JERUSALEM – For six months, when Prime Minister Netanyahu announced his appointment, he had only been known as “D”. Today, the letter reveals a name and a face: David Barnea is the new head of the Mossad, the thirteenth since the founding of the state, who in a week will take over from Yossi Cohen, the current director of Israeli secret services.
Barnea, 56, married with 4 children, also known as “Dedi”, has served as Cohen’s deputy since 2019. He served in the elite unit Sayeret Matkal (the same as Netanyahu and his current rival- political ally Naftali Bennett). Masters in business administration in the United States, in 1996 he joined the ranks of the “Institute” par excellence – this is the meaning of the term Mossad. For two years he served as commander of the agency’s Keshet unit, which specializes in tracking and infiltrating targets through electronic systems and eavesdropping. From 2013 to 2019 he headed the Tzomet unit, responsible for recruiting and activating the network of agents globally, with a particular dedication to Lebanon and Iran, the agency’s priorities under the direction of Cohen, to which Barnea will ensure continuity.
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According to Yossi Melman, the newspaper’s intelligence correspondent Haaretz, Barnea will continue in Cohen’s footsteps also in special actions against Hezbollah operations on a global level and in strengthening the “diplomatic” relations of the Mossad which, according to Melman, rely on a network of 150 spy agencies with which he maintains relations, and among these numerous countries with which Israel has not yet established official relations. Like Cohen, Barnea was involved in the secret contacts that recently led to normalization between the Jewish state and several Arab states. One of the dossiers that will occupy him now will be the management of the under-the-table alliance with Qatar, which at this moment is particularly critical in view of the reconstruction of Gaza following yet another conflict between Israel and Hamas.
The Israeli intelligence community speaks of an “excellent appointment”. Several agents who worked with Barnea, cited anonymously by Israeli newspapers, describe him as a “reformer, very modest, correct, with a great spirit of initiative, listening skills and absolutely innovative thinking”.
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Outgoing director Yossi Cohen, 59 years of which 38 spent in the Mossad, is considered one of the two men closest to Netanyahu – the other is former Washington ambassador Ron Dermer – and by many his future political heir, a street which is not excluded will undertake once the two years of expulsion from public office have elapsed as required by Israeli law. Several political commentators give him as a possible future candidate to lead the Likud. In the years of his leadership, some particularly daring operations have been attributed to the Mossad. Among these, in 2018, the theft of 55,000 documents taken overnight from the nuclear archive in Tehran and, on November 27, the murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, considered the father of the Pasdaran nuclear project, murdered near the capital. Iranian, according to some reconstructions, with a remote-controlled automatic machine gun in an operation that would have involved a team of 20 undercover agents, of which none were arrested.
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