A former head of the Mossad has described his disbelief and disappointment at allegations that his successor at the Israeli intelligence agency threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC), likening the conduct to mafia-like tactics.
Tamir Pardo, who served as director of the Mossad between 2011 and 2016, was responding to a Guardian investigation published this week about an alleged operation by the Israeli spy service to put pressure on the former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to abandon a war crimes investigation.
In a series of secret meetings, Yossi Cohen – who replaced Pardo as head of the Mossad in 2016 and left the agency in 2021 – is alleged to have used “threats and manipulation” against Bensouda and attempted to enlist her into cooperating with Israel’s demands.
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Pardo said he could not believe that “any employee of the Mossad would do things of the type described” in the investigation. “It sounds like Cosa Nostra-style blackmail,” he said.
“It doesn’t seem true. It’s inconceivable that something like this happened. It sounds to me like they’re talking about some other country and not about Israel,” he added.
After the Guardian published its investigation, it emerged that a prominent investigative reporter with Haaretz and its sister publication TheMarker had tried to report in 2022 on the Mossad’s operation against Bensouda but was blocked by senior Israeli security officials.
In the interview, Pardo was asked by Yossi Melman, a veteran chronicler of Israel’s intelligence services – who also said this week that he had been aware of the Mossad operation – why the former spy chief was troubled by the Guardian’s report on Cohen’s activities.
“There are things that spy agencies do not do,” Pardo replied. “Things that they won’t do, and that are forbidden for them to do. And this is one of them. I don’t want to think that anyone who works for the organisation in which I served for 36 years, let alone a person who headed it, was involved in the event that was described in the media.”
Approached by the Guardian earlier this week, Cohen did not respond to a request for comment. Bensouda declined to comment.
Asked by Melman if he was living in denial, Pardo said: “Maybe I’m better off that way, otherwise it’s just a horrible disappointment that something like this could happen in my country. I’ve seen some strange things in my life, but I refuse to believe that the organisation I served and whose values I believed in could do something like this.”
Pardo said the Mossad’s activities reported by the Guardian were “at the very edge of things that I view as not permissible, and based on what I was taught, this was also forbidden in the organisation in which I served”.
He added: “I don’t think that Israel or its emissaries should be using blackmail and threats against a prosecutor in the court in The Hague, which the Jewish people were key to establishing after the Holocaust in world war two. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
