TOM PUTNAM: Good evening, everyone, and welcome. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And it's my pleasure to welcome everyone and just reinforce what a wonderful partnership the Kennedy Library has had over the years with WBUR. We're proud to host so many programs with them. They are sponsors of our Forum programs, and we are especially pleased to have you all here this evening, along with our distinguished panelists.
And it's now my job to certainly just turn the program over now to Sam Fleming of WBUR to give the proper introduction. [applause]
SAM FLEMING: Hi, thanks for coming. What a special treat we're in store to hear tonight. This American Life, I think many of you probably heard the program this weekend. And to have our colleagues from This American Life here this evening, at this time, with this incredibly special book hits the shelves is just such a treat.
Ira Glass, I do not need to introduce him; everybody knows about Ira. But I just want to say he's one of the most generous pioneers, innovators and really just has done things that nobody else has ever thought of in terms of storytelling and promoting public radio. And for us at WBUR, we are ever so grateful for you, and to Ira Glass, who is here with us this evening. [applause]
IRA GLASS: I swear, this will be the last introduction before the evening begins. Thanks, Sam, so much. I'm always very, very happy to be doing an event with WBUR, because it's one of the best public radio stations in the country. [applause] Great local programming. And it's an honor to be here in the Kennedy Library talking about this other event. The Rabin assassination was seen in Israel as their Kennedy assassination. When it happened, people were shocked that such a thing could happen, that a Jew would kill another Jew in this kind of thing, kill the prime minister. People just hadn't imagined that it could be.
One of the things that Dan Ephron and Nancy Updike reported out in doing this is that the security details that were protecting the prime minister the day of the assassination, they didn't have a scenario which involved another Jew killing the prime minister, much less an Orthodox Jew, a religious Jew. What they thought were protecting the prime minister from was Palestinian terrorists or Palestinians.
So without further ado, let me invite to the stage Nancy Updike, who's been one of the producers of our show since the show began, and Dan Ephron, former bureau chief from Newsweek, Jerusalem bureau chief, to talk about this stuff. [applause]
Hi, guys.
NANCY UPDIKE: Hi.
DAN EPHRON: Hi, Ira.
IRA GLASS: Okay, so Dan, I think you should talk about what prompted you to write the book. Before you do, I just wanted to get a sense, because we've tried to bring in stuff that was not in the radio show. Can I get a sense from the audience? How many of you actually heard this week's episode. Okay, good. We have all sorts of stuff to play you and to talk about that was not in the show.
So Dan, why did you decide to dive so deeply into this?
DAN EPHRON: So I have been a reporter for more than 20 years, and I've spent a lot of that time in the Middle East and in Israel. And I was actually, I reported in Israel in the mid-'90s, and I attended that rally where Rabin was assassinated. I covered it for Reuters at the time.
And political rallies are not usually news for the foreign press. It's speeches and songs, and that's it; there's not much to write. But this was this period when Rabin was in the middle of a series of peace deals with the Palestinians, the Oslo deals. And his popularity rating, Rabin's, waxed and waned, based on essentially the success or failure of this agreement. And the rally was supposed to gauge the extent to which he still had public support for this peace deal. That's how we foreign correspondents saw it.
So I did go cover it. I left when it was over. I started walking back to the apartment where I was living in Tel Aviv. I was a few blocks away. I got a beeper message that said "shots fired in the area of Rabin, go back." And I ran back to the scene and heard witnesses say that it looked like Rabin had been hit.
I then covered the trial of Yigal Amir, and lived in Israel for a period after that. But eventually left Israel, and spent time in Washington, covered national security, which meant Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo. And in 2010, Newsweek sent me back to Israel to be the bureau chief. And I think we've talked about this. I am sort of relentlessly optimistic by nature; I always think things are going to work out. And I think I had that view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well. Which I know sounds funny generally, and maybe particularly funny in the last few weeks.
But I always felt that even in the period of the Second Intifada, where there was a lot of violence and suicide bombings regularly, that it was a matter of time for the right leaders to be elected, and for an agreement to be completed between the two sides. And when we moved there in 2010, I think that optimism drained out of me very quickly.
IRA GLASS: Why? What did you see?
I was just about to say, we don't have to talk about why [laughter], but–
IRA GLASS: Just summarize it quickly.
DAN EPHRON: Israel in 2010 was in some places a much better place than it had been when we lived there years earlier. We lived there, Nancy and I, during the Second Intifada, during this period where there was a lot of violence. And it was very clear when we went back that– the cafés we used to spend time at that had armed guards outside, the armed guards were gone. The economy was good. And this was 2010 when the economy in the rest of the world is taking a dive. It was as good place to live. We lived in Tel Aviv. We had lived in Jerusalem earlier. Tel Aviv in a lot of ways, lifestyle, is a terrific place.
So Israel had sort of managed to achieve the situation that it wanted for a long time, kind of get the dividends of peace without actually having to reach a peace agreement. And that was a huge disincentive to then do something with the peace process.
IRA GLASS: In other words, there weren't suicide bombings or anything like that. It wasn't violent. And so, they had no incentive to actually make a deal with the Palestinians, because they had what they wanted.
DAN EPHRON: On the other side of that, there were plenty of disincentives, because every peace process had set off suicide bombings, had set off violence from the Israeli right, had created political instability. So for an Israeli leader to initiate a process where they're negotiating with the Palestinians, he has to take into account that his coalition might collapse, that there would be a backlash from, if he's a rightwing prime minister, from his constituency.
And then, of course, the assassination scenario, to this day, looms. And it looms in the minds of Israeli politicians, in the minds of Israeli security chiefs.
IRA GLASS: You mean literally, like people think, in doing this calculation, you think they think, Well, look at what happened to Rabin; he reached out to the Palestinians and he got shot by a fellow Israeli?
DAN EPHRON: I think it's one more disincentive. There was a poll published in one of the Israeli newspapers two weeks ago that said something like 65% of Israelis believe that an assassination could happen again. This was a country that had no tradition of political assassinations.
So yeah, that moment in history looms large, even today.
IRA GLASS: And so, you moved back in 2010. What brought you back to the assassination? What brought you back to that night 20 years ago?
DAN EPHRON: So if the chances of peace had decreased quite a lot over the years, and that was my perspective in 2010, this moment 15 years earlier in 1995, where certainly I remembered it has a very hopeful moment, the tragedy of the assassination seemed that much bigger. And because I had covered it, and because I was a young journalist at the time, and it had a big impact on me, I looked for ways to go back and write about the assassination.
And at some point, I was doing that thing on YouTube that you do, where you click, and then you click, and then an afternoon goes by. [laughter]
NANCY UPDIKE: You're like, Oh, there are a lot of cat videos online. [laughter] Right. And the pizza boxes are piling up. And eventually I found a
short clip, a 20-second clip of the interrogation of Yigal Amir.
IRA GLASS: Yigal Amir, again, the assassin who was convicted of the crime.
DAN EPHRON: Right. And this was an interrogation that happened maybe 20 minutes or a half hour after the assassination itself. And it was a very short clip. The quality is terrible. We can show it. But it was mesmerizing, because Yigal Amir, he commits the murder and he sort of disappears. He disappears into the Israeli prison system, which means– journalists aren't allowed into prison to interview Israeli prisoners, for the most part. So he hasn't been heard from.
The question of, who is this guy who committed an act that really sort of changed the course of history; it tilted the slope of history in Israel, I was very curious about. And here was this little 20-second window. And I think what occurred to me right way was, if there's 20 seconds, if the police went to the trouble of recording a little bit of it, they've probably recorded all of it. And if it's somewhere in the country, someone has hours of interrogation video with Yigal Amir. I think that was the first moment where I thought, if I can get that, maybe there is the basis for a long article or a book, or something like that.
IRA GLASS: So why don't we play or show people some of what you're talking about?
DAN EPHRON: Again, the quality here is terrible, but you'll see Yigal Amir– I'm sorry. Okay, so Yigal Amir is on the left, he's in the shadow. And he's sitting at a table. And what he's saying here, it's very short, he says–
[video played]
What he's saying is "everything I did"– and he's explaining why he
killed Rabin not 30 minutes earlier. "Everything I did, I did because of my religious obligation." And he's speaking very slowly because the way the interrogations are conducted, the police officer who's sitting on the right side of the table there is taking down every word by hand. And so, often Yigal Amir is speaking too quickly and the policeman says "slow down." Or just now you heard, there was a little section where he says, "Did you get that down? Did you take that down?"
NANCY UPDIKE: You can also sometimes hear the policeman repeating what he says.
So you'll hear Amir say it, and then the police says it as he's writing it down. And then Amir will go on. And so, there's another chance to hear what's happening.
IRA GLASS: And I know that you did manage to track down all the video of it, and you watched it. You had covered the trial, you had seen him in court. How did it change your picture of who he was, to look at all the video? What did you learn?
DAN EPHRON: I think I thought that Yigal Amir was a marginal character. Marginal in terms of, from the margins of society.
IRA GLASS: Like a crazy?
DAN EPHRON: Not crazy. I think it was pretty clear in the trial that he was not insane.
He was just deeply ideological and extremist. But that he wasn't a particularly smart guy. That maybe he was a ruffian. In the mold of other Israelis who had committed extreme acts of violence again, usually Palestinians, or against the left. There have been very few incidents like that. There's no tradition of political assassination.
IRA GLASS: You pictured him as kind of a violent bully.
Right.
IRA GLASS: And what did you learn watching the video?
DAN EPHRON: He's a very smart guy. And deeply ideological. I think the thing that was most striking in the hours of the interrogation that followed the assassination– so the assassination occurs just before ten p.m. in the evening. It's after a very large peace rally. Rabin is coming off the stage. He's addressed the rally. There were 100,000 people there. He's coming off the stage to his car, into a parking lot. It's an open area parking lot. And he's surrounded by bodyguards. And then there's a ring of policemen around him.
And the shooter, Yigal Amir, has managed to get into this parking lot area that's supposed to be secure and wait for him. And he's got a gun; he's got a Beretta. And he sees Rabin walk past, very close to him. And Amir circles behind him, finds a gap between the bodyguards and shoots him.
That incident caused– you talked about this being the Israeli Kennedy assassination. I think in most ways it's not. But the ways that it is the Israeli Kennedy assassination is the impact on the country. I think there was a deep sense of trauma as a result. The prime minister had been assassinated, and he had been killed by a fellow Jew. So Israel is traumatized.
And in the police station, Amir is about as calm and as articulate as you can imagine. And he's calm and articulate, it becomes very clear, because he believes that what happened in the parking lot is that God created a situation where he can get close enough where there'll be a hole between the bodyguards. Because it's terribly unlikely– the fact that he could get into the parking lot at all is a surprise. The fact that he can spend 40 minutes there waiting for the prime minister to come down. Israeli secret service is very well trained. So the idea that he could outmaneuver them. And then survive; he's not shot dead.
IRA GLASS: But one of the things you say in the radio show is that he tells the interrogators that he would go to the rally, and if God wanted him to kill Rabin, he would give him a sign. And the sign would be, he would have an opportunity to do it. So when he gets the opportunity, when he's able to stand there, and when he's able to get in so close, he's like, Oh, that is the sign. God wants me to do this. And so, he does it.
DAN EPHRON: Yigal Amir had stalked Rabin for about two years, which meant that he had gone– every couple of months he would read in the newspaper that Rabin was going to appear at some public event. And Amir would go there and wait. Three times it happened before the assassination. And each time it happens, something went wrong. Either Amir got there early, or Rabin canceled and didn't come at all. And Amir saw this as a sign that God didn't want him to do it at that moment. Or that something would have gone wrong and God saved him by preventing the event from happening.
IRA GLASS: And just to say, for the people who didn't hear the radio show and don't know this story so well, the reason why he was killing the prime minister was because of the peace treaty. He saw it as a violation of Jewish law, basically.
DAN EPHRON: Right. So the Oslo peace deals called for Israel to withdraw from parts of the West Bank. And these were staged peace deals, so there was a process where, at the end of the process, certainly the Palestinians hoped they would get a state of their own in all or most of the West Bank and Gaza. For religious Jews or rightwing religious Jews, for many of them anyway, this was really a betrayal of Judaism, because that land, that land certainly in the West Bank and the West Bank and Gaza, to many Jews, is land that God promised to the Jews; it's the Jewish birthright. And Amir was one of them. He saw what Rabin was doing as a betrayal of Israel and a betrayal of Judaism.
IRA GLASS: So Nancy, I should say the two of you are married, and you see Dan writing this book. At what point did you think this could be a radio story as well?
NANCY UPDIKE: All of the documentation that Dan – I call him Danny – that Danny found, just voluminous – documents and video and diaries. But yeah, some of it was video, and video of key moments. There's a video of the assassination. There's a reenactment video that Yigal Amir did that is stunning to watch. There's hours and hours of interrogation. And the fact that all of this existed was exciting.
And then, also, Israel is a small country. This only happened 20 years ago. A lot of people are just alive, and you can call them up and say, Hey, can we come talk to you? And that's exactly what we did, just kind of called people out of the blue. We called one guy I think we're going to hear from later, just looked him up in the country directory 411 in the morning, and he said, "Yeah, come over this afternoon." And he was just like at home in his gym shorts, "Yeah, let's talk about this."
So the smallness and the informality of the country made it possible to talk to people who had been there and we had those conversations that we could kind of– like we had something from them at the time, and we could go back to them and have this conversation about now and how they remember it.
IRA GLASS: In a way, that's kind of unthinkable, if you think about a big public event like that happening in this country, that you could just reach everybody, just pick up the phone and talk to them. It's just incredible access.
NANCY UPDIKE: Yes, yes. And also, with some sleuthing, I mean in the video, the video quality of the-- this interrogation was terrible, but Danny managed to sort of see, oh, this guy, the main interrogator is smoking a pipe. No one smokes a pipe in Israel, like I've never met anyone who smokes a pipe except this guy. And so, to find out who he was, Danny started asking other policemen, other interrogators, who is the pipe smoker in 1995? And it's that, it's that guy who's the pipe smoker. So we went and talked to him.
Do we want to go to Motti? I'm sorry to be so wooden about getting to the tape. We should just flow to it.
DAN EPHRON: Let me show you one other video before we do that. So remember we said that there was that terrible grainy stuff, and you saw it, it was 20 seconds long. But some of the other video is actually pretty good. And that's the stuff where you can actually glean something.
[video played]
DAN EPHRON: This is Yigal Amir on the right. He's looking at us now. And this is a different interrogator on the left. And let me just let it run a little bit, and I'll explain what they're saying.
[video played]
DAN EPHRON: So this is this moment when– this is already a couple of weeks after the assassination. And the interrogator is, he's a man in his 40s. And eventually we found him, and interviewed him. So he's about 20 years older than Yigal Amir, but he realizes, the interrogator does, that they went to the same university around the same time. Yigal Amir is a law student. I mentioned he's a bright guy. At some point, a psychologist and a psychiatrist go into the prison and give him sort of an examination and an IQ test. His IQ is around 140.
But so, the interrogator realizes that they went to the same university at the same time because the interrogator went back to school. And he's very methodical about creating this rapport with Yigal Amir. And I think that was another thing that was very appealing about the material and that I came to understand in watching it. Policemen, investigators, interrogators want to know a lot of the same things in their interrogations that we do as journalists.
So he's asking all the what questions, and the ‘who’ questions: Who did you talk to? Who did you tell? What people did you tell that you were going to assassinate the prime minister? But he's asking, when did it first come to you? He wants to establish motive; so, why? And what was your mental state? What were you thinking when you left the house on the night of the assassination?
All these things are things that we as journalists want to know, certainly for a book where sketching a character is built from all these little details. Trying to understand a character's motives. These tiny things are just incredibly useful.
That's why I think in viewing this material it occurred to me that there's a book here.
IRA GLASS: Nancy, let's play the Naftali quote. Because one of the scenes that you have in the radio show that we put together is you go with this guy, Motti Naftali, and–
NANCY UPDIKE: This is the policeman, the pipe smoker, Motti.
IRA GLASS: And you went with him to the place where the assassination happens. You were just telling me about this when we were preparing to walk in the room, about he goes to the exact spot. He was in charge of some of the planning to protect the prime minister that night.
NANCY UPDIKE: I should just clarify on Motti's behalf. He was responsible for security at the rally. It's the Shabak who is responsible for protecting the prime minister.
They are the close protection unit.
IRA GLASS: But you walk with him onto the stage, and then down the stairs behind the stage where the prime minister walked down before he was shot.
NANCY UPDIKE: And he's this lovely guy. It's not that we're taking him to a place where he sort of makes a yearly pilgrimage. This was the first time he'd back in 20 years. And he talked about how his wife keeps him from– she throws everything out. She's like, "We just go ahead, we move ahead." He's like, "Yeah, I move ahead, I don't look back, I don't look back." And so, it was nice to be there with somebody who really was coming back to this moment sort of with a fresh mind.
And so, he was telling us about things, but he wasn't sort of getting maudlin. But when we went down the back stairs, to the place where the assassination happened, part of the memorial is that there are little brass circles in the pavement that show where everybody was standing, where the assassin was, where Rabin was. You see how close he was, where the guards were.
And he's just sort of looking at it and remembering that night. And he's just sort of "tsk, tsk, tsk." And he's like, "It's just such a fashla," a blunder, just a big blunder. He keeps kind of saying that.
And talking to him about interrogating Yigal Amir was also fascinating. I mean, he said that the first time that he saw himself in the video interrogating Yigal Amir was when he was preparing to give testimony at Yigal Amir's trial. And he said he was sort of taken aback by how kind of cool he was.
IRA GLASS: Cool, you mean like composed.
NANCY UPDIKE: Yeah, composed, how he was– he said he actually kind of got mad at himself in the video, like, "Don't you realize you're talking to the man who killed the prime minister?" And he talked about watching it, but then he also talked about having those feelings, containing those feelings during the interrogation. Trying to stay calm and be a policeman in the face of, as we were talking about, Yigal Amir, who was just giddy with the triumph of what he had accomplished. And Motti is trying to have this conversation, draw information out. He's trying to be polite.
[video played]
IRA GLASS: To life that he took, he says at the end. Can I have you guys give a sense of all the evidence that there is. One of the things that's so interesting about it, and when you first told me about this is the thing I thought was so interesting, was that 20 years later, all these conspiracy theories have grown up over the years, saying that Yigal Amir was there, there's the video, the whole country has seen it, but that he was either a patsy, or he was in on some sort of conspiracy. And then in fact, the official story, that he and his brother acted alone without anybody's help, just decided to kill the prime minister because they opposed the peace deal–
NANCY UPDIKE: And his brother was convicted as a co-conspirator.
IRA GLASS: All these conspiracy theories have grown up around the whole thing. And one of the things you talk about in your book and in the radio show is just how surprising that is, given how much evidence there is that puts them there, that reinforces the official version. Can I have you run down – we have some slides and we have some videos – just all of the evidence that you were able to find that backs up the official version?
DAN EPHRON: So big things and small things. Beginning with the confession, Yigal Amir is completely proud that he killed Rabin. And he is tackled at the scene. He gets three shots off, he's tackled at the scene. He's put into a car. And already in the car he's saying, "I hope I killed him. I shot him. I shot him and I think I hit him." And talking about the theology behind his motives. He's talking about din rodef and din moser, these kind of Talmudic laws that, in his interpretation, a death sentence hangs over Rabin for handing back parts of the West Bank. So there's his own confession.
It turns out at some point that there was an amateur video that surfaces.
NANCY UPDIKE: Of the assassination.
DAN EPHRON: Of the assassination, filmed from a balcony looking down on the parking lot. All the ballistics lines up. His brother is arrested. His brother spent a lot of time talking to Yigal Amir about how to do it. They plotted the assassination together. So his brother confesses as well. Friends are brought in who say "we heard them talk about it."
We interviewed the prosecutor in the case. And she'd been a prosecutor for years. And I think she said she had tried 10 or 12 murder cases in her career. There was no murder case as easy in terms of the evidence as the one with Yigal Amir. There were other complications. It was a very high profile case, but it was very clear, it was very evident.
IRA GLASS: Talk through some of the slides and other things you have.
DAN EPHRON: So first of all, one of the things that the police do, after they take his confession, is, in addition to the confession, they want to see him reenact the crime. And they'll take the suspect to the scene of the crime and they'll say, "Okay, walk me through it." Because if it's a false confession, something will surface during the course of the reenactment that will make it clear that the suspect actually doesn't know the real details of the crime.
And so, about ten days after the assassination, at two or three in the morning, they bring Yigal Amir, police bring Yigal Amir back to the square.
IRA GLASS: Two or three in the morning because?
NANCY UPDIKE: Because they're afraid people are going to shoot him. They're afraid for his life. In fact, in the reenactment, you see that he's wearing a bulletproof vest. He's a sort of petite man and it's kind of hanging on him. It was this big, white vest, which, I mean, it's hard not to look at that and think, oh, the prime minister was not wearing a bulletproof vest, and here's the assassin, they don't want– they don't want a Shabak guy who's mad to shoot him. So yeah, it's two in the morning.
DAN EPHRON: There's a lot of anger in the country. They want the square to be as empty as possible. Tel Aviv is a little bit like New York. There's a nightlife that goes on all night. And in fact, I think what happens is, taxi drivers spot this convoy of police cars heading to the square, and they kind of, over radio, circulate the news that they're going to do this reenactment.
And so, people actually do show up. And there's a video of the reenactment, where you hear people kind of booing Yigal Amir. Anyway, he takes the police back there and he lines people up, and he almost sort of– he's almost like a film director. He says, "You stand here, you go there. Wait, it's a little bit to the left. I'm going to come forward." We're going to see a very short clip of this.
[video played]
DAN EPHRON: Let me show that one more time, go to the last frame.
[video played]
DAN EPHRON: Okay, so yeah, you see the guy in the vest. That's Yigal Amir. And the guy in the checkered shirt, he was the interrogator in the video we saw. And here, he's a stand-in for Rabin. And Rabin is about to get into his car. And the people behind Amir are the bodyguards; he's managed to walk through them.
[video played]
DAN EPHRON: So that's another piece of evidence. And then there were just little things that spoke to both the fact that he did it–
IRA GLASS: Before you go on, do you want to show the video of what actually happened that night as well? Because once you see the reenactment, I feel like it's easy to understand from the video.
DAN EPHRON: Sure. So this was an amateur video.
NANCY UPDIKE: And it's filmed at night, so it's hard to see.
DAN EPHRON: It's filmed at night. It took a few weeks for the person to come forward and give it to the police. You'll see Rabin walking down the stairs.
[video played]
DAN EPHRON: Just so we explain–
NANCY UPDIKE: The circle is Yigal Amir.
DAN EPHRON: The circle is Yigal Amir. So it looks like Rabin is heading towards him. Rabin is in that group of– let's say three people to our left is a guy with a tie and a white shirt, and then Rabin is in a tie and a white shirt, in the middle, and then to the right of Rabin, we're going up and to the right, that's a bodyguard.
NANCY UPDIKE: Rabin is the bald one in the middle. Not to be disrespectful.
DAN EPHRON: Right. He's wearing glasses so every now and then you see a little glint of the glasses. And Amir, you'll see the circle. He waits for Rabin to pass. He circles behind him.
[video played]
DAN EPHRON: That's the first shot.
[video played]
IRA GLASS: He's so close.
DAN EPHRON: He gets very close. The truth is that–
NANCY UPDIKE: Can I tell you about Shlomo? Just to say, we talked to a Shabak guy. Shabak is Israel's FBI. And he was kind of brought in to fix the fashla, what happened here. And we went to talk to him, to interview him. And I asked him, "So when was the last time you watched this video?" He said, "I watch it every day. I watch it almost every day." Every day he watches it. And as we watched it, as we talked about it, he got worked up all over again. He was like, "This is"– every single thing that's happening is exactly what his entire job is to avoid. And he's just sort of obsessively watching it. And he gives talks to security details in the world. But this is an active part of his life, this video.
DAN EPHRON: You said he gets very close. In fact, there is this climate of violence in the months leading up to the assassination. Rabin is accosted at a rally a few weeks earlier. There is this sort of ugly rhetoric that goes on in the months, as the Oslo process is winding its way on, where Rabin is called a murderer at protests, and a traitor. And posters are held up of Rabin dressed of Arafat, or Rabin in an SS uniform.
And in fact, the secret service, the Israeli equivalent, the secret service, also the Israeli equivalent of the FBI, the Shabak, they do pick up on these little rumors or reports, intelligence reports about the possibility that someone might try to assassinate Rabin.
But I think what happens here at the square, and Naftali talks about it, is, even though there is that intelligence in the air, I think no one actually manages to absorb the idea that a Jew would pose a threat to Rabin. Including Rabin himself. There are moments when Rabin's security chief says, "You should be wearing a bulletproof vest," or, "You should be driving around in an armored car." Until a few months before the assassination, the car he drove around in, I think it was a Chevy Caprice, unarmored. And I think some time in the summer – the assassination's in November – some time in the summer, they finally decide to import an armored Cadillac. It was the kind that American presidents are driven around in.
But Rabin, the idea that in his own country– Rabin was a military man for the first three decades of his life. He was the chief of staff of the Israeli army in 1967 when Israel captured these territories. The idea that–
IRA GLASS: He was there during the Six-Day War.
DAN EPHRON: Exactly, yeah. That he would have to wear a bulletproof vest in his own country, to protect him from fellow Jews, he just couldn't fathom.
IRA GLASS: Let me ask just quickly, because I feel like we're running out of time, you have some photos of what Yigal Amir looked like. When you're sort of making the case of like, oh, he's not a crazy. He was a law student, right? Just show us those very, very quickly. And then I think we should spin ahead.
DAN EPHRON: That's Amir as a young kid. One of the things, getting the cooperation of the family was very important, of the Amir family, so we could interview them and try to understand how Amir grew up. He went to one of the better ultra orthodox high schools in Israel, a very good school. He served in units in the army that are highly regarded. This was him in the middle–
IRA GLASS: Which one is he?
DAN EPHRON: He is the short one in the middle. Dark hair.
IRA GLASS: Three from the left. [laughter]
DAN EPHRON: Right. Third from the left.
IRA GLASS: He's the Jewish-looking one. [laughter]
DAN EPHRON: Right. And here, he's on the right. There's that photo from the reenactment.
NANCY UPDIKE: He was from the heart of the country in some ways. This Shabak guy we talked to was saying, "Look, this is what makes someone like this dangerous. We trained him. He's got great weapons training. He can go anywhere in the country. This is a very dangerous person. And we know how dangerous he is because he trained with our army."
IRA GLASS: I wonder if we should talk about the conspiracy theories and play the Damti tape and play the video of the shirt. And I feel like for that to make sense, so these conspiracy theories come up and they're held by people originally from the far right. And then as the entire country moved to the right, they become much more mainstream. So how much of the country believes the conspiracy theories?
DAN EPHRON: About a third of Israelis have some fundamental doubts about the accuracy of the story itself. Did Yigal Amir shoot him? Or was he there? Or did he have an accomplice? Maybe he didn't do it at all. Maybe it was the Israeli Shabak, the Israeli FBI that actually is behind it. About a third of Israelis.
IRA GLASS: And then on the right, it's about a half of the right.
DAN EPHRON: Right.
IRA GLASS: And in their mind, you go into this in some ways in the show, you talk about how in the scenario that they create, he's shot in the back twice. There are three bullets, but one hits a bodyguard. Yigal Amir shoots twice. Hits Rabin in the back twice. And then Rabin–
NANCY UPDIKE: Wait, are you talking about the conspiracy theory?
IRA GLASS: No, I'm saying the truth of the thing that came out in court and what convicted Yigal Amir, is that the official story is that there are two bullets that go into him. There's no exit wounds, right?
DAN EPHRON: Right.
IRA GLASS: And that's basically what kills Yitzhak Rabin. And then, in the conspiracy theories you say, no, no, no, that Rabin gets put into the car–
NANCY UPDIKE: Right, that Yigal Amir fires blanks at Rabin and it was all a setup to be a fake assassination to boost Rabin's popularity and to sort of ram the Oslo deal through, to have a rise in sympathy for Rabin and for Oslo.
IRA GLASS: And they say partly because after the assassination, he does become more popular. The Oslo deal does get more support in the wake of the assassination. And in their version, Yigal Amir is firing blanks, and then Rabin gets into the car. He's unharmed in this version. And then what happens?
DAN EPHRON: And then something happens in the car that sabotages the plan, this plan that Rabin would survive an assassination attempt, and therefore his standing would rise, his approval rating would go up, and his peace process, he would be able to kind of carry this through. This is a time when Israel is very polarized between left and right.
And the peace process was one of the polarizing factors, or the polarizing factor.
So yeah, the theory is that somehow when he got into the car, something went wrong. Maybe there was a conspiracy within a conspiracy, and someone decided to take advantage of this moment and kill him anyway. Maybe someone from the secret service or from the Shabak.
NANCY UPDIKE: And part of it is maybe there's an additional person in the car, a sort of mysterious, additional person. Maybe it's Shabak. Maybe it's sort of a cabal within the Shabak. But that it's not just Rabin, his bodyguard, who was also injured, and the driver, that there's another person.
DAN EPHRON: And Rabin's driver that night, Damti, his last name, Menachem Damti. He's one of the people that Nancy described, where it was very easy to just call him. We literally looked up his number, called him and said, "Hey, we're doing a story. I've written a book. We're thinking about these conspiracy theories." And this was 11 in the morning. He said, "Okay, by three o'clock I should be free, so come on over." And we drove over there. Maybe you describe what his kitchen looked like.
NANCY UPDIKE: He was the one who was in gym shorts. We went over. Just very casual. And we sat in his kitchen and talked to him. And the entire wall in his kitchen is covered in framed photos of him with all these political bigwigs. He was a driver for 30 years, so it's him with Menachem Begin, him with Yitzhak Shamir, him with Shimon Peres, him with Yitzhak Rabin, him with Jimmy Carter, him with Bill Clinton, him with Anwar Sadat. It's a freaking shrine. And some of the pictures are really just sort of wonderful; they're just sort of hanging out, like him and Shimon Peres.
DAN EPHRON: And this is like a very modest, little–
NANCY UPDIKE: Yeah, just a regular apartment. And right in the middle, the one picture that is not like all the others is a photo that was taken just in the moments right after Yitzhak Rabin was shot. It's that terrible sort of bright flash, and all you see are policemen kind of bent over. I think you see Rabin's shoes or something. It's a very arresting photo. Especially in the midst of all these kind of smiling snapshots.
And so, the conspiracy theories, yeah, they focus on, well, what happened in the car, something happened in the car. And it was a big to-do in the car. And people made a big deal about who is this Damti guy? He was the alternate driver, that's suspicious. And we just had this conversation where he was like – which the other driver also confirmed, he's like, "I wasn't the alternate, we just split the week. That guy did half the week and I did half the week."
IRA GLASS: That's the thing about "there must be somebody else in the car," because in the videos you see the doors close.
NANCY UPDIKE: Yeah, that's part of it. Like, who closed the doors? And he just told us, "There's this sort of maneuver that you do where you accelerate and you break and then accelerate and that kind of snaps the doors shut."
But so, I was asking him, what was it like in the car? Was it chaotic? Were you and the bodyguard kind of talking to each other? Was he talking to Rabin? Was it loud? What was happening in the car? And this was his answer:
[video played]
DAN EPHRON: For 30 years Menachem had been a driver. And the drill was always that there was a bodyguard sitting next to him. And the bodyguard would say "you go right here, you go left there, take this road, do this." Because everyone had pounced on the shooter and everyone was focused on him, there was no one to come into the car and sit next to Menachem. And he felt utterly alone, utterly alone.
NANCY UPDIKE: The idea that were some other person, there was some other thing happening in the car is just, on top of everything else, it was very hard to believe, sitting in this man's kitchen. All he can talk about is, "I have never felt so alone."
IRA GLASS: It was very quiet in the car.
NANCY UPDIKE: It's very quiet, because the bodyguard is also injured, and he says like one thing to Rabin and Damti, the driver, says "resuscitate him, what are you doing?" And the bodyguard says, "I'm injured, too." And that's when Damti realizes, "Oh, the prime minister's down, the bodyguard's down. It is all on me." And it was just a shock.
IRA GLASS: He makes a left-hand turn just in the confusion, and then that becomes part of the conspiracy theories where they think, well, he's not going directly to the hospital because–
NANCY UPDIKE: It was a deliberate delay in order to give the people in the car, the person in the car time to actually do whatever they were going to do, when in fact it seems like going left and making that mistake is just a trauma that he has underwent for 20 years.
IRA GLASS: So Dan, you have a moment in the course of reporting in the book, where you were very skeptical of the conspiracy theories, and then you're talking to the daughter of the slain prime minister. And she is the one who raises this possibility of like, well, there's this one thing that made her believe, like, "I don't know, maybe they could be true." And it was one piece of evidence. Explain what that is.
DAN EPHRON: It was the shirt he was wearing that night. I knew about these conspiracy theories before I started working on the book. I'd sort of struggled with the question of what to do about it. And where I came down was, I was going to ignore them altogether. I didn't think they were real; there just felt like there was so much evidence, it was clear, it was a clear case. That was my feeling going into it.
During one of the interviews with Rabin's daughter, I think I even said that. I think I said, "These conspiracy theories, that's not going to be part of it." And she said, "Well, I'm a little bit troubled by some of the facts of that night. And do you know about the shirt?"
Now, Rabin's daughter, she's not a conspiracist, she's not on the far right, which as you said is generally where the conspiracy theories get hatched. But she at some point took possession of her father's clothing, the clothing he wore that night. And there are two holes in the back because he was shot from behind; they're very clearly bullet holes. But then she took out the shirt and showed me in her office. And when she turned it around, there was also a hole in the front.
It was hard to kind of ignore it. It's hard to be dismissive of conspiracy theories when you see something with your own eyes.
IRA GLASS: Because the conspiracy theories, the way it goes is they say when Rabin is in the car, somebody comes into the car and shoots him in the front.
DAN EPHRON: Right.
IRA GLASS: And so, the conspiracy theories say there should be a hole in the shirt, in the front. And then in her office, basically, she pulls out the shirt and there's a bullet hole in the front, and also there's an undershirt as well. She lines them up; there's a bullet hole in the undershirt, too.
DAN EPHRON: There's a hole.
IRA GLASS: There's a hole.
NANCY UPDIKE: There's a hole.
DAN EPHRON: There is a hole that is the size of the holes in the back. And it just looks weird.
IRA GLASS: We only have few minutes left.
NANCY UPDIKE: You should show the video.
IRA GLASS: But you have a video. She basically, you ask if you can get it tested and bring it to the United States to a forensics person. And so you bring it to somebody who did the Ruby Ridge case and actually went back over the Kennedy evidence at one point for an episode of NOVA. And he goes, and we describe in the show, and you describe in the book, he gives it all these tests.
NANCY UPDIKE: Six hours of forensic testing.
IRA GLASS: Before we talk about that, why don't you show the video? She basically gives you Rabin's clothes to put in a wheelie bag and take to America.
DAN EPHRON: Let me just say, there was a film at some point that an Israeli television crew does, and they kind of leave it murky–
NANCY UPDIKE: About the shirt.
DAN EPHRON: –about the shirt. And they sort of raise the– this is a film of ten years ago. And it kind of had this ominous ending where maybe it is a bullet hole. That does a lot to kind of move the conspiracy theories from the far right towards the mainstream. You hear a lot today – "Well, he was shot in the front, he was shot in the front. And that's how we know it wasn't really Yigal Amir."
And so, finding Luc Haag, the forensic gunshot expert, I wanted to find the guy whose view on this would be unimpeachable. And spoke to a lot of people I knew in law enforcement in Washington from the time I reported there, who said "this is the guy, this is guy to go to." He lives out in a town called Carefree, Arizona. And so, yeah, I put the clothes in a wheelie bag and flew out to Carefree.
And this is in our apartment in Tel Aviv packing the clothes. And we have a friend who is a photographer; he came over and photographed us, or videotaped us I should say.
[video played]
IRA GLASS: What's it like trying to get the prime minister's bloody clothing through the airport security in Israel without getting arrested? What's that process like? [laughter]
DAN EPHRON: I was very nervous about that. Seriously. Because yeah, anyone who's been to Israel, you know that the security is very tight at the airport. They're very good, these young selectors, these young people who are in charge of vetting you. It's not like in airports here. They grill you and they look for any trace of anxiety.
NANCY UPDIKE: Which you had.
DAN EPHRON: And I took the shirt, but I also– I'd spoken to Luc on the phone and he said, "Bring everything. Bring everything down to the shoes and socks." So I had a wheelie bag with nothing but Rabin's clothes in it. And they're looking for anxiety. And if you betray any anxiety, they open your luggage and they take each piece out. And I just, in the days leading up to it, I had these nightmares about having to explain why I had all this bloody clothing in the suitcase.
And I had gotten a letter from Dalia Rabin, from Rabin's daughter, explaining what was happening.
NANCY UPDIKE: I think they would have laughed at that. It's like, oh, you have a letter?
DAN EPHRON: So that was one thing. That was fine, we managed to get through that. But I was also worried about JFK and the sniffer dogs and pathogens and all the things that you wouldn't really thinking about, because people don't usually travel with the bloody clothes of the dead prime minister. Anyway, that was all mainly an ordeal in my mind. It went smoothly and we flew out.
IRA GLASS: They didn't ask you anything? Don't they X-ray the bags?
DAN EPHRON: They do X-ray the carryons, yes.
NANCY UPDIKE: But they're not X-raying it for blood.
DAN EPHRON: And we've been stopped a lot on our way in or out. Nancy once carrying a microphone in her carryon, I think they took it away, right? I think they wouldn't let you bring a microphone on.
NANCY UPDIKE: Not in my carryon.
DAN EPHRON: So they're sticklers. And I guess I was lucky, I guess we were lucky.
IRA GLASS: It's 7:30. Let's just talk for a second before we end, about why do you think the conspiracy theories have stayed? Why is this still a point of division in Israel?
What does this say about Israel that the country cannot agree on what happened that day?
DAN EPHRON: I mean, I think this is the toughest question to answer, because it gets at the core issue of what are the consequences of the assassination and really two narratives in Israel: the left's narrative that the assassination killed off the best chance for peace, and that it is an absolute certainty there would have been peace, had there not been an assassination.
NANCY UPDIKE: That's the leftwing view.
DAN EPHRON: That's the leftwing view. And that view kind of looks at the assassination almost as a coup, because within a few months after the murder power shifts from the left to the right. I sort of think of it as the pragmatists to the ideologues. Netanyahu becomes prime minister within six months after the assassination. And in the 20 years since then, really the right wing, the ideologues are the dominant party in the power. They are to this day, and throughout most of this period. That's the leftwing view.
The way the right sees it, Yigal Amir killed Rabin, yes, but the peace process would have died anyway, that it wasn't going anywhere, that Arafat was never a partner, that this violence, these suicide bombings by the Palestinians would have doomed the process.
IRA GLASS: Because when there were suicide bombings, there were suicide bombings because of the peace process. And that turned the Israeli public against the peace process. And they're saying that basically that would have killed off the peace process, no matter what.
NANCY UPDIKE: There are suicide bombings for lots of reasons, but yeah.
DAN EPHRON: And in some way, this argument over the conspiracy theories becomes a proxy for the bigger issues. And a proxy for other things. The left blame the right. The conspiracy theories are in some ways a defense mechanism – We didn't kill Rabin collectively, it was that man. That's one way of defending yourself. But if it wasn't even a member of your political group, if it was actually the Shabak or maybe even the prime minister himself who had this kind of weird idea about how to raise his popularity and it backfired on him, it kind of exonerates the right. All that goes into the debate today.
IRA GLASS: Or they're not guilty that one of them killed the prime minister.
DAN EPHRON: Right.
IRA GLASS: We should stop there. You'll be signing books. One of the most interesting things about the book is the same thing I felt when we did the radio show. I feel like I understand Israel better through the lens of this thing. And some of the details that you found are just amazing; some of the people who you describe.
So books are for sale. He's signing books.
I want to thank again WBUR and the Library for having us here. And thank you all for coming out.
[applause]