Mossad’s top hits
National intelligence agency has pulled off numerous impressive operations across the world
With speculation rife that the Mossad took out a top Hamas weapons expert in Malaysia on Saturday, it is worth looking back at a range of famous operations the agency allegedly pulled off over the years.
• Capture, trial and hanging of arch-Nazi Adolf Eichmann – 1960-1962
Though not a hit in that it was a kidnapping that led to a trial and a hanging, the Eichmann operation must still be on the list.
A Holocaust survivor in Argentina tipped off the Mossad that Eichmann might have been located living under the alias of Ricardo Klement.
Around a dozen Mossad agents were involved in the surveillance and capture operation. Pictures of “Klement” were compared to Eichmann with a key matching feature being the shape of his ears.
Mossad agents nabbed and whisked Eichmann into a car on his way home from work.
Next, he was flown to Israel on an El Al aircraft that had brought an official Israeli delegation to Buenos Aires as cover. Eichmann, heavily sedated and dressed in an El Al uniform, was passed off as a sick airline employee.
Eichmann was tried in Israel and hanged in 1962.
• Revenge for the murders of Israeli sportsmen at 1972 Munich Olympics – 1972 and on for decades
Following the September 1972 Munich Massacre of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes and coaches by eight Black September Palestine Liberation Organization operatives, the Mossad embarked on a wave of assassinations of suspected Black September operatives across Europe.
On October 16, 1972, two Mossad agents shot PLO Italy representative Abdel Wael Zwaiter around a dozen times at his residence after he came home from dinner in Rome. The hit was the first of a campaign of retaliation in which dozens of those directly or indirectly involved in the Munich Olympics attack were assassinated.
Additional retaliatory operations were carried out in 1973, 1979 and some say even into the 1990s.
• Hit on Hamas-Hezbollah weapons expert in Tunisia – December 15, 2016
On December 15, 2016, Muhammad al-Zawari was gunned down near his residence in Sfax, Tunisia in a hail of bullets in a drive-by hit.
Zawari was an aeronautical engineer who manufactured drones for Hamas, and possibly also for Hezbollah.
Reports from Tunis indicated that he also designed an unmanned naval vessel that could attack other sea vessels from under the water.
There was no evidence to identify the assassins, presumed by many to be Mossad agents, and all that was found were cell phones, silencers and a rental car. Even the items that were rented were reportedly purchased by third-parties possibly duped into unsuspectedly aiding the Mossad agents, some of whom were posing as journalists.
The assassination of the Hamas hi-tech weapons experts was different as many Hamas and other enemy targets of the Mossad tended to be military commanders, major financiers and those who had masterminded terrorist attacks on Israel.
A pattern of hits on Hamas engineers could show that the Mossad’s thinking had evolved to consider the group’s weapons experts to be the far larger and more irreplaceable threat in comparison to military commanders.
This would seem to go along with Mossad chief Yossi Cohen’s increased focus on hi-tech, with the Mossad opening a fund for investing in technology start-ups for the first time during his term.
Presuming the operation in Tunis was done by the Mossad, it also signaled that the elite spy agency under Cohen showed that it has discovered how to pull off assassinations in an age where most everything seems to be caught on video.
In contrast, the Mossad’s assassination of top Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in 2010 in Dubai was considered a major failure because video footage was eventually dug up that revealed all of the agents’ identities.
• Hitting Iran’s nuclear program with cyber, assassinations, sabotage – 2010 and before and after
To avoid the need for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Mossad was trying to slow the program, allegedly assassinating a range of Iranian scientists both before and after 2010.
But the most audacious and cutting edge allegedly joint Mossad and CIA operation against Iran’s nuclear program was the Stuxnet cyber-virus.
This computer worm destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges in attacks in 2009 and 2010 and is cited by many as the most dramatic cyberattack of all time.
More than 15 Iranian facilities, including Natanz, the Islamic Republic’s central facility for uranium enrichment, were infiltrated by the Stuxnet worm. Estimates are that around 1,000, or as many as one-fifth of all of Iran’s centrifuges at the time, destroyed by the virus.
• Hit on Hamas weapons expert in Malaysia – April 22, 2018
Fadi Muhammad al-Batsh was on his way to a mosque in Kuala Lampur in Malaysia on Saturday when he was gunned down in a drive-by motorcycle shooting viewed as similar to a hit on a Hamas weapons expert in Tunisia in 2016.
Batsh has been identified as a top Hamas electrical engineering expert for designing drones and rockets.
As of Tuesday, the Malaysian government still had no names for the suspects, and had only released computer-generated images of what they thought were the two assassins might look like based on descriptions by witnesses. However, despite Malaysia reporting that it had footage of the assassins waiting for Batsh for around 20 minutes, the lack of any identification several days later indicates that the assassins may have successfully obscured their faces with helmets or otherwise.
As of Tuesday, this operation may fit into the Tunisia operation pattern of assassinations of weapons engineers who are threats to Israel, and without leaving a trace. ARCH-NAZI Adolf Eichmann sits inside a bulletproof booth at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961.