Showing posts with label MOSSAD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MOSSAD. Show all posts

19 Feb 2010


The brazen assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh has thrown the spotlight on one of Israel’s most powerful but shadowy figures, Meir Dagan, the current Mossad chief, who yesterday faced calls for his resignation.

There is a piece of folklore often repeated about him: when he was appointed in 2002, Ariel Sharon, then the Prime Minister, ordered him to run the Israeli spy agency “with a knife between its teeth”. Eight years on, Mr Dagan appears to have followed his orders to the letter. The killing in Dubai of one of the top men in Hamas is only the most recent in a string of assassinations that have been traced to Mr Dagan.

His popular support in Israel has never been higher, as most Israelis approach the allegations that Mossad is behind the Dubai death with a wink and a smile. While senior officials in the Israeli Foreign Ministry fume over the diplomatic mess, caused by the implications of the Dubai assassinations, those who know Mr Dagan say that he is nonplussed by the row. “He is a determined street fighter,” said Amir Oren, a military correspondent for the Israeli daily Haaretz.

The thickset, soft-spoken Mr Dagan was twice wounded in more than 30 years of service in the Israel Defence Forces, but he avoids walking with a cane. He has served as head of Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau, and became a close confident of Mr Sharon during their years together in the IDF.

Mr Dagan’s predecessor, British-born Ephraim Halevy, was known for a more conservative approach to the Mossad, Mr Oren said. Mr Halevy focused instead on strengthening Mossad’s relationship with similar agencies in other countries.

“When Dagan took over he said the Mossad had become too risk-averse, and took its sweet time organising itself for operations,” said Mr Oren. “Dagan, meanwhile, is not trying to come across as diplomatically elegant.”

Maintaining good relations with other nations was dropped to the bottom of the list, said “B” a former Mossad agent who worked under Mr Dagan. “Mossad is facing a lot of anger right now over the use of British and European passports. I don’t know if Mossad was actually involved or how they got those passports though I can say that Dagan isn’t the kind of man to care about angering a few people to get the job done.”

“B” said that Mr Dagan had a no-nonsense approach and did not like to be questioned or second-guessed. “He is what you would call a one-man show,” he said.

Talk of Dagan’s unwillingness to share power with others surfaced early in his tenure, when the Jerusalem Post reported that more than 200 Mossad agents had quit their posts over Mr Dagan’s style. In June 2009, when his term as Mossad chief was extended by one year by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, one of his seconds in command promptly quit.

While some Israelis, including Mr Oren, have argued that Mr Dagan should resign his position over the loud public furore surrounding the Dubai assassinations - though Israel has not admitted its involvement in this, or any other mission - most are pleased with Mr Dagan’s tenure.

“Mossad have renewed the aura that the name Mossad used to generate in the region,” Alon Ben David , an Israeli intelligence analyst, told Israeli radio, a statement that was promptly echoed by the presenter.

Mr Dagan’s popularity was first strengthened by the Mossad’s rumoured involvement in the assassination of Hezbollah security chief Imad Mughniyah in February 2008. Talk of other killings of senior Hezbollah and Hamas officials began to spread. An alleged strike by Israeli planes on Syrian targets in September 2007 was also credited to him, part of his focus on nuclear weapons programmes in the Middle East.

SOURCE: The Times

Mr Netanyahu’s insistence that Mr Dagan stay on for an additional year was said to stem from his unparalleled knowledge of Iran’s nuclear facilities. While Israel’s military leaders traditionally serve for four years, with a one-year extension, Mr Dagan’s tenure has been extended twice. His budgetary allowance is also one of the largest, said a member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee - leading to a near doubling of the Mossad’s Tel Aviv offices since 2002.

17 Feb 2010


Israel's Mossad secret service, more formally known as the Institute for Espionage and Special Tasks, has a long history of carrying out clandestine operations, including several spectacular assassinations. Much remains secret but cases that are documented have involved large teams of agents using false or stolen passports to disguise their Israeli origins.

The Mossad's assassination unit has been known at different times as Caesarea and Kidon (Bayonet). Women agents have often been involved – there was reportedly one in the Dubai killing.

Israel's official silence does not mean that it cannot be heard trumpeting its success. "The intelligence [about Dubai] was reliable and accurate," ­commented the respected national security specialist Yossi Melman in the newspaper Haaretz earlier this month. "Even though Mabhouh knew Israeli intelligence had him in its sights and took stringent precautions they still managed to get him."

Information released by Dubai shows the professionalism of the suspected assassins and their methods, Melman commented today, citing a novel written by a former Mossad officer, Mishka Ben-David, the plot of which bears a close similarity to the abortive poison attack on the Hamas leader Khaled Misha'al in Jordan in 1997. That case caused huge political embarrassment when two agents using false Canadian passports fled to the Israeli embassy in Amman.

Israel's isolation in the Middle East meant an early reliance on secret operations. The Mossad's victims over the years – some avowed, others not – have included German scientists working on Egypt's rocket programme in the 1960s, Iraqis working on nuclear projects in the 1980s, and, it is assumed, Iranians who are thought to be doing the same today. Mossad agents also carried out the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the fugitive SS officer and architect of Hitler's "final solution," in Argentina in 1960. Eichmann was abducted and smuggled back to Israel, where he was tried and hanged.

Other key killings include that of the PLO military chief Abu Jihad in Tunisia in 1988 and an Islamic Jihad leader in Malta in the mid-1990s. The Mossad was also held responsible for the assassination of the military chief of Lebanon's Hezbollah, Imad Mughniyeh, in Syria two years ago, but Israel has never formally avowed it. Most Mossad operations, like those of most intelligence agencies, have taken place in the shadows only to emerge in a blaze of publicity and political embarassment after the event.

So it was when Golda Meir ordered the agency to hunt down and kill the Palestinians who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 in the name of the Black September group. Eleven Palestinians were eliminated in a Mossad operation known as Wrath of God in killings in Rome, Cyprus, Paris, Beirut, Athens, Rome and a small town in Norway where an innocent Moroccan waiter was mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, the alleged planner of Munich. Salameh was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1979.

Motives of revenge and deterrence appear to go hand in hand. "We tried not to do things just by shooting a guy in the streets, that's easy – fairly," said Dave Kimche, a former deputy head of the agency, talking of one assassination carried out by a bomb planted in a telephone. "By putting a bomb in his phone, this was a message that they can be got anywhere, at any time and therefore they have to look out for themselves 24 hours a day."

Mabhouh was apparently targeted because of his role in the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989 at the end of the first Palestinian intifada. But some question the sense, if not the morality, of such assassinations. "Every terrorist, no matter how senior, is soon replaced, sometimes by someone even better or more professional," Melman wrote in Haaretz.

SOURCE: The Guardian

20 Sept 2008

Baada ya kushinda uongozi ndani ya chama chake cha Kadima,kuna dalili kubwa kwamba Tzipi Livni,shushushu wa zamani wa Mossad,anaweza kuchukua cheo cha Uwaziri Mkuu wa Israel,taifa linalofahamika zaidi kwa ubabe.Historia ndefu ya mwanamama huyu inapatikana HAPA

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