POLITICO
by Avi Dichter
October 7, 2014

The former head of the Shin Bet on how to protect the president

The murder of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995—the first-ever assassination of an Israeli prime minister—was a terrible blow to all Israelis. To the Shin Bet it was an earthquake. The Shin Bet is Israel’s secret service and FBI rolled into one, and it was supposed to be protecting the prime minister (along with its regular duties protecting the Supreme Court, the leader of the opposition and the chairman of the Knesset). Afterward I was brought in to revamp the Shin Bet’s Security and Protection Division, and we invited the American Secret Service in for a week, so that we could learn from their methods. We knew that no one had more experience in VIP protection than the Secret Service. America had suffered four presidential assassinations, and the single best teacher of good security is always experience. So we learned much from the Secret Service back then. Among other things, they taught us how to put up a better defensive ring, rather than just play offense, as we’d done in the past.

Partly what went wrong in the killing of the prime minister was a failure of imagination: We simply never imagined that, with all the threats to him coming from elsewhere, an Israeli prime minister would be murdered by one of our own, a fellow Jew, a man in the crowd wearing a yarmulke. Other mistakes we made also occurred because we were going on pre-fixed ideas. For example, once we had thought that the Palestinians would not carry out a suicide bombing. That also proved to be wrong, as we discovered in 1993.

My point is that allowing oneself to be lulled into a false sense of security, making facile assumptions—complacency, in a word—is one of the greatest enemies of a personal security detail. It is particularly threatening when a long time has elapsed between serious threats to the prime minister or president. Certainly it has been quite awhile—thank God—since someone has taken a shot at the president of the United States, and so perhaps that was a factor in the recently reported lapses of security by the Secret Service…..

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