Middle Israel: Roman Gofman's Mossad successes will be measured by Barnea's failures - opinion

They had no idea what they were creating.

Faced with Britain’s ban on immigration to Palestine, the Hagana set up “The Mossad (Institution) for Aliya B,” which would plant agents in multiple lands, gather prospective immigrants, hire boats and skippers, and ship them illegally to the Promised Land’s shores.

That was in April 1939. By September, the evolving network’s operations were abruptly halted with the outbreak of World War II.

The Mossad resurfaced the morning after the war, ultimately sealifting more than 100,000 Holocaust survivors and airlifting another 160,000 Jews from Yemen and Iraq.

It would continue struggling for oppressed Jews, but its main mission soon shifted to hardcore espionage, penetrating enemy lands, spying on foreign armies, and hunting down wartime Nazis.

Benefiting from the young state’s ample supply of multilingual immigrants, the agency infiltrated the Arab world and the Eastern Bloc.

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

Four years later, the Mossad stunned the world by capturing Adolf Eichmann and smuggling him, undetected, halfway across the world.

While that operation took much resourcefulness, it paled compared to the 1967 Six Day War, in which the IDF’s victory was helped by detailed intelligence that was gathered over years by daring agents such as the legendary Eli Cohen.

But the Mossad also had its failures.

It failed to detect the Yom Kippur War’s approach in 1973 (although it did read well an Egyptian mole’s warning the day before the attack).

Before that, the Mossad mistakenly killed an innocent man while pursuing the Munich Massacre’s perpetrators, and in 1997, it botched an attempted assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal.

THE MOSSAD began focusing on Iran during Ariel Sharon’s premiership (2001-2006), and his appointment in 2002 of Meir Dagan as head of the Mossad.

A retired general, veteran commando, and son of Holocaust survivors, Dagan brought a new fighting spirit to the Mossad, sending its agents to actively sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, and meticulously mapping the Islamic regime’s political apparatus, scientific community, industrial layout, and military deployment.

During Dagan’s 11-year directorship, the Mossad reportedly killed scientists, sabotaged installations, and planted operatives across Iran.

The effort continued in earnest under his successors, Tamir Pardo and Yossi Cohen, and was underscored when a full archive of Iran’s nuclear program was snatched.

That is how the Mossad arrived at Barnea’s term, when the shadow war with Iran became a full-blown confrontation from which the Mossad, on the face of it, emerged with flying colors.

THE COMMISSION of inquiry that will ultimately investigate the past three years’ events will face a dilemma: what was the Mossad’s responsibility for Israel’s failures on October 7, 2023?

Formally, Gaza is out of the agency’s jurisdiction. The question, therefore, is: to what extent Iran and Qatar – which, unlike Gaza, were part of the Mossad’s responsibility – knew in advance of the invasion that the Mossad, like everyone else, failed to foresee.

At the same time, regarding its hardcore assignments, the Mossad delivered. In Lebanon, years of imaginative work resulted in the beeper attacks, which disabled thousands of Hezbollah terrorists in a matter of minutes.

In Iran, the Israel Air Force got precise locations of more than 70 personal targets, and hundreds of military installations and industrial plants, while being helped by squads of local operatives who reportedly fired missiles and unleashed explosive drones.

THE FIRST failure was in Iran itself. Yes, the military successes during the IDF’s attacks were breathtaking, but they did not bear the political fruit that should have been their aim.

Reports that the original plan was to be crowned by a Kurdish charge on Tehran are no consolation and, in fact, are alarming. The Kurds are a small and remote minority in Iran. They cannot be assigned to remove the regime, and the Mossad should have realized this.

The ayatollahs should be unseated by a Persian underground with leaders, arms, organization, and troops. Helping this happen should be Gofman’s top priority, just like his predecessors’ priority was Iran’s nuclear program and missile industry.

The second front is the global attack on Israel’s legitimacy.

The protest movement that we have come to face, and its influence on Western academia, politics, and culture, poses a strategic threat to the Jewish state.

Tracing this effort’s financing, exposing its masterminds, hounding its lieutenants, and sabotaging their ploys should be a central goal for Gofman’s Mossad.

Much has been said about Gofman’s suitability for his new position. This writer has nothing to add to this debate, except that in the last century, he urged the Mossad to tap the massive wave of Russian-speaking immigrants who arrived here in the 1990s (“Ephraim’s Mossad,” March 6, 1998).

The new Israelis, I argued, brought a type of worldliness that the Mossad’s founders possessed, and their Israeli-born successors lacked.

One of those immigrants had arrived here from Belarus at age 14; at that writing, he was a 22-year-old lieutenant in Armored Battalion 53. Now he is head of the Mossad.

Hopefully, his background will help him deliver what his Sabra predecessors didn’t deliver, and Israel’s survival now demands.