Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service

by Michael Bar-Zohar

In this book, we bring to light the greatest missions and the most courageous heroes of the Mossad, as well as the mistakes and failures that more than once tarnished the agency’s image and shook its very foundations.

They quickly became known as “Arik’s hit team” and rumors had it that they often killed captured terrorists in cold blood. Sometimes, it was said, they escorted a terrorist to a dark alley, and told him: “You’ve got two minutes to escape”; when he tried, they shot him dead. Sometimes they would leave behind a dagger or a gun, and when the terrorist reached for it, he would be killed on the spot.

It’s been claimed that after tossing away the grenade, Dagan killed Abu Nimer with his bare hands.

The dirtiest actions should be carried out by the most honest men.

But some maintain that Sharon half-jokingly said of his loyal aide: “Meir’s specialty is to separate the head of an Arab from his body.”

It was 2002 and the Mossad was losing steam. Several failures in the preceding years had dealt severe blows to its prestige; the much-publicized failure to assassinate a major Hamas leader in Amman and the capture of Israeli agents in Switzerland, Cyprus, and New Zealand had seriously damaged the Mossad’s reputation.

Lebanon War erupted in 2006, he was the only Israeli leader who objected to the strategy based on massive bombardments by the air force. He believed in a land offensive, doubted the air force could win the war, and came out of the war unblemished.

Under Dagan’s control, the Mossad had accomplished the heretofore unimaginable: the assassination of Hezbollah’s mad killer Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, the destruction of the Syrian nuclear reactor, the liquidation of key terrorist leaders in Lebanon and Syria, and, most remarkable of all, a relentless, ruthless, and successful campaign against Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.

On November 29, 2010, at seven forty-five A.M., in North Tehran, a motorcycle emerged from behind the car of Dr. Majid Shahriyari, the scientific head of Iran’s nuclear project. As he passed the car, the helmeted motorcyclist attached a device to the car’s rear windshield.

Seconds later, the device exploded, killing the forty-five-year-old physicist and wounding his wife. Simultaneously, in Atashi Street in South Tehran, another motorcyclist did the same to the Peugeot 206 of Dr. Fereydoun Abassi-Davani, another major nuclear scientist. The explosion wounded Abassi-Davani and his wife. The Iranian government immediately pointed its finger at the Mossad. The roles these two scientists played in Iran’s atomic weapons project were veiled in secrecy, but Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the project, declared that the attack had made a martyr of Shahriyari and deprived his team of its “dearest flower.”

On January 12, 2010, at seven fifty A.M., Professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi came out of his home at Shariati Street, in the Gheytarihe neighborhood in North Tehran. He was on his way to his lab at the Sharif University of Technology. When he tried to unlock his car, a huge explosion rocked the quiet neighborhood. The security forces that rushed to the scene found Mohammadi’s car shattered by the blast and his body blown to pieces.

In January 2007, Dr. Ardashir Hosseinpour was allegedly killed by Mossad agents with radioactive poison. News of the assassination ran in the Sunday Times in London, citing information from the Texas-based Stratfor strategy and intelligence think tank. Iranian officials ridiculed the report, claiming that the Mossad could never carry

out such an operation inside Iran, and that “Professor Hosseinpour suffocated by inhaling fumes during a fire in his home.” They also insisted that the forty-four-year-old professor was only a renowned electromagnetic expert and not involved with Iran’s nuclear endeavors in any way.

The assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists were just one front in a much larger war. According to the Daily Telegraph in London, Dagan’s Mossad had rolled out an assault force of double agents, hit teams, saboteurs, and front companies and brought their strength to bear over years and years of covert operations against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Stratfor’s director of analysis, Reva Bhalla, was quoted as saying: “With cooperation from the United States, Israeli covert operations have focused both on eliminating key human assets involved in the nuclear program and in sabotaging the Iranian supply chain.” Israel,

she claimed, had used similar tactics in Iraq in the early eighties, when the Mossad killed three Iraqi nuclear scientists, thus hampering the completion ...

The shah’s project, begun in the 1970s, didn’t cause any alarm in Israel; at the time, Israel was Iran’s close ally. In 1977, General Ezer Weizman, Israel’s defense minister, hosted General Hasan Toufanian, who was in charge of modernizing Iran’s army, in the Ministry of

Defense in Tel Aviv—as allies, Israel supplied Iran with modern military equipment.

According to the minutes of their confidential meeting, Weizman offered to supply Iran with state-of-the-art surface-to-surface missiles, while the director general of the ministry, Dr. Pinhas Zusman, impressed Toufanian by saying that the Israeli missiles could be adapted to carry nuclear warheads. But before the officials c...

In January 2006, a plane crashed in central Iran. All its passengers perished. Among them were senior officers in the Revolutionary Guards, including Ahmed Kazami, one of their commanders. The Iranians maintained that the crash was due to bad weather, but the Stratfor group hinted that the aircraft had been sabotaged by Western agents.

Only a month before, a military cargo plane had crashed into an apartment building in Tehran. All ninety-four passengers died. Many were also officers in the Revolutionary

Guards and influential pro-regime...

In November 2006, another military aircraft crashed during takeoff from Tehran—and thirty-six Revolutionary Guards were killed. On national radio, the Iranian minister of defense declared, “According to material from intelligence sources, we can say that American,...

Meanwhile, quietly, without any overt mention, Dagan had become the main strategist on Israel’s policy toward Iran. He believed that Israel perhaps might have no choice but to finally launch a full-scale, all-out attack on Iran. Bu...

By May 2007, President George W. Bush had signed a secret presidential order authorizing the CIA to initiate covert operations to delay Iran’s nuclear project. Soon after, a decision was made by some Western secret services to sabotage the supply chain of parts, equipment, and raw materials for the project. In August, Dagan met with U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicolas Burns to discuss his strategy toward Iran. Mishaps, sabotage, explosions have kept occurring in installations throughout Iran during the last seven years.

Following these revelations, Zadeh was denied entry into the United States and the EU, and his bank accounts in the West were frozen.

“The Mossad is responsible for several daring operations in the Middle East,” Al-Haul added, and mentioned some of Dagan’s feats against Syria, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad. “All this,” he concluded, “has turned Dagan into the Superman of the State of Israel.”

“Beside all the functions of a secret service, we have another major task: to protect the Jewish people, wherever they are, and to organize their immigration to Israel.” And indeed, in the years following, the Mossad would secretly help create self-defense units in places where the Jewish communities were in peril: Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, Baghdad, and some South American cities.

Young militant Jews were surreptitiously brought to Israel and trained by the army and

Mossad, weapons were smuggled into unstable or enemy countries and hidden, local Jews were organized into defense units to create forces able to defend the Jewish community from attacks by a mob or by irregular armed groups—at least until ...

In the fifties, the Mossad brought to Israel tens of thousands of imperiled Jews from the Arab countries in the Middle East and Morocco; and years later, in the eighties, it was again the Mossad that organized the rescue of Jews trapped in Khomeini’s...

Born Wolf Goldstein in Riga, Latvia, he had grown up in Switzerland, served in the Swiss Army during World War II, and immigrated to Israel in 1948. He had changed his name to the Hebrew Ze’ev Avni, and after a couple of years of living and working at kibbutz Hazorea, he had joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was posted in Brussels.

Under Isser, the intelligence community acquired what became its definitive shape. It was composed of five services: the Mossad, the Shabak, the Aman (military intelligence), the special branch of the police, and the research division of the foreign ministry.

When the German Army invaded Poland in World War II, he was a child. His family had managed to cross into Russia and narrowly escaped the Holocaust. After the war, they came back to Poland. In 1949, Victor’s parents and younger sister emigrated to Israel.

Khrushchev’s speech shredded Victor’s last illusions about Communism. And he realized that he held in his hands an explosive device that could shake the Soviet camp to its foundations. He decided to return the red brochure to Lucia. But on his way to her, he had second thoughts, and his feet carried him elsewhere—to the Israeli embassy.

The news spread through Damascus like wildfire. Fantastic, absurd, impossible, nonsense! There were no words to express the shock and the disbelief of Syria’s leaders when they heard the news. Could one of the leaders of the ruling party, a personal friend of the president, a millionaire and a socialite, be a spy?!

In the winter of 1963, Isser told Eitan, in the strictest confidence: “Hassan II, the

king of Morocco, fears that Egypt’s president Nasser plots to assassinate him because of his pro-Western policy. Hassan wants the Mossad to take care of his personal security.”

In France, Ben-Barka’s disappearance caused an unprecedented political scandal. President de Gaulle was beside himself with rage, and when he heard of Israel’s role in the abduction, he didn’t spare it in his fury. Isser Harel was stunned. How could the Mossad participate in such an affair? How could Amit play a role in such a criminal, immoral operation—and jeopardize Israel’s close alliance with France? He asked Eshkol to fire Amit immediately. Eshkol hesitated, but then appointed two boards of inquiry, which found no grounds for any measure against Amit. After all, Amit had lured Ben-Barka to Paris, but had not taken part in his abduction and assassination.

He was ignoring the basic rules of secret activity: never develop regular habits, never stay at the same address for too long, never use the same itinerary twice, never travel at the same time of day.

The Yom Kippur War ended on October 23. In the Golan Heights, the Syrian Army had been routed, and the Israeli cannons were positioned twenty miles from Damascus. In the south, the Egyptians had occupied a strip five miles wide on the Israeli shore of the Suez Canal, but their Third Army was completely surrounded by the Israelis, who had established a bridgehead in Egyptian territory, broken the Egyptian lines, and attained new positions barely sixty-three miles from Cairo.

Palestinian terrorists, in the service of Libya’s leader, Muammar Khaddafi, intended to shoot down an El Al plane during its takeoff from Rome’s airport. This was meant to be an act of vengeance against Israel for mistakenly shooting down a civilian Libyan aircraft over Sinai in February 1973.

Two years later, after the assassination of President Sadat by fanatic terrorists, he moved to London and started a brilliant business career, which made him a very rich man.

Vanunu spent the entire trip locked in the small cabin. He did not see Cindy anymore. He was worried about her and did not know what had happened to her. He did not realize that she was a member of the Mossad team; she had left him at the threshold of the safe house and probably left Italy that same night.

So far, the experts believed that Israel possessed between 10 and 20 primitive atomic bombs. But the information brought by Vanunu proved that Israel had become a nuclear power, and its arsenal contained at least 150 to 200 sophisticated bombs; it also had the capability of producing hydrogen and neutron weapons.

A short while afterward, Yitzhak Rabin himself was assassinated, not by a Palestinian terrorist but by a Jewish fanatic.

The Hezbollah—literally, the Party of God—was a Shiite terrorist organization created in 1982 in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The Hamas now announced that Mossad agents had assassinated Al-Mabhouh, first stunning him with an electronic shocker and then suffocating him with a pillow. Simultaneously, the Dubai police announced that no traces of poison were found in Al-Mabhouh’s blood. Nevertheless, they quickly reached the conclusion that the Mossad had killed Al-Mabhouh on their territory.

Israel had been designated as the culprit for another mysterious attack on a weapons convoy in January 2009; the trucks carrying weapons, missiles, and explosives had been destroyed, and forty people manning the convoy had been killed. One of the men allegedly killed was the Hamas leader in charge of smuggling weapons from Iran to Gaza.

Operation Moses was severely criticized by many Ethiopian Jews, as it took the lives of about four thousand people. In the Mossad, too, the officers of Caesarea, headed at that time by Shabtai Shavit, strongly disapproved of the planning and execution of the operation by the Bitzur department.