Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen has disclosed new details about some of Israel’s most secretive operations and sharply criticized the intelligence failure that led to the October 7 massacre. In a wide-ranging interview with the French magazine Le Point, Cohen discussed the pager operation against Hezbollah, sabotage activities in Iran, the theft of Iran’s nuclear archive from Tehran, and his working relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Cohen, who headed Mossad from 2016 to 2021, said he was involved in the long-term planning of the pager operation. He said the devices were designed to signal an encrypted message that could be opened only by pressing two buttons at once, forcing users to hold them with both hands near the face or chest and increasing the effect. He said Hezbollah had used the radios for years, making them a major internal security weakness. Cohen also said his first meeting with Putin came while he was accompanying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as national security adviser, and that Putin immediately showed he knew Cohen’s background. Cohen described an instant professional understanding and said he later viewed Putin as a colleague because of the Russian president’s KGB past.
On espionage, Cohen defended it as moral when it serves the state. He said intelligence officers sometimes must lie, mislead, play roles, and build cover stories, adding, “Espionage is not immoral. In my case, it was done for the state.” Turning to October 7, he criticized the IDF, Shin Bet, and Military Intelligence, saying the failure did not fully surprise him because he had warned for years about the deterioration of Israel’s intelligence capability in Gaza. He said that as national security adviser and later Mossad chief, he had asked to take responsibility for Gaza, or at least part of the intelligence work there, and argued that since the 2005 disengagement Israel’s ability to operate inside the Strip had steadily weakened because of a shortage of reliable human sources.
Cohen also said the 2018 extraction of Iran’s nuclear archive was “one of the most important missions.” He said that after the July 2015 nuclear deal, Mossad learned Mohsen Fakhrizadeh had gathered documents from across Iran and stored them in one secret location. After he became Mossad chief in January 2016, he ordered the agency to identify the site and bring the documents, disks, and source material to Israel. The archive was removed in January 2018, and Cohen said it exposed previously unknown nuclear sites, enrichment activity outside declared facilities, and information on enriched uranium. He said the idea was his, not Netanyahu’s, and that Donald Trump relied in part on those files when leaving the nuclear deal in May 2018.
Cohen further described Mossad penetration of Iranian supply chains through shell companies or acquired firms that sold Iran sensitive equipment. Once ordered, the equipment could be altered, sabotaged, packed with explosives, and activated at a chosen time. He compared that method to the pager operation and said that in an April 2021 incident at the Natanz nuclear facility, a system linked to centrifuge operations was destroyed after Mossad, he claimed, sold the Iranians the system with explosives embedded in advance. Cohen said he personally authorized the charge, and that the operation, carried out with one of Israel’s leading security companies, caused major damage. He concluded that Israel’s and the United States’ operations, including covert sabotage, agents inside Iran, and the archive theft, prevented Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
