Intelligence Report: Sensitive tasks
ahead for Mossad
Yossi Cohen believes Iran remains Israels No. 1 challenge and
will be charged with building ties with Tehrans Arab foes.
Yossi Cohen took over as the Mossads 12th director on Wednesday at the intelligence
organizations headquarters in Glilot, north of Tel Aviv. He is replacing Tamir Pardo who retires
after 35 years in the agency, five of them as its head.
For the last two and a half years Cohen served as national security adviser to the prime minister
and as head of the National Security Council. This capacity and proximity to Benjamin
Netanyahu gave him the edge over two other senior Mossad officials in the running for the job.
Netanyahu trusts Cohen and assigned him secret and sensitive missions: among them mending
relations with Turkey, improving ties with the Obama administration, which he did via his good
contacts with his American counterpart Susan Rice, and clandestine meetings with Arab leaders
and officials.
Cohen is a typical product of the Mossad where he has served in various operational and
managerial capacities since 1983, but he was not a typical recruit. He was born in Jerusalem in
1961 to a right-wing religious family with roots going back eight generations in the city. He
graduated from schools affiliated with the National Religious movement, which is today
represented by the right-wing Bayit Yehudi party.
When Cohen joined the Mossad as a young cadet, it was rare to see a religious candidate
wearing a kippa. Cohen, who later left off wearing a head covering, was the only religious
cadet in his class and, as a result, was the brunt of many jokes. The Mossad, at the time, was
practically off limits to people like him.
But Cohen was communicative, charming, easygoing, focused and manipulative all the traits
needed to be a good case officer, known in Mossad parlance as katza, the Hebrew acronym
for a collection officer. A Mossad case officer is expected to be able to establish contact with
potential agents, and if successful in recruiting an agent, running that agent and extracting the
required information the agent may possess. The case officers main responsibility is in the
field of human intelligence (HUMINT), the bread and butter of the agency.
COHEN, WHO was labeled the model by journalists for his dapper dress style that is in
stark contrast to the typically informal Israeli code, rose through the rank and file. He began as
a low-level case officer running Arab agents in Europe and later became chief of a Mossad
station, operating from the Israeli Embassy in a major Western European city. After returning to
Israel he was appointed by Meir Dagan, then Mossad chief, as head of the Tzomet (Junction)
department in charge of case officers and their agents.
The years 2006-2010 until Dagan retired and was replaced by Pardo were the heyday of
Mossad operations to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear bomb. Dagan put Cohen in charge of
these efforts. From his Tzomet office he ran a special operations center that coordinated with
all the other relevant departments.
During that period at least five key Iranian nuclear scientists were killed their deaths were
attributed by foreign sources to the Mossad a few more wounded and probably many more
warned that they would be well advised to stop working for the secret military project.
Mossad, together with the US National Security Agency, was also said to have created the
Stuxnet computer worm, which targeted systems in charge of centrifuges in the uranium
enrichment facility in Natanz, Iran, causing severe damage. Other operations included
preventing shipments from reaching Iran, either by damaging the equipment at the port of
departure, or by threatening companies not to do business with Iran, or by asking local security
services to intercept the shipments.
Another important operation during these years was the killing in 2008 in Damascus of Imad
Mughniyeh, the Defense Minister of Hezbollah, the militant Shiite-Lebanese organization.
According to American media, the assassination was a joint Mossad-CIA operation but other
foreign sources claim that though the CIA was privy to the planning and intention, its
operational role was marginal and most of the work was blue and white (the colors of the
Israeli flag).
Yet, Cohens team was not immune to failure. The most damaging of his failures was the case
of Ben Zygier, an Australian Jew who was recruited to work for a European-based front
company of the Mossad, which, while selling equipment to Iran, tried to penetrate its nuclear
program.
Zygier boasted about his role and exposed the operation. Agents had to be recalled and tens of
millions of dollars were wasted. Zygier was jailed and committed suicide in prison in 2010,
causing some fuss when the case was publicized in the media.
It is hard to assess whether the daring Mossad operations, combined with international
sanctions, prevented Iran from assembling a nuclear bomb or whether Tehran made a well
calculated decision to stop short of an actual weapon.
Either way, Iranian scientists and military men have already mastered the know-how and
acquired the technology, equipment and materials necessary to build a bomb should they decide
to do so.
ALL THESE anti-Iran operations were carried out simultaneously and required above all
agents in the right places, who needed solid and accurate information. Although the reasons
cannot be revealed, in 2011, then president Shimon Peres granted Cohen and his Tzomet team
the Israel Security Award, and in the same year he was also promoted to deputy head of the
Mossad.
Cohens return to the organization where he spent most of his career was well received.
Cohen knows the agency and most of its staff inside out. Mossads organizational behavior and
culture are rooted in years of experience and meticulous care to detail, but the spy agency needs
to be responsive and flexible in order to meet the challenges of the new Middle East reality.
This is a region where several states Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Libya are in various stages of
collapse; American power and influence are dwindling and Russia is taking full advantage; new
actors, such as ISIS and the Kurds are emerging, and the Sunni-Shiite rift is widening.
These new realities create opportunities but also risks for the Mossads new head.
Although his years at the National Security Council helped to upgrade his strategic
understanding, Cohen is more of a skillful operative than a thinker and will have his work cut
out for him.
Cohen wants to make the Mossad more combative and daring than it was under Pardo and
return to the good old days when Dagan led the organization. He strongly believes, like
Netanyahu, that Iran remains Israels No. 1 enemy that it continues to support terrorism and
has never abandoned its goal of obtaining nuclear weapons. One of his major tasks will be to
monitor and to verify that Iran is not once again cheating the international community and
violating the July 2015 nuclear deal it signed with the world powers.
Cohen will also continue to carry out on behalf of Netanyahu sensitive missions and deliver
messages to the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt and even
Turkey. Netanyahu hopes to establish an anti-Iranian coalition with those countries, but their
leaders are reluctant to go out into the open and be seen in the company of Israel unless there is
progress on the Palestinian issue. The Mossad has no input on the Palestinian issue, perhaps
Israels most challenging front, Colleagues who know Cohen from their work in the agency say
that from an early stage he dreamed of reaching the top.
Now his dream has come true and his test will be to provide the prime minister, who appointed
him, with a true picture of the reality faced by Israel and not one that is tainted by politics.
Yossi Melman is an Israeli security commentator and co-author of Spies Against
Armageddon. He blogs at http://www.israelspy.com and tweets at yossi_melman
Posted by Thavam
