The_Info_Web/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/GOVERNMENT/INTERNATIONAL/Mossad.md

aliases	created	updated	title	tags	description	category	summary	start	location	relations
Mossad The Mossad HaMossad Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations Institute for Intelligence and Special Assignments Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks Israeli Secret Intelligence Service Israeli intelligence	2025-07-22	2026-10-12	Mossad	Organization Intelligence Israel CIA KKMountain Nuclear Dimona SamsonOption Eichmann Vanunu IranIsraelArms PROMIS Lebanon	Mossad is the foreign intelligence agency of Israel, reporting to the prime minister.	Foreign Government	Israel's foreign intelligence service, whose liaison with the CIA, funded off the books through KK MOUNTAIN, runs through the Dimona, Eichmann, Phalangist, Vanunu and Iran arms episodes in this vault's record.	1949	Tel Aviv, Israel	type with reverse start end role fn head_of Reuven Shiloah true 1949 1952 first head 1 type with reverse start end fn head_of Isser Harel true 1952 1963 1 type with reverse start end fn head_of Meir Amit true 1963 1968 1 type with reverse start end fn head_of Zvi Zamir true 1968 1974 1 type with reverse start end fn head_of Yitzhak Hofi true 1974 1982 1 type with reverse start end role fn head_of Nachum Admoni true 1982 1989 deputy head before September 12, 1982 1 type with reverse start end role fn funded Central Intelligence Agency true 1960 1969 KK MOUNTAIN cash payments from the director's contingency fund 3 type with start role fn partner_of Central Intelligence Agency 1950 28 formal cooperative ventures in strategic intelligence by 1979, with James Jesus Angleton responsible for liaison 3 type with start end role fn partner_of Phalangists 1982 1982 the Mossad was made responsible for the link with the Phalangist leadership 17 type with start end fn subject_of Kahan Commission 1982-09 1983-02-08 18 type with start role fn participant_in Iran-Israel Joint Committee 1980 joint committee with military intelligence for arms supply to Iran, according to Ari Ben-Menashe 20

The Mossad (the Institute for Intelligence and Special Assignments, in the words of the 1983 Kahan Commission) is the foreign intelligence service of Israel. Its own website carries a directive of David Ben-Gurion on its creation and lists twelve directors from Reuven Shiloah in 1949 to Yossi Cohen, who left in 2021: Shiloah (1949 to 1952), Isser Harel (1952 to 1963), Meir Amit (1963 to 1968), Zvi Zamir (1968 to 1974), Yitzhak Hofi (1974 to 1982), Nachum Admoni (1982 to 1989), Shabtai Shavit (1989 to 1996), Danny Yatom (1996 to 1998), Efraim Halevy (1998 to 2002), Meir Dagan (2002 to 2011), Tamir Pardo (2011 to 2016) and Cohen (2016 to 2021).¹ The record below follows the service where it touches the American intelligence services, the nuclear program at Dimona, and the Lebanon, Iran and computer-software episodes that run through this vault.²

Liaison with the CIA and KK MOUNTAIN

Seymour Hersh wrote that the March 1979 agreement giving Israel access to KH-11 satellite imagery was "no less than the twenty-eighth in a series of formal Israeli-American cooperative ventures in strategic intelligence since the 1950s"; that nothing about them has been officially disclosed; and that many were financed "off-the-books," from "a special contingency fund personally maintained by the director of central intelligence." Through the 1960s, he wrote, one of the most sensitive operations in the Central Intelligence Agency was code-named KK MOUNTAIN ("kk" being the CIA digraph for documents dealing with Israel), which "provided for untold millions in annual cash payments to Mossad"; in return, Mossad agents acted "in essence, as American surrogates" in North Africa and in countries such as Kenya, Tanzania and the Congo. Other agreements financed Israeli operations in Syria and inside the Soviet Union, and part of the Soviet work was financed by disbursements cleared through the congressional oversight committees.³

Hersh wrote that in 1977 the Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner abruptly cut back intelligence liaison with Israel and other friendly services, that the Israelis answered by sharply reducing what they sent to Washington, and that the CIA rejected a 1978 analysis by the former ambassador to Iran Uri Lubrani that the Shah would not survive; in the Israeli view, he wrote, the 1979 KH-11 agreement was made inevitable by the CIA's failure to anticipate Soviet pressure on Afghanistan and the upheavals in Iran, where "Mossad's information was far superior," Hersh noting that there were large Jewish communities in both countries. Lubrani was attached to the Israeli delegation that negotiated the KH-11 agreement.³ Hersh also wrote that some American intelligence officials suspected that President Jimmy Carter's decision was a reward for Menachem Begin's success at the Camp David summit.³

On the American side, Hersh wrote, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's director of counterintelligence, "also was responsible for liaison with Israel"; former Agency officials who criticized his counterintelligence methods acknowledged that he had handled Israel "correctly and proficiently"; and one of his closest colleagues was the Israeli intelligence official Meir (Meme) Deshalit, who was posted to Washington in 1948 and was the older brother of the physicist Amos Deshalit. Angleton had worked with the Jewish resistance in Italy while in the Office of Strategic Services.⁴

Eichmann, 1960

The CIA's Directorate of Operations name file on Adolf Eichmann, released in 2005 under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and posted by the National Security Archive, records that the CIA was surprised by the capture of Eichmann by Israeli agents in Argentina on May 2, 1960 and that the Director of Central Intelligence immediately asked operatives with contacts in the Israeli service to gather "all possible details." In one exchange recorded in volume 1, document 49, a CIA officer congratulated his Israeli counterpart "on the final accomplishment of what appeared to be a magnificent job" and noted that captured Nazi war documents might interest him. To strengthen ties with the Israeli services, the editors wrote, Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff searched archives and submitted names of other German officers mentioned in the Eichmann documents; the review found that some of Eichmann's associates, including Otto von Bolschwing, described there as Eichmann's "tutor on Zionism and the politics of Zionism in the mid-1930s," had been assets of the Gehlen Organization and the CIA; the posting quotes the historian Timothy Naftali that Bolschwing contacted a former CIA handler in panic after the capture.⁵ Hersh wrote that Rafael Eitan "had participated in the 1960 kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires" and later resigned from Mossad.⁶

The spring of 1963 and the German scientists

A National Security Archive posting records that in the spring of 1963 "some top officials in Israel, primarily Mossad chief Isser Harel with the support of Foreign Minister Golda Meir," began through leaks to the Israeli press a public campaign about German scientists in Egypt developing ballistic missiles and radiological weapons, "possibly even nuclear weapons"; that the State Department intelligence chief Thomas Hughes asked the Director of Central Intelligence John McCone for a special estimate on advanced weapons programs in the United Arab Republic and Israel; and that the estimate of May 8, 1963 concluded that Israel "will attempt to produce a weapon sometime in the next several years" unless deterred, while the United Arab Republic did not have "the capability of producing a nuclear weapon in the foreseeable future."⁷ The same posting dates the correspondence between John F. Kennedy and Ben-Gurion over Dimona inspections to those months; Mossad's own list ends Harel's term in 1963.¹⁷

The Paris office and Operation Damocles, 1962

From 1962 the Paris office of Mossad was run by Yitzhak Shamir, under the cover name Samuel Singer, according to Roger Howard's account of Operation Damocles, the campaign directed by Isser Harel against German engineers and scientists working on Egypt's rocket program.⁸ Howard writes that Mossad's complicity in the disappearance of a Munich procurement company director in September 1962 "has never been conclusively proven, but almost certainly this was just the beginning of Operation Damocles."⁹ The Jewish Telegraphic Agency's obituary of Shamir states that between 1955 and 1965 he served as a senior Mossad official.¹⁰

The May 1967 estimate and the June 1967 war

David S. Robarge, the CIA's chief historian, writes that on May 25, 1967 Tel Aviv submitted to Washington a Mossad estimate claiming the Israeli military was badly outgunned by a Soviet-backed Arab force. The CIA's Office of National Estimates appraised the paper within five hours: "We do not believe that the Israeli appreciation . . . was a serious estimate of the sort they would submit to their own high officials. We think it is probably a gambit intended to influence the US to do one or more of the following: (a) provide military supplies, (b) make more public commitments to Israel, (c) approve Israeli military initiatives, and (d) put more pressure on Nasser." Walt Rostow sent both papers to Johnson with a note that the CIA appraisal "throws a great deal of cold water on the Israeli estimate."¹¹¹² On June 1, 1967, the Mossad chief Meir Amit met Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in Washington; the memorandum of the conversation was written by the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Rufus Taylor.¹³

Plumbat, 1968

Hersh wrote that Mossad wanted uranium ore of which "hundreds of tons" sat in a warehouse near Antwerp, controlled by Euratom, and that Dimona, "ostensibly a twenty-four-megawatt reactor capable of consuming no more than twenty-four tons of ore in a year," could not openly buy an eight-year supply. In March 1968, he wrote, Mossad approached one of its agents in West Germany to buy the ore for $4 million, allegedly for an Italian chemical company in Milan; Euratom approved the sale in October; the uranium left Antwerp aboard a vessel renamed the Scheersberg A, "purchased, with Mossad funds, by another Israeli agent-in-place in Turkey"; and at sea the ore was transferred to an Israeli freighter guarded by gunboats. The disappearance was known to Euratom within months, American and European agencies reported internally that Israel was involved, and it took nine years for the press to report it; Hersh cited published accounts "confirmed by Israeli officials" and a 1978 book, The Plumbat Affair.¹⁴

On September 10, 1968, Raphael Eitan, whom the National Security Archive identifies as deputy chief of Mossad operations and the organizer of the Mossad and LAKAM team in the Plumbat operation, visited the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation plant at Apollo, Pennsylvania, with three other Israelis, according to an Atomic Energy Commission security report of September 6, 1968.¹⁵

Osirak and the Lebanon war

Hersh wrote that Hofi, "the director of Mossad," and the chief of military intelligence Yehoshua Saguy opposed the 1981 attack on Osirak bombing "primarily because there was no evidence that Iraq was as yet capable of building a bomb," and that two weeks after the raid Hofi gave an interview, identified only by title under censorship, complaining about politicians who compromised secret intelligence, which in Hersh's account left "no doubt in the Israeli intelligence community" that Begin was the politician meant; Hersh added that Hofi was also a critic of Ariel Sharon.¹⁶

The Kahan Commission, reporting on the Sabra and Shatila massacres, wrote that Israel had extended aid to the Christian armed forces, that "the Mossad was made responsible for the link with the Phalangists," and that its representatives "maintained a rather close connection with the Phalangist leadership"; that the Mossad "to a not inconsiderable extent under the influence of constant and close contact with the Phalangist elite" favored strengthening the relationship while military intelligence emphasized the Phalangists' unreliability; and that the Mossad's head, in testimony of December 27, 1982, accepted that "subjective, and not only objective, relations also emerged." In the view prevailing among the Mossad agents before the war, the commission wrote, the Phalangists' atrocities were a thing of the past, although in meetings with the heads of the Mossad Bashir Gemayel had said things that "left no room for doubt" of his intention to eliminate the Palestinian problem in Lebanon even by "aberrant methods."¹⁷ In cables of September 15 the Mossad representative in Beirut reported the meetings of the chief of staff and the defense minister with the Phalangist leadership and that the Phalangists would enter West Beirut after the Israeli Defense Forces; a cable of September 16 at noon reported a coordination meeting to prepare the Phalangists "for operations to clear the city of terrorists," and another that they would start work at the Burj el-Barajneh camp. The head of the Mossad, who had assumed the post on September 12, 1982 after serving as deputy, learned of the decision to send the Phalangists into the camps only at the cabinet meeting of Thursday evening, did not give an assessment of their entry or express reservations, and was found by the commission to have shown an inaction that "should not be considered serious," and the commission considered it sufficient to determine responsibility without further recommendation.¹⁸

Iran, 1980 and 1981

Ari Ben-Menashe wrote that in the fall of 1980 Begin ordered the military intelligence chief Yehoshua Sagi and the Mossad's "acting director" Nachum Admoni to create an Iran-Israel Joint Committee of military intelligence and Mossad to supply arms to Iran; that David Kimche, whom he called head of Tevel, was its senior member; and that after Yitzhak Shamir became prime minister members including Kimche were forced out and Eitan ran the committee.¹⁹²⁰ The Mossad's own list gives Hofi as head from 1974 to 1982 and Admoni from 1982, and the Kahan Commission describes Admoni as deputy head until September 12, 1982.¹¹⁷ The House October Surprise Task Force wrote that Eitan and Saguy had told the Israeli government they never met Ben-Menashe and that his Israeli military file showed work as a translator; Ben-Menashe was acquitted in New York in November 1990.²¹ See Iran-Israel Joint Committee.

PROMIS, according to Ben-Menashe

Ben-Menashe wrote that Eitan, as counterterrorism adviser to Begin and then to Shamir, took an interest in the software program PROMIS; that in 1982 Earl Brian approached Eitan about selling it to foreign intelligence agencies; that Eitan decided to have a "trap door" installed to give Israeli agents access to the computers of any service that bought it; that Ben-Menashe recruited his childhood friend Yehuda Ben-Hanan, of Software and Engineering Consultants in California, to build the external access; that Eitan selected Jordan to test it and that Brian sold it through his company Hadron; and that Robert Maxwell "made a fortune out of it" through his companies.²² See PROMIS Software Scandal.

Vanunu and the Mirror Group, 1986

Hersh wrote that copies of the photographs Mordecai Vanunu took inside Dimona were made available in London, before the Sunday Times published, to an Israeli intelligence agent masquerading as an American reporter; that they were sent by courier to the office of Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who ordered Mossad to get Vanunu out of London and into Israeli custody; that "no kidnapping could take place in England for diplomatic reasons"; and that Vanunu was enticed by a Mossad agent named Cindy Hanin Bentov (a pseudonym; see Cindy Hanin Bentov) to leave for Rome a few days before publication, where, according to Vanunu's account to relatives, he was drugged and returned to Israel by ship.²³

Ben-Menashe told Hersh that after Vanunu's photographs reached the Israeli leadership he and others were told that "Peres said, 'Let's make him an example'" rather than assassinating him; that the foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, Nicholas Davies, "provided the framework" for the Sunday Mirror's hostile story of September 28, which went to Maxwell, publisher of the Mirror Group; and that Maxwell told him "I know what has to happen. I have already spoken to your bosses."²⁴ The Sunday Mirror's reporters Tony Frost and Mark Souster were ordered by their editor to take the photographs to the Israeli embassy; the senior deputy editor John C. Parker understood that Maxwell had given the order; the news editor Peter J. Miller said that "the line we were instructed to take cost the Sunday Mirror a world-beating exclusive"; and the editor Michael Malloy acknowledged discussing the story with Maxwell, said there was "nothing sinister or strange" in it, and recalled that Maxwell ordered the photographs shown to the Israelis.²⁴ The Mirror staff statements are those of the persons named.

Uri Geller

Jim Schnabel wrote that, according to Geller, Moshe Dayan asked Uri Geller "Now, what can you do for Israel?"; that "so the story goes" Geller then met the military intelligence chief Aharon Yariv and officials of Mossad and Shin Bet, was tested by them and began to work for them, viewing targets in Syria and elsewhere; and that Yariv, in an interview with the science writer John Wilhelm in the mid-1970s, denied ever meeting or consulting with Geller. Schnabel wrote that Geller says he later met secretly in hotel rooms in the United States with Israeli officials to brief them on his experiences at Stanford Research Institute and was warned "not to do certain things" there; that in one of Geller's stories a tape recorder started to play by itself at a meeting with Mossad officers; and that among the "wild surmises" in the air when CIA officials asked Puthoff about Geller was that he was "part of some Mossad disinformation project, designed to spook the Arabs into believing that Israel possessed a paranormal superman," or that Israeli intelligence wanted to infiltrate SRI. Several Israeli officials came to SRI in the summer of 1973; Hal Puthoff "had the impression that they were from Israeli military intelligence," and they said that Geller had done "surprisingly good work for them against Middle Eastern military targets" and asked whether it was luck or verifiable psychic ability.²⁵

Footnotes

---

1. Mossad, "History," mossad.gov.il (directive of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion on the establishment of the Mossad; list of the heads of the Mossad, 1949 to 2021). https://mossad.gov.il/en/history ↩︎

2. Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut, Report, February 8, 1983, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Historical Documents, vol. 8: 1982-1984, document 104. https://syriaaccountability.org/content/images/wordpress/ISRAELMFA_Commission-Inquiry-Beirut_1983_EN.pdf ↩︎

3. Hersh, Seymour M., The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, chapter 1, "A Secret Agreement," pp. 3-6. Full text read at https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option ↩︎

4. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 11, "Playing the Game," pp. 143-145. ↩︎

5. Feinstein, Tamara, ed., "The CIA Names File on Adolf Eichmann," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 150, March 24, 2005, citing the CIA Directorate of Operations file, vol. 1, document 49, and vol. 2, document 7. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB150/index.htm ↩︎

6. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 21, "Israel's Nuclear Spy," pp. 288-289. ↩︎

7. Burr, William, and Avner Cohen, eds., "The Battle of the Letters, 1963," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 671, May 2, 2019, documents 17 and 22. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2019-05-02/battle-letters-1963-john-f-kennedy-david-ben-gurion-levi-eshkol-us-inspections-dimona ↩︎

8. Roger Howard, Operation Damocles: Israel's Secret War against Hitler's Scientists in Egypt, 1954-1967 (2013), chapter 16. https://archive.org/details/operationdamocle0000howa ↩︎

9. Roger Howard, Operation Damocles, chapter 1. https://archive.org/details/operationdamocle0000howa ↩︎

10. "Yitzhak Shamir, Israel's 7th prime minister, dies at 96," Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 2012. https://www.jta.org/?p=1789432 ↩︎

11. Robarge, David S. "Getting it Right: CIA Analysis of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War." Studies in Intelligence 49, no. 1 (March 2005). https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/CIA-Analysis-1967-War.pdf ↩︎

12. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XIX, Document 61, Memorandum from Rostow to President Johnson, May 25, 1967, with attached CIA appraisal. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d61 ↩︎

13. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XIX, Document 124, Memorandum for the Record by Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor, June 1, 1967 (prepared June 2). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d124 ↩︎

14. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 13, "An Israeli Decision," pp. 180-181. ↩︎

15. National Security Archive, "The NUMEC Affair: Did Highly Enriched Uranium from the U.S. Aid Israel's Nuclear Weapons Program?" (November 2, 2016), Document 10 and commentary. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2016-11-02/numec-affair-did-highly-enriched-uranium-us-aid-israels-nuclear-weapons-program The identification of Eitan's role is the posting's commentary. ↩︎

16. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 1, pp. 9-11; chapter 21, p. 294 footnote (Hofi and Sharon). ↩︎

17. Kahan Commission Report, sections on the Phalangists and the Mossad, on the Phalangists' entry into the camps, and on the head of the Mossad (note 2). ↩︎

18. Kahan Commission Report (note 2), recommendations on the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and the head of the Mossad. ↩︎

19. Ben-Menashe, Ari, Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network, TrineDay, 2015 reprint of the 1992 edition, passages on the Joint Committee for Iran-Israel Relations, Tevel and the Mossad directorship. https://archive.org/details/profits-of-war-1992-ari-ben-menashe ↩︎

20. Ben-Menashe, Profits of War, passage on Begin's order to Sagi and Admoni in the fall of 1980. ↩︎

21. U.S. House of Representatives, Joint Report of the Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations Concerning the Holding of American Hostages by Iran in 1980, H. Rept. 102-1102, January 3, 1993, section on Ben-Menashe (p. 97). https://archive.org/details/14148-h.rp.-1102 ; Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 19, p. 260 footnote (acquittal in November 1990). ↩︎

22. Ben-Menashe, Profits of War, chapter on PROMIS. ↩︎

23. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 15, "The Tunnel," pp. 197-198. ↩︎

24. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 22, "An Israeli Asset," pp. 311-315. ↩︎

25. Schnabel, Jim, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Dell, 1997, chapter 9, "The Trickster." Full text read at https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2 ↩︎