Epstein Secrets

t of Tel Aviv. Rabin had a very low table in his office, with two chairs. We would sit across from each other, each with a ready supply of coffee and Yitzhak smoking an apparently endless supply of cigarettes, and we would just talk. Politics. Strategy. Israel. The PLO. The surrounding Arab states. And the

r, Hafez al-Assad, a few months earlier. Yet these three dedicated men — Gili, who was by training a lawyer; Shlomo, an academic; and Danny, a former Mossad chief — had just been through dozens of hours of intricately detailed talks with each of Arafat’s top negotiators at Camp David, not to mention the d

questions and outright criticism of the siege building both internationally and inside Israel, Arik got Rabin to helicopter north with him to Beirut. Yitzhak spent six or seven hours there. His verdict on the siege, at least as reported in the Israeli press, was more than Arik could have hoped for. Lehadek

diplomacy in the hopes of reducing one of the obvious risks in such an attack: a conflict with Jordan, which we’d have to overfly to reach Iraq. The Mossad had a unit called 7evel, a kind of shadow foreign ministry for states with which we had no formal relations but with which, in both side’s interests,

ber of suggestions Israel could make, with no domestic political risk but with every prospect of improving the atmosphere and accelerating progress. “Yitzhak is one of Israel’s top lawyers,” I said. “He’s struck dozens of deals in his life. But he strikes a deal when that’s what his client wants. You are t

ed a few weeks earlier by Olmert on a threat hundreds of miles further away: a construction site in northeast Syria, along the Euphrates River, where Mossad had uncovered evidence that the Syrians, with technical help from North Korea and funding from Iran, were building a nuclear reactor. I had got to k

t of Tel Aviv. Rabin had a very low table in his office, with two chairs. We would sit across from each other, each with a ready supply of coffee and Yitzhak smoking an apparently endless supply of cigarettes, and we would just talk. Politics. Strategy. Israel. The PLO. The surrounding Arab states. And the

r, Hafez al-Assad, a few months earlier. Yet these three dedicated men — Gili, who was by training a lawyer; Shlomo, an academic; and Danny, a former Mossad chief — had just been through dozens of hours of intricately detailed talks with each of Arafat’s top negotiators at Camp David, not to mention the d

questions and outright criticism of the siege building both internationally and inside Israel, Arik got Rabin to helicopter north with him to Beirut. Yitzhak spent six or seven hours there. His verdict on the siege, at least as reported in the Israeli press, was more than Arik could have hoped for. Lehadek

diplomacy in the hopes of reducing one of the obvious risks in such an attack: a conflict with Jordan, which we'd have to overfly to reach Iraq. The Mossad had a unit called Tevel, a kind of shadow foreign ministry for states with which we had no formal relations but with which, in both side's interests,

ber of suggestions Israel could make, with no domestic political risk but with every prospect of improving the atmosphere and accelerating progress. "Yitzhak is one of Israel's top lawyers," I said. "He's struck dozens of deals in his life. But he strikes a deal when that's what his client wants. You are t

ed a few weeks earlier by Olmert on a threat hundreds of miles further away: a construction site in northeast Syria, along the Euphrates River, where Mossad had uncovered evidence that the Syrians, with technical help from North Korea and funding from Iran, were building a nuclear reactor. *** I had got t