MembersANALYSIS: Mossad Director Yossi Cohen’s Legacy

Yossi Cohen, the already legendary director of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, resigned last week. His four-year term, the standard period for every Mossad director, had expired, and his successor is David Barnea, who had previously served as deputy director in the organization.

Cohen made a big impression in Israel and elsewhere by carrying out a series of spectacular actions that mainly torpedoed and probably set back Iran’s nuclear program for years.

However, the Mossad director was also very successful in other areas, even those not connected to intelligence gathering.

Contacts with Arab countries

For example, his excellent contacts with heads of security services in Sudan, Morocco, and the Gulf states resulted in peace agreements between Israel and those Muslim countries. Without Cohen’s excellent relations with these countries, this normalization in relations between Israel and these states probably would not have happened.

Cohen was also responsible for bringing the first hundreds of thousands of vaccines against the Coronavirus to Israel at...