Israel’s foreign intelligence service, usually known as the Mossad, has scored many spectacular victories in almost 80 years of undercover operations, earning a unique reputation for audacious espionage and ruthless violence.
But even former agents admit the service’s history is “chequered” with many failures that have embarrassed Israel, dismayed allies and led to accusations of systematic disregard for international law.
Israel has not formally commented on this week’s simultaneous explosion of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon that killed 37 people and injured about 3,000 others. The consensus among experts is that the Mossad, an abbreviation of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations in Hebrew, was responsible.
Other recent operations will also almost certainly have involved the service. The Mossad may have provided the intelligence allowing the assassinations in July of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political leader killed by a bomb in a bedroom in a government guesthouse in Tehran, and Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah founder member and in effect chief of staff, who died in Beirut after receiving a message summoning him to a flat that was then hit by a missile.
Though the most audacious operations get attention, much of the Mossad’s work is never known outside tightly restricted circles.
For decades, few had even heard of the Mossad, which was formally established in 1949. Former agents were ordered not to tell even their family or their previous employment and the service never admitted its involvement in any operation.
“Everything the Mossad did was quiet, no one knew. It was a totally different era. The Mossad was just not mentioned. When I joined, you had to know someone to be brought in. Now, there is a website,” said Yossi Alpher, who took part in some of the service’s best-known operations in the 1970s.
A second former agent said much of the Mossad’s work has always been the mundane, painstaking work of intelligence collection that is of little interest to anyone beyond the intel community.
“A lot of it is pretty boring, to be honest. You’re looking through a lot of dirt to find the gold,” he said.
The Mossad’s senior officials have long been more likely to be spending their time on sensitive diplomatic missions, briefing senior Israeli decision-makers on regional political dynamics or building relationships abroad than recruiting spies or running operations such as that targeting Hezbollah last week.
For decades, the Mossad oversaw years-long clandestine efforts to build up “enemies of Israel’s enemies”, such as Kurds, and Christians in what is now South Sudan. As with many of its efforts, this met with mixed success.
“These are now people who are either sovereign and independent, or have a firm and well-defended autonomy now and the Mossad made a huge contribution here,” said Alpher.
However, support for Maronite Christian militia in Lebanon ended less well. The Mossad is blamed by some for ignoring warnings about its chosen proxies’ reputation for brutality and ethnic hatred, and encouraging Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which thousands of civilians were killed.
Alpher said the mythic reputation of the Mossad, bolstered by a series of films and TV series, could be helpful to Israel as a deterrent but that the effect could be exaggerated.
“When the Palestinians look at Israel, they are looking at Shin Bet [the internal intelligence service] not the Mossad. The Shin Bet has the Palestinian file and so is far more present in the Palestinian conflict … and, for the region, its the Israel Defense Forces that are ultimately fighting the wars and whose deterrence is stronger or weaker at a strategic level than the Mossad, despite all the razzmatazz in Hollywood,” Alpher said.
Still, screenwriters are attracted to some of the Mossad’s most spectacular exploits.
One of the most famous is the 1960 capture in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi officer who was a key organiser of the Holocaust. Others include stealing whole warships from the French navy in 1969, warning of impending attack by Egypt and Syria in 1973 and providing key intelligence for the famous raid on Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976 that freed Jewish and Israeli passengers hijacked by Palestinian and German extremists.
In 1980, the service set up and ran an entire diving resort on Sudan’s Red Sea coast as a cover for the clandestine transport of thousands of members of Ethiopia’s Jewish community to Israel. The Mossad spies lived among tourists before finally being forced to close down the operation after five years.
In recent years, there have been a series of assassinations attributed to the Mossad, such as the 2008 killing of Imad Mugniyeh, a Hezbollah mastermind of dozens of attacks against Israel and the US. A series of scientists connected to Iran’s nuclear programme have died violently, with one killed in 2020 by 15 shots from a pre-positioned machine gun controlled from thousands of miles away.
While such attacks have been precise, others have been less discriminate.
After a deadly attack by Palestinian extremists on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the Mossad led a campaign to disrupt the networks and groups responsible. Many of those killed by Israeli assassins had little connection to the original attack and some had no connection with violence at all. The campaign ended when a Mossad team shot dead a Moroccan waiter in Norway in the belief he was a Palestinian Liberation Organisation security official, and then made a series of further errors leading to their arrest and trial by local authorities.
This week children, ordinary civilians and medical staff were among those killed or injured by exploding pagers, leading UN human rights experts to condemn “terrifying” violations of international law.
In 1997, an effort to kill Khaled Meshaal, a powerful Hamas leader, went badly wrong when the Mossad team was caught in Amman by local security forces. Israel was forced to hand over an antidote and relations with Jordan were badly damaged.
Then there is the failure to learn anything that might have warned of the Hamas raids into southern Israel on 7 October that killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians. The attack prompted the Israeli offensive in Gaza, and the current round of hostilities with Hezbollah.
“There’s no question that Israeli military, security agencies all have a lot to make up for after October 7, and not just in the eyes of allies and adversaries but also their own [Israeli] people. One failure does not signal that Israeli intelligence services are not what they once were, but they still need to rebuild the aura,” said Matthew Levitt, a US former intelligence official and expert at the Washington Institute, a pro-Israeli American thinktank.
“But that’s not the main reason [for the pager and walkie-talkie operation in Lebanon] … They are doing it because they are fighting on [multiple] fronts and now is the time to do what has to be done.”
