Gofman’s Mossad Will Be Judged by the Gaps Barnea Leaves Behind

When the Hagana established the Mossad for Aliya Bet in 1939, its founders had little idea what they were creating.

Confronted by Britain’s restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Hagana created “The Mossad (Institution) for Aliya B,” deploying agents across several countries to identify prospective immigrants, arrange vessels and crews, and bring them illegally to the shores of the Promised Land.

That began in April 1939. By September, the outbreak of World War II brought the fledgling network’s work to an abrupt halt.

Yet even those brief months helped lay the foundation for one of the world’s most renowned intelligence agencies—and gave it its name: the Mossad.

Now, as outgoing Mossad director David Barnea is succeeded by Roman Gofman, the agency’s record should be examined with equal attention to its achievements and its shortcomings, even as its recent successes are acknowledged.

After the war, the Mossad resumed its work, ultimately transporting more than 100,000 Holocaust survivors by sea and airlifting another 160,000 Jews from Yemen and Iraq.

Its mission soon expanded beyond rescuing persecuted Jews to classic intelligence work: penetrating hostile territory, studying foreign armies, and pursuing Nazi war criminals.

The young state’s large pool of multilingual immigrants gave the agency a natural advantage as it built networks across the Arab world and the Eastern Bloc.

The world first glimpsed the Mossad’s reach in 1956, when it obtained a copy of the secret speech in which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev exposed Joseph Stalin’s crimes.

Four years later, the Mossad stunned the world by capturing Adolf Eichmann and bringing him to Israel in a covert operation that remained undetected until its completion.

While that mission required extraordinary ingenuity, the 1967 Six-Day War offered an even more consequential demonstration of the agency’s value. The IDF’s victory was aided by years of detailed intelligence gathered by daring operatives such as the legendary Eli Cohen.

A record of achievement—and setbacks

But the Mossad has also suffered serious failures.

It did not anticipate the approach of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, despite receiving a warning from an Egyptian source the day before the attack.

Earlier, it mistakenly killed an innocent man while pursuing those responsible for the Munich massacre, and in 1997 it botched an attempted assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal.

Those successes and failures shaped the Mossad’s work in the last century, when its priorities were very different from the challenge that came to define this one: Iran.

The Mossad began focusing on Iran during Ariel Sharon’s premiership, from 2001 to 2006, and especially after Sharon appointed Meir Dagan to lead the agency in 2002.

A retired general, veteran commando, and son of Holocaust survivors, Dagan brought a more aggressive operational culture to the Mossad. He sent agents to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program and worked to map the Islamic regime’s political structure, scientific community, industrial base, and military deployment.

During Dagan’s 11 years as director, the Mossad reportedly killed scientists, sabotaged facilities, and placed operatives throughout Iran.

The campaign continued under his successors, Tamir Pardo and Yossi Cohen, and reached a major milestone when the agency obtained a vast archive of documents related to Iran’s nuclear program.

That was the Mossad Barnea inherited, at a time when the shadow war with Iran had become an open confrontation from which, at least on the surface, the agency emerged with distinction.

The Oct. 7 question

The future commission of inquiry into the events of the past three years will face a difficult question: what responsibility did the Mossad bear for Israel’s failures on Oct. 7, 2023?

Officially, Gaza lies outside the agency’s jurisdiction. The question, then, is how much Iran and Qatar—both within the Mossad’s remit, unlike Gaza—knew in advance of the invasion that the Mossad, like others, failed to foresee.

At the same time, on its central missions, the Mossad appears to have delivered.

In Lebanon, years of covert work culminated in coordinated pager attacks that disabled thousands of Hezbollah operatives within minutes.

In Iran, the Israeli Air Force received precise locations for more than 70 individual targets, along with hundreds of military installations and industrial sites, aided by local operatives who reportedly fired missiles and deployed explosive drones.

Gofman will be tested on Barnea’s unfinished work

Even so, Barnea’s Mossad stumbled on two fronts, and those are the areas where Roman Gofman will be judged.

The first failure was in Iran itself. The military blows were impressive, but they did not produce the political outcome they were meant to achieve.

Reports that the original plan was intended to culminate in a Kurdish advance on Tehran are not reassuring; they are troubling. Kurdish opposition alone is too limited and too distant from Iran’s centers of power to be charged with toppling the regime, and the Mossad should have recognized that.

The Iranian regime is more likely to be challenged by an indigenous Persian-led opposition with leadership, weapons, organization, and fighting capacity. Helping such a structure emerge should be Gofman’s foremost priority, just as the nuclear and missile programs were the priorities of his predecessors.

The second front is the worldwide campaign to delegitimize Israel.

The protest movement now confronting Israel, and its influence across Western universities, politics, and culture, represents a strategic challenge to the Jewish state.

Identifying the funding behind it, exposing its organizers, pursuing key operatives, and disrupting hostile influence efforts should be a central mission for Gofman’s Mossad.

Much has been said about Gofman’s fitness for the post. One relevant point is that, years ago, there were calls for the Mossad to draw on the large wave of Russian-speaking immigrants who arrived in Israel in the 1990s.

Those immigrants brought a breadth of experience that resembled the instincts of the agency’s founders and, in some respects, exceeded those of their Israeli-born successors.

One of them came from Belarus to Israel at 14; years later, he was a 22-year-old lieutenant in Armored Battalion 53. Today, he heads the Mossad.

If that background serves him well, he may be able to accomplish what earlier leaders could not—something Israel urgently needs.

Source link