Who is mossad

These claims were inevitably pounced on by the Israeli media. Other Israeli media suggested that the operation had achieved its aim in finding information about Arad, who sent three letters from captivity before Israel lost track of him. However, it remains unclear if the operation had solved the ultimate mystery of his fate. Danny Yatom was succeeded by Ephraim Halevy In September , Meir Dagan was designated the new Mossad director. Mossad was established by then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, who gave as Mossad's primary directive: "For our state which since its creation has been under siege by its enemies.

Intelligence constitutes the first line of defence Collections Department is the largest, with responsibility for espionage operations, with offices abroad under both diplomatic and unofficial cover. And with the Palestinian Islamist movement now vowing to take revenge, it seems grimly certain that it will bring more bloodshed in its wake. The images from Dubai follow the biblical injunction and the Mossad's old motto :"By way of deception thou shalt make war.

Founded in along with the new Jewish state, the Mossad largely stayed in the shadows in its early years. Yitzhak Shamir, a former Stern Gang terrorist and future prime minister, ran operations targeting German scientists who were helping Nasser's Egypt build rockets — foreshadowing later Israeli campaigns to disrupt Iraqi and continuing Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear and other weapons. The Mossad's most celebrated exploits included the abduction of the fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel.

Others were organising the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew his MiG to Israel, and support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels against Baghdad. Military secrets acquired by Elie Cohen, the infamous spy who penetrated the Syrian leadership, helped Israel conquer the Golan Heights in the Middle East war. It was after that that the service's role expanded to fight the Palestinians, who had been galvanised under Yasser Arafat into resisting Israel in the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The s saw the so-called "war of the spooks" with Mossad officers, operating under diplomatic cover abroad, recruiting and running informants in Fatah and other Palestinian groups.

Baruch Cohen, an Arabic speaker on loan to the Mossad from the Shin Bet internal security service, was shot in a Madrid cafe by his own agent. Steven Spielberg's film Munich helped mythologise the Mossad's hunt for the Black September terrorists who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympics.

Eleven of them were eliminated in killings across Europe, culminating in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, where a Moroccan waiter was mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, the Munich plot's mastermind. Salameh was eventually killed by a car bomb in Beirut in — the sort of incident that made Lebanese and Palestinians sit up and notice last year's botched training episode in Tel Aviv. Some details of the assassination of Mabhouh last month echo elements of the campaign against Black September — which ended with the catastrophic arrest of five Mossad agents.

Sylvia Raphael, a South African-born Christian with a Jewish father, was sentenced to five years in a Norwegian prison of which she served slightly over a year ; she may have been among the young Europeans in Israel who were discreetly asked, in nondescript offices in Tel Aviv, if they wished to volunteer for sensitive work involving Israel's security.

Other agents who had been exposed had to be recalled, safe houses abandoned, phone numbers changed and operational methods modified. Over the years, the Mossad's image has been badly tarnished at home as well as abroad. It was blamed in part for failing to get wind of Egyptian-Syrian plans for the devastating attack that launched the Yom Kippur war.

The security camera clearly captured his red- covered European Union passport. Two hours later, four men came to the hotel, in two pairs. All wore baseball caps that hid their faces. They carried two large bags. The fourth was an expert at picking locks.

They went directly to the elevators and to room Daveron and Folliard kept watch in the corridor while the lock picker began working the lock on the door to The idea was to reprogram it so a Mossad master key would open the door without being logged, but at the same time not disrupt the normal functioning of the proper key. A tourist stepped off the elevator, but Daveron quickly engaged him in some innocent, distracting conversation. The tourist saw nothing, the lock was picked, and the team entered the room.

Al-Mabhouh tried to escape back into the corridor. But two pairs of strong arms gripped him. The instrument was loaded with suxamethonium chloride, an anaesthetic known commercially as Scoline that is used in combination with other drugs in surgery.

On its own, it induces paralysis and, because it causes the muscles used in breathing to stop working, asphyxiation. The men maintained their grip until al-Mabhouh stopped struggling. As the paralysis spread through his body, they laid him on the floor.

Al-Mabhouh was wide awake, thinking clearly, seeing and hearing everything. Foam formed at the corners of his mouth. He gurgled. The executioners checked his pulse in two places, as they had been instructed to do by a Mossad doctor, making sure that this time he was really dead.

They removed his shoes, shirt, and trousers, placed them neatly in the closet, and put the body into the bed, under the covers.

The entire episode took 20 minutes. Using a technique developed by the Mossad for such occasions, the team closed the door in such a way that it seemed to have been locked from the inside, with the chain slid into place. Within four hours, most of the team was out of Dubai, and none were left 24 hours later. Everyone involved — Meir Dagan, Holiday, the hit team — believed another mission had been expertly accomplished.

Dagan reported the kill to prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. There did not seem to be any cause for alarm, however. A middle-aged merchant dead in bed in a locked room with no signs of struggle or trauma was likely indicative of nothing more than a heart attack or maybe a stroke. A Hamas official contacted the Dubai police chief, Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, and told him that the dead man with the Palestinian passport was, in fact, a top member of their organisation.

He told Khalfan that the death almost certainly had not been from natural causes and that, more likely than not, the Mossad had been behind it. Khalfan, 59 years old and highly decorated, had made it his personal mission to rid his country of criminals and foreign agents who used Dubai as a base for carrying out illegal activity.

Khalfan pulled the body out of the morgue for an autopsy. One disadvantage that Israeli operatives have, in comparison with their American or British counterparts, is that they have to use fake passports. A CIA squad can easily be outfitted with legitimate US state department passports, albeit under assumed names, and they essentially have an endless supply — one identity just buried under the next as needed.

American and British passports are accepted everywhere in the world and rarely draw undue attention. Israeli passports are not.