Judah Ari Gross is The Times of Israel's military correspondent. Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy speaks at a conference commemorating his successor, Meir Dagan, in Netanya on June 9, 2021. (Tamir Bargig/Netanya Academic College) The former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service roundly denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, accusing the outgoing premier of endangering national security through self-aggrandizement. Efraim Halevy, who served as the head of the spy agency under Netanyahu in the 1990s but has since become a staunch critic of him, said the prime minister’s penchant for openly discussing intelligence matters — a break from his predecessors’ policies of ambiguity — had made it more difficult for the Mossad to conduct covert targeted killings.