An Israel Spymaster's Memoir Sets the Stage for His Move on Netanyahu

In a new self-important memoir, former Mossad boss Yossi Cohen extols his daring exploits and now plots to replace his former patron.

Yossi Cohen in 2023. © AFP 2023 / GALI TIBBON.

Yossi Cohen, the former head of Mossad, does not conceal his longing to supplant Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's next prime minister.

Much like Charles de Gaulle, who bided his time in his country house for 13 years after the end of World War Two, waiting for the French people to summon him to save the republic, Cohen, cloaked in the luxury of a spacious office in a towering Tel Aviv skyscraper, waits for Israelis to call him forth.

And make no mistake—Cohen is unambiguous in his conviction that only he possesses the vision and strength to oust Netanyahu, lead the ruling Likud party, and forge unity from a fractured nation. It’s a unique role for a professional spymaster, at least in the West. George H.W. Bush was a mere placeholder as CIA director before resuming the political career that would lead to the White House. Cohen has been in the intelligence business for the better part of the past four decades.

To further his ambitions, the 64-year-old Cohen has set his memories to print. His forthcoming book, The Sword of Freedom: Israel, Mossad, and the Secret War (from Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins), is set to be unveiled on September 17 at no less than Temple Emanuel, the renowned and distinguished synagogue on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

For American readers, some of the most intriguing parts of the book are about his encounters with Gina Haspel, director of the CIA from mid-2018 to early 2021.

“I found Gina street-smart, tough, intuitive, and informed by the realities of more than three decades in intelligence around the world, much of it spent in the [National] Clandestine Service, the undercover arm of the CIA", writes Cohen, who says that he and Haspel shared several common objectives: hunting down ISIS and Al-Qaeda operatives, monitoring Iran, and developing cutting-edge espionage technologies and tradecraft.

He cites a speech Haspel delivered in 2019 at Auburn University. "I frequently meet with my foreign counterparts, either in Washington or over there, and they are generally very interesting characters, for whom I have great regard and even fondness.” She went on to say, “There is one counterpart who's especially fun to engage in, very James Bond-like. He worked his way up through his service, has great spy stories.” Cohen is certain that she was talking about him.

Rise Up and Kill

At another point he says that he wanted to assassinate General Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp’s Al Quds Force and architect of Tehran’s project to encircle Israel in a "ring of fire" with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and pro-Shiite militias in Syria—as well as designing attacks against U.S. troops in the Middle East. But he writes that Lt. General Aviv Kohavi, Israeli chief of Staff from 2018 to 2023, torpedoed his plan, fearing it would lead to regional war.

According to Cohen, Haspel told him, “Your generals, like ours, don’t like to fight.” But he didn’t give up on the idea, he writes, and flew to Washington to meet her and press his case with other U.S. officials.

"I shared with Gina all the intelligence information we had, and we had it in abundance because we were tracking Soleimani,” he says. In early 2020, Trump decided to do it himself, ordering a Jan. 3 U.S. drone strike that killed the legendary Iranian at the Baghdad airport.

Months later, Cohen recalls, "U.S. President Donald Trump taunted me and said that Israel was supposed to do it with us, but two days earlier they [Israeli leaders] told us: we can't do it.” He adds: “Yet Netanyahu tried to take credit for the assassination." It’s anecdotes like that that make “The Sword of Freedom” a juicy read. And even his critics admit that Cohen was an excellent intelligence officer and manager. All in all, the book is a valuable portrait of the Mossad during the perilous years Cohen climbed up its ranks, eventually reaching the top.

His Secret Service

Cohen was first recruited by Mossad in 1984 and spent two years training to be a case officer, or agent handler. He rose through the ranks as a talented and shrewd operative, recruiting and running Palestinian, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah spies. His skills and talents were appreciated by his superiors, and he was promoted to be head of the department in charge of the "Iranian file.”

But there were serious flaws in his character, senior former Mossad officials have told me. They’ve described him as an arrogant, hedonistic philanderer who befriended Israeli tycoons, showed contempt to his colleagues, and inflated his achievements to anyone who would listen.

In his memoir he boasts that, posing as a Lebanese lawyer who traveled between Beirut and Paris, he managed to recruit an Iranian physicist in Paris who provided him with valuable intelligence. “I was the first to bring Israel information about the centrifuges” that Iran acquired from Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, he says.

But I have also heard other versions, according to which it was in fact American and British intelligence—not the Mossad—who were first to warn of Khan’s activities in Iran. (See, for example, former senior CIA officer James Lawler’s account of taking down the Khan network.)

Another incident revolves around Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian nuclear scientist who led its military program. Cohen writes that before he took charge in 2016 both the Mossad and the IDF had written off Fakhrizadeh as “a poor manager not worth paying attention to” as a target for recruitment or elimination. Only when he quarterbacked the Mossad’s capture of Iran’s nuclear records archive in 2018 did it become clear that Fakhrizadeh was “sophisticated and intelligent,” he writes. But that’s a gross exaggeration. Fakhrizadeh’s importance and centrality were well known among the intelligence agencies of not just Israel but the West for at least a decade before the Mossad stole the archives from a secret Tehran warehouse. About two and a half years later, in a daring, AI-based, and imaginative operation under Cohen’s command, Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in an operation attributed to the Mossad.

Room at the Top?

Cohen was considered to be very close to Netanyahu, for whom he served as national security adviser for three years starting in 2013, and his wife Sarah, known to have a great influence on her husband. After Hamas’s murderous, surprise invasion of Israel and hostage taking in October 2023, however, Cohen began blaming Netanyahu for the debacle and called for his resignation, all the while angling to replace his onetime benefactor.

“I am the only one who can unite Israel, lead the Likud party and replace” him, he claims. Others take issue with that.

It’s worth noting here that, in his memoir, Cohen conveys his fondness for Britain and its intelligence system. He quotes John le Carré, the literary master of the intelligence officer’s psyche, and reveals that he went so far as to adopt “Klan,” the name of a character from a British television thriller series, as an operational pseudonym.

Perhaps Cohen would do well to also learn from another British source—Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. The wonderful novella tells the story of two English adventurers who present themselves as gods come to save the tribes of a fictional country resembling Afghanistan. They win over the locals, and one of them is crowned king—until they are revealed as frauds and executed.

Kipling’s story is, among other things, a parable about arrogance leading to downfall, and about greed and disrespect for others that end in self-destruction. Cohen should beware.