72 years of assassinations and recruiting agents What you don't know about the Israeli Mossad

72 years of assassinations and recruiting agents

 What you don't know about the Israeli Mossad

On this day 72 years ago, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad was founded, which assassinated many Palestinian and Arab leaders, and one of its agents almost became president of Syria.

With an annual budget of $3 billion, and about 7,000 employees distributed between the main office in Tel Aviv and the rest of the foreign headquarters, as well as nearly half a million other agents, officers and delegates spread all over the world of all nationalities, the Mossad is considered one of the largest global spy agencies that undertake the tasks Intelligence and special operations outside the borders of her country.

For more than seven decades, the Israeli intelligence agency, the most powerful in the Middle East, gained secrecy and ambiguity that not only authorized it to carry out assassinations and liquidations against Palestinian and Arab leaders along with politicians and scholars, but also contributed to ending the Syrian nuclear program and helping to smuggle Jews from Arab countries And Ethiopia to Israel and other qualitative operations.

But this deliberate ambiguity undoubtedly contributed to the spread of false stories and lies that glorify the power of this agency in the context of the ongoing psychological war with its enemies in the region and the world. Just as the Mossad has been involved in operations against Arab and foreign countries hostile to Israel, whether by thwarting its nuclear attempts or assassinating Palestinian leaders on its soil, it is also practicing its espionage activities against friendly and ally of Israel as well.

First seed

When it was established in 1937, the Mossad worked as an illegal immigration organization aimed at deporting Jews to Palestine, as the origin of the word Mossad goes back to the Hebrew phrase “Mossad for Aliyah Bit,” which means the illegal immigration organization, which was considered at the time one of the institutions of the Israeli intelligence service and the traditional apparatus of the Central Intelligence Office and security.

The Mossad began its first activities through a group of no more than 40 officers, administrators and field agents in the information department of one of the intelligence services of the Haganah gangs. As for the Mossad, in its current sense, it is the abbreviation of “Hamosad for Modi’in Ultafkdim Meuhadi” or intelligence and special missions, which was established at the end of 1949 .

Since its founding in its current form by Isser Harel on the recommendation of then Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in mid-December 1949, the Mossad is considered one of the civil institutions in Israel, where its members do not have military ranks, yet all the employees in the Mossad service served in the Israeli army. Most of them are officers.

The main objective of its formation was to create a central body to coordinate and improve cooperation between the existing security services, starting with the Army Intelligence Department "Aman" and the Internal Security Service "Shin Bet", in addition to the Political Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Three years after the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel, specifically in March 1951, the Mossad was reorganized to become Israel's foreign arm and officially became affiliated with the Prime Minister's Office.

Its most prominent foreign operations

The Mossad has a track record and a long list of assassinations that it carried out against Palestinian and Arab leaders, along with thinkers and scholars, most notably: the assassination of the Palestinian novelist and leader Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut in 1972, the assassination of 12 Palestinian members of the Black September organization who carried out the Munich operation in 1972, and the assassination of the second man The Fatah Khalil al-Wazir movement in Tunisia in 1988, in addition to the assassination of the former Secretary-General of the Lebanese Hezbollah Abbas al-Moussawi in 1992, the prominent leader of the Qassam Brigades, engineer Yahya Ayyash, with the bombing of his mobile phone in 1996, and a large number of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance elements.

In addition to the assassination of Qassem Soleimani last year, the Mossad contributed to the hijacking of a Russian MiG-21 plane from Iraq in 1966 to learn its capabilities and secrets in order to achieve Israeli air supremacy in the 1967 war. It also thwarted Iraq's repeated attempts to acquire a nuclear weapon, starting with the bombing of a warehouse containing missiles. A nuclear reactor in a French port in 1979 in an operation called "The Sphinx", ending with the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor "Osirak" in 1981.

The Mossad was also able to kidnap the Nazi German leader Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and transport him to Israel, where he was tried for crimes against the Jews and was executed at the end of May 1962. In 1965, the Mossad succeeded in a surprising secret operation in stealing 90 kilograms of uranium from America and transferred to the Israeli Dimona reactor, In addition to stealing the design of the French "Mirage" aircraft in 1968 in order to manufacture the "Kfir" aircraft.

Failed operations

Perhaps the most prominent evidence of the Mossad’s failure to complete its operations is the failed assassination attempt against a prominent Hamas leader, Khaled Mashaal, in the Jordanian capital, Amman in 1997. About Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from Israeli prisons, as well as sending an Israeli medical team with the antidote to the poison that Mashaal inhaled and put him in a long coma that nearly killed him.

Operation Mishaal is not the only one in the Mossad’s record of failure. In mid-1965, after he was caught red-handed with the help of Egyptian intelligence, the Syrian regime executed Eli Cohen, the Israeli spy planted by the Mossad in Damascus after he trained him to memorize the Qur’an and Islamic teachings alongside the Syrian dialect, where the Mossad weaved a story He faked his life as a Syrian Muslim named Kamel Amin Thabet, who came from Argentina with the aim of stabilizing and investing in Syria. At first, Cohen succeeded in weaving a wide network of relations with Syrian political and military leaders, which unknowingly helped him obtain a treasure trove of intelligence, while some circulated the news of his candidacy for the party presidency or even the republic thanks to his extensive relations with the ruling party.