IN July 1973 a young Moroccan waiter was walking home from the cinema with his pregnant wife in the tranquil Norwegian resort of Lillehammer when he was shot dead by an armed gang. Ahmed Bouchiki had been mistaken by agents of the Israeli secret service, Mossad, for Ali Hassan Salameh, whom they believed to have been a key figure in Black September, the extremist Palestinian faction blamed for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics the previous year.

Five of the Mossad agents were convicted and jailed in Norway shortly after the killing took place. But their leader, Mike Harari, who has died aged 87, got away. Back in Jerusalem, Harari offered his resignation to the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, but it was turned down because, she told him, he “still had much work to do”. Nonetheless, Harari’s dreadful error tarnished the career of a man referred to by some as “the Zionist James Bond” and probably prevented him reaching the top of an organisation that many Israelis regard as one of the pillars of the Jewish state.

Harari’s life was one led largely in the shadows and, according to the current defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, most of his deeds are “unknown and never will be known”. However, he wrote about some of his actions in his biography The Master of Operations in which he tried to clear himself of blame for the Lillehammer fiasco, and the accounts of former colleagues leave no doubt about his huge contribution to what Israel considered its anti-terror struggle. It was Harari, for instance, who built and led the teams for Operation Wrath of God, a mission to track down and kill those Israel held responsible for the Munich terror attack. The campaign culminated in the Lillehammer failure, but three months before that Harari’s agents had staged a raid on Beirut in which three senior leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation were killed.

It would be six years before Harari led another operation in the Lebanese capital, when this time Salameh was correctly identified and killed. In between, in July 1976, Harari had played a pivotal role in Operation Thunderbolt in which Israeli commandos landed at Uganda’s Entebbe airport to free Israeli and Jewish hostages held by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. By some accounts, Harari had reconnoitred the airport beforehand by blagging his way into the control tower disguised as an Italian businessman.

Harari was born in Tel Aviv when Palestine was still a British-mandated territory. He grew up amid the turmoil of the 1930s, when a huge increase in Jewish immigration to the territory, prompted by the rise of Nazism in Europe, fuelled deep tensions with the local Arab population. At the age of 16 in 1943 he lied about his age to join Palmach, an elite underground commando force formed by the Jewish militia, Haganah, to prepare for a possible British withdrawal and Axis invasion of Palestine.

This was his introduction to military training, including covert techniques such as sabotage. Harari was arrested several times as the British authorities attempted to disarm Palmach. At the end of the war he was sent to Marseille to try to organise the illegal emigration to Palestine of thousands of Holocaust survivors. From their stories he learned the full extent of the Nazi genocide.

Following the birth of Israel in 1948, Harari joined the internal security agency, Shin Bet. He established the security regime at Lod — now Ben Gurion International — airport, and in the early 50s was given responsibility for organising security at Israel’s embassies around the world. Then, in 1954, he was recruited by Mossad and joined the agency’s intelligence-gathering wing. He set up and ran agents across Europe and soon became the unit’s commander, also playing a role in smuggling Jews out of communist eastern Europe.

By the end of the 60s the emergence of Palestinian factions intent on using militant tactics to force their cause on to the international agenda posed a grave challenge to Israel. Harari was to be at the heart of Mossad’s struggle against these organisations, and in 1970 he was appointed head of its special operations division, Caesarea. There he created a unit that was involved in sabotage and assassinations. It was this force that was given the task of finding and eliminating the Palestinians Mossad believed had planned the attack in Munich.

Officially, Harari retired from Mossad in 1980 after 26 years of service. He went into private business and spent a lot of time in Central America. But he is said to have been reassigned to Mexico City for a short period as Mossad station chief, and his dealings in Panama in the 80s, at a time when the military dictator Manuel Noriega had American backing before he was ousted in 1989, are shrouded in murkiness. By some accounts he played a major role in reorganising the Panamanian military and in ensuring that Panama was able to buy Israeli weapons. But he later appeared on Israeli television to deny he had ever been an adviser to Noriega.

Retired or not, Harari continued to be of service to Mossad and in 2007 he was honoured, at the age of 80, with the agency’s highest decoration for an unspecified “important contribution to a unique operational activity,” possibly related to Israeli attempts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme.

Norway issued an arrest warrant for Harari in 1998 in connection with the Lillehammer killing, but it was cancelled a year later. He was portrayed by the actor Moshe Ivgy in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich, a controversial account of the Operation Wrath of God.

Harari is survived by his wife, Pnina, two children and five grandchildren.

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2014