When American Airlines Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower on September 11, 2001, then-Mossad chief Efraim Halevy was in the middle of a meeting with then-prime minister Ariel Sharon.
“Suddenly someone came in the room, passed him a piece of paper. And he said to me, ‘Something has happened. I think you shouldn’t be here, you should be in your office.’ I said, ‘What happened?’ He told me briefly, and I was off on my way,” Halevy recalled, speaking to The Times of Israel ahead of the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
“The 9/11 events caught everyone by surprise,” he said.
Halevy, 86, had been the head of the Mossad spy agency for three and a half years when two planes hit the World Trade Center, a third hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, after the passengers regained control of the aircraft from the hijackers and prevented it from hitting its target, which investigators believe was either the White House or the United States Capitol.
The British-born spymaster was wary of revisiting many of the technical questions of the Mossad’s activities following the attacks — what they knew and when and what was shared with the US — but he said there was a general effort to bring whatever relevant information it collected with the Americans.
“I’m now well past 80 and to start going into my memory, which has all kinds of ‘boxes,’ some which are very full and some of which are emptying up — I would rather not go into that minefield,” he said.
“We had an understanding that on this issue we had to cooperate in bringing information [to the US] if it came our way and to initiate activities to gather information subsequent to the attack.”
Halevy recalled a grim mood in the Mossad following the attack and not only out of an understanding that a major event had taken place with the potential to significantly reshape the world.
“It was a very somber atmosphere. An Israeli was killed in one of the aircraft, he had been an officer in an elite unit in Israel. So there was an Israeli ‘angle’ to this, beyond the Israelis who were killed in New York, which was an event itself,” he said.
American-Israeli mathematician and businessman Daniel Lewin is believed to have been the first person killed in the September 11 attacks, having been stabbed to death by one of the terrorists on board American Airlines Flight 11 as he apparently tried to intervene and prevent the hijacking.
Daniel C. Lewin. (AP Photo/Courtesy Akamai Technologies)
Lewin, who had moved to the US to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT years before, served for four years in the Israel Defense Forces’ famed Sayeret Matkal, an elite unit that works closely with the Mossad and Israel’s other intelligence services. In addition to Lewin, five Israelis were among the roughly 3,000 people killed in the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Halevy said that he quickly understood the severity of the September 11 attacks and that they would have a profound impact on the world, saying in the years that followed that they would lead to a “World War Three.” Besides America’s twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the latter of which formally ended last month — there have indeed been many wars in the Middle East in the past 20 years, in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and Gaza, which can at least partially be traced back to the September 11 attacks.
“Not everything I anticipated turned out that way, but I did think that what was clear was that as a result of this, terror had to be treated in a different way and the priorities had to be in a different way and that the rules of combat had to be changed in terms of how you deal with potential threats, like figures who may be potential terrorists,” he said.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/mossad-spy-chief-on-9-11-we-realized-rules-for-fighting-terror-had-to-change/