Until a few hours ago we only knew the initial of his name, the “D”. Today, after the green light from Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit , we know that the next head of the Mossad will be David “Dedi” Barnea , 56, married, four children. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced today at a press conference. At their side was Yossi Cohen , who will step down on June 1 after five and a half years at the helm of the agency in which he was within 38 years ago. His main task
“To prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” said the chief executive. CAREER Yossi Melman, a famous Israeli journalist considered one of the greatest espionage experts in the country and beyond, has signed a portrait of the new head of Mossad on Haaretz, the son of a Jew who fled Nazi Germany. “He lives in the Sharon region north of Tel Aviv. He did his military service in Sayeret Matkal, a special forces unit. About 30 years ago, he joined the Mossad, where he became an agent. After a period of training, he joined Tzomet, the division of the spy agency responsible for locating, recruiting and managing agents and spent there his entire career (up to running it), apart from a two-year stint as deputy head of Keshet, the division responsible for target tracking and infiltration. He was appointed deputy director of Mossad in 2018 “.APPRECIATION
Netanyahu’s choice for what many refer to as “a reformer” has also been popular with critics of the prime minister: the support declared to the Jerusalem Post by former Mossad chief Danny Yatom and former deputy Ram Ben Barak , two that the premier never sent to say, certify the appreciation of the intelligence world. THE EXPERIENCE
In Tzomet, Melman explains, Barnea had to deal with the priorities that were and will still be of Mossad: Iran and the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, supported by the Tehran regime. Among the successes that fall under his vice-direction is the elimination (never commented on by the Mossad) of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the scientist in charge of the Iranian nuclear program, attributed to the Israeli service. It was an operation, as reported on Formiche.net, which highlighted several flaws in Iranian intelligence. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE PREDECESSOR About
him His career is reminiscent of that of his successor Cohen, who headed Tzomet. But the style promises to be different, writes Melman. The agency, which can count on about 7,000 men, will return “a low-profile organization that avoids the public eye and the personal attention that characterized” the last five and a half years, with Cohen becoming a loyalist of the former. minister, as well as a great director of his foreign policy, as demonstrated by a recent meeting with the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. So much so that in Likud there are those who see him as a possible successor to Netanyahu. But not before the three years of forced rest he will be forced to take once he leaves the Mossad. THE “NEW” MOSSAD
Although Mossad is an agency whose primary mission is the gathering of information through agents – human intelligence – over the past decade and a half, Melman points out, it has increasingly made use of technology and cyber warfare. It seems that with Barnea “the trend towards what has been termed Hugint – a combination of human intelligence and signal intelligence – will continue”. RELATIONSHIP WITH THE USA
The new director also has the difficult task of strengthening dialogue with the United States by Joe Bidenafter the four years of great harmony between Washington and Jerusalem when Donald Trump was in the White House (just think of the Abrahamic Agreements). As Ronen Bergman pointed out in his portrait of Barnea on Yedioth Ahronoth, the new boss finds himself managing the Mossad at a very delicate moment: on the one hand, the need to allocate huge resources to the Iran dossier (with the Biden administration intending to return in the nuclear agreement JCPOA), on the other hand the lack of buttons ”, given that the predecessor pressed almost all of them. Just think once again of the Abrahamic Agreements or the targeted assassinations.
(In the photo, from left: David Barnea, Benjamin Netanyahu, Yossi Cohen)
