Efraim Halevy’s story of his years in the ranks and leadership of Israel’s Mossad could not have come at a more opportune time. “Man in the Shadows” (St. Martin’s, 292 pages, $24.95) spotlights the most pressing and controversial areas where foreign and defense policy making, intelligence gathering, and political ambitions collide.

As a former director of the famed intelligence agency, Mr. Halevy cannot kiss and tell, so he teases readers instead with sketchy references to, or descriptions of, intelligence operations.

But as ambassador to the European Union, Mr. Halevy tells us he was repeatedly told, “if there was violence or unrest [among Muslims] in Europe, this was primarily due to Israeli intransigence on these issues. Europe was ‘paying the price’ for Israel’s sins and the moment Israel changed its policy on these subjects and met the Palestinians’ justified demands, all would be well.” This perception has become a critical factor creating pressure on Israel to resolve the Palestinian issue for the sake of wider Western interests.

Mr. Halevy played a pivotal role in securing Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan and the book makes for excellent reading in this area. He analyzes the process and politics through which Israel reached the Oslo accords with the Palestinians, and explains how Israel boxed itself into accepting the Middle East Road Map.

The first Gulf War yielded a paradoxical result: “All of a sudden it became vital and urgent for Washington to act decisively and demonstrably to get traction and movement on the Palestinian issue,” Mr. Halevy writes. “This rapidly became the litmus test for the United States to prove that it had not become the ‘enemy’ of the Arab nations.” Out of that came the Madrid peace conference, and out of the bilateral negotiations that followed came the Oslo accords. Needless to say, Mr. Halevy is not enthusiastic with either the process or the product. The former cut the professionals out of the picture; the latter inevitably led to the collapse of inflated hopes. Oslo was wrongly conceived from inception, because it lacked the give-and-take that should flow from the involvement of intelligence gathering and policy making. “What characterized the Palestinian channel,” he writes, was that “the Israeli interlocutors were for the most part persons politically aligned with their principals [i.e. Shimon Peres].” Moreover, the decision to leave the intelligence community out of the picture was born of a view that “achieving a settlement should not be mired by practical considerations of defense, security, and related factors.”

By the end of the summer of 2000 – following Yasser Arafat’s rejection of Prime Minister Barak’s generous offer at Camp David and just before the launch of the second intifada – it had become clear that to reach a settlement with the Palestinians, Israel would have to completely accept the Palestinian’s three basic demands: total withdrawal of Israel to the 1949 armistice lines, the partition of Jerusalem, and the implementation, in some form or other, of the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. In other words, Mossad and the rest of the intelligence community had reached the conclusion that the Palestinian’s minimal demands (and their continuing penchant for terrorism) exceeded Israel’s maximum generosity.

This conclusion found its most potent expression in President Bush’s June 24, 2002, remarks in the Rose Garden, during which he became the first American president to endorse the principle of a Palestinian state while insisting on a sea change in Palestinian leadership. (Mr. Halevy claims that it was his draft language, approved in Jerusalem, which served as the basis for the president’s speech, “A Call for a New Palestinian Leadership.”)

But then Iraq interfered once again. In order to secure Prime Minister Blair’s left flank, as well as to assuage Arab and Muslim concerns, the Bush administration had agreed to officially endorse the road map, a step-by-step outline co-signed by the Quartet, a unique diplomatic contraption embracing America, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations. Mr. Halevy saw this as a dangerous development. “The link,” he writes, “hitherto latent, between the conflict and America’s wider interest in the region therefore received public exposure and recognition.” Israel was trapped into accepting the road map, albeit with 14 reservations that tampered down hawkish opposition within Mr. Sharon’s cabinet while not obliging Washington to commit to anymore than a vague assurance that it “would be addressed.” (So eager was Mr. Sharon to accede to the Bush administration’s request that at the cabinet meeting convened to consider this decision, the American assurance was “translated into Hebrew as stating that Israel’s reservations had been accepted.” Elsewhere in his own book, Mr. Halevy mentions being offered an ambassador-level position in “the six embassies” around the world, as if Israel has no more; several times, principals gather for a “for-eyes talks,” actually a “four eyes talk,” Hebrew idiom for a one-on-one meeting.)

Israel’s initiative, begun by Mr. Halevy, was designed to enable a new Palestinian leadership to emerge and to forge an interim agreement with Israel that would, in time, lower the intensity of the conflict and promote a climate of reconciliation, was transformed, overnight into a formula applied as a solution imposed with the barrel of a shotgun.

Israel’s begrudging decision to accept the road map was the equivalent of its decision during the first Gulf War to refrain from responding to Iraqi Scud missile attacks.

“Man in the Shadows” makes a strong case for Mr. Halevy’s thesis that alongside “leaders and people who have had varying influence on the train of events … there has been a third element … the professional level.” Indeed, the book is, in part, an attempt to settle scores with those he considered his bureaucratic foes within the foreign ministry and among political circles. Mr. Peres comes in for considerable criticism; most other targets remain nameless, although Mr. Halevy’s references to “some in the prime minister’s office” during his brief post-Mossad tenure as

Mr. Sharon’s national security adviser are obviously aimed at senior counsellor Dov Weisglass. Mr. Halevy criticizes the “openly and proudly announced” fact that “a special channel has been set up from the office of the prime minister to the White House … Statements to this effect over the last three years could not have endeared the Israeli leadership to the professional levels in Washington, D.C.” During Mr. Sharon’s tenure, Mr.Weisglass was the personification of this tendency, frequently flying to Washington to brief “Condi.”

Over time, Mr. Halevy came to appreciate the role of his political masters, who were forced to consider his intelligence within a context of what might or might not be possible politically as well as operationally. “It was the mission of the intelligence chief not only to give his very best evaluation of a situation and/or a threat or a challenge. It was inherent in his brief to provide his political master with the option to ‘play’ the advice given to him, to enhance his chances of political survival.”

Mr. Halevy argues for “extensive offensive planning” in the war on terror but understands that the “political level” is constrained by “the reluctance of the public at large to come to terms with the reality of terrorism.”

Regarding America, Mr. Halevy thinks the reorganization of intelligence after September 11, 2001, to be largely a mistake. For one thing, he wonders who’s actually in charge. “Who will be the counterpart in the United States for intelligence chiefs the world over, given the new structure? …Will it be the new directors of the CIA, shorn of their prestige and power, or the DNI [director of national intelligence]?” (This was written before Porter Gross resigned his post as Director of Central Intelligence in April 2005.)

Mr. Halevy believes America needs “a fully fledged security service” because the FBI focus on law enforcement “does not go hand in hand with security.”

As for the future, Mr. Halevy cautions that Western powers may yet have to exploit the difference (insignificant as it may currently appear) between the territorial aspirations of Hamas and Hezbollah as opposed to the global ambitions of the “international Muslim fundamentalist terror.”

After all, he asks, Is the game of nations not one where each side chooses between tough alternatives, only to find itself exchanging sides when the ally of yesterday is the sworn enemy of today? [Saddam] Hussein was then the savior of the moderate Arab world and the vital interests of the United States in the region. Fifteen years later, he is in the dock facing trial and his country in the throes of a fierce battle over its future. Fifteen years ago, Washington was celebrating its victory over the Soviet Union and the ultimate demise of the Soviet empire with the Taliban and bin Laden as mini-heroes of a fifty-year Cold War won at last.

Only someone with Mr. Halevy’s resume could properly hold to such a perspective; for a country to alter its view of friends and enemies over time is not a sign of either incompetence or treason. It is the beginning of wisdom.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.