Declassified: Shin Bet knew Israel Kastner was targeted[Just-released 1956 cabinet minutes on his assassination]...could strengthen the conjecture of some that the Shin Bet security service was involved in the murder of KastnerThe minutes raise difficult questions...[GSS head Isser] Harel told the cabinet that the intelligence services knew of the plan to kill Kastner and had arrested eight people who were “among potential terrorists.” One of them, who was convicted of the murder and imprisoned, was Eckstein. Harel told the cabinet that Eckstein had taken part in a 1955 plan to assassinate Kastner that did not go forward....Kastner was given a bodyguard by the Shin Bet, who “for some reason was pulled off a few days before the murder,” Katzir said, adding that this fact encouraged those who believed in a conspiracy theory involving the Shin Bet.And a related, even more explosive question is whether the organization itself was involved with various conspiracy theories promulgated over the years. To understand them, it must be recalled that Eckstein, the assassin, worked as an informant for the Shin Bet before the murder.Harel told the cabinet, according to the minutes, that ties with Eckstein were cut off before the murder...[According to Eckstein]...in his recent book “Smichat Tla’im” (“Quilt Blanket”) (Carmel Publishing House, 2014). “Little by little, without feeling how the change was taking place in my thoughts, in my opinions – and finally in my desires as well – the understanding grew stronger in me that when I spy and inform for ‘ours’ against ‘them,’ I am lying in my soul,” Eckstein wrote. He described how he became entranced with the underground against whom he was sent to spy. “They knew they were surrounded by agents and provocateurs, and I understood that if I wanted to be part of them, I had to bring them a suitable ‘dowry’ and thus – woe is me – I became the servant of two masters.”...Harel told the ministers that the reason Eckstein was not tried was a lack of evidence, and because the justice minister feared people would say he was a provocateur....Eckstein, in his book, alludes to another person’s involvement in the murder. “Another shot thundered at the very instant of my third shot, followed by agonizing cries. Apparently someone was there, in any event, carried out confirmation of the kill and, as a true professional, did not miss even in the dark.”Kastner’s daughter told a similar story...of another person who was involved in the shooting. That person was never arrested.“My father got out of the car. Eckstein tried to shoot him and it didn’t work. My father fled, ran into the building, but somebody prevented him from going in. He ran out again, and took a bullet in the back,” Suzi Kastner says, recalling her father’s words...Suzi Kastner says she believes the mysterious other man, who confirmed the kill, was a Shin Bet agent, and that a senior Shin Bet official was behind the murder, to take revenge on Kastner for not saving his family in the Holocaust....Did [Police Minister Shalom] Sheetrit doubt that Eckstein and his accomplices, Dan Shemer and Yosef Menkes, were the actual murderers, and raise the possibility that the Shin Bet had assassinated Kastner?