Meir Dagan died in 2016, six years after his tenure as director of the Mossad, Israel’s vaunted intelligence agency, ended. But some of the fruits of his efforts were apparent this past summer, during the so-called Iran-Israel war, when the latter country carried out a series of daring and ultimately successful operations against the Iranian regime. Among other feats, Israel built drone bases inside Iran itself and carried out what is probably the largest decapitation strike in modern military history, eliminating the vast majority of Tehran’s military leadership in one fell swoop. President John F. Kennedy famously said that “victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” The success of the Iran-Israel war has many fathers, but surely Dagan can be counted among them.

Samuel Katz’s recently published The Architect of Espionage: The Man Who Built Israel’s Mossad Into the World’s Boldest Intelligence Force makes the case that Dagan transformed the Jewish state’s foreign intelligence service, equipping it for its present-day heroics. Dagan was not a natural choice to lead the Mossad, but he was perhaps its most consequential director. Born in Kherson, Ukraine, in 1945 in trying circumstances, his early years were inseparable from the ravages of war and the suffering of the Holocaust. His parents, Shmuel and Mina, were Polish Jews who spent most of World War II in a Soviet work camp. Nazi forces had burned most of their tiny village to the ground. The Soviet “liberators” encouraged the Jews of the town to flee and join them in the Ural........

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