Aliza Magen, Highest-Ranking Woman in the Mossad, Dies at 87

Aliza Magen, who spent some 40 years working for the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, eventually serving as deputy under three of its directors, making her the highest-ranking woman in the organization’s history, died on April 14 in Jerusalem. She was 87.

Her death was announced in a statement by the Israeli prime minister’s office.

Mrs. Magen joined the Mossad directly after her mandatory military service and worked there her entire career. For more than 20 years she served undercover in various posts around Europe, where she was tasked with running agents and collecting intelligence.

She participated in some of the Mossad’s biggest operations, though many of the details of her work remain classified. She was fluent in German, and one of her first operations was a multiyear effort to undermine, assassinate or turn German scientists who were building missiles for Egypt, which could have devastated Israel during a war.

From her base in Austria, she helped recruit a former top-ranking Nazi officer to become a Mossad asset.

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In the 1970s she participated in a campaign, called Operation Wrath of God, to hunt down and kill the organizers of the 1972 terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics that led to the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches.

She returned to Israel in the early 1980s. There she worked as the deputy head of the Mossad’s Tzomet division, which handles agents and overseas intelligence gathering. She later ran the agency’s administrative division and its operations center.

Mrs. Magen was preparing to retire in 1990, when Shabtai Shavit, the new Mossad director, asked her to be his deputy. While the Mossad had long counted women among its ranks, she was the first to rise to a top position in its leadership.

Mrs. Magen made it clear that she had no aspirations to lead the Mossad, which is one reason that Mr. Shavit’s successor, Danny Yatom, kept her on after he took office in 1996.

Mr. Yatom was forced to resign in 1998 in the wake of a botched Mossad operation to bug the home of an alleged Hezbollah operative in Switzerland. Such was her reputation that Mrs. Magen kept her post, serving for several more months under the next Mossad head, Efraim Halevy.

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“She was always one of the most respected intelligence officers,” Mr. Halevy said in an interview. “I trusted her in every aspect of what was going on in the Mossad.”

Aliza Halevi was born on July 5, 1937, in Jerusalem, in what was then known as Mandatory Palestine and administered by Britain. Her parents were German Jews who had fled the Nazis, and she grew up speaking German along with Hebrew and English.

She joined the Mossad in 1958 after completing her mandatory military service. Because of her language skills, she was assigned in 1961 to take notes at the trial of the senior Nazi official Adolf Eichmann for his role in the Holocaust.

Her comments and analysis caught the attention of the Mossad director at the time, Isser Harel, who cleared the way for her to rise in the ranks. Within a year she was working in Europe.

She participated in scores of operations, including a successful effort to persuade an Iraqi fighter pilot to defect to Israel, with his plane.

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She also helped lead an international hunt for a Soviet-Israeli boy named Yossele Schumacher, who had been abducted and taken out of the country by friends of his ultrareligious grandparents, who feared his parents would raise him as secular. Mossad agents found him in Brooklyn and returned him to Israel.

The case became a major scandal in Israel that deepened the rift between religious and secular society.

She married Avraham Magen in 1973. He died in 2011. No immediate family members survive.

For most of her career, Mrs. Magen’s role in the Mossad was a secret, only becoming public after her elevation to deputy. After that she spoke openly about the difficulties and advantages of being a woman in an intelligence career.

It was often hard, she said, for a woman to rise in the ranks of the Mossad, because the top leadership roles required experience working undercover in foreign countries, assignments that are difficult for women to manage while raising a family.

“This is where the vicious circle of difficulty for the advancement of women is created,” she said in a 2008 interview with the Intelligence Heritage Center in Israel.

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At the same time, she said, women agents often have an easier time working undercover because people are less likely to be suspicious of them.

“In one exercise, for example, we had to observe a certain place, and there was no observation point we could be in without raising people’s suspicions,” she said in a 2018 interview with Yediot Ahronot, a daily newspaper. “So I found a small store across the street with a pavement in front of it. I asked the salesman if I could get a chair and rest outside for a while.”

She told him she felt dizzy, a claim that the man believed instantly.

“I just sat down on a chair calmly,” she said. “I don’t think a man could do such a thing.”