Israel’s Deep State: How the Mossad Operates Without Oversight

In the quiet northern reaches of Tel Aviv sits a headquarters whose address is rarely printed, whose budget is never fully disclosed, and whose staff numbers are, at best, an educated guess. This is the home of the Mossad, formally known as the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, an agency that has spent more than seven decades operating in the shadows of global politics while shaping the security posture of an entire nation.

Few intelligence organizations in the world carry the mythology that surrounds the Mossad. It has been credited, blamed, and sometimes both at once, for assassinations across four continents, for smuggling operations that saved tens of thousands of Jewish lives, for daring abductions of war criminals, and for a running shadow campaign against Iran’s nuclear ambitions that reads like fiction even when confirmed as fact. To understand modern Israeli security policy, one has to understand the Mossad, an agency whose director answers to no one but the prime minister, and whose operations, when they surface at all, tend to surface decades after they occurred.

Born From Necessity

The Mossad’s origin story begins in December 1949, barely a year after the state of Israel itself came into being. Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, a man deeply preoccupied with the survival of his young nation, tasked a trusted aide named Reuven Shiloah with building an organization that could coordinate the fractured intelligence efforts already underway. At the time, Israel’s security services were a patchwork: the army ran its own military intelligence arm, a separate internal security service watched for domestic threats, and a political intelligence unit tried to make sense of what was happening beyond the country’s borders. Ben Gurion wanted a central coordinating body, and what emerged was the Central Institute for Coordination, the seed from which the modern Mossad grew.

By March 1951, the organization had been folded directly into the office of the prime minister, a structural choice that continues to define it today. Unlike many of the world’s spy agencies, the Mossad does not report to a legislature, a defense ministry, or any oversight committee with real teeth. It answers only to whoever occupies the prime minister’s chair. Journalist Ronen Bergman, one of the foremost chroniclers of Israeli intelligence history, has gone so far as to call the Mossad a "deep state," a description that captures both its power and its near total insulation from public accountability.

For nearly half a century, even the name of the man running the agency was a state secret. That changed only in 1996, when Danny Yatom became the first Mossad chief whose identity was officially confirmed by the government, following years of public pressure. Since Reuven Shiloah’s tenure in 1949, the agency has passed through the hands of fourteen directors, including figures such as Meir Amit, who played a pivotal behind the scenes role before the Six Day War, and Meir Dagan, who led the Mossad through a period widely described as its most aggressive era of covert action against Iran. The current director, Roman Gofman, was sworn in during the summer of 2026.

The Machinery Behind the Myth

Officially, the Mossad’s organizational chart is classified, but journalists and defectors have pieced together a rough sketch of how the agency functions. Its largest division, known as Tzomet, houses the case officers called katsas, Hebrew shorthand for intelligence gathering officers. These are the men and women who recruit foreign agents, run networks abroad, and operate under cover identities that range from diplomatic postings to entirely fabricated business fronts. Two former heads of Tzomet, Yossi Cohen and David Barnea, later rose to lead the entire agency, a career path that says something about how central this division is to the Mossad’s work.

Then there is Caesarea, the division responsible for special operations, and within it the notorious Kidon unit, whose name translates roughly as bayonet or spear. Kidon operatives are widely believed to be the agency’s assassination specialists, trained for roughly two years at a facility near the coastal town of Herzliya before being cleared for operational work. A separate branch called Keshet, meaning rainbow, handles electronic surveillance, break ins, and wiretapping, the unglamorous but essential plumbing of modern espionage.

Perhaps the most unusual feature of the Mossad’s structure is its reliance on what are called sayanim, Hebrew for helpers. These are unpaid Jewish civilians scattered across the diaspora who assist Mossad operatives out of a sense of loyalty to Israel rather than for money. A sayan who happens to run a car rental agency might quietly arrange a vehicle without the usual paperwork. A sayan working in a hotel might provide a spare room key. According to the writer Gordon Thomas, by the late 1990s there were an estimated four thousand sayanim in Britain alone and sixteen thousand in the United States. This network allows the Mossad to punch well above the weight of its official budget, letting it run operations across dozens of countries without maintaining a large permanent footprint everywhere it operates.

The agency’s original motto was drawn from the Book of Proverbs: for by stratagems, you wage war. It was later swapped for another verse from the same book, one warning that without guidance a people fall, but that in a multitude of counselors there is safety. Both mottos, tellingly, speak to strategy and quiet planning rather than brute force, a philosophy that runs through nearly every operation the agency has become known for.

Snatching Eichmann From Buenos Aires

No Mossad operation looms larger in popular memory than the 1960 capture of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who had overseen the logistics of the Holocaust. Israeli intelligence discovered that Eichmann was living quietly in Argentina under the assumed name Ricardo Klement. A five-person team led by Shimon Ben Aharon spent weeks confirming his identity through careful surveillance before finally seizing him from a street near his home on May 11, 1960. He was drugged, disguised as an airline crew member, and flown to Israel aboard a plane that had officially been sent to Argentina for a diplomatic delegation.

Argentina protested loudly at what it called a flagrant violation of its sovereignty, and the matter reached the United Nations Security Council, which acknowledged both the breach of Argentine territory and the legitimacy of bringing Eichmann to justice. He was tried in Jerusalem and later executed; the only judicial execution ever carried out by the state of Israel. A follow up mission targeting the notorious camp doctor Josef Mengele was eventually abandoned.

The Long Shadow War With Iran

If the Eichmann capture defined the Mossad’s early decades, its confrontation with Iran has come to define the modern era of the agency. Since the late 1990s, a string of Iranian nuclear scientists have died under mysterious circumstances, among them Masoud Alimohammadi, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, Majid Shahriari, Darioush Rezaeinejad, and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan. Iran has consistently pointed a finger at the Mossad, and while Israel has never formally claimed responsibility, former director Meir Dagan came close in a later interview, praising the campaign for producing what he called white defections, a term for scientists so frightened by the killings that they requested transfers away from the nuclear program entirely.

Perhaps the boldest chapter of this campaign unfolded in 2018, when Mossad agents infiltrated a secret nuclear archive inside Tehran and smuggled more than one hundred thousand documents and files out of the country. The haul reportedly proved that an earlier Iranian program, known as the AMAD Project, had been explicitly designed to develop nuclear weapons, a claim Israel shared with allied governments across Europe and North America. Two years later, in August 2020, al Qaeda’s deputy leader Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah was shot dead in Tehran along with his daughter, an operation widely attributed to Mossad operatives working inside the Iranian capital itself, a striking demonstration of how deep the agency’s reach into Iran is believed to extend. In 2024, former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad added a startling coda to this saga, revealing that a special unit Iran had created specifically to counter Mossad operations had itself been headed by a Mossad agent.

Operations Across the Arab World and Beyond

The Mossad’s confrontation with Palestinian militant groups produced some of its most controversial episodes. Following the killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the agency launched a sustained campaign of retribution against those it held responsible, tracking down and killing several alleged organizers in cities including Paris, Rome, and Nicosia over the following years. That campaign was later dramatized in films such as Steven Spielberg’s Munich.

Not every operation went smoothly. In 1973, a team of agents in Lillehammer, Norway, mistakenly killed a Moroccan waiter named Ahmed Bouchiki after confusing him for Ali Hassan Salameh, a senior Black September commander. Six agents were arrested by Norwegian authorities, and Israel later paid compensation to Bouchiki’s family, a rare public acknowledgment of a botched mission.

In 1997, an operation against Hamas leader Khaled Mashal went badly wrong in Jordan. Two Mossad agents posing as Canadian tourists injected Mashal with a toxin in Amman, but Jordanian security forces caught them before they could escape and rounded up several more agents sheltering in the Israeli embassy. To secure their release, Israel was forced to fly in the antidote and save the very man its agents had just tried to kill. The diplomatic fallout led to the release of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from Israeli custody, an outcome that arguably strengthened the group the operation had set out to weaken.

More successful, at least from Israel’s perspective, was the 2010 killing of senior Hamas commander Mahmoud al Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room. Surveillance footage later showed a team estimated at more than two dozen operatives traveling on forged passports from Britain, Ireland, Australia, France, and Germany. Dubai’s police chief publicly declared his certainty that Mossad was responsible and formally sought the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though no criminal charges ever followed. The episode caused genuine diplomatic strain with several European governments angered at the misuse of their citizens’ identities.

Syria, too, has featured prominently in the Mossad’s operational history. Perhaps its most storied agent, Eli Cohen, spent years embedded at the highest levels of the Syrian government in the 1960s, close enough to the president that he was reportedly considered for the post of defense minister. Cohen fed Israel detailed maps of Syrian defenses on the Golan Heights and famously arranged for trees to be planted around military positions under the pretext of providing shade for soldiers, when in truth they served as targeting markers for Israeli forces during the Six Day War. He was eventually caught and executed publicly in Damascus in 1965, but his intelligence proved decisive years later on the battlefield. Decades afterward, in 2007, Mossad surveillance uncovered a covert nuclear reactor under construction in Syria, information that led directly to its destruction by Israeli warplanes that September.

Rescue Missions and Quiet Diplomacy

Not everything attributed to the Mossad involves violence. The agency has also run extensive humanitarian operations aimed at bringing Jewish communities to Israel. In 1956, it built a clandestine network inside Morocco to smuggle Moroccan Jews out of the country after immigration to Israel was banned. Decades later, it helped organize the evacuation of Ethiopian Jews from famine-stricken camps in Sudan during the 1984 Operation Moses, and again during the Bosnian War, when it assisted Sarajevo’s Jewish community in escaping the siege of the city. The agency also maintained quiet contact with refuseniks in the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, smuggling religious items and messages in and out of the USSR at a time when Soviet Jews faced severe restrictions on emigration and worship.

A Fraught Relationship with Allies

Even Israel’s closest allies have not been spared friction with the Mossad. In August 2001, the agency reportedly warned American authorities that as many as two hundred people it believed to be terrorists were entering the United States and planning a major assault, a warning that arrived a month before the September 11 attacks. It remains unclear whether the warning contained enough specificity for American counterterrorism officials to act on, but the episode is often cited by those who argue that intelligence sharing between allies can still fail catastrophically even when the underlying information is accurate.

The agency’s use of foreign passports has caused repeated diplomatic headaches. New Zealand imposed sanctions on Israel in 2004 after operatives were caught trying to fraudulently obtain New Zealand passports, prompting a formal apology from the Israeli foreign minister. The United Kingdom lodged its own protests in 1986 and again in 2010 over the use of forged and cloned British identities. In 1984, Nigerian politician Umaru Dikko was nearly kidnapped from London and smuggled out of the country inside a shipping crate, an operation that unraveled only when alert customs officials at Stansted Airport discovered him still alive inside it.

The Cultural Footprint

Few intelligence agencies have captured the public imagination quite like the Mossad. It has inspired an entire genre of espionage fiction, from Daniel Silva’s long running Gabriel Allon novels to John le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl. Television audiences have encountered the agency through characters such as Ziva David in the American series NCIS, whose father was portrayed as a Mossad director, and through the Apple TV series Tehran, which follows a Mossad operative working undercover inside Iran. Films such as Operation Finale and The House on Garibaldi Street have dramatized the Eichmann capture, while Spielberg’s Munich remains perhaps the most widely seen cinematic treatment of the agency’s most controversial era.

A Reputation Built on Silence

What makes the Mossad such an enduring subject of fascination is precisely what makes it so difficult to write about with certainty: its insistence on secrecy. Most of what the public knows arrives years or decades after the fact, filtered through investigative journalists, memoirs of disillusioned former agents, court documents from botched operations, and the occasional deliberate leak designed to send a message to Israel’s adversaries. For every operation confirmed by Israeli officials, there are several more that remain permanently in the realm of allegation, denial, and educated speculation.

That ambiguity is, in many ways, the point. An intelligence agency that never confirms or denies its actions retains a kind of psychological leverage that a more transparent service could never match. Whether the subject is a Syrian nuclear scientist found dead on a beach, an Iranian general who vanished only to resurface as a defector, or a Hamas engineer gunned down on a Kuala Lumpur street, the Mossad’s fingerprints are often suspected long before, if ever, they are proven. Seventy-six years after its founding as a small coordinating office under a fledgling government, the agency remains one of the most consequential, and least understood, instruments of state power operating anywhere in the world today.