by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv for ProPublica

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David Barnea, the director of the Mossad for some of the most remarkable successes in its storied history, never intended to be an intelligence officer. As a young man, he served as a team leader in the Israeli military’s most elite commando unit and then came to New York to study for a career in business.

After earning a master’s degree in finance at Pace University, he took jobs at an Israeli investment bank and then a brokerage firm, the first steps toward a career in which the biggest danger was an unexpected shift in the world’s financial markets.

Barnea’s world was jolted in November 1995 when an extremist right-wing Israeli assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally. Rabin had signed the 1993 Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and was pushing for a two-state solution to decades of conflict between Arabs and Jews.

“The Rabin assassination shocked him like many other Israelis,” recalled David Meidan, a retired senior Mossad operative considered Barnea’s mentor. He said the killing prompted Barnea, at age 30, to rethink everything and look for “some meaning in his life.” A friend suggested he apply to the Mossad, and after passing the required physical and psychological tests, he was accepted into the agency’s trainee program.

Barnea showed a........

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