JERUSALEM — Avraham Shalom, a former director of Israel’s Shin Bet security service who led the agency through some of its greatest achievements before resigning in disgrace, died in Tel Aviv Thursday.
The Shin Bet did not give a cause of death. He was 86.
Mr. Shalom directed Shin Bet from 1980 to 1986, a turbulent period when Israel was coping with Palestinian militants and Jewish extremists and was involved in a war in neighboring Lebanon.
But his career was derailed after the service was accused of killing two Palestinian bus hijackers and then trying to cover up the action. The scandal was detected after newspapers published photos of the two attackers being led away, still alive, from the hijacking.
The incident, which became known as the ‘‘Bus 300 affair,’’ ultimately forced Mr. Shalom to resign two years later in 1986. In a letter to Chaim Herzog, then Israel’s president, Mr. Shalom said, ‘‘All my actions in the matter of bus 300 were carried out by authority and with permission.’’ He was later pardoned by Herzog.
Mr. Shalom was born in 1928 in Vienna and immigrated to Tel Aviv in 1939. He joined what would become Israel’s navy in 1946, two years before the country’s independence, and was recruited to the Shin Bet in 1950.
During a two-year leave of absence from the internal security agency in the late 1950s, Mr. Shalom served as an officer and eventually headed the Mossad’s Operations Division. He was part of the team that captured one of the most wanted Nazi leaders, Adolf Eichmann, in Argentina in 1960.
In a rare reunion with members of the team in Jerusalem nearly 50 years later, Mr. Shalom said he was surprised by Eichmann’s polite and calm demeanor.
‘‘To think that this was a man who treated humans like nails or pieces of stone was unexplainable,’’ he said. “It is still inexplicable.”
In 1972, Mr. Shalom was appointed commander of the Security Division following the Munich Olympics Massacre, which resulted in the death of 11 Israeli athletes and officials by Palestinian militants.
In this capacity, Mr. Shalom was in charge of the security of Israeli airlines, the secret service, and Israeli embassies, including overseeing the security of official Israeli delegations traveling around the world, according to Shin Bet.
During his direction of the agency in the 1980s, he cracked down on underground Israeli right-wing extremists, and eventually led the agency to thwart a plan to blow up the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
Later in life, Mr. Shalom became a strong advocate for reaching peace with the Palestinians.