Standing on a canteen table in down-town Tel Aviv, Israel's spymaster studied the men and women of Mossad. In the few weeks since taking over Mossad, Meir Dagan knew he already commanded something his recent predecessors never managed.


Respect.


Barely raising his voice he spoke. "When I was fighting in Lebanon, I witnessed the
aftermath of a family feud. The patriarch's head had been split open, his brain on the floor. Around him lay his wife and some of his children. All dead. Before I could do anything, one of the murderers scooped up a handful of brain and swallowed it. This is how you will all now operate. Otherwise
someone will eat your brain."

His every word held them in thrall - even if they sent a shudder through some of his listeners, hardened as they were. In the canteen were those who had killed many
times already.


Killing enemies who could not be brought to trial because they were hidden deep inside Israel's Arab neighbours. Only Mossad could find and kill them. Rafi Eitan, the legendary former Operations Chief of Mossad told me when we sat together in his living room in a north Tel Aviv suburb: "I always tried to kill when I could see the whites of a person's eyes. So I could see the fear. Smell it on his breath. Sometimes I used my hands. A knife, or a silenced gun. I never felt a moment's regret over a killing."

Meir Amit, when he had been director of Mossad, later insisted "we are like the official hangman or the doctor on Death Row who administers the lethal injection. Our actions are all endorsed by the State of Israel.


When Mossad kills it is not breaking the law. It is fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day". We spoke as he walked me through Mossad's own
unique memorial in Tel Aviv to the dead - a
concrete maze shaped in the form of a brain. Each name engraved on the concrete was of an agent who had been killed while trying to destroy Israel'S enemies.


Some of those agents had one thing in common. Amit had sent them to their deaths.