Mr Halevy is among a string of former intelligence chiefs to come out against Mr Netanyahu during the election campaign, foremost among them Meir Dagan, Mossad chief under Ariel Sharon, who was the keynote speaker at an opposition rally.
The desperate hunt for the bombers and their associates has exposed not just the men behind the bloodshed, but a string of basic, and tragic, intelligence failures that have led some to question whether Tuesday's bloodshed could have been avoided.
The row involving Brennan and the spying on congressional staff is the latest in a string of controversies involving the US intelligence community, including documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that revealed the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, had misled Congress.
The decision was taken at a private session of the select committee on Tuesday before the body heard evidence from Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger seeking to justify the Guardian's decision to publish a string of stories based on US and UK intelligence agency files leaked by Snowden to the media.
Mr Snowden is behind a string of other disclosures about US intelligence operations.
On August 8th, perhaps deliberately exploiting the army's discomfiture, Mr Morsi threw down a gauntlet to the generals by sacking a string of senior officers, including the head of intelligence and the military governor of northern Sinai.
Tests for intelligence might ask people to recite a string of digits backward, define a word like "predicament," identify what an egg and a seed have in common or assemble four triangles into a square.
One particularly bold investigative journalist, Akbar Ganji, exposed the role of the intelligence ministry in a string of murders of dissenting intellectuals two years ago.
Under the guidance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he kept a string of case officers from the Soviet military intelligence service, the G.R.U., supplied with documents, real and fake, purportedly stolen from his jobs at various Army bases.
PARIS — In a highly critical report made public on Tuesday, police inspectors detailed a string of "objective failures" by French security and intelligence services regarding Mohammed Merah, the self-proclaimed jihadist who shot and killed seven people in southern France in March.
