ABSTRACT
My only meeting with the late Reuven Shiloah, the first head of the Mossad, took place in his office at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. It was in the late 1950s; he was the political adviser to Foreign Minister Golda Me'ir. Shiloah had been a trusted adviser to the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion. After resigning from his post as head of the Mossad, he moved directly into the diplomatic service, was appointed Minister at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and then filled a number of positions at the Foreign Ministry until his untimely death. He was, I believe, the first Mossad official who made the move from the intelligence community to the diplomatic service. During our meeting I hardly gave this fact a thought, and it never occurred to me to ask him about the move from the hidden world of espionage to the visible world of diplomacy. At that time I had no idea that I would follow a similar course - a 35-year commitment to the Mossad, in which I rose to the position of deputy head, followed by a career in diplomacy as Israel's Ambassador to the European Union.
