Ammon News - by Musa Keilani

Israel’s military chief of staff, Major-General Benny Gantz, has contradicted a report about the country’s super-secret agency Mossad by disclosing that the Israeli military has dramatically increased the number of covert operations against “enemy countries” across the world.

“You almost won’t find a point in time where something isn’t happening somewhere in the world,” Gantz said in an interview published in Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth daily last week.

“I am escalating all those special operations.”

One would not have expected Gantz to give details and he did not. His disclosure of stepped-up Israeli covert operations is in stark contrast to reports that Mossad was said to have scaled back its assassination campaigns against Iranian nuclear scientists at the order of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, what was said to fear that the operations might “go awry”.

Well, Netanyahu should know. He had first-hand experience, as an Israeli prime minister, when a Mossad operation gets bust.

It was Netanyahu, as is the Israeli custom, who, as prime minister, authorised the failed 1998 attempt against Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal in Amman. The plot blew up in his face when the two Mossad agents who were carrying forged passports were caught. At the time, King Hussein skilfully negotiated the delivery of an antidote for the poison that was administered to Mishaal in return for the release of the undercover agents. In the bargain, King Hussein also secured the release of Hamas leader Ahmad Yassin from Israeli detention (Yassin was killed in an Israeli “targeted” assassination later on).

Yet another Mossad blunder came when, under Netanyahu’s premiership in January 2010, closed circuit television footage and false passports exposed that Mossad agents were present in a Dubai hotel where Hamas leader Mahmoud Al Mabhouh was found murdered.

Time magazine reported last month that Mossad had scaled down covert operations inside Iran by “dozens of per cent” in recent months, in a campaign to disable or delay the Iranian nuclear programme.

“The reduction runs across a wide spectrum of operations, cutting back not only alleged high-profile missions such as assassinations and detonations at Iranian missile bases, but also efforts to gather firsthand on-the-ground intelligence and recruit spies inside the Iranian programme,” according to Israeli security officials quoted by Time.

No country other than Israel ever boasts with its covert intelligence-related activities, let alone state-sponsored assassinations. Of course, Israel never issues any official statements on such operations, except an occasional and implicit denial when it suits it. However, comments by unnamed officials clearly indicated Mossad’s involvement in many assassinations of “Israel’s enemies” in foreign lands.

Former Mossad director Meir Amit said: “We are like the official hangman or the doctor on death row who administers the lethal injection. Our actions are all endorsed by the state of Israel. When Mossad kills it is not breaking the law. It is fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day.”

An Iranian Mossad agent, Majid Jamali Fashid, confessed on Iranian television that the Israeli agency was behind the January 2010 killing of nuclear scientist Massoud Ali Mohammedi. Confirming that the confession was genuine, Israeli officials told Time that an unnamed third country was behind exposing the Mossad cell in Iran.

At the time, the confession did not make waves because of Iran’s routine of blaming anything and everything that goes wrong on “foreign powers”.

In January this year, Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was killed. In an unusual move, the United States “categorically” denied involvement in the death and issued a condemnation. That approach pointed the finger at Israel, which was furious because it thought that the US should not have issued such a statement.

Israel was said to be responsible for a November 2011 explosion at a missile base outside Tehran, which also claimed the life of the commander of Iran’s missile programme.

Iran has been trying to hit back. It is suspected of having been behind recent foiled plots against Israeli targets in Thailand, Azerbaijan, Singapore and Georgia.

Indian officials blamed Iran for an attack in New Delhi, where the wife of an Israeli diplomat was injured by a magnetic bomb attached to her car. It was the modus operandi seen in the killings of Iranian scientists.

When Israeli’s military chief says that Mossad is involved in “something... happening somewhere in the world” all the time, one had better believe him.


*Jordan Times