Mossad commands the mythology, but Israel’s shadow wars rely on three competing agencies that fuse espionage, occupation, and military force.
Under Israel’s founder and first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, authority was divided among the premier’s office, the foreign minister, the army chief of staff, and several influential ambassadors. Each fought to extend his control over the agencies taking shape around them.
In “Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad,” Gordon Thomas describes the first dispute. One camp wanted to concentrate on economic and political intelligence, another on the military power of Israel’s enemies, while others pressed for operations against former Nazis and fascists.
Thomas writes that Ben Gurion summoned the intelligence chiefs to his office on 2 March 1951 and informed them that foreign intelligence collection would be assigned to a new body, Mossad LeTeum, or the Institute for Coordination.
Israel’s official Mossad history dates the institute’s initial establishment to 13 December 1949, under Reuven Shiloah. The March 1951 meeting marked its reorganization under the prime minister’s office rather than its original creation.
A security state born divided
Mossad was initially tied to the Foreign Ministry and staffed by senior officers representing the other intelligence bodies: Shin Bet, or Shabak, responsible for internal security; Aman, or military intelligence; air force intelligence; and naval intelligence. Some of these branches were later merged, while others disappeared or were absorbed into the larger structure.
Thomas writes that Ben Gurion told the intelligence chiefs to give Mossad their “shopping list.” Where the agency obtained the “goods,” and what it paid for them, was none of their business.
By the early 1950s, Israel’s intelligence system had settled around three main services. Aman became the military intelligence arm supplying the army with information and national assessments. Shin Bet assumed responsibility for domestic intelligence, counterespionage, and what Israel defines as counterterrorism. Mossad took charge of covert activity and intelligence collection beyond the state’s borders.
Ronen Bergman writes in “Rise and Kill First” that these agencies occupied Israel’s “shadow world” from the outset. They were closely connected but institutionally separate, and all ultimately answered to the prime minister.
Parliamentary and legal oversight mechanisms do exist, including the Knesset’s intelligence subcommittee, but their reach has long been constrained by secrecy, compartmentalization, and direct executive control. Mossad’s operations in particular remain largely hidden from public scrutiny, while Shin Bet’s formal legal footing came only with the 2002 General Security Service Law.
Bergman notes that Israel departed from the model adopted by many other states, where intelligence gathering and covert operations remained institutionally separate. From the outset, operational units were embedded within Israel’s intelligence apparatus, with Mossad and Aman exercising direct control over their respective covert-action arms.
The aim was to turn intelligence into action without the delays imposed by a conventional chain of command. Other states might collect information in peacetime to prepare for a future war. Israel built services expected to run continuous operations behind enemy lines, often in the belief that covert violence could postpone a larger confrontation.
Mossad’s long arm abroad
Mossad is responsible for foreign intelligence and covert activity outside territories under direct Israeli control. Even when Shin Bet wants to meet one of its sources in Europe or Asia, the encounter ordinarily falls under Mossad’s jurisdiction.
If Shin Bet seeks to recruit somebody abroad for later deployment in occupied Palestinian territory, Mossad can handle the overseas recruitment before transferring the source back to Shin Bet.
Its work covers intelligence collection and the disruption of operations directed against Israel or Israeli interests. Its special missions abroad can include sabotage, abduction, infiltration, and assassination.
Israeli prime ministers approve the most sensitive operations, while Mossad gathers the intelligence needed to execute them. It also works with Aman on assessments of foreign states and armed organizations operating outside Israel.
The boundaries are not always clean. Israel’s attack on a Hamas leadership meeting in Doha on 9 September 2025 was announced as a joint military and Shin Bet operation, despite taking place on foreign soil.
Some Israeli observers explained Shin Bet’s role by pointing to its standing responsibility for Palestinian organizations. Others saw a political attempt to keep Mossad at a distance, particularly because its director had participated in negotiations conducted through Qatar.
After the 1973 war, the Agranat Commission criticized Israel’s dependence on Aman’s assessments and recommended greater analytical pluralism. Mossad was among the bodies expected to develop an independent research capacity, reducing the danger that one military interpretation would dominate the entire system. Israel’s small pool of experienced researchers, however, repeatedly frustrated attempts to build a fully fledged civilian counterpart to Aman.
When Mossad’s legend began to crack
Mossad’s golden age began to fade after the January 2010 assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. The killing succeeded, but Dubai’s surveillance network exposed the suspected hit team, its disguises, travel routes, and use of fraudulently obtained foreign passports. The operation damaged Mossad’s relations with several western states and punctured the mythology of an invisible service that left no trace.
Operations attributed to Mossad continued in Tunisia, Malaysia, and Iran, but Aman’s technological branches increasingly moved to the center of Israel’s security campaigns. Unit 8200 dominates signals collection and analysis, Unit 9900 handles visual and geospatial intelligence, and Unit 504 runs human sources for the military.
That rise did not spare Aman from responsibility for the failure preceding Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Unit 8200 had gathered indications of Hamas preparations but failed to overturn the assumptions guiding the political and military leadership.
A previous decision had also left the unit without an operational presence near Gaza on 7 October 2023. Israel’s two-decade fixation on technological collection had produced an enormous volume of data while weakening the human and analytical judgment required to interpret it.
Even so, Mossad continues to dominate Israeli accounts of espionage. Its old operations offer agents under false identities, compromised sources, forged documents, intricate planning, and official denials. Military assassinations based on Aman’s intelligence carry less mystery. They are more visibly the work of aircraft, surveillance systems, target banks, and command rooms.
In practice, the two services frequently converge. The assassination of Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut on 27 September 2024 was the product of years of intelligence penetration and military surveillance.
Some Israeli assessments have attributed the killing of Hezbollah field commander Wissam al-Tawil in Khirbet Selm to Aman, but the evidence released publicly does not settle which service led the operation.
Mossad’s reputation received a major boost from the mass detonation of pagers and two-way radios across Lebanon on 17 and 18 September 2024. The devices killed civilians as well as Hezbollah personnel and wounded thousands.
Mossad chief David Barnea later presented the operation as a turning point in the war, with revelations that the agency had established front companies and manipulated the communications supply chain.
The attack displayed precisely the sort of long-term infiltration on which Mossad’s reputation was built. It also showed why the division between intelligence gathering and operational violence is so difficult to locate inside Israel’s security establishment.
Mossad carried less immediate blame than Shin Bet and Aman for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood because Gaza fell primarily within their areas of responsibility. It did not escape criticism. The agency was expected to penetrate Hamas’s external leadership, while its defenders argued that plans for the Hamas-led operation had been concealed even from members of the political bureau abroad.
Shin Bet polices the occupation
Shin Bet is Israel’s designated internal security service. Alongside police investigators, it gathers information, interrogates suspects, pursues counterespionage cases, and monitors citizens who are outside the military chain of command.
Its mandate includes preventing attacks originating in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, blocking foreign intelligence activity inside the state, and protecting senior officials and state institutions. These functions place Shin Bet at the center of the machinery used to police Palestinians under occupation.
As Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operations intensified between 1968 and 1970, Shin Bet underwent a major expansion. It received larger budgets and recruited more personnel, while Arabic speakers were transferred from Aman’s Unit 504, which specialized in handling Arab informants. From then on, suppressing the Palestinian resistance became the agency’s primary mission.
Gaza proved its most difficult arena. The territory is among the most densely populated places in the world, and its social networks made penetration difficult despite decades of occupation, surveillance, detention, and coercive recruitment. Shin Bet could not build its intelligence picture alone.
Ariel Sharon, who took command of the Israeli army’s Southern Command in 1969 and later became prime minister, deployed additional forces to Gaza in support of Shin Bet. The division of labor established during that period remains in place. Shin Bet recruits informants and conducts interrogations, while the army provides the firepower, surveillance systems, and personnel needed to act on its intelligence.
Shin Bet remains responsible for what Israel classifies as counterterrorism intelligence in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It works with Aman on assessments of Palestinian organizations, political developments, and the likely consequences of Israeli measures. It also takes the lead on internal security assessments concerning Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jewish Israelis.
Arrests, movement permits, medical access, family pressure, and the threat of exposure can all become tools for recruitment. This makes Shin Bet’s human networks inseparable from the wider system of military rule under which they operate.
Aman: The intelligence army within an army
Aman is the Israeli army’s Military Intelligence Directorate. Its power rests partly on the breadth of responsibilities it accumulated through practice rather than a single law that clearly defines its limits. Critics have repeatedly questioned the scale of its remit, but Israel has no equivalent civilian body capable of replacing its research, collection, targeting, and operational functions.
The directorate collects military intelligence on targets beyond Israel’s borders and conducts intelligence campaigns abroad. It provides national-level warnings, identifies threats, assesses enemy capabilities and intentions, and prepares recommendations for the senior political and military leadership.
Aman also coordinates intelligence among the army’s land, air, and naval branches. It builds and updates target banks, supports joint operations, interrogates prisoners of war, and helps prepare war plans and emergency mobilization schemes. Its assessments can therefore shape both the definition of a threat and the force used against it.
Other intelligence bodies inside the military do not formally belong to Aman, including those attached to the air force, ground forces, and navy. They nevertheless share information and work alongside it. Each gathers intelligence for its branch commander, helping to develop forces and activate them when required.
The army’s four regional commands – Northern, Central, Southern, and Home Front – maintain their own intelligence departments. Aman supplies them with collection resources and guidance, while each prepares an assessment for its regional commander. These departments are institutionally separate from Aman’s central research bodies, although they feed into the wider collection effort.
At General Staff assessment sessions, a regional commander can present an interpretation that differs from Aman’s. In theory, this creates competing readings of developments in neighboring states and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. In practice, the authority of Aman’s national assessment has often crowded out dissent, the very weakness exposed by the 1973 war and again before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Unit 504 and the return of the human source
Unit 504 is Aman’s principal human intelligence arm. It recruits and runs agents deep inside enemy territory, giving the military access that satellites, intercepted communications, and visual surveillance cannot provide. A source close to a decision-making circle can reveal intentions, internal arguments, morale, and patterns of thought that no sensor can reliably capture.
The unit’s renewed prominence reflects the limits of Israel’s technological model. A Channel 12 report published in February 2026 said Unit 504 had undergone sweeping structural and operational changes since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Its personnel had doubled to include hundreds of agent handlers, combat personnel, and prisoner interrogators, while its field missions had expanded.
For the first time in the unit’s history, a female special-operations officer completed the full training program and qualified as an agent handler. The report said further female combat personnel were due to join after completing their training, serving in units responsible for protecting handlers during sensitive missions, including cross-border operations and meetings with human sources.
Aman will continue to depend heavily on Units 8200 and 9900, along with automated surveillance, artificial intelligence (AI), and the vast machinery used to generate targets. The expansion of Unit 504 reflects a lesson driven home by the Al-Aqsa Flood failure. Israel’s intelligence services had amassed enormous quantities of data but failed to understand what their adversary intended to do.
Israel’s three principal services remain divided by geography, institutional culture, and competition for access to the prime minister. Their mandates overlap whenever an operation crosses a border, moves from collection to assassination, or links Palestinian resistance to a wider regional front.
Behind the separate names stands one security architecture, tying clandestine reach abroad to the occupation’s informant networks and the army’s capacity for force.
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