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Mossad
The Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks
ha-Mossad le-Modiin ule-Tafkidim Meyuhadim
ha-Mossad le-Modiin ule-Tafkidim Meyuhadim
Mossad Seal
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Mossad [Hebrew for
"institution"] has responsibility for human intelligence collection,
covert action, and counterterrorism. Its focus is on Arab nations and
organizations throughout the world. Mossad also is responsible for the
clandestine movement of Jewish refugees out of Syria, Iran, and Ethiopia.
Mossad agents are active in the former communist countries, in the West, and at
the UN.
Mossad is headquartered
in Tel Aviv. The staff of Mossad was estimated during the late 1980s to number
between 1,500 to 2,000 personnel, with more recent estimates placing the staff
at an estimated 1,200 personnel. The identity of the director of Mossad was
traditionally a state secret, or at least not widely publicized, but, in March
1996, the Government announced the appointment of Major General Danny Yatom as
the replacement for Shabtai Shavit, who resigned in early 1996. Danny Yatom
resigned on February 24, 1998, following the release of the Ciechanover
Commission report which dealt with the failed attempt to assassinate Khalid
Meshaal, a top Hamas political leader, and thus found faults with his
performance as head of Mossad. Yatom was replace in early March 1998 by Efraim
Halevy, then Israel's representative to the European Union. Halevy, as a Mossad
agent, had previously worked behind the scenes to help negotiate the peace
treaty between Israel and Jordan.
Formerly known as the
Central Institute for Coordination and the Central Institute for Intelligence
and Security, Mossad was formed on 01 April 1951. Mossad was established by
then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, who gave as Mossad's primary directive:
"For our state which since its creation has been under siege by its
enemies. Intelligence constitutes the first line of defence...we must learn
well how to recognise what is going on around us."
Mossad has a total of
eight departments, though some details of the internal organization of the
agency remain obscure.
·
Collections
Department is the largest,
with responsibility for espionage operations, with offices abroad under both
diplomatic and unofficial cover. The department consists of a number of desks
which are responsible for specific geographical regions, directing case
officers based at "stations" around the world, and the agents they
control.
·
Political
Action and Liaison Department conducts political activities and liaison with friendly
foreign intelligence services and with nations with which Israel does not have
normal diplomatic relations. In larger stations, such as Paris, Mossad
customarily had under embassy cover two regional controllers: one to serve the
Collections Department and the other the Political Action and Liaison
Department.
·
Special
Operations Division, also known as Metsada,
conducts highly sensitive assassination, sabotage, paramilitary, and
psychological warfare projects.
·
LAP
(Lohamah Psichlogit)Department is responsible for psychological warfare, propaganda and
deception operations.
·
Research
Department is responsible for
intelligence production, including daily situation reports, weekly summaries
and detailed monthly reports. The Department is organized into 15
geographically specialized sections or "desks", including the USA,
Canada and Western Europe, Latin America, Former Soviet Union, China, Africa,
the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. A "nuclear" desk is
focused on special weapons related issues.
Israel's most celebrated
spy, Eli Cohen, was recruited by Mossad during the 1960s to infiltrate the top
echelons of the Syrian government. Cohen radioed information to Israel for two
years before he was discovered and publicly hanged in Damascus Square. Another
Mossad agent, Wolfgang Lotz, established himself in Cairo, became acquainted
with high-ranking Egyptian military and police officers, and obtained
information on missile sites and on German scientists working on the Egyptian
rocket program. In 1962 and 1963, in a successful effort to intimidate the
Germans, several key scientists in that program were targets of assassination
attempts. Mossad also succeeded in seizing eight missile boats under
construction for Israel in France, but which had been embargoed by French
president Charles de Gaulle in December 1968.
In 1960, Mossad carried
out one of its most celebrated operations, the kidnapping of Nazi war criminal
Adolph Eichmann from Argentina. Another kidnapping, in 1986, brought to Israel
for prosecution the nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, who had revealed
details of the Israeli nuclear weapons program to a London newspaper. During
the 1970s, Mossad assassinated several Arabs connected with the Black September
terrorist group. Mossad inflicted a severe blow on the PLO in April 1988, when
an assassination team invaded a well-guarded residence in Tunis to murder
Arafat's deputy, Abu Jihad, considered to be the principal PLO planner of
military and terrorist operations against Israel. Gerald Bull, a Canadian
scientist who developed the famed "Super Gun" for Iraq was killed by
the Mossad at his Brussels apartment in March 1990, effectively halting the
development of the Supergun project.
Egyptian security
services reported the discovery of a total of seven Israeli espionage networks
during 1996, which is a significant increase compared to the 20 similar
networks discovered in the previous 15 years.
And Mossad's record has
also been blemished by a few embarrasing failures. In Lillehammer, Norway, on
07 January 1974, Mossad agents mistakenly killed Ahmad Boushiki, an Algerian
waiter carrying a Moroccan passport, whom they mistook for PLO security head
Ali Ahmad Salameh, believed to have masterminded the 1972 massacre of Israeli
athletes at the Munich Olympics [Salameh was killed in a 1979 car-bomb
explosion in Lebanon]. Following the attack, the Mossad agents were arrested
and tried before a Norwegian court. Five Israeli agents were convicted and
served short jail sentences, though Israel denied responsibility for the
murder. In February 1996, the Israeli government agreed to compensate the
family of Ahmad Boushiki.
On 15 November 1995,
Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an Israeli citizen.
Following the controversy over the failure of intelligence to protect Rabin, and
the embarrassment over the mistaken assassination of a Swedish national, the
Director Geneneral of Mossad, known only as 'S', was forced into retirement. On
24 March 1996, Prime Minister Shimon Peres appointed Major General Danny Yatom
as the new Director General of Mossad, the first Director of Mossad to ever be
publically identified.
On 24 September 1997,
Mossad operatives attempted to assassinate Khalid Meshaal, a top political
leader of the Palestinian group Hamas. The assassins entered Jordan on fake
Canadian, and injected Meshaal with a poison. Jordan was able to wring a number
of concessions out of Israel in the aftermath of the fiasco, including the
release of the founder of Hamas, Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, from an Israeli jail.
Ephraim Halevy, a nephew
of the late Sir Isaiah Berlin [who helped to negotiate a peace deal with
Jordan], became the new head of Mossad after two bungled operations led to the
arrests of agents in Switzerland and Jordan. Mossad scaled down overseas
assassinations after the bungled operations in the late 1990s. But by 2002
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to remove Halevy, after the two clashed
repeatedly about what strategy to adopt against Palestinian violence
In October 2002 General
Meir Dagan, who served in the Israeli Army with Ariel Sharon, and assisted him
during his election campaign, was confirmed as head of Mossad. Dagan led an
undercover commando unit that tracked and killed Palestinian militants in the
Gaza Strip. Sharon wanted Mossad to go back to the undercover and special
operations for which it was renowned.
This Post Last Update Edit Date : 13 May 2013
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