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The Myth Of Mossad, From Biblical Spies To High-Tech Assassins

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–Analysis–

TEL AVIV — Anyone who wants to understand the Mossad should know about the very first operation conducted by a Jewish secret service. It happened quite a while ago and its coordinator was as prominent as it was unusual: God the Father.

This is what it says in the Holy Scripture, Numbers, Chapter 13: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Send men to explore the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites, and choose one from each tribe who is a prince.'” Moses followed the order from above, chose a nobleman from each of the twelve Israelite tribes and gave them the following instructions: “Go up the mountain and see the land, and the people, whether they are strong or weak, few or many, whether they live in tents or in fortresses… Look also at the condition of the ground, whether it is fat or lean.”

The twelve spies did an excellent job and after forty days they brought back insight that was both promising and threatening. “The land flows with milk and honey. But the people who live there are powerful and the cities are fortified.” Attack or retreat? The scouts could not agree on what should follow from these findings.

Today’s intelligence experts are critical of the biblical spying operation. “Nothing against old Moses,” Yaakov Caroz, the former deputy head of the Mossad, told me. “But we see three serious errors in his approach. Firstly, Moses should not have chosen the men exclusively from one social class, from the social elite — he should have ignored the boss’s orders. And secondly, he should not have chosen one representative from each tribe. It would have been much better to simply select the most capable men. Social or party-political proportionality is deadly in our business.”

And mistake number three, perhaps the worst in the opinion of the Mossad professional: “Instead of creating an impartial committee to check the news and coolly weigh it up, Moses left the evaluation to the men he had sent out. And that naturally led to a dispute between those who thought it was impossible to conquer the country and those who were in favor of an attack.”

The skeptics did not prevail at that time, otherwise history would look different: the children of Israel would never have entered the land of Canaan — and the Jewish people might have perished.

A biblical mission

The modern state of Israel owes its existence largely to underground fighters and spies.

During their mandate in the 1940s, the British prevented large numbers of Jews from entering Palestine. In order to illegally smuggle in the Jews escaping Nazi atrocities and to force the British to withdraw, secret combat troops obtained information in every possible way, even resorting to violence and terror. The importance of the weapons and reconnaissance work secretly acquired by Mossad precursors was demonstrated immediately after the proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, and was the only way to repel the subsequent attack by the Arab states.

A secret service that watches over an entire people, a protective shield in a sea of enemies, an effective protection against the risk of a second Holocaust: that is what makes the Mossad so unique. And that also explains its deep roots in the Jewish people. The American CIA, the British MI5 and the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) are at best accepted as a necessary evil. The “scoundrels” are viewed with skepticism in their home countries, while the Israeli secret service can rely on widespread sympathy.

In 1951, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, founded his spy force: the military intelligence service Aman procures information for the armed forces; the Shin Bet is responsible for counterterrorism at home; the Mossad (“Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks”) takes over operations abroad. The centrality of the Mossad’s task is also shown by the fact that its chief reports directly to the prime minister.

Incredible successes

The successes were sensational even in the first few years.

In 1956, Mossad agents were the first to intercept the secret speech of Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev, in which he denounced Stalin’s crimes. And they managed to find the Nazi murderer Adolf Eichmann, who had fled to Argentina: they drugged him in Buenos Aires and abducted him to Israel in 1960 — that’s how the Mossad myth was born.

The father of these secret service triumphs was Isser Harel, the first head of the “Institute”. Years after he left the service, we met in his modest house in Tel Aviv, where he told me: “Eichmann was more than a technical problem, it was a psychological one. We needed this man, the organizer of the extermination of the Jews, alive, before a Jewish court. We owed that to all his victims and to the Jewish people.”

The Mossad helped build the Israeli atomic bomb by secretly procuring uranium. It succeeded in persuading an Iraqi pilot to flee to Israel with his Russian MiG-21. In a worldwide commando operation following the Munich Olympic attack in 1972, it pursued and killed the twelve perpetrators. But an innocent Moroccan waiter also fell victim to God’s Vengeance after a mix-up. And again and again, the Mossad got involved in dirty arms deals, acting as a secret foreign ministry with the world’s dictators.

Embarassing errors

The 1990s were a time of Mossad decline. Spectacular successes failed to materialize, and mishaps piled up. Two are particularly memorable: in 1997, Israeli agents attacked the political leader of the terrorist organization Hamas in the Jordanian capital Amman with a lethal injection. Khalid Mashal fell into a coma, but survived. The Mossad men were arrested. In order to get them released, the Israeli government had no choice but to enter into an embarrassing agreement: not only did it have to provide an effective antidote for Mashal, but it also had to release Hamas terrorists imprisoned in Israel.

And then, in 1998, Mossad agents made an amateurish attempt to tap a telephone in Bern: the neighbors noticed the noise and notified the cantonal police. To be caught red-handed by the rather staid Swiss was an embarrassing low point.

But if you follow the findings of intelligence expert Ronen Bergman, the problems were running much deeper. “At a time when digital technology was becoming increasingly important, the Mossad was lagging behind,” he writes in his book The Shadow War. “And in the competition for qualified young talent, high-tech companies were often more successful.”

Recruiting the geeks

But, once again, the Mossad showed its ability to renew itself. In the new millennium, the bosses decided to change course in a radical fashion. While the foreign intelligence service had long been so secret that not even its existence was officially confirmed or the names of its leaders disclosed, it now set up an Internet portal and organized an advertising campaign (“The Mossad opens up — only for a few. Maybe for you”).

The message was clear: we are looking for the brightest minds in the country.

In a later version, the institute even placed a complicated numbers quiz in the press, which over 25,000 interested people tried to solve. The message was clear: we are looking for the brightest minds in the country. And in return we offer prestige, good pay and an exciting life — national pride included.

A surprising number of highly gifted people answered their call. They were allowed to experiment with high-tech materials; some probably hoped that they could later use this knowledge to make a profit for their own companies and start-ups in the Silicon Wadi industrial park. The work of the cyber prodigies led Mossad to surprising successes behind the enemy line. The Arab world was no longer the main target of the foreign intelligence service — but Iran, whose rulers repeatedly threaten to destroy the Israeli state and are building the components for an atomic bomb.

In 2010, the Mossad managed to deal a serious blow to the highly advanced Iranian nuclear program. Together with the CIA, the Israelis were able to develop a highly effective computer virus called Stuxnet and smuggle it into the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. Thousands of uranium centrifuges were destroyed in what they called Operation Olympic Games.

Worldcrunch 🗞 Extra!

Know more • In Israel’s current conflicts, the Mossad headquarters near Tel Aviv have been a prime target of the Jewish State’s enemies. Al-Jazeera reported that Hezbollah fired a Qader 1 ballistic missile toward Mossad’s central command building on September 25, in retaliation for Israeli bombings and the killing of high-profile Hezbollah members, including leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the explosion of pagers and wireless devices.

Then on October 1, Hezbollah announced it had again targeted Mossad headquarters, along with Israel’s Glilot military base, with salvos of Fadi-4 rockets.

Later that same day, Iran announced that Mossad HQ was among the targets of its barrage of some 180 missiles fired at Israel.

The IDF said that its Iron Dome defense system as well as on intervention by the U.S. and Jordan was able to intercept most of the missiles and prevent major damage. — Hagar Farouk (read more about the Worldcrunch method here)

You know it was us

In parallel to the high-tech war against industrial plants, killer squads remain active and murder Iranian nuclear scientists on the streets of Tehran. All of these actions can only delay the nuclear weapons program, not stop it. But they instill fear in the enemy, they say: “Mossad can hit anywhere and at any time, on your doorstep, in heavy traffic, at night or in broad daylight. And we don’t even have to comment on these acts: you know it was us”.

Recent evidence of spectacular attacks on Iranian soil, like something out of a science fiction movie: Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of Tehran’s nuclear program, was killed in 2020 by a robot equipped with artificial intelligence placed on a street, whose shooting function was triggered by a satellite-controlled mechanism. Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, a state guest in Iran, was assassinated this summer with a bomb that had been planted weeks earlier in the state guest house he frequently used. The device was detonated by remote control.

In September 2024, Lebanon has been at the center of a spectacular high-tech murder campaign: in the meticulously prepared Operation Trojan Horse, Israel’s secret service smuggled pagers and walkie-talkies loaded with dynamite into the country, which cost the lives or eyesight of thousands of Hezbollah fighters, as well as many civilians.

The fact that Hamas terrorists were able to carry out a terrible massacre in Israel on Oct. 7 last year, leaving over 1,100 dead, and that all protective mechanisms on the Israeli side were so scandalously neglected, is something most people do not blame on the Mossad, but on the government and the military intelligence service; the head of Aman has already resigned. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to delay the formation of an investigative committee for as long as possible, probably because he knows that the findings would be the end of his political career.

No moral boundaries

Perhaps the Mossad has never been more powerful than it is today: its budget is in the billions, its number of employees has risen to over 7,000, almost as many as Germany’s BND, and a third of the CIA — no other country in the world has a foreign intelligence service that is nearly as large and powerful in relation to its population.

The Mossad can only be as good and as effective as the cohesion of the nation.

No legal or moral limits are imposed on the organization. The right to self-defense in the name of the nation is interpreted very broadly by the Mossad chief in consultation with the prime minister, including assassinations and brutal cyberattacks, just as the Talmud says: “If someone comes to kill you, stand up and kill him first.”

A secret service plays God. But the Mossad can only be as good and as effective as the cohesion of the nation. Israeli society has drifted apart dramatically in recent years, and voters have moved far to the right. The current cabinet includes right-wing radicals and ultra-religious settlers who reject any reconciliation with Palestinians. One might assume that the secret service chiefs also belong to this camp and act as particularly aggressive warmongers. But the opposite is the case: Mossad chiefs are said to have refused on several occasions, for example, to prepare a bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities proposed by the prime minister — in their eyes too risky militarily and too provocative politically.

The former heads of the domestic intelligence service are even tougher and more radical in their criticism of Israeli policy. Six of them came together a few years ago to make a joint film (The Gatekeepers). They see themselves as patriots and yet draw a bitter conclusion: that all Israeli governments since 1967 — with the exception of Yitzhak Rabin’s — have pursued a policy that has exacerbated the conflict with the Palestinians.

The conclusion drawn by the intelligence officers: without an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and a two-state settlement, there can be no peace in the Middle East: “We may win every battle, but we will lose the big war.”