David Barnea, the director of the Mossad for among the most outstanding successes in its storied historical past, by no means meant to be an intelligence officer. As a younger man, he served as a workforce chief within the Israeli army’s most elite commando unit after which got here to New York to check for a profession in enterprise.
After incomes a grasp’s diploma in finance at Tempo College, he took jobs at an Israeli funding financial institution after which a brokerage agency, the primary steps towards a profession through which the largest hazard was an surprising shift on the planet’s monetary markets.
Barnea’s world was jolted in November 1995 when an extremist right-wing Israeli assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally. Rabin had signed the 1993 Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat, chief of the Palestine Liberation Group, and was pushing for a two-state answer to many years of battle between Arabs and Jews.
“The Rabin assassination shocked him like many different Israelis,” recalled David Meidan, a retired senior Mossad operative thought-about Barnea’s mentor. He mentioned the killing prompted Barnea, at age 30, to rethink every thing and search for “some that means in his life.” A good friend prompt he apply to the Mossad, and after passing the required bodily and psychological exams, he was accepted into the company’s trainee program.
Barnea confirmed a knack for recognizing, recruiting and operating brokers who would work for the Mossad inside international locations hostile to Israel. A yr after he joined the spy company, he grew to become a case officer in its Tzomet, or Junction, division.
Meidan mentioned Barnea had the qualities important for achievement within the position: “emotional intelligence and empathy.” His international postings included years in a European capital, the place Mossad colleagues mentioned he proved to be charming, centered and decided.
The latter qualities had been evident from an early age. Barnea was born in Ashkelon, Israel, in 1965. His father, Yosef Brunner, left Hitler’s Germany in 1933 for British-ruled Palestine and ultimately served as a lieutenant colonel within the early years of the Israel Protection Forces.
At age 14, Barnea’s dad and mom enrolled him in a army boarding college. He grew to become a health fanatic and nonetheless runs or cycles when he has the prospect. When it got here time to do his required army service, Barnea received a coveted spot within the Sayeret Matkal, an elite commando unit often dispatched throughout Israel’s borders to gather intelligence or perform covert assaults or sabotage.
Within the Nineteen Nineties, when he started his profession as a spy, the Mossad’s essential focus was on Palestinian terrorism. Barnea, who speaks Arabic, proved adept at operating brokers in and across the PLO and different organizations.
He rose by the ranks and was a part of the Mossad’s management when it determined to make gathering intelligence on Iran its high precedence in 2002. The shift mirrored rising concern about Iran’s secretive nuclear program and its ties with highly effective regional proxies equivalent to Hezbollah.
In 2019, Barnea was named deputy head of the Mossad and chief of its operations directorate. Inside the company, he stood out as an advocate of aggressive operations geared toward Iranian scientists, nuclear websites and Iran’s rising arsenal of missiles that would attain Israel.
In November 2020, Barnea oversaw the operation that assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a physicist and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps common who was in command of the army features of Iran’s nuclear program. After months of surveillance by non-Israeli brokers, the Mossad was in a position to determine Fakhrizadeh’s journey patterns. A plan was hatched to park a Nissan pickup truck by the aspect of the highway and set up a singular remote-controlled machine gun on its mattress. The weapon had a complicated digital camera and synthetic intelligence software program that will determine Fakhrizadeh and shoot solely at him.
The operation was managed from Mossad headquarters, north of Tel Aviv, the place Barnea was joined within the command heart by his boss, company director Yossi Cohen. They may see the nuclear physicist’s automobile approaching, after which the gun opened hearth, hitting Fakhrizadeh a number of occasions whereas sparing his spouse, who was sitting subsequent to him.
Seven months later, Barnea was appointed head of the Mossad by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s the thirteenth man to carry the job.
Within the years that adopted, Barnea constructed on the strengths of the Fakhrizadeh operation, recruiting scores of non-Israeli brokers for operations inside Iran. These brokers performed essential roles within the June airstrikes towards Iran’s nuclear program, figuring out the areas of nuclear scientists’ houses and knocking out Iran’s air defenses.
A colleague within the Mossad’s high ranks, Haim Tomer, mentioned that Barnea is probably not as “strategic, charismatic or flamboyant” as a few of his predecessors, however he has proved himself to be a “top-tier operator.”
The Mossad’s successes underneath Barnea embrace the exploding pagers that decimated Hezbollah, the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and a Hamas political chief who was visiting Tehran, and the commando raids that destroyed Iran’s air defenses and allowed Israel to strike the nuclear services with out shedding a airplane.
These missions symbolize a outstanding turnaround for Israelis within the intelligence neighborhood, lots of whom felt they’d failed the nation after the Oct. 7, 2023, assault through which Hamas killed greater than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 251. That sense of disgrace was felt in each company, even ones just like the Mossad that weren’t mainly answerable for monitoring Hamas.
The Mossad’s administrators usually serve for 5 years, and so Barnea, or Dadi as he’s identified to his employees, could also be changed by the center of 2026; however his time period may very well be prolonged as recognition of his successes.
“These are historic days for the folks of Israel,” Barnea instructed a gathering of operatives at Mossad headquarters after the transient warfare in June, the place he referred to his shut cooperation with the CIA. “The Iranian menace, which has endangered our safety for many years, has been considerably thwarted because of extraordinary cooperation between the Israel Protection Forces, which led the marketing campaign, and the Mossad, which operated alongside — along with the help of our ally, the USA.”
Yossi Melman is a commentator on Israeli intelligence and a documentary filmmaker. Dan Raviv is a former CBS correspondent and host of “The Mossad Recordsdata” podcast. They’re the co-authors of “Spies Towards Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars.”
