TEL AVIV, Israel, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has appointed a veteran spy as the new chief of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, amid an unprecedented -- and some say potentially dangerous -- command shuffle as tensions rise with Iran.
Tamir Pardo, twice deputy director of the Mossad, will replace hard-charging former army general and black operations specialist Meir Dagan, who has run the agency since 2002.
Dagan is due to retire in December after eight years in which he revitalized a service demoralized by failures and internal turf wars, and pulled off a series of intelligence coups.
These are believed to include the assassination of Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian leaders as well as Iranian nuclear scientists. One was killed in a daylight bombing in Tehran Monday and another was wounded. Authorities blamed Israel for those attacks.
Pardo, who unlike the veteran Dagan is a little-known figure because of his undercover work, took part in the 1976 Israeli commando raid on Entebbe, Uganda, to rescue hostages seized aboard an Air France jetliner. UPI
