The truth about the Mossad

The Dark Side of Mossad: Intelligence

The events of October 7^th, 2023. (Paragraph 1)

October 7^th, is considered the bloodiest day in Isarel’s history and the deadliest for Jews since the Holocaust[1]. About 1200 people were killed, both Israelis and foreigners. Among them 859 civilians about 278 soldiers, 57 policemen and 10 members of Shin Bet, one of the three Israeli Intelligence agencies. 3400 were wounded and 247 soldiers and civilians were taken hostage. All of this was the consequence of a series of coordinated attacks led by Hamas from the Gaza strip into Israel. The attacks began with the launch of 3000 rockets against Israel and powered paraglider incursions into Israeli territory[2]. At the same time Hamas issued a called to arms for Muslims everywhere to launch an attack. These attacks were the results of events occurring over the course of 2023. 247 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces and 39 Israelis had been killed by Palestinians. Israeli settlers had displaced large numbers of Palestinians, and this led to clashes around the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Tensions between Israel and Palestine were at an all-time high[3].

Surveillance in the Gaza Strip (paragraph 2)

The Gaza strip is one of the most heavily locked-down, surveilled and suppressed areas in the world. Israel’s digital espionage industry is highly developed and extremely aggressive[4]. All electronic communications are monitored; every phone call is monitored; readers detect movement; there are remote control machine guns everywhere. Israelites also used facial recognition and spyware to monitor anyone who could be connected to Hamas and to restrict the movements of Palestinians in general. And yet on October the 7^th, Hamas fighters crossed the border into Israel without any difficulty whatsoever, rampaged through Israeli communities, abducted woman, and children, taking control of eight Israeli military bases, capturing, and killing Israeli soldiers and finally returning over the border with their hostages and meeting absolutely no resistance. The whole event was documented by the fighters themselves using smartphones[5].

What went wrong? (Paragraph 3)

There are three major theories[6]:

1. that massed failed;
2. that it was a LIHOP operation;
3. that it was a MIHOP operation

The first theory is that the October 7^th attacks indicate an enormous intelligence failure by Mossad, the IDF and Shin Bet. This is the theory put forward by Israeli herself. Israel believes that so much intelligence is coming in from so many different sources that it is practically impossible to organize and process the information. After all, Hamas members are always talking about plans to attack Israel, so Israel cannot respond using force to every threat. That would mean that Israel would always be at war or in a constant state of alert. According to this theory Israel was distracted by domestic issues and by relations with Saudi Arabia and was simply not prepared for this type of complex attack, prepared over many months. There is evidence that Hamas is not as low-tech as Israel believed. For example, Hamas operatives have used fake Facebook accounts to persuade Israeli soldiers to download data-stealing apps and have also used fake dating apps to install spyware. It is very possible that some of the information used to plan these attacks came from these sources. If we add to all of this the fact that the IDF has recently been suffering a brain drain with potential employees, such as software engineers and semiconductor engineers, deciding that they can earn more money working in the civilian market for companies such as Intel and Apple, then you have a recipe for disaster. Many, however, are not convinced; Israel, they say, has had such vast experience of terror threats that they simply refuse to entertain the idea that her intelligence forces were caught off guard;

The second theory is the Let It Happen On Purpose (LIHOP) theory. According to this theory Israel knew full well that an attack of this type was imminent. In July of 2023, a member of the Israel Signals Intelligence Unit informed her bosses that Hamas was making preparations for a massive attack. Israeli officials were in possession of an approximately forty-page document code – named “Jericho Wall”, which described, in great detail, exactly the kind of attack which happened on October 7^th. It is clear from this document that Hamas knew the location and size of Israel military forces and communications hubs. Many Israeli military intelligence leaders read Jericho Wall but rejected it. In addition to this, the US Intelligence community also warned of an increased risk of attack. On September 28, streams of intelligence suggested that Hamas was preparing to escalate rocket attacks across the border. On October 5 the CIA warned of an increased possibility of violence by Hamas. Finally, on October 6, the day before the attack, US officials claimed that an attack was imminent. Israel was also allegedly warned[7] by Egypt three days before the attack that something big was being planned from Gaza but Netanyahu has denied this.

Why would Israel ignore such warnings (paragraph 4)

This is the so – called LIHOP theory. According to this theory, the Israelis lost patience with the Palestinian hostility to the two-state solution. We must remember that the hostility stretches back over one hundred years. Throughout the twentieth century, two powerful movements gained strength. The first was Palestinian nationalism; the second was Zionism which was taking hold in Europe. Unfortunately, the British and French promised the same land to both groups of people, in return for military support during World War I. The solution, after the collapse of the Ottoman empire, was to divide the land into two states, Palestine and Israel. Jerusalem would be an international zone. The Jews accepted this solution but the Arabs saw it as colonisation and the stealing of land. They declared war on Israel in 1948 but Israel won, taking control of West Jerusalem and a lot of Palestine. Since then, the area has been in a constant state of turmoil (agitation), aggravated by the mass immigration of Jews during and following World War II, with few periods of relative peace. In 1967, Israel seized (appropriate) the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza and all of Jerusalem after the Six Day War. No accord has had a permanent positive effect, as all solutions are rejected by extremist groups on both sides. Anwar Sadat was assassinated by his own military following the Camp David Accords, while Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Zionists extremist following the Oslo Accord in 1993. It became clear to all that the two-state approach was dead in the water. Negotiation did not work and, even if (anche se) the PLO had become more compromise-minded, a breakaway group had formed. It was called Hamas and was dedicated to the destruction of Israel. More and more Israelis started to believe that the only solution was to wipe (cancellare) Palestine and the Palestinians off the face of the planet. But, in order to do this, they need an excuse and, according to the proponents of the LIHOP theory, October 7^th gave them the excuse they needed. This is why Israeli intelligence and defence forces stood down (do no react) and let it happen.

According to the Washington Post, Hamas exists because of Israeli funding. Israel considered Hamas to be a lesser evil (il male minore) compared to the “PLO”. For this reason, they funded Hamas in an attempt to divide Palestinians. Brig General Yitzhak Segev, the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he had helped to finance Hamas as a counterweight (balance) to the PLO and that he used Israeli taxpayers’ money (tasse degli israeliani) to do so.

The MIHOP theory claims (sostiene) that, because Hamas is, in part, an Israeli creation, Israel is behind the October 7^th attacks and the terrorists were acting on Israeli orders. It must be said, however, that there is precious little evidence to back up this theory.

Where do we go from here? (Paragraph 5)

It is difficult to envisage a solution to the problem of the Israel-Palestine conflict because it is an ideological problem to which any political solution is certain to fail.

On one hand, the Palestinians and their supporters believe that the land belongs (appartiene) to them, given that they have lived there for many centuries.

On the other hand, the Israelis and Zionists Christians, generally Protestants, use the Bible and, specifically, Chapter 11 of the book of Isaiah, to claim that the “Chosen People” have the right to settle in and occupy the Holy Land. The traditional view of the Catholic Church is that Isaiah 11 is not to be taken literally but rather (piuttosto) refers to the Jews becoming believers in Christ in the so-called “End Times”. The Vatican is, however, not taking sides in the conflict. These ideologies are irreconcilable (non si possono riconciliare) and a diplomatic solution will be enormously difficult and perhaps (forse) impossible to find. Given that the US and Western Europe generally espouse (adopted) the Zionist view, while other superpowers with nuclear capabilities are coming down on the side of the Palestinians, the world finds itself in perhaps the most critical crisis of its history.   

[1] Wired: Israel’s failure to stop the Hamas Attack Shows the danger of too much surveillance.

[2] Id

[3] Id

[4] Id

[5] Id

[6] Wired: Israel’s failure to stop the Hamas Attack Shows the danger of too much surveillance.

[7] Si dice che hanno ammonito

 ^—

^{The Wrong Identification Of A Target Is Not A Failure}

^{THE RESOUNDING SUCCESS OF Operation Spring of Youth did not mean a letup in the string of Mossad targeted killings in Europe. In the final days of preparation for the Beirut raid, Meiri and another operative were in Paris, waiting for Basil al-Kubaisi, a law professor at Beirut University and a low-level activist in the PFLP, to finish with a prostitute before they shot him dead. (“I decided that, just as they give a condemned man a last request, this guy also deserved some sex before he died,” Meiri related.) Then, only hours after the Spring of Youth forces returned to Israel, Harari, Meiri, and five additional operatives traveled to Athens, where they killed Zaid Muchassi with a bomb planted in the mattress of his hotel bed. Muchassi had just been appointed the Fatah representative in Cyprus, where he replaced Hussein Abd al-Chir—whom the Mossad also had killed, on January 24, with a bomb in a Nicosia hotel mattress. On June 10, information came in indicating that Wadie Haddad had sent two of his men to Rome, to carry out an attack on the El Al airline office. The information came from a Junction agent deep inside Haddad’s organization. This new and promising recruit, who would be described in AMAN’s annual report as “an outstanding source with excellent and exclusive access to the Haddad organization,” and who agreed to spy in exchange for money, was given the code name Itzavon, Hebrew for “Sadness.” A team commanded b}

^{………………………}

^{THE RESOUNDING SUCCESS OF Operation Spring of Youth did not mean a letup in the string of Mossad targeted killings in Europe. In the final days of preparation for the Beirut raid, Meiri and another operative were in Paris, waiting for Basil al-Kubaisi, a law professor at Beirut University and a low-level activist in the PFLP, to finish with a prostitute before they shot him dead. (“I decided that, just as they give a condemned man a last request, this guy also deserved some sex before he died,” Meiri related.) Then, only hours after the Spring of Youth forces returned to Israel, Harari, Meiri, and five additional operatives traveled to Athens, where they killed Zaid Muchassi with a bomb planted in the mattress of his hotel bed. Muchassi had just been appointed the Fatah representative in Cyprus, where he replaced Hussein Abd al-Chir—whom the Mossad also had killed, on January 24, with a bomb in a Nicosia hotel mattress. On June 10, information came in indicating that Wadie Haddad had sent two of his men to Rome, to carry out an attack on the El Al airline office. The information came from a Junction agent deep inside Haddad’s organization. This new and promising recruit, who would be described in AMAN’s annual report as “an outstanding source with excellent and exclusive access to the Haddad organization,” and who agreed to spy in exchange for money, was given the code name Itzavon, Hebrew for “Sadness.” A team commanded by “Carlos,” a Bayonet operative, began following the two men, who were driving around Rome in a Mercedes with German registration plates. On the night of June 16–17, the Bayonet team planted a bomb under the car. In the morning, when one of the Palestinian men got into the car and started to drive away, he was followed by a Mossad car, with Harari driving and Carlos in the passenger seat, holding a remote control the size of a shoebox. In order for the bomb to be detonated, a minimal distance between the vehicles had to be maintained. After a few minutes, the Palestinian man in the car stopped to pick up his partner, who was staying at another address, and then drove off again. Carlos was about to push the button exactly when the car entered the Piazza Barberini, site of the Triton Fountain, an important work by the famous sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Harari knew Rome well from the days after World War II when he was working to help refugees immigrate to Israel, and he was someone who appreciated art. “No! Stop! The statue…It’s Bernini! Do not detonate!” he yelled at a confused Carlos, then proceeded to explain the importance of the work to him. A few seconds later, when the car carrying the two Palestinians had moved away from the fountain, the button was pressed. The front part of the car exploded and the two men were very badly injured. One later died in the hospital. Police found weapons in the car and interpreted the explosion as a “work accident,” assuming the two were terrorists who had a bomb in the car and had handled it incorrectly. “Sadness” also reported on the activities of Mohammed Boudia, the head of PFLP operations in Europe. Boudia was a colorful combination of Algerian revolutionary, bisexual bohemian playboy, adventurer, and arch-terrorist who worked for both Haddad and Black September. The small theater he ran in Paris, Théâtre de l’Ouest, was used as a cover for his plans to attack Israelis and Jews. Thanks to Sadness’s reports, the Shin Bet managed to thwart some of his plans before they were executed. One was for simultaneous explosions of powerful TNT bombs in Tel Aviv’s seven biggest hotels on the Seder night of Passover 1971. During June 1973, Sadness reported that Boudia was plotting another big attack. A team of thirty Bayonet and Rainbow operatives followed him the length of Paris before an opportunity arose, when he parked his car in Rue des Fossés-SaintBernard, in the Latin Quarter. When he came back and started it again, a pressuresensitive bomb placed under the seat of his car exploded and killed him. Bayonet’s string of triumphs instilled a sense of euphoria throughout the whole organization. “It seemed as if there was nothing the Mossad couldn’t do,” said a Caesarea veteran, “and that there was no one we couldn’t reach.” That said, the reckoning with Black September remained open. Nine months after the horrific slaughter in Munich—the attack that had triggered the uptick in targeted killings—senior members of Black September were still at large. The Mossad had killed a lot of people, but not the eleven men it wanted most. These included the three surviving participants of the operation, who had been imprisoned but then sprung after Black September hijacked a Lufthansa plane and forced the Germans to release them. The other eight had been marked by the Mossad as tied to the conception, command, or execution of the attack. At the top of that list was Ali Hassan Salameh, Black September’s operations officer. Ali Salameh’s father, Hassan Salameh, had been one of the two commanders of the Palestinian forces in 1947 when war broke out after the UN decision on the establishment of Israel. The Haganah had repeatedly tried and failed to assassinate him, until he was finally killed in combat. His son carried a heavy burden. “I wanted to be myself, [but]…I was constantly conscious of the fact that I was the son of Hassan Salameh and had to live up to that, even without being told how the son of Hassan Salameh should live,” Ali Salameh said in one of the only two interviews he ever gave. “My upbringing was politicized. I lived the Palestinian cause, at a time when the cause was turning in a vicious circle. They were a people without a leadership. The people were dispersed, and I was part of the dispersion. My mother wanted me to be another Hassan.” But by the mid-1960s, the pressure from Ali’s family, together with Yasser Arafat, was enough. Ali gave in and presented himself at the Fatah recruitment office. “I became very attached to Fatah,” he recalled. “I had found what I was looking for.” “He very quickly became Arafat’s favorite,” said Harari. In 1968, he was sent to Egypt by Arafat, for training in intelligence and the operation of explosives. He became an assistant to Abu Iyad, who assigned him to oversee the identification and liquidation of Arabs who collaborated with Israelis. Salameh was young, charismatic, wealthy, and handsome, and enjoyed the high life that went hand in hand with membership in Rasd, the secret intelligence arm of Fatah. He combined his love of women and parties with his terrorist activities in a manner that “raised eyebrows in Fatah,” according to an Israeli military intelligence report on him. The Mossad believed that Salameh had been involved in a long list of terror attacks, some against Jordan and some against Israel, including the hijacking of the Sabena airliner. Documents seized in al-Najjar’s apartment in Beirut indicated that Salameh’s responsibilities included liaising with European terrorist organizations, and that he had invited Andreas Baader, co-founder of the German BaaderMeinhof Gang, to a Palestinian training camp in Lebanon. “We showed the documents to the Germans,” said Shimshon Yitzhaki, head of the Mossad’s counterterror unit, “to make it clear to them that the danger of Palestinian terror was their concern as well.” There is no disagreement about these charges, but the Mossad was also convinced that Salameh was implicated in the planning and execution of the Munich massacre, and that he had even been present not far from the scene when the terror squad was dispatched to Connollystrasse 31 in the Olympic Village. However, Mohammed Oudeh (Abu Daoud) maintained that Salameh wasn’t involved at all and that he, Oudeh, planned and commanded the operation. Doubts about Salameh’s role were also raised in two books on the subject, Kai Bird’s The Good Spy and Aaron Klein’s Striking Back. But to this day, Yitzhaki remains confident: “The fact that Abu Daoud, years after the event, when Salameh was no longer alive, wanted to take all the credit for himself makes no difference. Ali Salameh was not present when the attack went down in Munich, but he was involved in the deepest manner possible in the planning, recruitment of personnel, and perpetration of that shocking murder.” In any case, Salameh was a marked man. “Ali Hassan Salameh was the numberone target,” Harari said. “We hunted him for a long time.” The Mossad had only one recent photograph of him, though, which they used, without success, to try to locate him. Information about him took Bayonet operatives to Hamburg, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Stockholm, and other European cities. Each time, they seemed to have missed him by moments. The breakthrough came in mid-July 1973, after an Algerian named Kemal Benamene, who was working for Fatah and had links with Black September, left his apartment in Geneva for a flight to Copenhagen and waited for him there. The Mossad had reason to believe he was planning an attack with Salameh, and he was followed. If they could stick close to Benamene, the Israelis reasoned, they would reach Salameh and be able to kill him. The Caesarea men trailing Benamene saw that he didn’t leave Copenhagen airport, but instead went to the area for passengers in transit and then immediately boarded a flight to Oslo. From there he took a train to Lillehammer. The whole time, he was followed by Mossad operatives. Harari and Romi concluded that he was going to meet their target in the sleepy Norwegian town. Commandeering personnel from two Bayonet teams engaged in missions elsewhere in Europe, Harari rapidly formed a task force. The team of twelve was headed by Nehemia Meiri and comprised a mixture of trained assassins and other operatives and Caesarea staffers who knew Norwegian and were available for the job. One of these team members was Sylvia Rafael, the operative who traveled the Arab world posing as an anti-Israeli Canadian photojournalist named Patricia Roxburgh and gathered much valuable information on the armies in the region. Other members of the squad included Avraham Gehmer, who had been Rafael’s training officer; Dan Arbel, a Danish-Israeli businessman who occasionally took part in Mossad operations in Arab countries, helping with logistics and renting cars and apartments; and Marianne Gladnikoff, an immigrant from Sweden and former Shin Bet employee who had just recently joined the Mossad but who spoke Scandinavian languages fluently. — WHAT HAPPENED NEXT IS a matter of some dispute. In one version, likely the most accurate, the Caesarea surveillance team lost Benamene’s trail in Lillehammer. They then began using the “combing method,” a technique Meiri helped devise in the 1950s when he was looking for KGB agents in Israel, which enabled the search team to cover large urban areas and quickly locate their target’s position. After a day’s search, they zeroed in on a man sitting with a group of Arabs in a café in the center of the town. He looked, they thought, exactly like the man in the photograph of Salameh they were carrying, “like two brothers look like each other,” General Aharon Yariv, the former head of AMAN who was now Prime Minister Meir’s adviser on counterterrorism, later said. In another version, the man identified as Salameh was not just sitting with some unknown Arabs in a café, but was actually spotted in a meeting with known Fatah activists. In this version, then, the Israelis saw that the suspect was associating with other known terrorists, and thus they had an additional indication, apart from the photograph, that this was most likely the man they were looking for. Either way, a report that Salameh had been positively identified was transmitted to the Mossad HQ, on Shaul Hamelech Street in Tel Aviv. But Harari was told that it was not possible for him to speak to the director, Zvi Zamir, because he had decided to travel to Lillehammer himself in order to be there when the hit was carried out. Harari instructed his team to continue with the surveillance. They soon discovered that the man they thought was Salameh lived a quiet life in Lillehammer. He had a blond Norwegian girlfriend who was heavily pregnant. He went to the movies and to an indoor pool in town. He didn’t betray any of the skittishness or caution of a man concerned that the Mossad might be looking for him. Marianne Gladnikoff purchased a swimsuit and went to the pool to watch and observe him. What she saw only made her question whether this man really was the most wanted Palestinian terrorist after all. She was not the only one. But when Gladnikoff and others expressed their doubts to Harari—who in turn discussed them with Zamir, already in Oslo, en route to Lillehammer—they were dismissed. “We told them that we thought this wasn’t our man,” an operative nicknamed Shaul said. “But Mike and Zvika [Zamir] said it made no difference. They said, ‘Even if it isn’t Salameh, it’s clear that he’s some other Arab with connections to terrorists. So even if we don’t hit Salameh, the worst we’d do is kill a less important terrorist, but still a terrorist.” Harari had his own opinion: “Seven operatives make a positive identification between the photograph and the man we’d seen in the street, and only a minority think it wasn’t him. You have to decide, and you go with the majority. The easiest thing is to say ‘Don’t pull the trigger,’ but that way you’ll end up doing nothing.” The target was kept under observation. In a phone call on Saturday, July 21, Zamir, who had not managed to get the train to Lillehammer, ordered Harari to proceed with the hit. That night, the man and his girlfriend left their apartment and took a bus to a movie theater. The Bayonet team, in vehicles and on foot, did not let them out of their sight. At about 10:30, the couple left the theater and took the bus home. When they got off the bus, a gray Volvo stopped nearby, and Shaul and Y., another operative, got out. The two drew silenced Beretta pistols and shot the man eight times before running back to the car and making off. They left the woman, who was not hit, kneeling over their victim, screaming as she cradled his bloody head. The hit men drove to a prearranged meeting place, where some of the other team members and Mike Harari were waiting. Shaul reported that the job was a success, but added that they had seen a woman who had witnessed the killing write down the Volvo’s license number as they drove away. Harari told the logistics man, Arbel, to park the car on a side street and toss the keys into a storm drain. Then Arbel and Gladnikoff were to take a train to Oslo and fly to London and then Israel. The other operatives were to wait in rented apartments for a few hours and then fly out as well. Meanwhile, Harari and the two assassins would drive south to Oslo, where they would take a ferry to Copenhagen. Shaul and Y. took separate flights out of Denmark. Harari boarded a plane for Amsterdam, confident, flush with success. Salameh’s elimination was the final rung on the ladder of Harari’s climb to the directorship of the Mossad once Zamir’s term ended. Only in Amsterdam, while watching the news on TV, did he finally understand that a catastrophe had just occurred. — THE MAN THE ISRAELIS killed in Lillehammer was not Ali Hassan Salameh, but Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan working as a waiter and cleaning man at the swimming pool. He was married to a woman named Torill, who was seven months pregnant. She described what happened: All of a sudden, my husband fell. I did not understand what had happened, and then I saw those two men. They were three, four meters away from us. One of them was the driver of the car, and the second was his passenger. They stood outside the car, on both sides, firing pistols. I fell flat on the ground, sure they wanted to kill me, too, and that I would die in a moment. But then I heard the car doors slam and it drove away. My husband didn’t shout….I got up and ran as fast as I could to the nearest house and told them to call the police and an ambulance. When I got back, there were already people around my husband trying to help him. An ambulance came and I drove with my husband to the hospital, and there they told me he was dead. Mossad chief Zamir tried to dismiss the disaster: “Not one of us has the means of making only correct decisions. Wrong identification of a target is not a failure. It’s a mistake.” Zamir placed some of the blame on the victim’s conduct: “He behaved in a manner that seemed suspicious to our people who were following him. He made a lot of journeys, the aim of which it is difficult to know. He may have been dealing in drugs.” Meiri was not at the scene because he’d torn a ligament the day before and had been sent back to Israel by Harari. In his version of events, Bouchiki was seen meeting with known Fatah operative Kemal Benamene. He insisted the operation was therefore still a success. “It angers me that it is seen as a failure,” he said. “What difference does it make if I kill the arch-murderer or his deputy?” But there’s no substantive evidence that Bouchiki was anyone’s deputy. In truth, he had no connection at all to terrorism, and the Lillehammer affair was nothing but the cold-blooded murder of an innocent pool attendant. And Bayonet’s problems were just beginning. According to Shaul, while waiting for the hit to go down, Dan Arbel had bought a faucet and a few other items for a house he was building in Israel. He put them in the trunk of the gray Volvo—the car Harari later told him to dump because a witness had gotten the plate number. But Arbel didn’t want to carry his rather heavy purchases, so instead of getting rid of the Volvo, he drove it to the airport in Oslo with Gladnikoff. The police were waiting at the rental car return at the airport. Arbel broke down fairly quickly under interrogation because of his claustrophobia. “Only after the operation,” Shaul said, “did we read in Arbel’s file [about] his fear of closed places and how apprehensive he was about getting caught and interrogated. It was very unprofessional behavior on Caesarea’s part. A man writes an honest report and no one reads it. If they had read it, he would have been suspended immediately from operational duties.” Arbel told the police where to find Avraham Gehmer and Sylvia Rafael, and a search of their hideout led to the capture of two more operatives. It was already clear to the Norwegians that this was a targeted killing and the Mossad was behind it. Documents found on the detainees (which the operatives were supposed to have destroyed after reading them) led to the discovery all across Europe of safe houses, collaborators, communications channels, and operational methods. The information also helped the Italian and French security authorities with their investigations into targeted killings that had been carried out in their countries. The six detainees were put on trial, making headlines all across the globe and causing extreme discomfort in Israel. Particularly embarrassing was that Arbel had given up everything, even the phone number of Mossad HQ in Tel Aviv. Israel did not admit that it was responsible for killing Bouchiki, but the state provided legal defense and other assistance for the prisoners. The court found that the Mossad was behind the murder. Five of the six were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to five and a half years, but they were all released after serving only short periods because a secret agreement was reached between the governments of Israel and Norway. Upon their release from prison, they were greeted as returning heroes in Israel. Harari and Zamir kept their jobs, although the snafu probably cost Harari his dream of becoming head of the Mossad. “Lillehammer was a real failure all down the line, from those who tailed the target to the shooters, from the Mossad to the State of Israel,” said Caesarea veteran Moti Kfir. “By a miracle, precisely those who were truly responsible for what happened came out of it without any harm.” That miracle was Golda Meir, the Mossad’s greatest fan. Harari claimed that he and Zamir acknowledged their responsibility for the debacle and that “we offered our immediate resignations to Golda. She wouldn’t hear of it. She said there were important things to be done, that we were needed, and that we must stay.” During the weeks afterward, while Harari was trying to get his people out of jail, the prime minister invited him to her modest apartment in north Tel Aviv and, Harari said, she “made me tea in her kitchen and tried really hard to cheer me up.” Still, the failure in Lillehammer led to a much more cautious Caesarea policy. On September 4, Harari was in charge of a wide-ranging operation by Caesarea and Rainbow in Rome, tracking a Black September squad headed by Amin alHindi, another of the figures on the list of eleven Israel wanted to kill because of their roles in the Munich massacre. This squad was acting on behalf of the Libyan ruler, Muammar Qaddafi, who had equipped them with six SA-7 Strela shoulderlaunched antiaircraft missiles, with which they were planning to shoot down an El Al airliner just after it took off from Fiumicino Airport. Harari and his team followed them as they transported the missiles to an apartment in Ostia, a suburb of Rome that was “a catapult shot from the runway,” in Harari’s words. They intended to fire the missiles from the roof of the building. In a nearby playground, sitting on a lawn with kids playing around their mothers, Harari and Zamir sat and argued with Meiri, who pleaded, “Let me go in. I’ll knock them all off in a minute and take the missiles.” But after the Lillehammer fiasco, Zamir was wary. Over Meiri’s vociferous objections, Zamir said, “Nehemia, not this time. We’ll inform Italian intelligence and let them take care of it.” “And what’ll we get out of that?” Meiri asked. “The Arabs will hijack an Italian plane or threaten them some other way, and they’ll let these guys go.” “If an El Al plane was in immediate danger, then we’d blow up not only the apartment but the whole building, but there are still many hours before they’re planning to fire the missiles,” Harari responded. “Besides, when we blasted Hamshari, we knew the bomb would hit only the lamp and the desk and his head, but here? How can I let you start a gunfight in a six-story building when I don’t know who their neighbors are and who else is likely to get hurt? Perhaps the prime minister of Italy lives in the apartment across the hall? Perhaps the prime minister’s grandmother?” Meiri wasn’t persuaded. His fury soared when Zamir ordered him to be the Mossad representative to go with the Italian police and point out the apartment, because he was the one who knew how to speak Italian best. “If they see me, I’ll be burned, and I’ll never be able to take part in another op,” Meiri complained. Harari tried to calm him. “Don’t worry, Nehemia. There are some excellent plastic surgeons in Israel. We’ll give you a new face, even better than the one you’ve got now. Go show them where the apartment is.” The Italians arrested all the members of al-Hindi’s squad, but, exactly as Meiri had predicted, they were freed after three months because of pressure from Qaddafi. Bayonet was in effect disbanded because of the Lillehammer affair. The fake Italian passport Meiri had used for the operation was exposed during the investigation by the Norwegian police, and his travels abroad were severely curtailed. He left the Mossad shortly afterward.}

Rise and Kill First

Mr Rabbit Señor conejo

History

Mossad was formed on December 13, 1949, as the Central Institute for Coordination at the recommendation of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to Reuven Shiloah. Ben Gurion wanted a central body to coordinate and improve cooperation between the existing security services—the army's intelligence department (AMAN), the Internal Security Service (Shin Bet), and the Political Intelligence Service (Mossad).^[2][3][4] The central body governing the three security services was Va'adat;^[4] today it is the Ministry of Intelligence.^[5]

In March 1951, it was reorganized and incorporated into the prime minister's office, reporting directly to the Prime Minister of Israel.^[3] Due to Mossad's accountability directly to the prime minister and not to the Knesset, journalist Ronen Bergman has described Mossad as a "deep state".^[6]

In the 1990s, Aliza Magen-Halevi became the highest-ranking woman in Mossad's history when she served as the agency's deputy director under Shabtai Shavit and Danny Yatom.^[7]

The Mossad made an unusual move on Israel's 68th Independence Day by releasing a secret recruitment ad for its Cyber Division. The ad featured seemingly random letters and numbers, which turned out to be a hidden puzzle. Over 25,000 people attempted to solve it, and while most failed, dozens succeeded and were recruited.^[8] In a rare 2012 interview with "Lady Globes," Mossad fighters talked about the recruitment of men and women to the Mossad, the screening tests, their work in the Mossad alongside starting a family, the relationship between the time to prepare for the actions and the actions themselves, working in teams, the emotional intelligence required of them, the nature of the activity, avoiding fame and omnipotence, and conversations with enemies.^[9]

THE BABYLONIAN TALMUD, TRACTATE SANHEDRIN, PORTION 72, VERSE 1

A Note On The Sources#

THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY guards its secrets jealously. Its near-total  opacity is protected by a complex array of laws and protocols, strict military  censorship, and the intimidation, interrogation, and prosecution of journalists and  their sources, as well as a natural solidarity and loyalty among the espionage  agencies’ personnel.

All glimpses behind the scenes have, to this day, been partial at best.

How then, it might reasonably be asked, to write a book about one of the most  secretive organizations on earth?

Efforts to persuade the Israeli defense establishment to cooperate with the  research for this project went nowhere. Requests to the intelligence community  that it comply with the law by transferring its historical documents to the State  Archive and allowing publication of materials fifty years old or more were met  with stony silence. A petition to the Supreme Court for an order forcing  compliance with the law was dragged out over years, with the complicity of the  court, and ended with nothing but an amendment to the law itself: The secrecy  provisions were extended from fifty to seventy years, longer than the history of the  state.

The defense establishment did not merely sit with folded arms. As early as  2010, before the contract for this book was even signed, a special meeting was  held in the Mossad’s operations division, Caesarea, to discuss ways of disrupting my research. Letters were written to all former Mossad employees warning them  against giving interviews, and individual conversations were held with certain ex-  staffers who were considered the most problematic. Later in 2011, the chief of the

General Staff of the IDF, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, asked the Shin Bet  to take aggressive steps against the author, claiming that I had perpetrated  “aggravated espionage” by having in my possession classified secrets and “using  classified material in order to disparage me [Ashkenazi] personally.” Since then,  several actions have been taken by various bodies to stop publication of the book, or at least large parts of it.

The military censor requires the Israeli media to add the words “according to  foreign publications” whenever it mentions secret actions attributed to Israeli  intelligence, primarily targeted assassinations. This is to make it clear that the  existence of the publication does not constitute official acknowledgment of Israel’s  responsibility. In this sense, then, this book must be taken as a “foreign publication” whose contents do not have any official Israeli confirmation.

None of the thousand interviews upon which this book is based—with sources  ranging from political leaders and chiefs of intelligence agencies to the operatives  themselves—were approved by Israel’s defense establishment. Most of the sources  are identified by their names. Others understandably feared being identified and  are therefore referred to by their initials or nicknames, in addition to any details about them I was able to provide while still keeping their identities secret.

I have also made use of thousands of documents given to me by these sources,  all of which are referenced for the first time here. My sources never received  permission to remove these documents from their places of employment, and  certainly did not have permission to pass them on to me. This book is thus about  as far as possible from an authorized history of Israeli intelligence.

So, why did these sources speak with me and supply me with these documents?

Each had his own motive, and sometimes the story behind the scenes was only a  little less interesting than the content of the interview itself. It is clear that some  politicians and intelligence personnel—two professions highly skilled in  manipulation and deception—were trying to use me as the conduit for their  preferred version of events, or to shape history to suit themselves. I have tried to  thwart such attempts by cross-checking with as many written and oral sources as I  could.

But it seemed to me that there was often another motive, which had much to do  with a particularly Israeli contradiction: On the one hand, nearly everything in the  country related to intelligence and national security is classified as “top secret.” On the other hand, everyone wants to speak about what they’ve done. Acts that people  in other countries might be ashamed to admit to are instead a source of pride for  Israelis, because they are collectively perceived as imperatives of national security,  necessary to protect threatened Israeli lives, if not the very existence of the  embattled state.

After a time, the Mossad did manage to block access to some of my sources (in  most cases only after they had already spoken to me). Many more have died since I  met them, most of natural causes. Thus, the firsthand accounts that these men and  women have given for this book—men and women who witnessed and participated  in significant historic events—are in fact the only ones that exist outside the vaults  of the defense establishment’s secret archives.

Occasionally, they are the only ones that exist at all. required in his German school to give the Nazi salute and sing the party anthem.

He returned as a soldier to a Europe in ruins, his people nearly destroyed, their  communities smoldering ruins. “The Jewish people had been humiliated, trampled,  murdered,” he said. “Now was the time to strike back, to take revenge. In my dreams, when I enlisted, revenge took the form of me arresting my best friend  from Germany, whose name was Detlef, the son of a police major. That’s how I  would restore lost Jewish honor.”

It was that sense of lost honor, of a people’s humiliation, as much as rage at the  Nazis, that drove men like Gichon. He first met the Jewish refugees on the border  between Austria and Italy. The men of the Brigade fed them, took off their own  uniforms to clothe them against the cold, tried to draw out of them details of the  atrocities they had undergone. He remembers an encounter in June 1945 in which

a female refugee came up to him.

“She broke away from her group and spoke to me in German,” he said. “She  said, ‘You, the soldiers of the Brigade, are the sons of Bar Kokhba’ ”—the great  hero of the Second Jewish Revolt against the Romans, in A.D. 132–135. “She said,

‘I will always remember your insignia and what you did for us.’ ”

Gichon was flattered by the Bar Kokhba analogy, but for her praise and  gratitude, Gichon felt only pity and shame. If the Jews in the Brigade were the sons  of Bar Kokhba, who were these Jews? The soldiers from the Land of Israel,

standing erect, tough, and strong, saw the Holocaust survivors as victims who  needed help, but also as part of the European Jewry who had allowed themselves  to be massacred. They embodied the cowardly, feeble stereotype of the Jews of

the Diaspora—the Exile, in traditional Jewish and Zionist parlance—who  surrendered rather than fought back, who did not know how to shoot or wield a  weapon. It was that image—in its most extreme version, the Jew as a Muselmann,  prisoners’ slang for the emaciated, zombie-like inmates hovering near death in the  Nazi camps—that the new Jews of the Yishuv rejected. “My brain could not grasp,

not then and not today, how it could have been that there were tens of thousands of  Jews in a camp with only a few German guards, but they did not rise up, they  simply went like lambs to the slaughter,” Gichon said more than sixty years later.

“Why didn’t they tear [the Germans] to shreds? I’ve always said that no such thing  could happen in the Land of Israel. Had those communities had leaders worthy of  the name, the entire business would have looked completely different.”

In the years following the war, the Zionists of the Yishuv would prove, both to  the world and, more important, to themselves, that Jews would never again go to  such slaughter—and that Jewish blood would not come cheaply. The six million

would be avenged.

“We thought we could not rest until we had exacted blood for blood, death for  death,” said Hanoch Bartov, a highly regarded Israeli novelist who enlisted in the  Brigade a month before his seventeenth birthday.

Such vengeance, though—atrocity for atrocity—would violate the rules of war  and likely be disastrous for the Zionist cause. Ben-Gurion, practical as always,  publicly said as much: “Revenge now is an act of no national value. It cannot  restore life to the millions who were murdered.”

Still, the Haganah’s leaders privately understood the need for some sort of  retribution, both to satisfy the troops who had been exposed to the atrocities and  also to achieve some degree of historical justice and deter future attempts to slaughter Jews. Thus, they sanctioned some types of reprisals against the Nazis and  their accomplices. Immediately after the war, a secret unit, authorized and  controlled by the Haganah high command and unknown to the British  commanders, was set up within the Brigade. It was called Gmul, Hebrew for  “Recompense.”

The unit’s mission was “revenge, but not a robber’s revenge,” as a  secret memo at the time put it. “Revenge against those SS men who themselves  took part in the slaughter.”

“We looked for big fish,” Mordechai Gichon said, breaking a vow of silence  among the Gmul commanders that he’d kept for more than sixty years. “The senior  Nazis who had managed to shed their uniforms and return to their homes.”

The Gmul agents worked undercover even as they performed their regular  Brigade duties. Gichon himself assumed two fake identities—one as a German  civilian, the other as a British major—as he hunted Nazis. In expeditions under his  German cover, Gichon recovered the Gestapo archives in Tarvisio, Villach, and  Klagenfurt, to which fleeing Nazis had set fire but only a small part of which  actually burned. Operating as the British major, he gleaned more names from  Yugoslavian Communists who were still afraid to carry out revenge attacks themselves. A few Jews in American intelligence also were willing to help by  handing over information they had on escaped Nazis, which they thought the  Palestinian Jews would use to better effect than the American military.

Coercion worked, too. In June 1945, Gmul agents found a Polish-born German  couple who lived in Tarvisio. The wife had been involved in transferring stolen  Jewish property from Austria and Italy to Germany, and her husband had helped run the regional Gestapo office. The Palestinian Jewish soldiers offered them a  stark choice: cooperate or die.

“The goy broke and said he was willing to cooperate,” said Yisrael Karmi, who  interrogated the couple and later, after Israel was born, would become the  commander of the Israeli Army’s military police. “I assigned him to prepare lists of all the senior officials that he knew and who had worked with the Gestapo and  the SS. Name, date of birth, education, and positions.”

The result was a dramatic intelligence breakthrough, a list of dozens of names.

Gmul’s men tracked down each missing Nazi—finding some wounded in a local  hospital, where they were being treated under stolen aliases—and then pressured  those men to provide more information. They promised each German he would

not be harmed if he cooperated, so most did. Then, when they were no longer  useful, Gmul agents shot them and dumped the bodies. There was no sense in  leaving them alive to tip the British command to Gmul’s clandestine mission.

Once a particular name had been verified, the second phase began: locating the  target and gathering information for the final killing mission. Gichon, who’d been born in Germany, often was assigned that job. “No one suspected me,” he said.

“My vocal cords were of Berlin stock. I’d go to the corner grocery store or pub or  even just knock on a door to convey greetings from someone. Most of the time,  the people would respond [to their real names] or recoil into vague silence, which  was as good as a confirmation.” Once the identification was confirmed, Gichon  would track the German’s movements and provide a detailed sketch of the house

where he lived or the area that had been chosen for the abduction.

The killers themselves worked in teams of no more than five men. When  meeting their target, they generally wore British military police uniforms, and they  typically told their target they had come to take a man named so-and-so for  interrogation. Most of the time, the German came without objection. As one of the  unit’s soldiers, Shalom Giladi, related in his testimony to the Haganah Archive, the

Nazi was sometimes killed instantly, and other times transported to some remote  spot before being killed. “In time we developed quiet, rapid, and efficient methods  of taking care of the SS men who fell into our hands,” he said.

As anyone who has ever gotten into a pickup truck knows, a person hoisting himself up  into one braces his foot on the rear running board, leans forward under the canvas canopy,  and sort of rolls in. The man lying in wait inside the truck would take advantage of this natural tilt of the body.

The minute the German’s head protruded into the gloom, the ambusher would bend over  him and wrap his arms under his chin—around his throat—in a kind of reverse choke hold,  and, carrying that into a throttle embrace, the ambusher would fall back flat on the mattress, undergrounds had their killing campaign in full motion, trying to push the British out of Palestine.

Yitzhak Shamir, now in command of Lehi, resolved not only to eliminate key  figures of the British Mandate locally—killing CID personnel and making  numerous attempts to do the same to the Jerusalem police chief, Michael Joseph  McConnell, and the high commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael—but also  Englishmen in other countries who posed a threat to his political objective. Walter  Edward Guinness, more formally known as Lord Moyne, for example, was the  British resident minister of state in Cairo, which was also under British rule. The  Jews in Palestine considered Moyne a flagrant anti-Semite who had assiduously  used his position to restrict the Yishuv’s power by significantly reducing immigration quotas for Holocaust survivors.

Shamir ordered Moyne killed. He sent two Lehi operatives, Eliyahu Hakim and  Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, to Cairo, where they waited at the door to Moyne’s house. When  Moyne pulled up, his secretary in the car with him, Hakim and Bet-Zuri sprinted  to the car. One of them shoved a pistol through the window, aimed it at Moyne’s  head, and fired three times. Moyne gripped his throat. “Oh, they’ve shot us!” he

cried, and then slumped forward in his seat. Still, it was an amateurish operation.

Shamir had counseled his young killers to arrange to escape in a car, but instead  they fled on slow-moving bicycles. Egyptian police quickly apprehended them, and  Hakim and Bet-Zuri were tried, convicted, and, six months later, hanged.

The assassination had a decisive effect on British officials, though not the one  Shamir had envisioned. As Israel would learn repeatedly in future years, it is very  hard to predict how history will proceed after someone is shot in the head.

After the unmitigated evil of the Holocaust, the attempted extermination of an  entire people in Europe, there was growing sympathy in the West for the Zionist  cause. According to some accounts, up until the first week of November 1944,

Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, had been pushing his cabinet to  support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. He rallied several influential  figures to back the initiative—including Lord Moyne. It is not a stretch to assume,

then, that Churchill might well have arrived at the Yalta summit with Franklin  Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin with a clear, positive policy regarding the future of a  Jewish state, had Lehi not intervened. Instead, after the Cairo killing, Churchill  labeled the attackers “a new group of gangsters” and announced that he was  reconsidering his position.

And the killing continued. On July 22, 1946, members of Menachem Begin’s

Irgun planted 350 KG explosives in the south wing of the King David Hotel, in  Jerusalem, where the British Mandate’s administration and army and intelligence  offices were housed. A warning call from the Irgun apparently was dismissed as a  hoax; the building was not evacuated before a massive explosion ripped through it.

Ninety-one people were killed, and forty-five wounded.

This was not the targeted killing of a despised British official or a guerrilla  attack on a police station. Instead, it was plainly an act of terror, aimed at a target  with numerous civilians inside. Most damningly, many Jews were among the  casualties.

The King David Hotel bombing sparked a fierce dispute in the Yishuv. Ben-  Gurion immediately denounced the Irgun and called it “an enemy of the Jewish  people.”

But the extremists were not deterred.

Three months after the King David attack, on October 31, a Lehi cell, again  acting on their own, without Ben-Gurion’s approval or knowledge, bombed the  British embassy in Rome. The embassy building was severely damaged, but thanks  to the fact that the operation took place at night, only a security guard and two  Italian pedestrians were injured.

Almost immediately after that, Lehi mailed letter bombs to every senior British  cabinet member in London. On one level, this effort was a spectacular failure—not  a single letter exploded—but on another, Lehi had made its point, and its reach,  clear. The files of MI5, Britain’s security service, showed that Zionist terrorism  was considered the most serious threat to British national security at the time—

even more serious than the Soviet Union. Irgun cells in Britain were established,  according to one MI5 memo, “to beat the dog in its own kennel.” British  intelligence sources warned of a wave of attacks on “selected VIPs,” among them  Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and even Prime Minister Clement Attlee himself.

At the end of 1947, a report to the British high commissioner tallied the casualties  of the previous two years: 176 British Mandate personnel and civilians killed.

“Only these actions, these executions, caused the British to leave,” David  Shomron said, decades after he shot Tom Wilkin dead on a Jerusalem street. “If [Avraham] Stern had not begun the war, the State of Israel would not have come into being.”

One may argue with these statements. The shrinking British Empire ceded  control of the majority of its colonies, including many countries where terror  tactics had not been employed, due to economic reasons and increased demands  for independence from the native populations. India, for instance, gained its  independence right around the same time. Nevertheless, Shomron and his ilk were firmly convinced that their own bravery and their extreme methods had brought  about the departure of the British.

And it was the men who fought that bloody underground war—guerrillas, assassins, terrorists—who would play a central role in the building of the new state  of Israel’s armed forces and intelligence community office in the former Templer colony in Tel Aviv. “Intelligence is one of the military and political tools that we urgently need for this war,” Shiloah wrote in a memo to Ben-Gurion. “It will have to become a permanent tool, including in our [peacetime] political apparatus.”

Ben-Gurion did not need to be persuaded. After all, a large part of the  surprising, against-all-odds establishment of the state, and its defense, was owed to  the effective use of accurate intelligence. 

That day, he ordered the establishment of three agencies. The first was the  Intelligence Department of the Israel Defense Forces General Staff, later  commonly referred to by its Hebrew acronym, AMAN. Second was the Shin Bet  (acronym for the General Security Service), responsible for internal security and  created as a sort of hybrid between the American FBI and the British MI5. (The  organization later changed its name to the Israeli Security Agency, but most  Israelis still refer to it by its acronym, Shabak, or, more commonly, as in this book,  as Shin Bet.) And a third, the Political Department—now belonging to the new  Foreign Ministry, instead of the Jewish Agency—would engage in foreign espionage and intelligence collection. Abandoned Templer homes in the Sarona  neighborhood, near the Defense Ministry, were assigned to each outfit, putting  Ben-Gurion’s office at the center of an ostensibly organized force of security services.

But nothing in those first months and years was so tidy. Remnants of Haganah  agencies were absorbed into various security services or spy rings, then shuffled  and reabsorbed into another. Add to that the myriad turf battles and clashing egos  of what were essentially revolutionaries, and much was chaos in the espionage  underground. “They were hard years,” said Isser Harel, one of the founding fathers

of Israeli intelligence. “We had to establish a country and defend it. [But] the  structure of the services and the division of labor was determined without any  systematic judgment, without discussions with all the relevant people, in an almost dilettantish and conspiratorial way.”

Under normal conditions, administrators would establish clear boundaries and  procedures, and field agents would patiently cultivate sources of information over a  period of years. But Israel did not have this luxury. Its intelligence operations had  to be built on the fly and under siege, while the young country was fighting for its  very existence.

—

THE FIRST CHALLENGE THAT Ben-Gurion’s spies faced was an internal one: There  were Jews who blatantly defied his authority, among them the remnants of the  right-wing underground movements. An extreme example of this defiance was the  Altalena affair, in June 1948. A ship by that name, dispatched from Europe by the  Irgun, was due to arrive, carrying immigrants and arms. But the organization

refused to hand all the weapons over to the army of the new state, insisting that  some of them be given to still intact units of its own. Ben-Gurion, who had been  informed of the plans by agents inside Irgun, ordered that the ship be taken over by  force. In the ensuing fight, it was sunk, and sixteen Irgun fighters and three IDF  soldiers were killed. Shortly afterward, security forces rounded up two hundred  Irgun members all over the country, effectively ending its existence.

Yitzhak Shamir and the Lehi operatives under his command also refused to  accept the more moderate Ben-Gurion’s authority. Over the summer, during the  truce, UN envoy Bernadotte crafted a tentative peace plan that would have ended  the fighting. But the plan was unacceptable to Lehi and Shamir, who accused  Bernadotte of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II and of drafting a  proposal that would redraw Israeli borders in such a way—including giving most  of the Negev and Jerusalem to the Arabs, and putting the Haifa port and Lydda

airport under international control, as well as obliging the Jewish state to take back  300,000 Arab refugees—that the country would not survive.

Lehi issued several public warnings, in the form of notices posted in the streets

of cities:

ADVICE TO THE AGENT BERNADOTTE: CLEAR OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.

The  underground radio was even more outspoken, declaring, “The Count will end up  like the Lord” (a reference to the assassinated Lord Moyne). Bernadotte ignored  mthe warnings, and even ordered UN observers not to carry arms, saying, “The  United Nations flag protects us.”

Convinced that the envoy’s plan would be accepted, Shamir ordered his  assassination. On September 17, four months after statehood was declared, and the  day after Bernadotte submitted his plan to the UN Security Council, he was traveling with his entourage in a convoy of three white DeSoto sedans from UN  headquarters to the Rehavia neighborhood of Jewish Jerusalem, when a jeep  blocked their way. Three young men wearing peaked caps jumped out. Two of  them shot the tires of the UN vehicles, and the third, Yehoshua Cohen, opened the  door of the car Bernadotte was traveling in and opened fire with his Schmeisser

MP40 submachine gun. The first burst hit the man sitting next to Bernadotte, a  French colonel by the name of André Serot, but the next, more accurate, hit the  count in the chest. Both men were killed. The whole attack was over in seconds —“like thunder and lightning, the time it takes to fire fifty rounds,” is the way the  Israeli liaison officer, Captain Moshe Hillman, who was in the car with the  victims, described it. The perpetrators were never caught.

The assassination infuriated and profoundly embarrassed the Jewish leadership.

The Security Council condemned it as “a cowardly act which appears to have been  committed by a criminal group of terrorists in Jerusalem,” and The New York  Times wrote the following day, “No Arab armies could have done so much harm [to the Jewish state] in so short a time.”

Ben-Gurion saw Lehi’s rogue operation as a serious challenge to his authority,  one that could lead to a coup or even a civil war. He reacted immediately,  outlawing both the Irgun and Lehi. He ordered Shin Bet chief Isser Harel to round

up Lehi members. Topping the wanted list was Yitzhak Shamir. He wasn’t  captured, but many others were, and they were locked up under heavy guard. Lehi  ceased to exist as an organization.

Ben-Gurion was grateful to Harel for his vigorous action against the  underground and made him the number-one intelligence official in the country.

A short, solid, and driven man, Isser Harel was influenced by the Russian  Bolshevik revolutionary movement and its use of sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and  assassination, but he abhorred communism. Under his direction, the Shin Bet kept

constant surveillance and conducted political espionage against Ben-Gurion’s  political opponents, the left-wing socialist and Communist parties, and the right-  wing Herut party formed by veterans of Irgun and Lehi.

Meanwhile, Ben-Gurion and his foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, were at  loggerheads over what policy should be adopted toward the Arabs. Sharett was the  most prominent of Israel’s early leaders who believed diplomacy was the best way  to achieve regional peace and thus secure the country. Even before independence,  he made secret overtures to Jordan’s King Abdullah and Lebanon’s prime minister, Riad al-Solh, who would be instrumental in forming the coalition of invading  Arabs, and who already had been largely responsible for the Palestinian militias  that exacted heavy losses on the pre-state Yishuv. Despite al-Solh’s virulently anti- Jewish rhetoric and anti-Israel actions, he secretly met with Eliyahu Sasson, one of  Sharett’s deputies, several times in Paris in late 1948 to discuss a peace agreement.

“If we want to establish contacts with the Arabs to end the war,” said Sasson when  Sharett, enthusiastic about his secret contacts, took him to report to the cabinet,

“we have to be in contact with those people who are now in power. With those  who have declared war on us…and who are having trouble continuing.”

Organization

Divisions

The organizational structure of the Mossad is officially classified. Mossad is organized into divisions, led by a director who is equivalent to a major general in the Israel Defense Forces.^[10]

• Tzomet: Mossad's largest division, staffed with case officers called katsas tasked with conducting espionage overseas and running agents.^[11] Employees in Tzomet operate under a variety of covers, including diplomatic and unofficial. The division was led from 2006 to 2011 by Yossi Cohen^[12] and from 2013 to 2019 by David Barnea, both of whom later served as Mossad directors.^[13]
• Caesarea: conducts special operations and houses the Kidon (Hebrew: כידון, "bayonet", "javelin" or a "spear") unit, an elite group of assassins.^[14]
• Keshet ("Rainbow"): electronic surveillance, break-ins, and wiretapping^[10]
• Human Resources^[10]
• A special unit called Metsada allegedly runs "small units of combatants" whose missions include "assassinations and sabotage".^{[15][better source needed]}

Venture capital

Mossad opened a venture capital fund in June 2017,^[16] to invest in high-tech startups to develop new cyber technologies.^[17] The names of technology startups funded by Mossad are not published.^[17]

Personnel

Katsa

A katsa is a field intelligence officer of the Mossad.^[18] The word katsa is a Hebrew acronym for Hebrew: קצין איסוף, romanized: ktsin issuf, "intelligence officer", literally "gathering officer". A katsa is a case officer who runs agents to clandestinely collect intelligence.

Kidon

The kidon are Mossad's elite assassins. Recruits receive two years of training at Mossad's training facility near Herzliya.^[11]

Sayanim

Sayanim (Hebrew: סייענים, lit. helpers, assistants)^[19] are unpaid Jewish civilians who help Mossad out of a sense of devotion to Israel.^[20] They are recruited by Mossad's field agents, katsas, to provide logistical support for Mossad operations.^[11] A sayan running a rental agency, for instance, could help Mossad agents rent a car without the usual documentation.^[21][22] The usage of sayanim allows the Mossad to operate with a slim budget yet conduct vast operations worldwide.^[23] Sayanim can have dual citizenships but are often not Israeli citizens.^[24][25]

According to Gordon Thomas, there were 4,000 sayanim in Britain and some 16,000 in the United States in 1998.^[21]

Israeli students called bodlim are often used as gofers for Mossad.^[26]

^{Directors of the Mossad in 2015}

Motto

Mossad's former motto, be-tachbūlōt ta`aseh lekhā milchāmāh (Hebrew: בתחבולות תעשה לך מלחמה) is a quote from the Bible (Proverbs 24:6): "For by wise guidance you can wage your war" (NRSV). The motto was later<sup>[when?]</sup> changed to another Proverbs passage: be-'éyn tachbūlōt yippol `ām; ū-teshū`āh be-rov yō'éts (Hebrew: באין תחבולות יפול עם, ותשועה ברוב יועץ, Proverbs 11:14). This is translated by NRSV as: "Where there is no guidance, a nation falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety."^[27]

^{Directors of Mossad}

About half of the Mossad's leaders rose through its ranks, while the rest are retired IDF soldiers appointed to head the agency. The Prime Minister personally appoints the head of the Mossad for Intelligence and Special Duties without needing government or other supervisory body approval (unlike the Chief of Staff or the Shin Bet's head). The appointment undergoes review by the advisory committee for appointing senior civil service officials. The term is five years, extendable by the Prime Minister for another year without conditions.^[28]

Until 1996, the head of the Mossad's name was kept confidential. The Mossad argued that secrecy allowed the head to move freely worldwide. In response to public criticism, the government began revealing the head's name when Danny Yatom assumed office.^[29]

Alleged operations

Operation Harpoon

Together with Shurat HaDin, Mossad^[when?] started Operation Harpoon, for "destroying terrorists' money networks".^[30][31]

Africa

Egypt

• Provision of intelligence for the cutting of communications between Port Said and Cairo in 1956.^{[citation needed]}
• Mossad spy Wolfgang Lotz, holding West German citizenship, infiltrated Egypt in 1957, and gathered intelligence on Egyptian missile sites, military installations, and industries. He also composed a list of German rocket scientists working for the Egyptian government, and sent some of them letter bombs. After the East German head of state made a state visit to Egypt, the Egyptian government detained thirty West German citizens as a goodwill gesture. Lotz, assuming that he had been discovered, confessed to his cold war espionage activities.^[32]
• After a tense May 25, 1967, confrontation with CIA Tel Aviv station chief John Hadden, who warned that the United States would help defend Egypt if Israel launched a surprise attack, Mossad director Meir Amit flew to Washington, D.C. to meet with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and reported back to the Israeli cabinet that the United States had given Israel "a flickering green light" to attack.^[33]
• Provision of intelligence on the Egyptian Air Force for Operation Focus, the opening air strike of the Six-Day War.
• Operation Bulmus 6 – Intelligence assistance in the Commando Assault on Green Island, Egypt during the War of Attrition.^{[citation needed]}
• Operation Damocles – A campaign of assassination and intimidation against German rocket scientists employed by Egypt in building missiles.^{[citation needed]}
  • A bomb sent to the Heliopolis rocket factory killed five Egyptian workers, allegedly sent by Otto Skorzeny on behalf of the Mossad.^[34]
  • Heinz Krug, 49, the chief of a Munich company supplying military hardware to Egypt disappeared in September 1962 and is believed to have been assassinated by Otto Skorzeny on behalf of the Mossad.^[34]

Morocco

In September 1956, Mossad established a secretive network in Morocco to smuggle Moroccan Jews to Israel after a ban on immigration to Israel was imposed.^[35]

In early 1991, two Mossad operatives infiltrated the Moroccan port of Casablanca and planted a tracking device on the freighter Al-Yarmouk, which was carrying a cargo of North Korean missiles bound for Syria. The ship was to be sunk by the Israeli Air Force, but the mission was later called off by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.^[36]

Tunisia

The 1988 killing of Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), a founder of Fatah.^[37]

The alleged killing of Salah Khalaf, head of intelligence of the PLO and second in command of Fatah behind Yasser Arafat, in 1991.^[38]

The 2016 alleged killing of Hamas operative Mohamed Zouari in Tunisia. Known to Israel's security echelon as "The Engineer", he was a Hamas-affiliated engineer who was believed to be constructing drones for the group. He was shot at close range.^[39][40]

Uganda

For Operation Entebbe in 1976, Mossad provided intelligence regarding Entebbe International Airport^[41] and extensively interviewed hostages who had been released.^[42]

South Africa

In the late 1990s, after Mossad was tipped off to the presence of two Iranian agents in Johannesburg on a mission to procure advanced weapons systems from Denel, a Mossad agent was deployed, and met up with a local Jewish contact. Posing as South African intelligence, they abducted the Iranians, drove them to a warehouse, and beat and intimidated them before forcing them to leave the country.^[36]

Sudan

After the 1994 AMIA bombing, the largest bombing in Argentine history, Mossad began gathering intelligence for a raid by Israeli Special Forces on the Iranian embassy in Khartoum as retaliation. The operation was called off due to fears that another attack against worldwide Jewish communities might take place as revenge. Mossad also assisted in Operation Moses, the evacuation of Ethiopian Jews to Israel from a famine-ridden region of Sudan in 1984, also maintaining a relationship with the Ethiopian government. ^{[citation needed]}

Americas

Argentina

In 1960, Mossad discovered that the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was in Argentina. A team of five Mossad agents led by Shimon Ben Aharon slipped into Argentina and, through surveillance, confirmed that he had been living there under the name of Ricardo Klement. He was abducted on May 11, 1960 and taken to a hideout. He was subsequently smuggled to Israel, where he was tried and executed. Argentina protested what it considered as a violation of its sovereignty, and the United Nations Security Council noted that "repetition of acts such as [this] would involve a breach of the principles upon which international order is founded, creating an atmosphere of insecurity and distrust incompatible with the preservation of peace" while also acknowledging that "Eichmann should be brought to appropriate justice for the crimes of which he is accused" and that "this resolution should in no way be interpreted as condoning the odious crimes of which Eichmann is accused."^[b][46] Mossad abandoned a second operation, intended to capture Josef Mengele.^[47]

United States

During the 1990s, Mossad discovered that a Hezbollah agent was operating inside the United States to procure materials needed to manufacture IEDs and other weapons. In a joint operation with U.S. intelligence, the Hezbollah agent was kept under surveillance in hopes that his communications would expose additional Hezbollah operatives. The agent was eventually arrested.^[36]

Mossad informed the FBI and CIA in August 2001 that, based on its intelligence, as many as 200 terrorists were slipping into the United States and planning "a major assault on the United States". The Israeli intelligence agency cautioned the FBI that it had picked up indications of a "large-scale target" in the United States and that Americans would be "very vulnerable".^[48] However, "It is not known whether U.S. authorities thought the warning to be credible, or whether it contained enough details to allow counter-terrorism teams to come up with a response." A month later, terrorists struck at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the largest terrorist attack in history.^[48]

The US journalists Dylan Howard, Melissa Cronin and James Robertson linked the Mossad to American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in their book Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales. They relied for the most part on the former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe.^[49] According to him, Epstein's activities as a spy served to gather compromising material on powerful people in order to blackmail them.^[50] There is also a possible connection to the Mossad via Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father Robert Maxwell is said to have had contacts with the Mossad.^[51] Epstein's victim Virginia Giuffre also alleged Epstein to be an intelligence asset, linking on Twitter to a Reddit page, that alleged Epstein being a spy, running a blackmail operation.^[52]

Uruguay

In 1965, the Mossad assassinated Latvian Nazi collaborator Herberts Cukurs.^[53]

Asia

Central Asia and the Middle East

A report published on the Israeli military's official website in February 2014 said that Middle Eastern countries that cooperate with Israel (Mossad) are the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, the Republic of Azerbaijan, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The report claimed that Bahrain has been providing Israel with intelligence on Iranian and Palestinian organizations. The report also highlights the growing secret cooperation with Saudi Arabia, claiming that Mossad has been in direct contact with Saudi intelligence about Iran’s nuclear energy program.^[54][55]

Iran

Prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, SAVAK (Organization of National Security and Information), the Iranian secret police and intelligence service was created under the guidance of United States and Israeli intelligence officers in 1957.^[56][57] After security relations between the United States and Iran grew more distant in the early 1960s which led the CIA training team to leave Iran, Mossad became increasingly active in Iran, "training SAVAK personnel and carrying out a broad variety of joint operations with SAVAK."^[58]

A US intelligence official told The Washington Post that Israel orchestrated the defection of Iranian general Ali Reza Askari on February 7, 2007.^[59] This has been denied by Israeli spokesman Mark Regev. The Sunday Times reported that Askari had been a Mossad asset since 2003, and left only when his cover was about to be blown.^[60]

Le Figaro claimed that Mossad was possibly behind a blast at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Imam Ali military base, on October 12, 2011. The explosion at the base killed 18 and injured 10 others. Among the dead was also general Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, who served as the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ missile program and was a crucial figure in building Iran's long-range missile program.^[61] The base is believed to store long-range missiles, including the Shahab-3, and also has hangars. It is one of Iran's most secure military bases.^[62]

Mossad has been accused of assassinating Masoud Alimohammadi, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, Majid Shahriari, Darioush Rezaeinejad and Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan; scientists involved in the Iranian nuclear program. It is also suspected of being behind the attempted assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Fereydoon Abbasi.^[63] Meir Dagan, who served as Director of Mossad from 2002 until 2009, while not taking credit for the assassinations, praised them in an interview with a journalist, saying "the removal of important brains" from the Iranian nuclear project had achieved so-called "white defections", frightening other Iranian nuclear scientists into requesting that they be transferred to civilian projects.^[33]

In 2018 the Mossad infiltrated into Iran's secret nuclear archive in Tehran and smuggled over 100,000 documents and computer files to Israel. The documents and files showed that the Iranian AMAD Project aimed to develop nuclear weapons.^[64] Israel shared the information with its allies, including European countries and the United States.^[65]

Iraq

Assistance in the defection and rescuing of the family of Munir Redfa, an Iraqi pilot who defected and flew his MiG-21 to Israel in 1966: "Operation Diamond". Redfa's entire family was also successfully smuggled from Iraq to Israel. Previously unknown information about the MiG-21 was subsequently shared with the United States.

Operation Sphinx^[66] – Between 1978 and 1981, obtained highly sensitive information about Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor by recruiting an Iraqi nuclear scientist in France.

Operation Bramble Bush II – In the 1990s, Mossad began scouting locations in Iraq where Saddam Hussein could be ambushed by Sayeret Matkal commandos inserted into Iraq from Jordan. The mission was called off due to Operation Desert Fox and the ongoing Israeli-Arab peace process.^{[citation needed]}

Jordan

In what is thought to have been a reprisal action for a Hamas suicide-bombing in Jerusalem on July 30, 1997 that killed 16 Israelis, Benjamin Netanyahu authorised an operation against Khaled Mashal, the Hamas representative in Jordan.^[67] On September 25, 1997, Mashal was injected in the ear with a toxin (thought to have been a derivative of the synthetic opiate Fentanyl called Levofentanyl).^[68][69] Jordanian authorities apprehended two Mossad agents posing as Canadian tourists and trapped a further six in the Israeli embassy. In exchange for their release, an Israeli physician had to fly to Amman and deliver an antidote for Mashal. The fallout from the failed killing eventually led to the release of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of the Hamas movement, and scores of Hamas prisoners. Netanyahu flew into Amman on September 29 to apologize personally to King Hussein, but he was instead met by the King's brother, Crown Prince Hassan.^[68]

Lebanon

The sending of letter bombs to PFLP member Bassam Abu Sharif in 1972. Sharif was severely wounded, but survived.^[70]

The killing of the Palestinian writer and leading PFLP member Ghassan Kanafani by a car bomb in 1972.^[71]

The provision of intelligence and operational assistance in the 1973 Operation Spring of Youth special forces raid on Beirut.

The targeted killing of Ali Hassan Salameh, the leader of Black September, on January 22, 1979 in Beirut by a car bomb.^[72][73]

Providing intelligence for the killing of Abbas al-Musawi, secretary general of Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon in 1992.^[74]

Allegedly killed Jihad Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the military wing of the PFLP-GC, in Beirut in 2002.^[75]

Allegedly killed Ali Hussein Saleh, member of Hezbollah, in Beirut in 2003.^[76]

Allegedly killed Ghaleb Awwali, a senior Hezbollah official, in Beirut in 2004.^[77]

Allegedly killed Mahmoud al-Majzoub, a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in Sidon in 2006.^[78]

Mossad was suspected of establishing a large spy network in Lebanon, recruited from Druze, Christian, and Sunni Muslim communities, and officials in the Lebanese government, to spy on Hezbollah and its Iranian Revolutionary Guard advisors. Some have allegedly been active since the 1982 Lebanon War. In 2009, Lebanese Security Services supported by Hezbollah's intelligence unit, and working in collaboration with Syria, Iran, and possibly Russia, launched a major crackdown which resulted in the arrests of around 100 alleged spies "working for Israel".^[79] Previously, in 2006, the Lebanese army uncovered a network that allegedly assassinated several Lebanese and Palestinian leaders on behalf of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.^[80]

Palestine

Caesarea tried for many years to assassinate Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, a job later tasked by Israel's Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon to a military special ops task force code named "Salt Fish", later renamed "Operation Goldfish", specially created for the job of assassinating Arafat,^[81] with Ronan Bergman suggesting that Israel used radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat.^[82]

Syria

Eli Cohen infiltrated the highest echelons of the Syrian government, was a close friend of the Syrian President, and was considered for the post of Minister of Defense. He gave his handlers a complete plan of the Syrian defenses on the Golan Heights, the Syrian Armed Forces order of battle, and a complete list of the Syrian military's weapons inventory. He also ordered the planting of trees by every Syrian fortified position under the pretext of shading soldiers, but the trees actually served as targeting markers for the Israel Defense Forces. He was discovered by Syrian and Soviet intelligence, tried in secret, and executed publicly in 1965.^[83] His information played a crucial role during the Six-Day War.

On April 1, 1978, 12 Syrian military and secret service personnel were killed by a booby trapped sophisticated Israeli listening device planted on the main telephone cable between Damascus and Jordan.^[84]

The alleged death of General Anatoly Kuntsevich, who from the late 1990s was suspected of aiding the Syrians in the manufacture of VX nerve-gas, in exchange for which he was paid huge amounts of money by the Syrian government. On April 3, 2002, Kuntsevich died mysteriously during a plane journey, amid allegations that Mossad was responsible.^[84]

The alleged killing of Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil, a senior member of the military wing of Hamas, in an automobile booby trap in September 2004 in Damascus.^[85]

The uncovering of a nuclear reactor being built in Syria as a result of surveillance by Mossad of Syrian officials working under the command of Muhammad Suleiman. As a result, the Syrian nuclear reactor was destroyed by Israeli Air Forces in September 2007 (see Operation Orchard).^[84]

The alleged killing of Muhammad Suleiman, head of Syria's nuclear program, in 2008. Suleiman was on a beach in Tartus and was killed by a sniper firing from a boat.^[86]

On July 25, 2007, the al-Safir chemical weapons depot exploded, killing 15 Syrian personnel as well as 10 Iranian engineers. Syrian investigations blamed Israeli sabotage.^[84]

The alleged killing of Imad Mughniyah, a senior leader of Hezbollah complicit in the 1983 United States embassy bombing, with an exploding headrest in Damascus in 2008.^[87]

The decomposed body of Yuri Ivanov, the deputy head of the GRU, Russia's foreign military intelligence service, was found on a Turkish beach in early August 2010,^[88] amid allegations that Mossad may have played a role. He had disappeared while staying near Latakia, Syria.^[89]

Mossad was accused of being behind the assassination of Aziz Asbar, a senior Syrian scientist responsible for developing long-range rockets and chemical weapons programs. He was killed in a car bomb in Masyaf on August 5, 2018.^[90]

United Arab Emirates

Mossad is suspected of killing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas military commander, in January 2010 at Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The team which carried out the killing is estimated, on the basis of CCTV and other evidence, to have consisted of at least 26 agents traveling on bogus passports. The operatives entered al-Mabhouh's hotel room, where Mabhouh was subjected to electric shocks and interrogated. The door to his room was reported to have been locked from the inside.^{[91][92][93][94][95]} Although the UAE police and Hamas have declared Israel responsible for the killing, no direct evidence linking Mossad to the crime has been found. The agents' bogus passports included six British passports, cloned from those of real British nationals resident in Israel and suspected by Dubai, five Irish passports, apparently forged from those of living individuals,^[96] forged Australian passports that raised fears of reprisal against innocent victims of identity theft,^[97] a genuine German passport and a false French passport. Emirati police say they have fingerprint and DNA evidence of some of the attackers, as well as retinal scans of 11 suspects recorded at Dubai airport.^[98][99] Dubai's police chief has said "I am now completely sure that it was Mossad," adding: "I have presented the (Dubai) prosecutor with a request for the arrest of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu and the head of Mossad," for the murder.^[100]

South Asia and East/Southeast Asia

India

A Rediff story in 2003 revealed that Mossad had clandestine links with the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India's external intelligence agency. When R&AW was founded in September 1968 by Rameshwar Nath Kao, he was advised by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to cultivate links with Mossad. This was suggested as a countermeasure to military links between that of Pakistan and China, as well as with North Korea. Israel was also concerned that Pakistani army officers were training Libyans and Iranians in handling Chinese and North Korean military equipment.^[101]

Pakistan believed intelligence relations between India and Israel threatened Pakistani security. When young Israeli tourists began visiting the Kashmir valley in the early 1990s, Pakistan suspected they were disguised Israeli army officers there to help Indian security forces with anti-terrorism operations. Israeli tourists were attacked, with one slain and another kidnapped. Pressure from the Kashmiri Muslim diaspora in the United States led to his release. Kashmiri Muslims feared that the attacks could isolate the American Jewish community, and result in them lobbying the US government against Kashmiri separatist groups.^[101]

India Today reported that the two flats were RAW safe houses used as operational fronts for Mossad agents and housed Mossad's station chief between 1989 and 1992. RAW had reportedly decided to have closer ties to Mossad, and the subsequent secret operation was approved by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. India Today cites "RAW insiders" as saying that RAW agents hid a Mossad agent holding an Argentine passport and exchanged intelligence and expertise in operations, including negotiations for the release of an Israeli tourist by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front militants in June 1991. When asked about the case Verma refused to speak about the companies, but claimed his relationship with them was purely professional. Raman stated, "Sometimes, spy agencies float companies for operational reasons. All I can say is that everything was done with government approval. Files were cleared by the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and his cabinet secretary. Balachandran stated, "It is true that we did a large number of operations but at every stage, we kept the Cabinet Secretariat and the prime minister in the loop."^[102]

In November 2015, The Times of India reported that agents from Mossad and MI5 were protecting Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to Turkey. Modi was on a state visit to the United Kingdom and was scheduled to attend the 2015 G-20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey. The paper reported that the agents had been called in to provide additional cover to Modi's security detail, composed of India's Special Protection Group and secret agents from RAW and IB, in wake of the November 2015 Paris attacks.^[103][104]

Malaysia

In 2018, Hamas and the family of Malaysian-based Hamas engineer and university lecturer Fadi Mohammad al-Batsh have accused the Mossad of assassinating him. In April 2018, al-Batsh was shot dead by two men on a motorbike in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi described the suspects as Europeans with links to an unidentified foreign intelligence agency. In response, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman denied that Mossad was involved in al-Batsh's assassination and suggested that his death was the result of an internal Palestinian dispute.^[105][106] Hamas also issued a statement describing Batsh as a "martyr" and "distinguished scientist who has widely contributed to the energy sector."^[107]

In October 2022, the New Straits Times and Al Jazeera Arabic reported that several Malaysian Mossad operatives had attempted to kidnap two Palestinian computer experts in Kuala Lumpur in late September 2022. Though they managed to kidnap one of the men, the second escaped and alerted Malaysian police. The operatives allegedly assisted Mossad officials via video call in interrogating and beating their captive, who was questioned about the computer programming and software capabilities of Hamas and its Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. With the aid of the second Palestinian man, Malaysian police were able to track down the car registration plates to a house where the alleged kidnappers were arrested and the man was freed. According to Al Jazeera Arabic, a "well-informed Malaysian source" claimed that an investigation had uncovered an undercover 11-member Mossad cell in Malaysia that was involved in spying on important sites including airports, government electronic companies, and tracking down Palestinian activists. This Mossad cell allegedly consisted of Malaysian nationals who received training in Europe.^{[108][109][110]}

North Korea

Mossad may have been involved in the 2004 explosion of Ryongchon, where several Syrian nuclear scientists working on the Syrian and Iranian nuclear-weapons programs were killed and a train carrying fissionable material was destroyed.^[111]

Pakistan

In a September 2003 news article,^[112] it was alleged by Rediff News that General Pervez Musharraf, the then-president of Pakistan, decided to establish a clandestine relationship between Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Mossad via officers of the two services posted at their embassies in Washington, DC.

Sri Lanka

Mossad had helped both Sri Lanka and the Eelam. Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky claimed that Mossad trained both the Sri Lankan armed forces and the LTTE while keeping the two separated. Ravi Jayawardene, head of the STF, had toured Israel in 1984 and took inspiration from the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian Territories to form armed Sinhalese settlements in strategic border areas of the Tamil-dominant Northern and Eastern provinces.^[113]

Europe

Austria

In 1954, after Mossad received intelligence that an Israeli officer who had access to classified military technologies, Major Alexander Israel, had approached Egyptian officials in Europe and offered to sell Israeli military secrets and documents, a team of Mossad and Shin Bet officers was quickly sent to Europe to locate him and abduct him, and located him in Vienna. The mission was code-named Operation Bren. A female agent managed to lure him to a meeting through a honey trap operation, and he was subsequently kidnapped, sedated, and flown to Israel aboard a waiting Israeli military plane. However, the plane had to make several refueling stops, and he was given an additional dose of sedatives each time, which ultimately caused him to overdose, killing him. Upon arrival in Israel, after it was discovered that he was dead, he was given a burial at sea, and the case remained highly classified for decades.^[114]

Mossad gathered information on Austrian politician Jörg Haider using a mole.^[115]

Belgium

Mossad is alleged to be responsible for the killing of Canadian engineer and ballistics expert Gerald Bull on March 22, 1990. He was shot multiple times in the head outside his Brussels apartment.^[116] Bull was at the time working for Iraq on the Project Babylon supergun.^[117] Others, including Bull's son, believe that Mossad is taking credit for an act they did not commit to scare off others who may try to help enemy regimes. The alternative theory is that Bull was killed by the CIA. Iraq and Iran are also candidates for suspicion.^[118]

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Assisted in air and overland evacuations of Bosnian Jews from war-torn Sarajevo to Israel in 1992 and 1993.^[119]

Cyprus

The killing of Hussein Al Bashir in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1973 in relation to the Munich massacre.^[74]

France

Mossad allegedly assisted Morocco's domestic security service in the disappearance of dissident politician Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965.^[120]

Cherbourg Project – Operation Noa, the 1969 smuggling of five Sa'ar 3-class missile boats out of Cherbourg.^{[citation needed]}

The killing of Mahmoud Hamshari, alleged coordinator of the Munich massacre, with an exploding telephone in his Paris apartment in 1972.^[74]

The killing of Basil Al Kubaisi, who was involved in the Munich massacre, in Paris in 1973.^[74]

The killing of Mohamed Boudia, member of the PFLP, in Paris in 1973.^[74]

On April 5, 1979, Mossad agents are believed to have triggered an explosion which destroyed 60 percent of components being built in Toulouse for an Iraqi reactor. Although an environmental organization, Groupe des écologistes français, unheard of before this incident, claimed credit for the blast,^[66] most French officials discount the claim. The reactor itself was subsequently destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 1981.^[66][121]

The alleged killing of Zuheir Mohsen, a pro-Syrian member of the PLO, in 1979.^[122]

The killing of Yehia El-Mashad, the head of the Iraq nuclear weapons program, in 1980.^[123]

The alleged killing of Atef Bseiso, a top intelligence officer of the PLO, in Paris in 1992. French police believe that a team of assassins followed Atef Bseiso from Berlin, where that first team connected with another team to close in on him in front of a Left Bank hotel, where he received three head-shots at point blank range.^[124]

Germany

Operation Plumbat (1968) was an operation by Lekem-Mossad to further Israel's nuclear program. The German freighter "Scheersberg A" disappeared on its way from Antwerp to Genoa along with its cargo of 200 tons of yellowcake, after supposedly being transferred to an Israeli ship.^[125]

The sending of letter bombs during the assassination campaign. Some of these attacks were not fatal. Their purpose might not have been to kill the receiver. A Mossad letter bomb led to fugitive Nazi war-criminal Alois Brunner's losing four fingers from his right hand in 1980.^[126] Years earlier, on 25 September 1963, the Mossad tried to kill SS-Hauptsturmführer and concentration camp doctor Hans Eisele with a mail bomb. However, the bomb detonated early, instead killing a postal worker.^[127][128]

The alleged targeted killing of Wadie Haddad, using poisoned chocolate. Haddad died on 28 March 1978, in the German Democratic Republic supposedly from leukemia. According to the book Striking Back, published by Aharon Klein in 2006, Haddad was eliminated by Mossad, which had sent the chocolate-loving Haddad Belgian chocolates coated with a slow-acting and undetectable poison which caused him to die several months later. "It took him a few long months to die", Klein said in the book.^[129]

Mossad discovered that Hezbollah had recruited a German national named Steven Smyrek, and that he was travelling to Israel. In an operation conducted by Mossad, the CIA, the German Internal Security agency Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), and the Israeli Internal Security agency Shin Bet, Smyrek was kept under constant surveillance, and arrested as soon as he landed in Israel.^[130]

Greece

The killing of Zaiad Muchasi, Fatah representative to Cyprus, by an explosion in his Athens hotel room in 1973.^[74]

Ireland

The assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh – a senior Hamas military commander – in Dubai, 2010, was suspected to be the work of Mossad, and there were eight Irish passports (six of which were used) fraudulently obtained by the Israeli embassy in Dublin, Ireland for use by alleged Mossad agents in the operation. The Irish government was angered over the use of Irish passports, summoned the Israeli ambassador for an explanation and expelled the Israeli diplomat deemed responsible from Dublin, following an investigation. One of the passports was registered to a residence on Pembroke Road, Ballsbridge, on the same road as the Israeli embassy. The house was empty when later searched, but there was suspicion by Irish authorities it had been used as a Mossad safe house in the past.^[131][132] Mossad is reported to have a working relationship with the Irish military intelligence service^[133] and has previously tipped the Irish authorities off about arms shipments from the Middle East to Ireland for use by dissident republican militants, resulting in their interception and arrests.^[134]

Italy

The killing of Wael Zwaiter, thought to be a member of Black September.^[135][136]

In 1986, Mossad used an undercover agent to lure Mordechai Vanunu, in a honey trap style operation, from the United Kingdom to Italy. There, he was abducted and returned to Israel, where he was tried and found guilty of treason because of his role in exposing Israel's nuclear weapons programme.^[137]

Malta

The killing of Fathi Shiqaqi. Shiqaqi, a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was shot several times in the head in 1995 in front of the Diplomat Hotel in Sliema, Malta.^[138]

Norway

On July 21, 1973, Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, was killed by Mossad agents. He had been mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, one of the leaders of Black September, the Palestinian group responsible for the Munich massacre, who had been given shelter in Norway. Mossad agents had used fake Canadian passports, which angered the Canadian government. Six Mossad agents were arrested, and the incident came to be known as the Lillehammer affair. Israel subsequently paid compensation to Bouchiki's family.^{[137][139][140]}

Serbia

Israel provided weapons to the Serbs during the Bosnian War, possibly due to the pro-Serbian bias of the government of the time,^[141] or possibly in exchange for the immigration of the Sarajevo Jewish community to Israel.^[142] The Mossad allegedly was responsible for providing Serbian groups with arms.^[143]

Switzerland

According to secret CIA and US State Department documents discovered by the Iranian students who took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979:

In Switzerland the Israelis have an Embassy in Bern and a Consulate-General in Zürich which provide cover for Collection Department officers involved in unilateral operations. These Israeli diplomatic installations also maintain close relations with the Swiss on a local level in regard to overt functions such as physical security for Israeli official and commercial installations in the country and the protection of staff members and visiting Israelis. There is also close collaboration between the Israelis and Swiss on scientific and technical matters pertaining to intelligence and security operations. Swiss officials have made frequent trips to Israel. There is a continual flow of Israelis to and through Switzerland. These visits, however, are usually arranged through the Political Action and Liaison regional controller at the Embassy in Paris directly with the Swiss and not through the officials in the Israeli Embassy in Bern, although the latter are kept informed.^{[citation needed]}

In February 1998, five Mossad agents were caught wiretapping the home of a Hezbollah agent in a Bern suburb. Four agents were freed, but the fifth was tried, found guilty, sentenced to one year in prison, and following his release was banned from entering Switzerland for five years.^[144]

Soviet Union

Mossad was involved in outreach to refuseniks in the Soviet Union during the crackdown on Soviet Jews in the period between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mossad helped establish contact with Refuseniks in the USSR, and helped them acquire Jewish religious items, banned by the Soviet government, in addition to passing communications into and out of the USSR. Many rabbinical students from Western countries travelled to the Soviet Union as part of this program in order to establish and maintain contact with refuseniks.

United Kingdom

In 1984 Mossad agents were caught attempting to kidnap Nigerian politician Umaru Dikko from London. On July 4, 1984 customs officials at Stansted airport discovered Dikko in a crate about to be flown to Nigeria. Agents Alexander Barak, Felix Abithol and anesthetist Dr Levi-Arie Shapiro were given prison sentences of between ten and fourteen years.

In 1986, a bag containing eight forged British passports was discovered in a telephone booth in West Germany. The passports had been the work of Mossad and were intended for the Israeli Embassy in London for use in covert operations. The British government, furious, demanded that Israel give a promise not forge its passports again, which was obtained.^[145]

On June 15, 1988, following the trial and conviction of a Palestinian post-graduate student studying at Hull University, Ismail Sowan, two Mossad agents were expelled from the UK. Sowan was found in possession of a large arms cache and was sentenced to eleven years in prison. During his trial it had been revealed that he had employed by Mossad for ten years. The Mossad agents, Arie Regev and Jacob Barad, were Sowan’s controllers. They had failed to inform MI6 of Sowan’s activities and that they were aware that a Palestinian, Abd al-Rahim Mustapha, believed to be involved in the assassination of Naji al-Ali had entered the country illegally.^[146] The Mossad station in UK remained closed until the 1994 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in London.

Ukraine

In February 2011, a Palestinian engineer, Dirar Abu Seesi, was allegedly pulled off a train by Mossad agents en route to the capital Kyiv from Kharkiv. He had been planning to apply for Ukrainian citizenship, and reappeared in an Israeli jail only three weeks after the incident.^[147]

Oceania

New Zealand

In July 2004, New Zealand imposed diplomatic sanctions on Israel over an incident in which two Australia-based Israelis, Uriel Kelman and Eli Cara, who were allegedly working for Mossad, attempted to fraudulently obtain New Zealand passports by claiming the identity of a severely disabled man. Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom later apologized to New Zealand for their actions. New Zealand cancelled several other passports believed to have been obtained by Israeli agents.^[148] Both Kelman and Cara served half of their six-month sentences and, upon release, were deported to Israel. Two others, an Israeli, Ze'ev Barkan, and a New Zealander, David Reznick, are believed to have been the third and fourth men involved in the passport affair but they both managed to leave New Zealand before being apprehended.^[149]

In popular culture

Films (including made-for-television movies)

• The films Sword of Gideon (1986) and Munich (2005), depict Mossad agents' retaliation against Black September following the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics.
• The Impossible Spy (1987) is a TV movie about the life of top Mossad spy Eli Cohen.
• In the film Swordfish (2001), the lead character Gabriel Shear (played by John Travolta) is believed to be a Mossad agent.
• The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019) is loosely based on the events of Operation Moses and Operation Joshua (jointly referred to as Operation Brothers), in which Ethiopian Jews were covertly moved from refugee camps in Sudan to Israel.
• The House on Garibaldi Street (1979) and Operation Finale (2018) movies about the Mossad exfiltration of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann from Argentina

Literature

(Alphabetical by author's surname)

• In Jeffrey Archer's novel Honour Among Thieves (1993), the lead female protagonist is a Mossad agent.
• In book 4 of Mark Greaney's Gray Man series, Dead Eye, Mossad and the CIA partner to capture the world's most feared and lethal rogue former black ops agent Courtland Gentry.
• Daniel Silva's spy novel series is centered on fictional Mossad agent and assassin, Gabriel Allon. The term "Mossad" is never used in the novels, but the protagonist is described as working for Israel's intelligence service (which the characters refer to simply as "the Office").
• John Le Carre's novel The Little Drummer Girl (1983) describes a fictional Mossad operation against Palestinian terrorists.
• Frederick Forsyth's novel The Fist of God describes the inner workings of various Mossad divisions.

Television

(Alphabetical by show)

• Tehran (2020–present) is a spy thriller television series about a Mossad agent working undercover in Iran.
• In the TV series The Blacklist (2013–present), Mossad agent Samar Navabi (played by Mozhan Marnò) is one of the side characters.
• In the TV series Covert Affairs (2010–2015), Mossad agent Eyal Lavin is a recurring character.
• Since the NCIS season 3 episode "Kill Ari (Part 1)" (2005), Mossad has played an instrumental part. Mossad's presence includes one of the main characters, Agent Ziva David, who is a former Mossad Agent. She originally filled the position of Mossad liaison to NCIS, until the end of season 7, when she became a full-time NCIS agent. Her father, Eli David, was the director of Mossad, until the season 10 episode "Shabbat Shalom", when he was killed. Many other characters have been included in the show from Mossad, including Michael Rivkin and Ari Haswari. Some episodes of the show have taken place in Israel.
• The Spy (2019) is a web television miniseries on the life of top Mossad spy Eli Cohen.

See also

• Israel portal

• Duvdevan Unit – Israel's undercover strike unit
• List of Israeli assassinations
• Special Activities Division
• The Spy Machine (1998), a British documentary special about the work of the Mossad
• Unit 8200, Israeli Intelligence Corps SIGINT and cyber unit
• Yamam, Israel's elite Border Police SWAT unit

Explanatory notes

1. ^ Also referred to as "the Mossad" (Hebrew: הַמּוֹסָד, romanized: ha-Mosád, IPA: [hamoˈsad]; Arabic: الموساد, romanized: al-Mōsād, IPA: [almoːˈsaːd]; lit. 'the Institute').
2. ^ Argentina claimed that the "illicit and clandestine transfer of Eichmann from Argentine territory constitutes a flagrant violation of the Argentine State's right of sovereignty[.]"^[43] In Eichmann's case, the most salient feature from the perspective of international law was the fact of Israeli law enforcement action in another state's territory without consent; the human element includes the dramatic circumstances of the capture by Mossad agents and the ensuing custody and transfer to Israel[.]^[44] At its most obvious level this means that the exercise of enforcement jurisdiction within the territory of another state will be a violation of territorial integrity. For example, after Adolf Eichmann [...] was abducted from Argentina by a group of Israelis, now known to be from the Israeli Secret Service (Mossad), the Argentine Government lodged a complaint with the UN Security Council [...] It is however unclear whether as a matter of international law the obligation to make reparation for a violation of territorial sovereignty such as that involved in the Eichmann case includes an obligation to return the offender.^[45]

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144. ^ Probert, Roy (July 7, 2000). "Mossad agent gets 12-month suspended sentence". Swissinfo. Retrieved July 1, 2022.
145. ^ Weber, Yonatan (June 20, 1995). "Expelling Israeli diplomats: Thatcher did it first - Israel News, Ynetnews". Ynetnews. Ynetnews.com. Retrieved November 19, 2015.
146. ^ Middle East International No 328, 24 June 1988, Publishers Lord Mayhew, Dennis Walters MP; George Joffe p.5
147. ^ "UN confirms Mossad kidnaps Gaza's chief power plant engineer, Dirar Abu Seesi, from Ukraine, suspects Ukrainian help". WikiLeaks Central. March 10, 2011. Retrieved March 11, 2011.
148. ^ "Israeli government apologises to New Zealand". The New Zealand Herald. NZPA. June 26, 2005. Retrieved October 26, 2011.
149. ^ Hallel, Amir (October 2, 2004). "At home with the Mossad men". The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved October 26, 2011.

Further reading

• Bar-Zohar, Michael and Mishal, Nissim. Mossad: The Great Operations of Israel's Secret Service. The Robson Press, 2012. ISBN 978-1-84954-368-2.
• Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network. New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1992. ISBN 1-879823-01-2. OCLC 26586922.
• Black, Ian and Benny Morris. Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991. ISBN 978-0-8021-3286-4. OCLC 249707944.
• Central Intelligence Agency. Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services: A Survey. Washington, D.C., 1979. (Included in Documents from the US Espionage Den. Tehran: Center for the Publication of the US Espionage Den's Documents, 1982.)
• Jonas, George. Vengeance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. ISBN 0-671-50611-0. OCLC 10507421.
• Lapid, Ephraim and Amos Gilboa, Israel's Silent Defender: An Inside Look at Sixty Years of Israeli Intelligence (2012)
• Libel, Tamir. "Looking for meaning: lessons from Mossad’s failed adaptation to the post-Cold War era, 1991–2013." Journal of Intelligence History 14.2 (2015): 83–95. abstract
• Raviv, Dan and Melman, Yossi. Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel's Secret Wars. Sea Cliff: Levant Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0985437831.

External links

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