Operation Harpoon Together with
Shurat HaDin, Mossad started Operation Harpoon, for "destroying terrorists' money networks".
Africa Egypt • Provision of intelligence for the cutting of communications between Port Said and Cairo in 1956. • Mossad spy
Wolfgang Lotz, holding West German citizenship, infiltrated Egypt in 1957, and gathered intelligence on Egyptian missile sites, military installations, and industries. He also composed a list of German rocket scientists working for the Egyptian government, and sent some of them letter bombs. After the East German head of state made a state visit to Egypt, the Egyptian government detained thirty West German citizens as a goodwill gesture. Lotz, assuming that he had been discovered, confessed to his
Cold War espionage activities. • After a tense confrontation with
CIA Tel Aviv station chief John Hadden on May 25, 1967, who warned that the United States would help defend Egypt if Israel launched a surprise attack, Mossad director
Meir Amit flew to Washington, D.C. to meet with U.S. Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara and reported back to the Israeli cabinet that the United States had given Israel "a flickering green light" to attack. • Provision of intelligence on the
Egyptian Air Force for
Operation Focus, the opening air strike of the
Six-Day War. •
Operation Bulmus 6 – Intelligence assistance in the Commando Assault on
Green Island, Egypt during the
War of Attrition. •
Operation Damocles – A campaign of assassination and intimidation against
German rocket scientists employed by
Egypt in building missiles. • A letter bomb sent to the Heliopolis rocket factory killed five Egyptian workers, allegedly sent by
Otto Skorzeny on behalf of the Mossad. • Heinz Krug, 49, the chief of a Munich company supplying military hardware to Egypt disappeared in September 1962 and is believed to have been assassinated by
Otto Skorzeny on behalf of the Mossad. In early 1991, two Mossad operatives infiltrated the Moroccan port of
Casablanca and planted a tracking device on the freighter
Al-Yarmouk, which was carrying a cargo of
North Korean missiles bound for
Syria. The ship was to be sunk by the
Israeli Air Force, but the mission was later called off by Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin. The alleged killing of
Salah Khalaf, head of intelligence of the
PLO and second in command of Fatah behind
Yasser Arafat, in 1991. The 2016 alleged killing of
Hamas operative
Mohamed Zouari in
Sfax. Known to Israel's security echelon as "The Engineer", he was a Hamas-affiliated engineer who was believed to be constructing drones for the group. He was shot at close range.
Uganda For
Operation Entebbe in 1976, Mossad provided intelligence regarding
Entebbe International Airport and extensively interviewed hostages who had been released.
South Africa In the late 1990s, after Mossad was tipped off to the presence of two
Iranian agents in
Johannesburg on a mission to procure advanced weapons systems from
Denel, a Mossad agent was deployed, and met up with a local Jewish contact. Posing as South African intelligence, they abducted the Iranians, drove them to a warehouse, and beat and intimidated them before forcing them to leave the country.
Sudan After the
1994 AMIA bombing, the largest bombing in Argentine history, Mossad began gathering intelligence for a raid by Israeli Special Forces on the Iranian embassy in
Khartoum as retaliation. The operation was called off due to fears that another attack against worldwide Jewish communities might take place as revenge. Mossad also assisted in
Operation Moses, the evacuation of
Ethiopian Jews to Israel from a famine-ridden region of Sudan in 1984, also maintaining a relationship with the Ethiopian government.
Americas Argentina In 1960, Mossad discovered that the
Nazi leader
Adolf Eichmann was in
Argentina. A team of five Mossad agents led by Shimon Ben Aharon slipped into Argentina and, through
surveillance, confirmed that he had been living there under the name of Ricardo Klement. He was abducted on May 11, 1960, and taken to a hideout. He was subsequently smuggled to Israel, where he was
tried and executed. Argentina protested what it considered as a violation of its sovereignty, and the
United Nations Security Council noted that "repetition of acts such as [this] would involve a breach of the principles upon which international order is founded, creating an atmosphere of insecurity and distrust incompatible with the preservation of peace" while also acknowledging that "Eichmann should be brought to appropriate justice for the crimes of which he is accused" and that "this resolution should in no way be interpreted as condoning the odious crimes of which Eichmann is accused." Mossad abandoned a second operation, intended to capture
Josef Mengele.
United States Shortly after
Rafael Eitan visited
Inslaw in February 1983, the software PROMIS was allegedly stolen and copied by the
United States Department of Justice, which triggered years of litigation. Earl W. Brian and
Edwin Meese, two men with close ties to
Reagan, are said to have sold or given the software to over 80 countries, with a "back door" built into the program, which allowed for espionage. Two versions of the software are said to have been sold: an American one for the CIA and an Israeli one for the Mossad. The software with the built-in back door is said to have reached the
KGB via the British publisher
Robert Maxwell, a Mossad agent. Maxwell was also able to sell the bugged Israeli version of PROMIS to
Sandia National Laboratories and
Los Alamos National Laboratory, two of the most important nuclear research and national security facilities in the United States. He is said to have been assisted by
John Tower. After the 1987 arrest of Israeli spy
Jonathan Pollard, wiretaps pointed to a high-level Israeli spy in the U.S. known as "Mega". Mega may have been a group of people (possibly the
Mega/Study Group, alleged to be connected to Israeli intelligence). During the 1990s, Mossad discovered that a
Hezbollah agent was operating inside the United States to procure materials needed to manufacture
IEDs and other weapons. In a joint operation with U.S. intelligence, the Hezbollah agent was kept under surveillance in hopes that his communications would expose additional Hezbollah operatives. The agent was eventually arrested. Mossad informed the
FBI and CIA in August 2001 that, based on its intelligence, as many as 200 terrorists were slipping into the United States and planning "a major assault on the United States". The Israeli intelligence agency cautioned the FBI that it had picked up indications of a "large-scale target" in the United States and that Americans would be "very vulnerable". However, "It is not known whether U.S. authorities thought the warning to be credible, or whether it contained enough details to allow counter-terrorism teams to come up with a response." A month later, terrorists struck at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
in the largest terrorist attack in history. The US journalists
Dylan Howard, Melissa Cronin and James Robertson linked the Mossad to American sex offender
Jeffrey Epstein in their book
Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales. They relied for the most part on the former Israeli intelligence officer
Ari Ben-Menashe. According to him, Epstein's activities as a spy served to gather compromising material on powerful people in order to
blackmail them. There is also a possible connection to the Mossad via
Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father Robert Maxwell is said to have had contacts with the Mossad. Epstein's victim
Virginia Giuffre also alleged Epstein to be an intelligence asset, linking on
Twitter to a
Reddit page, that alleged Epstein being a spy, running a blackmail operation.
Uruguay In 1965, the Mossad assassinated
Latvian Nazi collaborator
Herberts Cukurs.
Asia Central Asia and the Middle East A report published on the Israeli military's official website in February 2014 said that Middle Eastern countries that cooperate with Israel (Mossad) are the
United Arab Emirates,
Afghanistan, the
Republic of Azerbaijan,
Bahrain and
Saudi Arabia. The report claimed that Bahrain has been providing Israel with intelligence on
Iranian and Palestinian organizations. The report also highlights the growing secret cooperation with Saudi Arabia, claiming that Mossad has been in direct contact with Saudi intelligence about Iran's nuclear energy program.
Iran Prior to the
Iranian Revolution of 1978–79,
SAVAK (Organization of National Security and Information), the Iranian
secret police and intelligence service was created under the guidance of United States and Israeli intelligence officers in 1957. After security relations between the United States and Iran grew more distant in the early 1960s which led the
CIA training team to leave
Iran, Mossad became increasingly active in Iran, "training SAVAK personnel and carrying out a broad variety of joint operations with SAVAK." A US intelligence official told
The Washington Post that Israel orchestrated the defection of Iranian general
Ali Reza Askari on February 7, 2007. This has been denied by Israeli spokesman
Mark Regev.
The Sunday Times reported that Askari had been a Mossad asset since 2003, and left only when his cover was about to be blown.
Le Figaro claimed that Mossad was possibly behind a blast at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Imam Ali military base, on October 12, 2011. The explosion at the base killed 18 and injured 10 others. Among the dead was also general
Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, who served as the commander of the Revolutionary Guards' missile program and was a crucial figure in building Iran's long-range missile program. The base is believed to store long-range missiles, including the
Shahab-3, and also has hangars. It is one of Iran's most secure military bases. Mossad has been accused of assassinating
Masoud Alimohammadi,
Ardeshir Hosseinpour,
Majid Shahriari,
Darioush Rezaeinejad and
Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan; scientists involved in the
Iranian nuclear program. It is also suspected of being behind the attempted assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist
Fereydoon Abbasi.
Meir Dagan, who served as Director of Mossad from 2002 until 2009, while not taking credit for the assassinations, praised them in an interview with a journalist, saying "the removal of important brains" from the Iranian nuclear project had achieved so-called "white
defections", frightening other Iranian nuclear scientists into requesting that they be transferred to civilian projects. Israel shared the information with its allies, including European countries and the United States. On August 7, 2020,
al-Qaeda's deputy leader
Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah and his daughter were shot to death by two Mossad agents in Tehran. In 2024, former Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed that Iran's intelligence service had established a unit to counter Mossad operations, only for its leader to have been exposed as a Mossad agent in 2021. He also claimed that around 20 Iranian operatives had been acting as
double agents, supplying intelligence to Israel.
Iraq in Hatzerim Assistance in the defection and rescuing of the family of
Munir Redfa, an
Iraqi pilot who defected and flew his
MiG-21 to Israel in 1966: "
Operation Diamond". Redfa's entire family was also successfully smuggled from Iraq to Israel. Previously unknown information about the MiG-21 was subsequently shared with the United States. Operation Sphinx On September 25, 1997, Mashal was injected in the ear with a toxin (thought to have been a derivative of the synthetic opiate
Fentanyl called Levofentanyl). Jordanian authorities apprehended two Mossad agents posing as Canadian tourists and trapped a further six in the Israeli embassy. In exchange for their release, an Israeli physician had to fly to Amman and deliver an antidote for Mashal. The fallout from the failed killing eventually led to the release of
Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of the Hamas movement, and scores of Hamas prisoners. Netanyahu flew into Amman on September 29 to apologize personally to King Hussein, but he was instead met by the King's brother, Crown Prince Hassan. The killing of the Palestinian writer and leading
PFLP member
Ghassan Kanafani by a car bomb in 1972. The provision of intelligence and operational assistance in the 1973
Operation Spring of Youth special forces raid on
Beirut. The
targeted killing of
Ali Hassan Salameh, the leader of
Black September, on January 22, 1979, in Beirut by a car bomb. Providing intelligence for the killing of
Abbas al-Musawi, secretary general of Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon in 1992. Allegedly killed Ali Hussein Saleh, member of Hezbollah, in Beirut in 2003. Allegedly killed
Ghaleb Awwali, a senior Hezbollah official, in Beirut in 2004. Allegedly killed
Mahmoud al-Majzoub, a leader of
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in Sidon in 2006.
Palestine Caesarea tried for many years to assassinate
Palestine Liberation Organization leader
Yasser Arafat, a job later tasked by Israel's
Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon to a military
special ops task force code named "Salt Fish", later renamed "Operation Goldfish", specially created for the job of assassinating Arafat, with Ronan Bergman suggesting that Israel used
radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat.
Syria Eli Cohen infiltrated the highest echelons of the Syrian government, was a close friend of the Syrian President, and was considered for the post of Minister of Defense. He gave his handlers a complete plan of the Syrian defenses on the
Golan Heights, the Syrian Armed Forces order of battle, and a complete list of the Syrian military's weapons inventory. He also ordered the planting of trees by every Syrian fortified position under the pretext of shading soldiers, but the trees actually served as targeting markers for the Israel Defense Forces. He was discovered by Syrian and Soviet intelligence, tried in secret, and executed publicly in 1965. His information played a crucial role during the
Six-Day War. On April 1, 1978, 12 Syrian military and secret service personnel were killed by a booby trapped sophisticated Israeli listening device planted on the main telephone cable between Damascus and Jordan. The alleged death of General Anatoly Kuntsevich, who from the late 1990s was suspected of aiding the Syrians in the manufacture of VX nerve-gas, in exchange for which he was paid huge amounts of money by the Syrian government. On April 3, 2002, Kuntsevich died mysteriously during a plane journey, amid allegations that Mossad was responsible. The uncovering of a nuclear reactor being built in Syria as a result of surveillance by Mossad of Syrian officials working under the command of
Muhammad Suleiman. As a result, the Syrian nuclear reactor was destroyed by Israeli Air Forces in September 2007 (see
Operation Orchard). On July 25, 2007, the al-Safir chemical weapons depot exploded, killing 15 Syrian personnel as well as 10 Iranian engineers. Syrian investigations blamed Israeli sabotage. The decomposed body of
Yuri Ivanov, the deputy head of the
GRU, Russia's foreign military intelligence service, was found on a Turkish beach in early August 2010, amid allegations that Mossad may have played a role. He had disappeared while staying near Latakia, Syria. Mossad was accused of being behind the assassination of Aziz Asbar, a senior Syrian scientist responsible for developing long-range rockets and chemical weapons programs. He was killed in a car bomb in
Masyaf on August 5, 2018.
United Arab Emirates Mossad is suspected of killing
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas military commander, in January 2010 at
Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The team which carried out the killing is estimated, on the basis of
CCTV and other evidence, to have consisted of at least 26 agents traveling on bogus passports. The operatives entered al-Mabhouh's hotel room, where Mabhouh was subjected to electric shocks and interrogated. The door to his room was reported to have been locked from the inside. Although the UAE police and Hamas have declared Israel responsible for the killing, no direct evidence linking Mossad to the crime has been found. The agents' bogus passports included six British passports, cloned from those of real British nationals resident in Israel and suspected by Dubai, five Irish passports, apparently forged from those of living individuals, forged Australian passports that raised fears of reprisal against innocent victims of identity theft, a genuine German passport and a false French passport. Emirati police say they have fingerprint and DNA evidence of some of the attackers, as well as retinal scans of 11 suspects recorded at Dubai airport. Dubai's police chief has said "I am now completely sure that it was Mossad," adding: "I have presented the (Dubai) prosecutor with a request for the arrest of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu and the head of Mossad," for the murder.
South Asia and East/Southeast Asia India A
Rediff story in 2003 revealed that Mossad had clandestine links with the
Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India's external intelligence agency. When R&AW was founded in September 1968 by
Rameshwar Nath Kao, he was advised by then Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi to cultivate links with Mossad. This was suggested as a countermeasure to military links between that of Pakistan and China, as well as with
North Korea. Israel was also concerned that Pakistani army officers were training Libyans and Iranians in handling Chinese and North Korean military equipment. Pakistan believed intelligence relations between India and Israel threatened Pakistani security. When young Israeli tourists began visiting the Kashmir valley in the early 1990s, Pakistan suspected they were disguised Israeli army officers there to help Indian security forces with anti-terrorism operations. Israeli tourists were attacked, with one slain and another kidnapped. Pressure from the
Kashmiri Muslim diaspora in the United States led to his release. Kashmiri Muslims feared that the attacks could isolate the American Jewish community, and result in them lobbying the US government against Kashmiri separatist groups. In November 2015,
The Times of India reported that agents from Mossad and MI5 were protecting Prime Minister
Narendra Modi during his visit to Turkey. Modi was on a state visit to the United Kingdom and was scheduled to attend the 2015 G-20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey. The paper reported that the agents had been called in to provide additional cover to Modi's security detail, composed of India's Special Protection Group and secret agents from RAW and IB, in wake of the
November 2015 Paris attacks.
Malaysia In 2018, Hamas and the family of Malaysian-based Hamas engineer and university lecturer
Fadi Mohammad al-Batsh have accused the Mossad of assassinating him. In April 2018, al-Batsh was shot dead by two men on a motorbike in
Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister
Ahmad Zahid Hamidi described the suspects as Europeans with links to an unidentified foreign intelligence agency. In response,
Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman denied that Mossad was involved in al-Batsh's assassination and suggested that his death was the result of an internal Palestinian dispute. Hamas also issued a statement describing Batsh as a "martyr" and "distinguished scientist who has widely contributed to the energy sector." In October 2022, the
New Straits Times and
Al Jazeera Arabic reported that several Malaysian Mossad operatives had attempted to kidnap two Palestinian computer experts in Kuala Lumpur in late September 2022. Though they managed to kidnap one of the men, the second escaped and alerted
Malaysian police. The operatives allegedly assisted Mossad officials via video call in interrogating and beating their captive, who was questioned about the computer programming and software capabilities of Hamas and its
Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. With the aid of the second Palestinian man, Malaysian police were able to track down the car registration plates to a house where the alleged kidnappers were arrested and the man was freed. According to Al Jazeera Arabic, a "well-informed Malaysian source" claimed that an investigation had uncovered an undercover 11-member Mossad cell in Malaysia that was involved in spying on important sites including airports, government electronic companies, and tracking down Palestinian activists. This Mossad cell allegedly consisted of Malaysian nationals who received training in Europe.
North Korea Mossad may have been involved in the
2004 explosion of Ryongchon, where several Syrian nuclear scientists working on the Syrian and Iranian nuclear-weapons programs were killed and a train carrying fissionable material was destroyed.
Pakistan In a September 2003 news article, it was alleged by Rediff News that General
Pervez Musharraf, the then-president of Pakistan, decided to establish a clandestine relationship between Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Mossad via officers of the two services posted at their embassies in Washington, DC.
Sri Lanka Mossad had helped both
Sri Lanka and the
Eelam. Mossad agent
Victor Ostrovsky claimed that Mossad trained both the
Sri Lankan armed forces and the LTTE while keeping the two separated.
Ravi Jayewardene, head of the
STF, had toured Israel in 1984 and took inspiration from the
Israeli settlements in the
Palestinian Territories to form armed Sinhalese settlements in strategic border areas of the Tamil-dominant Northern and Eastern provinces.
Europe Austria In 1954, after Mossad received intelligence that an Israeli officer who had access to classified military technologies, Major Alexander Israel, had approached Egyptian officials in Europe and offered to sell Israeli military secrets and documents, a team of Mossad and Shin Bet officers was quickly sent to Europe to locate him and abduct him, and located him in
Vienna. The mission was code-named
Operation Bren. A female agent managed to lure him to a meeting through a
honey trap operation, and he was subsequently kidnapped, sedated, and flown to Israel aboard a waiting Israeli military plane. However, the plane had to make several refueling stops, and he was given an additional dose of sedatives each time, which ultimately caused him to overdose, killing him. Upon arrival in Israel, after it was discovered that he was dead, he was given a
burial at sea, and the case remained highly classified for decades. Mossad gathered information on Austrian politician
Jörg Haider using a
mole.
Belgium Mossad is alleged to be responsible for the killing of Canadian engineer and
ballistics expert
Gerald Bull on March 22, 1990. He was shot multiple times in the head outside his
Brussels apartment.
Cyprus The killing of
Hussein Al Bashir in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1973 in relation to the
Munich massacre.
France Mossad allegedly assisted
Morocco's domestic security service in the disappearance of dissident politician
Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965.
Cherbourg Project – Operation Noa, the 1969 smuggling of five
Sa'ar 3-class missile boats out of Cherbourg. The killing of
Mahmoud Hamshari, alleged coordinator of the Munich massacre, with an exploding telephone in his Paris apartment in 1972. most French officials discount the claim. The reactor itself was subsequently destroyed by
an Israeli air strike in 1981. The alleged killing of
Zuheir Mohsen, a pro-Syrian member of the
PLO, in 1979. The killing of
Yehia El-Mashad, the head of the Iraq nuclear weapons program, in 1980. The alleged killing of
Atef Bseiso, a top intelligence officer of the PLO, in Paris in 1992. French police believe that a team of assassins followed Atef Bseiso from Berlin, where that first team connected with another team to close in on him in front of a Left Bank hotel, where he received three head-shots at point blank range.
Germany Operation Plumbat (1968) was an operation by
Lekem-Mossad to further Israel's nuclear program. The German freighter "Scheersberg A" disappeared on its way from
Antwerp to
Genoa along with its cargo of 200 tons of
yellowcake, after supposedly being transferred to an Israeli ship. The sending of
letter bombs during the
assassination campaign. Some of these attacks were not fatal. Their purpose might not have been to kill the receiver. A Mossad letter bomb led to fugitive Nazi war-criminal
Alois Brunner's losing four fingers from his right hand in 1980. Years earlier, on 25 September 1963, the Mossad tried to kill SS-
Hauptsturmführer and
concentration camp doctor Hans Eisele with a mail bomb. However, the bomb detonated early, instead killing a postal worker. The alleged targeted killing of
Wadie Haddad, using poisoned chocolate. Haddad died on 28 March 1978, in the
German Democratic Republic supposedly from leukemia. According to the book
Striking Back, published by Aharon Klein in 2006, Haddad was eliminated by Mossad, which had sent the
chocolate-loving Haddad
Belgian chocolates coated with a slow-acting and undetectable poison which caused him to die several months later. "It took him a few long months to die", Klein said in the book. Mossad discovered that
Hezbollah had recruited a German national named Steven Smyrek, and that he was travelling to Israel. In an operation conducted by Mossad, the
CIA, the German Internal Security agency
Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), and the Israeli Internal Security agency
Shin Bet, Smyrek was kept under constant surveillance, and arrested as soon as he landed in Israel.
Greece The killing of Zaiad Muchasi,
Fatah representative to
Cyprus, by an explosion in his Athens hotel room in 1973. Mossad is reported to have a working relationship with the Irish
military intelligence service and has previously tipped the Irish authorities off about arms shipments from the Middle East to Ireland for use by
dissident republican militants, resulting in their interception and arrests.
Italy The killing of
Wael Zwaiter, thought to be a member of
Black September. In 1986, Mossad used an undercover agent to lure
Mordechai Vanunu, in a
honey trap style operation, from the United Kingdom to Italy. There, he was abducted and returned to Israel, where he was tried and found guilty of
treason because of his role in exposing
Israel's nuclear weapons programme.
Norway On July 21, 1973,
Ahmed Bouchiki, a
Moroccan waiter in
Lillehammer, Norway, was killed by Mossad agents. He had been mistaken for
Ali Hassan Salameh, one of the leaders of
Black September, the
Palestinian group responsible for the
Munich massacre, who had been given shelter in Norway. Mossad agents had used fake
Canadian passports, which angered the Canadian government. Six Mossad agents were arrested, and the incident came to be known as the
Lillehammer affair. Israel subsequently paid compensation to Bouchiki's family.
Serbia Israel provided weapons to the Serbs during the
Bosnian War, possibly due to the pro-Serbian bias of the government of the time, or possibly in exchange for the immigration of the Sarajevo Jewish community to Israel. The Mossad allegedly was responsible for providing Serbian groups with arms.
Switzerland According to secret
CIA and
US State Department documents discovered by the Iranian students who took over the
U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979: In February 1998, five Mossad agents were caught wiretapping the home of a
Hezbollah agent in a
Bern suburb. Four agents were freed, but the fifth was tried, found guilty, sentenced to one year in prison, and following his release was banned from entering Switzerland for five years.
Soviet Union Mossad was involved in outreach to
refuseniks in the Soviet Union during the
crackdown on
Soviet Jews in the period between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mossad helped establish contact with Refuseniks in the USSR, and helped them acquire Jewish religious items, banned by the Soviet government, in addition to passing communications into and out of the USSR. Many rabbinical students from Western countries travelled to the Soviet Union as part of this program in order to establish and maintain contact with refuseniks.
United Kingdom In 1984, Mossad agents were caught attempting to
kidnap Nigerian politician
Umaru Dikko from London. On July 4, 1984, customs officials at
Stansted airport discovered Dikko in a crate that was about to be flown to Nigeria. Agents Alexander Barak, Felix Abithol, and anesthetist Dr. Levi-Arie Shapiro were given prison sentences of between ten and fourteen years. In 1986, a bag containing eight forged British passports was discovered in a telephone booth in
West Germany. The passports had been the work of Mossad and were intended for the Israeli Embassy in London for use in covert operations. The British government, furious, demanded that Israel give a promise not forge its passports again, which was obtained. On June 15, 1988, following the trial and conviction of a Palestinian post-graduate student, Ismail Sowan, who was studying at
Hull University, two Mossad agents were expelled from the UK. Sowan was found in possession of a large arms cache and sentenced to eleven years in prison. During his trial, it was revealed that he had been employed by Mossad for ten years. Mossad agents Arie Regev and Jacob Barad were Sowan's controllers. They had failed to inform
MI6 of Sowan's activities and that they were aware that a Palestinian (Abd al-Rahim Mustapha – who was believed to be involved in the assassination of
Naji al-Ali) had entered the country illegally. The Mossad station in the UK remained closed until the
1994 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in London.
Ukraine In February 2011, a Palestinian engineer,
Dirar Abu Seesi, was allegedly pulled off a train by Mossad agents en route to the capital
Kyiv from
Kharkiv. He had been planning to apply for Ukrainian citizenship, and reappeared in an Israeli jail only three weeks after the incident.
Oceania New Zealand In July 2004, New Zealand imposed
diplomatic sanctions on Israel over an
incident in which two Australia-based Israelis, Uriel Kelman and Eli Cara, who were allegedly working for Mossad, attempted to fraudulently obtain
New Zealand passports by claiming the identity of a severely disabled man. Israeli Foreign Minister
Silvan Shalom later apologized to New Zealand for their actions. New Zealand cancelled several other passports believed to have been obtained by Israeli agents. Both Kelman and Cara served half of their six-month sentences and, upon release, were
deported to Israel. Two others, an Israeli, Ze'ev Barkan, and a New Zealander, David Reznick, are believed to have been the third and fourth men involved in the passport affair but they both managed to leave New Zealand before being apprehended.
International Criminal Court According to
The Guardian, Mossad reportedly conducted an effort to derail the investigation by the
International Criminal Court (ICC) of Israeli actions in the
Palestinian territories.
Fatou Bensouda,
Prosecutor of the ICC, alleged that she and her family were victims of a campaign by Mossad director
Yossi Cohen to dissuade her from opening prosecution of Israeli officials for
war crimes. The reportage claimed that between late 2019 and early 2021, there were at least three encounters between Cohen and Bensouda, in which Cohen attempted at first to get Bensouda to co-operate with Israel and later to persuade her not to pursue a full investigation. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to the Israel investigation by accusing the ICC of "only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes" and Bensouda of having "engaged in corrupt acts for her personal benefit". ==In popular culture==