Meir Dagan

Meir Dagan was born Meir Huberman in 1945 on a train near Kherson as his family moved westward at the end of the Second World War, and reached Israel as a child. Conscripted in 1963, he fought as a paratroop officer in the Six-Day War and on the Sinai front in the Yom Kippur War, and in 1971 received the Medal of Courage for overpowering an armed man who was holding a live grenade while he commanded a special counter-terrorism unit in the Gaza Strip. He commanded the Barak Armoured Brigade in the 1982 Lebanon War and retired as a major general in 1995. He directed the Mossad from 2002 to 2011, a decade in which the agency was widely reported to have worked to slow Iran's nuclear programme; after leaving office he publicly opposed an Israeli military strike on Iran. He died of cancer in Tel Aviv in 2016.