JERUSALEM, March 4 (JTA) — The newly appointed head of Mossad will have some daunting work ahead of him. Ephraim Halevy, a former deputy head of the foreign intelligence service, will oversee an overhaul and rehabilitation of the organization. Mossad’s vaunted image has been tarnished over the past several months, which saw the bungled attempt last September on the life of a Hamas leader in Jordan, the arrest of a senior Mossad officer suspected of feeding false information to his superiors, and a botched bugging attempt last month in Switzerland that led to the arrest of a Mossad agent. Along with announcing Halevy’s appointment Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also named Maj. Gen. Amiram Levine, the head of the Israel Defense Force northern command, to serve as Mossad’s deputy director. The premier acknowledged that there had been damage to the agency as a result of recent “malfunctions” as well as “unnecessary, and irresponsible” leaks to the media. Halevy, who enjoys a good relationship with Jordan’s King Hussein, helped restore ties between the two countries after a botched Mossad assassination attempt on Jordanian soil last September threatened Israeli-Jordanian relations. The failed attempt on a Hamas leader in Jordan was a major factor in Yatom’s recent decision to resign from Mossad. There were media reports suggesting that Netanyahu would have Halevy serve as Mossad director for a transitional period until Levine was ready to take over. But at the news conference, Netanyahu stressed that Halevy would be taking over the intelligence agency for a significant amount of time. Netanyahu said he would present the new appointments before the government for approval, and that he expected Halevy to take up the new post in the coming weeks. Yatom agreed to stay on until Halevy assumed the post, Netanyahu said. In a separate development, the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Uzi Landau of the Likud, dismissed as “nonsense” a British newspaper report regarding a failed Mossad operation in Bern. According to the report, a team of Mossad agents were sent to Switzerland last month to assassinate two businessmen — not to bug an apartment, as had been widely reported — who intended to purchase biological and chemical weapons in eastern Europe for Hezbollah. Interviewed on Israel Radio, Landau termed the report the result of a damaging – – and ridiculous — leak that could prove harmful to state security.
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