Proclaiming Justice with Laurie Cardoza Moore

Michael Bar-Zohar: It turned out that Israel had organized an entire operation, including a huge machine gun which was imported piece by piece secretly into Iran, placed on a pickup with a connection to the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv, the best sniper of the Mossad was holding the trigger.

The trigger activated the machine gun in Iran. They saw his car approaching and identified exactly the face of Fakhrizadeh. The guy pulled the trigger. Five bullets. His wife was sitting beside him and was not touched. Nothing happened to her.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I'm Laurie Cardoza Moore and this is the Proclaiming Justice Podcast.

Professor, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a great honor to have you. This is a very intriguing topic to talk about. Of course, the Mossad is getting a lot of media play in the United States right now. I wanted to just ask if you could share a little bit about the history of the Mossad, just to put this conversation in context.

Michael Bar-Zohar: The history was very interesting because, on one hand, Israel was a small country with about a million inhabitants. Then something happened in Russia, in Moscow. That was the beginning. Khrushchev was then the leader of the Soviet Union. He made a top-secret speech in front of hundreds of members of the party. He made a speech about the crimes of Stalin, which was something unbelievable. The communists there in the Kremlin in Moscow were stunned.

When we heard about it in the West, all the secret services wanted to get hold of it. The CIA announced a price of $1 million at the time, 1956. That was a lot of money then, and nobody succeeded. One day, a special emissary came from Jerusalem to Washington, bringing the speech of Khrushchev, the original speech of Khrushchev.

They had gotten it because of a love story between a Jewish press reporter and the secretary of the head of the Communist Party in Poland. The Israelis got it, and suddenly the Americans said, "Hey, these guys know quite a lot of things. We did not succeed to do this, and they succeeded."

Then we had a friend in the CIA who was Jim Angleton. We called him Jim. He was one of the founders of the CIA, and he was in love with Israel. He became a friend at a very top position and he kept coming to Israel, living in the apartment of the Israeli head of the Mossad and doing everything possible to help Israel for many years. We knew that Jim was a friend, and it continued for many long years.

Later, there was a kind of unbelievable friendship between Mike Pompeo, who was the head of the CIA and later Secretary of State, and the head of the Israeli Mossad, Yossi Cohen. They became bosom buddies. Even in one case, we carried out an operation in Iran and some of our agents were stuck and could not leave. There was a danger for their lives.

Pompeo writes in his memoirs that he was on his way to fly to a meeting in Europe when he got a phone call from Yossi Cohen. Yossi told him, "Listen Mike, I have a few guys who have to get out." Pompeo said, "Don't worry, it's okay." Within 24 hours, they were out. Then Pompeo came with his wife to Israel. The head of the Israeli Mossad rented a house close to the ocean, and the four of them spent about a week or two together just vacationing.

They worked together very strongly. When America wanted to get rid of one of the worst terrorists, Qasem Soleimani, who was the head of the Quds Force of the Guardians of the Republic, first Israel was going to do it. At the last moment, Netanyahu changed his mind because of the pressure of the army. Trump was very mad at him. But Cohen said to Pompeo, "Don't you worry, all the basic information and all the help, we shall participate."

That is the way the CIA assassinated Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, outside the airport, with the help of the Israelis. There were many joint operations between the two services, starting with this moment when this tiny country brought the Khrushchev speech and later in quite a few operations which they did together. For instance, until today, the CIA and the Mossad are working very closely together against the Iranian nuclear project.

A few years ago, the analysts of both services succeeded to create a new virus called Stuxnet. Stuxnet was introduced into the computers of Natanz and the other bases of the nuclear project. When they activated it, it caused tremendous damage to all this nuclear project, until today, some say.

The CIA had good relations with the secret service of Holland. Holland had a kind of free-will agent in Iran. It was a Dutch engineer named Erik van Sabben, and he was working once in a while for the Dutch services. The Dutch told him, "Listen, you must introduce this virus into the Iranian network of computers."

Van Sabben did it because he was going once in a while as the Iranians were asking him for some small jobs at the computers. Unfortunately, Sabben escaped from Iran after that happened, and two weeks later, he died in the Emirates in a very strange traffic accident. One of the heads of the Dutch service said he paid a heavy price. Sometimes it's a very dangerous business, especially with Iran.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: What do you think is one of the most important initiatives or campaigns that the Mossad was part of? Was it the most recent? Watching what was transpiring in the West in the United States and seeing the involvement of our government, what do you think was the most strategic initiative of the Mossad in all their years?

Michael Bar-Zohar: I think there were three important missions. One was the theft of the secret nuclear archives of Iran. When Iran signed this agreement with Europe and the States, the Iranians wanted to hide their nuclear archives. Where shall they hide it? They couldn't hide it in a university because people were coming to every room and checking. They couldn't hide it in a military base because the observers of the anti-nuclear agency in Vienna were everywhere.

So, they decided to hide it in a kind of old, decrepit building somewhere in an unimportant neighborhood of Tehran. They said nobody would look for it there. They took an old warehouse and they put inside huge safes full with all the documents and all the CDs of the nuclear project of Iran, which proved what Iran was denying. They were denying that they wanted to obtain an atom bomb.

One night in January 2018, a group of Israeli agents penetrated into this building. In all of Iran, this was so secret that only five Iranians knew where the archives were hidden. The Mossad penetrated into the building. They brought with them torches which reached 2,200 degrees centigrade. They broke into the safes and they took out of them 50,000 documents and 35,000 CDs.

They put about half a ton of documents into several trucks, which succeeded to cross the border. They say it was to Azerbaijan, and from there they were flown to Israel. The head of the Mossad showed them to the Prime Minister, and two weeks later, they flew to Washington and brought them to Trump. Trump was the first foreigner who read the translation of these documents, and that's when he decided that America should withdraw from this agreement with Iran because the Iranians were lying about it.

The second most important happened in 2020. The head of the secret nuclear project of Iran was a scientist named Dr. Fakhrizadeh. This guy was the called the king of the nuclear project of Iran. He was a general in the Revolutionary Guard, a close friend of Khamenei, and he held in his hands all the secrets of the atomic project. We tried several times to get him, but it was impossible.

That weekend, he drove with his wife to his summer home with about three cars of the secret service protecting him. The first car left the convoy because they had to check if his summer home was clear. Then, all of a sudden, bullets started hitting the dashboard. He tried to escape, went outside, and five bullets killed him. When the secret service started looking for the assassins, there was nobody there.

It turned out that Israel had organized, with the help of the Americans, an entire operation including satellites and identifying cameras. There was a huge machine gun which was imported piece by piece secretly into Iran, placed on a pickup by the road with a connection to the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv, the head of the Mossad was sitting in a war room.

Beside him was the best sniper of the Mossad holding a trigger. But actually, the trigger activated the machine gun in Iran. They saw his car approaching and identified exactly the face of Fakhrizadeh. The guy pulled the trigger. Five bullets. His wife was sitting beside him and was not touched. Nothing happened to her, not his wife, not his bodyguards. That was the second operation.

The third one is now, with the operation President Trump calls the "12 Day War." First of all, the Mossad says it openly: "We are in Tehran everywhere. We know everything that happens in Tehran." A few years ago, the Iranian government decided to create a special unit which would find who are the traitors in their services who are giving all the information to the Mossad.

They created the unit, and then one day they found out that the commander of the unit, General Nassiri, and all his aides were all agents of the Mossad. They escaped to Israel. Today we don't know where they are, in Israel or probably in America. Israel was carrying out very daring operations inside Iran. Behind it there were two services. One was the CIA and one was the British MI6.

They give the Israelis all the protection and the services necessary, but the Israelis were on the front. One day, the head of the CIA told the head of the Mossad, "Listen, there is this guy in this city in Iraq who gives us a lot of trouble and we want to get rid of him. Would you do that for me?" He said, "Of course." Forty-eight hours after, this guy, who was the head of one of the more ferocious militias in Iraq, was killed.

The third operation is now the "12 Day War" when the Mossad first gave the army and the air force all the information needed to the smallest detail. They knew exactly where the big centers of nuclear research are, like Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow, but also the laboratories, the warehouses, and the stockpiles. When the Israeli Air Force arrived in the skies of Iran, they knew everything.

The Mossad did two things. First of all, they created their own secret army of local agents because the local agents of Mossad in Iran, most of them, are Turkmens, Azeris, and different tribes. You know that Iran is about 40% Persians, and all the rest are minorities. Most of these minorities hate this regime and they are ready to work together with the Israelis.

A year ago, Netanyahu called the head of the army, the head of the Mossad, the head of the Shin Bet, and the head of the Intelligence Bureau of the army and told them, "Listen, we have one year left. In a year, the Iranians will have enough fissile material to build nuclear weapons. In this year, we have to prepare and to hit them just before they start building the weapon."

In total secrecy for a year, more than a thousand people in Israel have been working on this project. Pilots, mechanics, secret agents, secretaries, and drivers. More than a thousand people in this country, where everything is leaked, worked in total secrecy to prepare this project. They carried it out a year after the meeting. That was the moment when the Iranians obtained about 409 kilos of fissile material.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: That's a miracle if you ask me, to get that number of people together to operate and to execute the mission.

Michael Bar-Zohar: They were patriots. They knew that what they were doing was something on which the existence of Israel depends. There is a square in Tehran called Palestine Square. There the Ayatollahs have built a huge chronometer which shows you the time left to Israel to exist, in minutes. People come with their children and say, "See, that shows us how long the Israelis are still going to live."

So, we knew that this was the existence of Israel. The Mossad succeeded, first of all, to give them all this information. Second, to create this secret army of secret agents, they built a secret farm of drones underground and they succeeded to smuggle into Iran hundreds of drones. They built a secret warehouse underground of missiles, explosives, and weapons.

They used all of this in order to neutralize the entire Iranian defenses of Tehran. The first night of the attack, the Israeli Air Force penetrated into Iran, but they didn't attack Tehran. The first night, two things had to be done. One was destroying all these bases. The second was even more dramatic. The heads of the Iranian army and the Revolutionary Guard got a special message at midnight.

It said bad news is coming straight from Ayatollah Khamenei; you must come to an extra-urgent meeting in this address, in this bunker in this military camp at 3:00 in the morning.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: That's how they got them.

Michael Bar-Zohar: All the chiefs of the army, 19 generals, were there. At 3:00 in the morning, they got two missiles from the Israeli Air Force. Everything was prepared. They got the message not from Khamenei, they got it from the Mossad. All the 19 generals, the heads of the security infrastructure of Iran, were gone.

At the same moment, other planes and other drones zeroed in on the homes of the 11 top scientists who were building the nuclear bomb. They found their homes at that very moment when the generals were killed in the bunker. All these scientists were killed, some of them in their beds at home. When the war started, actually, the army of Iran was completely disorganized.

The nuclear facilities, the people who were in charge mostly in building the bomb itself, were out. The following operation was the coordination with the United States. When they attacked, the only person in the States who knew that Israel was going to attack tonight was President Trump. He knew but he did not participate. He was very excited by the operation.

The question was, would America join us? Because what we had were three major centers of the nuclear facilities. One was Natanz, where all these centrifuges were churning the uranium. There was Isfahan, where they transformed it again into solid. The third one was Fordow, which was about 250 feet underground in the mountains. We could take care of Isfahan and Natanz, but Fordow was very complicated.

There was only one nation in the world that had these special bombs which could penetrate that deep and explode inside. That was America. The question was, would the Americans help? Our plan was, if the Americans don't go, we'll have a special unit of Mossad which will fly with helicopters and they'll go inside and blow it up. That was a very risky business.

One day, the spokeswoman of the White House says President Trump still hesitates. He will decide in the next two weeks. But the moment she said that, in Missouri at the base of the B-2 bombers, they were already arming the planes. The following day, four B-2s took the air and flew east toward Guam. I said to my wife, it must be a diversion.

Sure enough, at the same moment, seven other B-2s flew east toward the Middle East. The Mossad and the Air Force prepared for them a kind of aerial corridor which was safe. They could get straight to Fordow and to Natanz without being bothered. That's what happened. Six of them bombed Fordow, one bombed Natanz, and 30 Tomahawk missiles from an American ship were fired at Isfahan.

That was the joint operation with a tremendous cooperation between the Mossad and the American services. What was most important and still is, is the trust. What there is between the Mossad and the CIA and the other American services is a tremendous trust. I spoke to somebody who was in charge of the connections between the Mossad and the American services.

He said, "You must understand, in America, there are about six or seven secret services. We cannot afford to convey some information to one of them without giving it at the same time to all the others. They must feel that we are not playing any games because there is a lot of competition. So, they must know that with Israel, they are on a safe side." Until today, that proved to be excellent. In this case, we have a very close relationship.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: During that whole situation, we were all watching with bated breath. Is Trump going to commit to stand with Israel? They used to have t-shirts here in Israel where it has an American fighter jet saying, "Israel, we've got your back," and then Israel has its version, "America, we've got your back." We were praying and hoping that Trump was going to enable Israel to finish its mission, which was really a mission for the whole world.

This whole situation has put the Mossad back on the radar in America. There's an intentional effort to condemn the Mossad and make them look like they're this evil group that is plotting against the United States. We've got these influencers in the United States who are trying to falsely accuse the Mossad. What would you say to our audience about why this relationship, especially our two agencies, is important and how America benefits?

Michael Bar-Zohar: First, there are a few major fields in which we cooperate because we find out that our and the American interests are exactly identical. One of them is terrorism. America more than anybody else in the world understands the danger of terrorism and especially of Islamic terrorism. Most Muslims are moderate, good people.

But there is a minority who are crazy, who really believe that they have to kill all the Jews and all the Christians and Allah will be the ruler of the entire world. They believe it, and they are ready to kill just for that. Every European country has today a growing percentage of Muslims. It's enough for a small group which is cohesive, which knows exactly what they want, which is ready to die.

The mentality of ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah is to glorify death. We, the free peoples, we glorify life. We want people to live, to flourish, to prosper. They are ready to die. They believe that dying for Islam is the best thing that can happen. A friend of mine was in a meeting last year in one of the cities of the West Bank. Many of the people there were Palestinians with the green band of Hamas.

One of them was a father who held his little child, a girl. My friend was a television reporter. He came to him and said, "Do you love her?" He said, "I love her, she's all my life." He said, "What will you do if in 12 or 13 years she will tell you that she wants to become a martyr and die for Islam?" He said, "I shall encourage her, I shall help her." And her mother said, "Yes, thank God, that must happen." That's a different mentality.

Now, the Americans and the Israelis are together on all the operations against terrorism because they understand the danger for Western civilization, for the freedom of people. In the fight against terrorism, we are completely together. The Americans are able to rely on somebody because you need to know Arabic—not only to learn the language at school, but to live in an Arab village and know the world around you.

We know the name of every Islamic terrorist in the West Bank and in Gaza, and we know how to get to them. Always when a head terrorist is killed, you find that he's number one or two on the American wanted list. When the head of Hezbollah was killed in Lebanon, the Europeans said he was such a scholar. Americans said, "Wow, thank God for that. The world is rid of one of the worst terrorists."

The second field, America has very important interests in the Middle East. You have your army there in Qatar and in quite a lot of places. But you need a base on the ground. You need an army which will help. Israel today has the best air force in the world and the best Mossad. So, for America, with whom we share all our secrets, it's very important to have this kind of connection.

Lyndon Johnson had called it an aircraft carrier. Israel is an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. Today is much more than that because there is a cooperation on quite a lot of levels. That's why we carry out maneuvers together with the American army. The American army has a lot of weapons and stocks in Israel, and there are a lot of things which I'm not going to tell you.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: You wrote in your book, *Mossad*, about a rocket engine that was being created that Israel took out that had the capacity to hit the mainland. Many Americans don't realize that because we've never suffered a war on our homeland. Thank God for that. We can't imagine that anybody would have the capability of attacking us. But the fact that they had the capacity to hit a major city on the U.S. mainland is frightening.

Michael Bar-Zohar: That's their dream.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: You've got another book coming out. I'm excited to learn about the Mossad women. Being a woman, I'm very interested in this because I think women make great warriors.

Michael Bar-Zohar: It's very strange because at the beginning, women were accepted in the Mossad to be secretaries. Then the second stage was that they said we can use women as escorts. When an Israeli agent is somewhere at an enemy country, when you see a couple in the street, they are less suspicious than a single man. So, many women were just taken as escorts.

Then they started to see the light and they found out these capacities of women—cold-blooded, intelligent, and creative. They started to take women for very important jobs. There was this woman called Shula Cohen. She was in Beirut and she became one of the closest friends of the Prime Minister and of the President of Lebanon. Her son celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in the home of the President of Lebanon.

She would cross the border from Lebanon to Israel and bring in secret documents. They told her, "If they catch you, it's going to be the end." She said, "I don't care about it. It's not you who recruited me, I recruited the Mossad. I'm coming." She was finally caught, tortured, and sentenced to death by hanging. She was in prison awaiting her death.

When the Six-Day War came, we exchanged her for Lebanese prisoners. She came to Israel at the age of 50. She succeeded to smuggle into Israel all her family and she lived in Jerusalem. She died at the age of 100 here in Israel. People didn't know about her and she risked her life.

Another one, an American girl called Yael Epstein. Her father was a scientist at Princeton and they were living close to Einstein. She was a very sweet girl who loved Israel very much. Then she got married, a bad marriage, and she was completely devastated. She flew to Israel and she said, "I want to do something for Israel." She met the heads of the Mossad.

All the others who met her said no, she's not good because she's too naive. But Mike Harari said, "She can use her naivety and her simplicity in order to succeed." And she did. She became a fantastic agent. She was in Beirut during dramatic operations, like the elimination of the heads of Black September. When that was carried out, all the Israeli agents got orders to leave. She was the only one who the head of the Mossad told, "You stay," because her cover was perfect.

She went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She was an American girl. She goes there and they saw her walking around day after day. Finally, one of the employees said, "You're looking for something?" She said, "Yes, I'm a writer. I want to write a series for television about some woman who did fantastic things in an exotic country."

They found Lady Hester Stanhope, who was the niece of Prime Minister Pitt the Younger. She was a kind of free spirit. She escaped London and sailed to Lebanon, dressed as a man, and became an explorer. She was the one who discovered Palmyra and the archaeological finds in Ashkelon. This girl Yael says, "I want to do something about her."

She gets the material and she writes the outline of a series for television. She goes to London to one of the great producers, and they give her a contract. Then she flies to Beirut under a different name. She's going to write about this lady. The only thing she did not know was how to write. She said, "I don't know how to write. I've never seen the desk of a writer."

So, they brought her to Israel and took her to the house of one of my colleagues to see his desk and the way the papers are, in order to reproduce it. She came to Beirut and she carried out her operation and she was wonderful. She came back finally to Israel. Golda Meir said, "What? This little girl did everything?" She kissed her and she hugged her.

This operation in Beirut was just the first Yael did. She spent 14 years in Arab cities and in Arab military bases in the countries around us. She was in Baghdad. She was in the nuclear site that the Iraqis were building. She was everywhere. A sweet woman, she died last year here in Israel.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I can't wait to read the book. On behalf of American citizens, thank you for taking the time to meet with us and thank you for all the work that you've done to help strengthen that bond.

Michael Bar-Zohar: It's an honor. If I were to speak to the American public today about why the relationship is critically important, I would put it on two levels. First, the same values and the same way of looking at good and evil. Especially today, when you see that the world is going in a very bad direction, there must be two spotlights in the world: America and Israel.

A few years ago in an excavation in the Valley of Elah, not far from Jerusalem, they found an ostracon, a small piece of clay filled with ancient Hebrew writing. And what it said? It said, "Protect the widow, protect the orphan, fight the bad resolution of the king, protect the baby, protect the foreigner, protect the pauper."

Eleven centuries before Christ, they had written this on this piece of clay. On 10 inches of clay, you write all the greatest orders as to what a people must do. And that we have together with America because we have this kind of heritage.

You have this innocence in America, this openness. The American mentality is how to do good. For instance, all these organizations and charity and giving back to society, all this doesn't exist in other Western countries. America is the only one. So, we feel this kind of closeness. That would be the seeding of our friendship. Then you have the fight against evil, against terrorism, and rogue countries like North Korea. We are together in the same battle.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Thank you again for joining me on this edition of Proclaiming Justice. Please share this podcast with your family and friends. For more information about how you can get involved, please visit our website at pjtn.org. As a PJTN Watchman, you can help us keep up the fight to preserve our freedom for our children and their children for such a time as this.