Sometimes Iran or other adversaries counterattack and hit their target. This week may have been one of those weeks.
Although the focus in recent years has been a list of allegedly astounding Mossad operational successes against Iran and Hamas weapons scientists, the spy agency is not perfect and is made out of flesh and blood like everyone else.
Sometimes Iran or other adversaries counterattack and hit their target. This week may have been one of those weeks.
Tehran claimed that a series of missile strikes killed and injured around a dozen Mossad agents at an alleged facility in Erbil, Iraq, giving specific numbers and details about how the alleged agents were subsequently evacuated.
Iran also claimed to have busted a Mossad cell that was seeking to sabotage its Fordow nuclear facility. Sources have indicated to The Jerusalem Post that Fordow is one of the agency’s primary targets.
This is not surprising since it is the second most crucial nuclear facility for uranium enrichment and maybe the most crucial in the later stages of nuclear weaponization.
Further, the degree of information issued by the ayatollahs was unusually detailed in terms of using a neighbor to approach a member of Fordow’s IR-6 advanced centrifuge unit for enriching uranium
In Iranian media coverage of the event, it was framed with an unusual amount of modesty including acknowledging many past Mossad successes against Iran, something which gave the reports some rare heft.
On the other hand, there have been numerous times that the global media has expressed heavy skepticism to Iranian announcements of busting Mossad agents which seemed incoherent.
Many such “Mossad busts” are mere cover to arrest local opposition officials.
It is unknown whether Turkey’s announcement of arrests of alleged Mossad agents this past October, including bizarrely posting pictures of the claimed spies with their alleged initials, but not their alleged names, was real or similar fake news.
In addition, the Post understands that at least one announcement by Tehran of thwarting an attempted Mossad assassination of former Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani in 2019 (he was later assassinated by the US in 2020) was misleading or completely false.
But if former Mossad deputy chief and current Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Ram Ben Barak rejected the Turkish claims as patently false, neither he nor any other Israeli officials issued such loud rejections this week regarding Iran.
And there are documented Mossad failures in the past.
In 2010, a number of alleged Mossad agents were caught on CCTV in the UAE during an operation in which senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated.
This created a diplomatic nightmare for Israel as many allied Western countries accused Jerusalem of using their passports and some identities of their citizens to infiltrate the UAE.
It is not as if such a tactic would make the Mossad unique among intelligence agencies, but getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar is different and Israel faced real diplomatic punishments for years.
In Harpoon, the book discloses intelligence assets in the Lebanese banking system, such as LCB fraud auditor Munir Z.
The breakthroughs, which allegedly reaped benefits for Israel’s fight against financial terrorism, did not come without loss, with Munir Z. eventually caught and killed by Hezbollah in 2009.
Intelligence operations rarely come without risk and complex calculations about balancing agents’ safety with pushing them to obtain more intelligence breakthroughs.
Some, though certainly not all, of Hezbollah busts of alleged Israeli intelligence assets, in the last several years, appear to have had some truth to them.
There is the failed attempted assassination of Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal in Jordan in 1998 in which multiple Mossad agents were captured.
They only got home after Israel helped cure Mashaal from a poison he had been injected with and had to embarrassingly release Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Ben Barak was once allegedly captured in Cyprus in 1991 during a mission with a flop.
There have also been numerous supposed spies for the Mossad who turned out to be double agents or who were feeding the agency false information just to continue to feel part of an adventure.
During the 1973 Lillehammer Affair, the Mossad assassinated the wrong man, speaking a major scandal, and like much of the Israeli defense establishment, as least many Mossad officials incorrectly predicted that Egypt was deterred from going to war with Israel in 1973 (prove wrong during the Yom Kippur War.)
After former US President Donald Trump leaked to Russia intelligence about ISIS, attributed to Israel, a number of Israeli and US intelligence officials said that that spy successes and losses are occurring all the time and that the public simply does not learn of them, or learns of a fraction of them years later.
China and Iran both had success in eliminating dozens of CIA agents in 2010-2013 when they both cracked communication codes and at least one CIA agent turned on his own.
Russian intelligence infamously breached US intelligence via double agents Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, in the 1980s and from 1979 to 2001, respectively.
So sometimes Israel’s adversaries really do draw blood.
But however fallible the Mossad may be, it is nearly universally acknowledged as the top clandestine agency for penetrating Iran, and the intelligence it provides the US and the West sometimes makes Israel even more valuable than its status as “the Startup Nation.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-701649.
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