There was a time, not so long ago, when the names of the heads of [Israel’s] Mossad and the Shin Bet were secret. These people remained, for the most part, anonymous for a good part of their lives.… Nowadays, [however], it seems these blokes just can’t [keep quiet], and they make a beeline for every microphone they can lay their hands on, resulting in a disservice to both the country and themselves.

Meir Dagan, the immediate former head of the Mossad, for example, would have vastly served both better by remaining silent.… Instead, he has come out as impulsive, self-serving, totally irresponsible and void of self-control to the point where at [last week’s] Jerusalem Post Conference in New York, he stooped to calling a minister in the government “a liar” in front of an audience of 1,200 people who had come to celebrate Israel, not watch its leadership squabble on the stage.…

When Ariel Sharon brought Dagan into the Mossad, the talk was that Sharon had chosen a bulldozer like himself to shake the place up, which Dagan did very quickly and, some would argue, all-too thoroughly, throwing some of the baby out with the bathwater and leading to operational catastrophes such as the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas strongman, in Dubai in January 2010. While successful, unfortunately for Israel, the operation was filmed in real time by some two dozen surveillance cameras at the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel, where Mabhouh met his death at the hands of two of the most unlikely tennis players you would ever meet, and presented to the world as a 27-minute edited spy thriller by Dubai’s police chief, Dhai Khalfan Tamim.…

That said, it was widely believed that Dagan had done a good job, that he had restored confidence to the organization, brought in young people with scientific minds, taking the Iranians by surprise when their centrifuges began to spin out of control and Stutnex arrived on their doorstep. Then Iranian nuclear scientists began to disappear when they traveled abroad, and others died while on their way to work in Tehran and other cities. There were impressive demises of Hezbollah leaders in Beirut and even in the heart of Damascus, and generally, as far as the public was concerned, Dagan was something of a national hero. Until he opened his mouth, that is.

Several months ago, when the public debate in Israel over whether to attack Iran or not was at its height, I asked a person I trust implicitly why, if we were going to attack, is everyone speaking so much about it? He answered me in one word: “Dagan.”

It was Dagan who started the whole snowball rolling when giving his parting remarks to defense correspondents as he was leaving his job, saying that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be…useless, counter-productive and have extremely negative consequences for Israel for little gain. He also accused prime minister [Binyamin Netanyahu] and the defense minister [Ehud Barak] of wanting such an attack for essentially political purposes.…

His message was repeated on television and in a backgrounder with Yediot Aharonot, the country’s largest newspaper, and again and again since, including a devastating interview with Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes in March of this year, and culminating in his latest performance at The Jerusalem Post Conference.…

I have not gone into the Yuval Diskin case. The immediate past head of the Shin Bet is also warning us we have dangerous leaders at the helm. He too would have done us all a favor had he been silent and not tried a mini-Dagan without being quite so categorical on the Iranian element.

The Dagan example, however, is more than enough on its own for Israel seriously to reconsider whether the heads of its security organizations should be known to the public, what they should be allowed to say once they are out of service, and how long they are expected to hold their tongues before treading on the country’s security as a stepping stone into politics.