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Discredited Shin Bet Chief Carmi Gillon
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners October 30, 2005 |
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Yigal Amir, convicted of murdering Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin should have been "shot down on the spot like a dog," the man in charge of Rabin's security was quoted as saying Sunday.
Carmi Gillon, who headed the Shin Bet security service when Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, made the comments to the Yediot Ahronot daily ahead of the 10-year anniversary his death.
Amir, who opposed Rabin's peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians, was convicted of shooting Rabin after a political rally, although controversy continues to this day as to whether Amir was not part of a conspiracy involving members of the Shin Bet itself, including Gillon. Amir was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
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"He doesn't have to be a settler, he could be a dark-skinned Sephardic student, studying at Bar Ilan University and living in Herzliya."
Discredited Shin Bet chief Carmi Gillon, speaking to journalists on August 24, 1995, two months before the Rabin assassination, predicting the profile of the prospective murderer of the Prime Minister
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"Yigal Amir is alive because of an operational failure," said Gillon, who was abroad at the time of the assassination and resigned afterward. "Unfortunately, the bodyguards didn't respond as they were taught to do," Gillon said. "They failed by not shooting him on the spot like a dog, like any other despicable terrorist."
Gillon refused to confirm the published remarks.
Why didn't Rabin's bodyguards kill Amir?
Gillon's trip abroad is one of the facts that conspiracy theorists raise in suggest that the acute operational failure to which the former Shin Bet chief refers was in fact part of a conspiratorial setup to allow Amir to get close to Rabin and to fire what members of his bodyguard detail reportedly shouted out were "Blanks! Blanks!"
Indeed, a series of eyewitnesses, including Shin Bet and Police officials provide evidence why Amir was not indeed "shot down ... like a dog." Witnesses stated that Amir shouted, "It's nothing ... they're blanks. It's a toy gun." A Shin Bet (secret service) agent testified that "I heard a policeman shout to people to calm down. The shot is a blank." Policeman Moshe Ephron stated: "The shots didn't sound natural. If they were real shots, they should have sounded much louder."
Leah Rabin stated her husband did not stagger and fall after apparently being shot at close range. "He was standing and looking very well." She also said that she was kept from seeing her husband for a full hour and was told by an Israeli security chief that she "should not worry as the whole thing had been staged."
A poll published in Yediot over the weekend showed that 20 percent of the Israeli public thinks Amir should be pardoned. Other polls have shown that even larger percentages of the Israeli public believe that the full story of the assassination has never been revealed and that there was a conspiracy involving the Shin Bet.
The trial of another Shin Bet agent, Avishai Raviv, who admitted to staging events intended to make Israel's right wing look bad, ended inconclusively, since Raviv insisted that he was only doing his job on behalf of the internal security agency.
In fact, as the late journalist Adir Zik wrote in Hatzofeh, "Carmi Gillon was the direct handler of Avishai Raviv for an extended period. It was he who turned Raviv into the biggest provocateur in Israel's history.... Even while Gillon's deputies directed Raviv, Gillon was in direct contact with him. He ordered him to marry a Russian born settler as a cover for his activities.
"Gillon ordered Raviv to undertake a long series of violent crimes against Jews and Arabs in Hebron, Jerusalem, and at Tel Aviv and Bar Ilan Universities. "Gillon ordered Raviv to make violent attacks on Knesset Members Tamar Guzonsky and Shulamit Aloni on behalf of the Shabak front organization, Eyal."
"Gillon's hatred of the Right led him to utilize the services of a Shabak plant in the Israel Broadcasting Authority named Eitan Oren, to film and televise a series of phoney reports whose goal was to humiliate the residents of Judea and Samaria...."
"Gillon ordered Raviv to print a photomontage of Rabin in a Gestapo uniform and display it a huge anti-government rally. Rabin called Gillon to his office and demanded an explanation. Gillon told Rabin not to worry, Raviv was under his authority."
"Immediately after Rabin's murder, Raviv told police investigators that he had heard Amir threaten Rabin's life four or five times. Raviv had to have informed his superiors, including Gillon, about Amir's intentions and they had to have deliberately ignored the warnings."
Gillon, however, said the results of the Rabin murder did not surprise him. Because Rabin's security detail did not kill Amir immediately, he has become a poster boy for the radical right wing, encouraging political killings, Gillon said. The immediate elimination of Amir would have also had the benefit of getting rid of someone who could have revealed the purported Shin Bet conspiracy.
"The assessment that the next political assassination is upon us is correct," Gillon said in the Yediot interview. The radical right wing, he said, is now focusing its hatred on another person, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he added. Now, as then, the likely inheritor of power would be Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
The pre-assassination video re-emerges
In recent weeks, conspiracy theorists have accused Peres publicly of ordering Rabin's assassination, and then leading the coverup of the alleged conspiracy. They claim that Peres directed the Shin Bet, which he personally headed, to investigate its own failures in the murder rather than the Israeli Police, the usual agency which investigates crimes. Their accusations were strengthened by the extraordinary evidence of video footage of the moments preceding the assassination, now publicly available for the first time on the Internet on a site www.shimonperes.net, hosted by David Rutstein, one of the those leading the accusers of the Vice PM for principal responsibility in the Rabin assassination conspiracy.
The video -- filmed by a man who described himself as an "amateur filmmaker" but who turned out to be an Israeli government employee -- focuses intensively on the figure of Yigal Amir loitering for many minutes in what was supposed to be a "sterile area." It also show Shimon Peres showing unusual interest in the limousine that would take Rabin away and which was, the conspiracy theorists claim, the place where the Prime Minister was in fact murdered by the real assassins.
The Wikipedia entry for the Kempler video notes that:
1. The camera was trained to the area of action before any action occurred.
2. A security guard is seen stepping aside to give Amir a clear shot.
3. Amir appears to shoot with a different arm than he used when reenacting the shooting for the police.
4. Sloppy doctoring of the film is self-evident in the video, where Amir's arm is seen unnaturally elongated.
5. The flash from Amir's gun as seen in the video is inconsistent with the type of firearm allegedly employed by Amir.
6. Rabin's reaction to Amir's shots is incongruous with the wounds reportedly sustained by Rabin.
Carmi Gillon's Prophetic Powers
Gillon's prophetic powers should not be underestimated. On August 24, 1995, two months before Rabin's murder, Gillon told a group of journalists that Rabin's life was in danger from an assassin. He described this theoretical murderer: "He doesn't have to be a settler, he could be a dark-skinned Sephardic student, studying at Bar-Ilan University and living in Herzlia."
Yigal Amir was precisely that: a Sephardic Bar-Ilan student living in Herzlia!
Veteran journalist Ophir Shalakh of Maariv was one of the journalists in attendance who noted, "The profile Carmi Gillon presented precisely described Yigal Amir."
Gillon's prophetic abilities also were revealed on the night of the Rabin assassination, when first informed of the murder by phone while he was in Paris: "It was a Jew."
As Barry Chamish, widely credited -- and discredited in official circles and among the mainstream media -- for having first and most thoroughly investigated the Rabin assassination, and undermining with evidence the official version of the murder, noted that "Gillon's Shabak underlings were quoted claiming to have queried Gillon why he was flying to Paris two days before the most security-sensitive rally in the country's history. He refused to answer but did order his deputies not to change even one detail of his procedures for the rally."
Gillon, Chamish notes, "has consistently refused to explain what he was doing in Paris but a correspondent of mine found one revealing quote, the only one of its kind. Gillon explained that he was visiting Yaacov Perry in hospital in Paris. Very touching, but if true, it means both the current Shabak head and his predecessor were in Paris the night of the assassination."
Chamish also believes that Gillon was working for Peres, and was later paid off handsomely for his service, even though he was forced to resign in the wake of the official report of the Shamgar Commission investigating Shin Bet failures. "The goal of the murder was to place the French puppet Shimon Peres in power. And Gillon was there pitching in. He was later rewarded for his connivance and silence, when in 1999, Peres appointed Gillon at a huge salary to chair his peace institute."
Gearing up for the tenth anniversary
Amir's family, meanwhile, is lobbying for his early release from prison, touching off an uproar as the country prepares to mark the 10th anniversary of Rabin's slaying. The family Web site compared the assassination to the "killing of a criminal," and calls for the prosecution of Israeli leaders who supported the Gaza pullout.
Lawmaker Ran Cohen has asked the Justice Ministry to press incitement charges against the Amirs. The ministry has not yet responded. Shimon Peres has also not yet taken legal action against those accusing him of ordering the assassination of his predecessor.
Yigal Amir commented at a court hearing in 1995, soon after his arraignment: "If I tell the truth, the whole system will collapse. I know enough to destroy this country."
It would be ironic indeed if the comments of the discredited Shin Bet chief, reportedly wistfully expressing hope that Yigal Amir would have been shot down like a dog by Shin Bet agents, succeed after ten years of bringing again to public attention his own role "predicting" the killer's identity, in directing the "agent provocateur" who played such a key role in the plot, and perhaps even suggesting the need for further investigation to ascertain whether in fact his own activities may have been directed by the most senior officials in the Israeli government, then and now. Every dog, as the saying goes, has his day.
Shimon Peres, meanwhile, is quoted yesterday as telling Israel radio that a political assassin may yet be at large, and that censorship of certain extreme views is necessary to protect the democratic institutions of the nation. "there is among us an extremist minority that should be forbidden to be heard in the media. This is a grave danger to our democracy."
A memorial for Rabin will be held Nov. 12 and the conspiracy theorists are organizing events to demand a re-investigation of the assassination. The gathering was postponed by a week to allow former U.S. President Bill Clinton to attend.
The AP contributed to this report.
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