Stories of Ukrainian Jews. MOSSAD Directors
If you decide to visit the Mossad website, be prepared to see a warning: “We strongly recommend that you consider how safe it will be for you to contact us.”
Despite such an alarming start to the acquaintance, anyone can become a member of the Israeli intelligence service team, regardless of religion, profession or nationality. Subject, of course, to a careful selection. Current or future agents could theoretically describe the process of selection, but in practice this is hardly possible, otherwise they would not have passed through the qualification sieve of the recruiting department.
At the same time, the Mossad does not experience a shortage of people willing to cooperate. Once in 2000, the secret service placed an advertisement in Israeli newspapers for the recruitment of agents. Applications were received from thousands of people, but only one was accepted.
The number of employees of the Institute (translation of the word “Mossad” from Hebrew) is unknown. According to one version, about 7,000 agents work for Israeli intelligence worldwide. If this is true, then it is second in size only to the CIA. The budget for the maintenance of the Mossad is also classified. Until recently, even the name of its director was not disclosed and was known only to the prime minister, to whom intelligence service reports directly.
Its first declassified director in 1996 was Danny Yatom, whose parents had emigrated from the Chernivtsi region. Over time, all the directors of the Mossad since its founding in 1951 have become known. It turned out that before Yatom, one of the most secret intelligence agencies in the world was also headed by Meir Amit, whose parents left for Palestine from Kharkiv, and Yitzhak Hofi, the son of immigrants from Odessa. The tenth director of the Mossad from 2002 to 2011 was a native of Kherson, Meir Dagan.
In total, immigrants from Ukraine had been the chief Israeli intelligence officers for 24 years. During this time, under their leadership, many operations had been carried out that largely changed the course of events both within Israel itself and far beyond its borders. Some of them are described in the book “Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service”, published recently in the “Jewish Library” series, founded by the Boris Lozhkin Charitable Foundation, the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress and the Charitable Foundation of the Family of Yuriy Lutsenko . At the same time, most of the Mossad’s work still stays top secret.
