Reuven Shiloah

Reuven Shiloah was born in 1909 in Jerusalem

Shiloah was born Zaslansky in Jerusalem in 1909, to a religious family. His father, Rabbi Aharon Yitzhak Zaslansky, was a native of Lithuania and one of the city's rabbis. He later shortened his name to Zaslani, and Shiloah was his underground alias.

He studied at the Tachkemoni School and at the David Yellin Teachers College, where he learned Arabic and graduated in 1929. He moved to secular Zionism and studied Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There he was recruited into the Haganah.

He carried out intelligence missions in Iraq in 1932 and 1935 under cover as a teacher and a journalist. From 1936 he worked in the Jewish Agency's Political Department, gathering intelligence in Lebanon and Syria and handling ties with British intelligence. In 1945 he was part of the Jewish Agency delegation to the San Francisco Conference.

In 1949 he took part in the armistice talks with Egypt in Rhodes and led the delegation to the talks with Jordan. He proposed a body to coordinate intelligence services, which became the Mossad in 1951. After a car accident in 1952, he left the Mossad at the end of that year.

From 1953 to 1957 he served as an envoy at the Israeli Embassy in the United States. He then advised Foreign Minister Golda Meir and received the personal rank of Ambassador in January 1959. He died of a heart attack in 1959 and was buried at the Sanhedria Cemetery.