The Future Shin Bet Chief Entered Israel on a False Passport

The man who would lead Shin Bet arrived in Israel as Otto Stanek. His Czech passport was false. Before long, the security service’s own paperwork would carry another name for him: Walter Rappaport.

Amos Manor had been born Arthur Mendelowitz in Transylvania in 1918. The identities accumulated as he moved through war, clandestine migration and intelligence work. The Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center dates his arrival to June 22, 1949. He began working for Shin Bet the following month.

His official service biography compresses the preceding catastrophe into a few lines. Drafted into the Hungarian army after the outbreak of World War II, he was sent to Auschwitz in 1944. He survived.

After the war, he worked in Bucharest for Mossad Le’Aliyah Bet, the underground organization moving Jewish refugees toward Palestine. Ynet’s obituary records his work there from 1947. Amos began as an operational alias in that office; it eventually became his first name.

The Heritage Center says the Bucharest offices closed in 1949 and Manor and his wife were smuggled out using the false Czech passport. Once in Israel, Isser Harel advised him to register under Walter Rappaport. The purpose was to protect his personal security and relatives still vulnerable to the Romanian authorities.

He formally became Amos Manor on January 2, 1950. According to the center, Moshe Sharett advised him on the Hebrew surname. The service he had just joined put his familiarity with Eastern Europe to immediate use.

Manor spoke Hebrew, English, French, Romanian and Hungarian. His initial assignment concerned Eastern Europe in Shin Bet’s non-Arab affairs branch. He rose to deputy chief in 1952 and took over the agency in 1953, succeeding Izi Dorot. Within four years of entering the country under borrowed papers, he headed its domestic security service.

Shin Bet dates his leadership to 1953–63 and his retirement to 1964. A later career took him into company boards, banks and hotels. The official record presents a rapid ascent; the names in the earlier paperwork preserve the precarious journey that made it possible.