Hey everyone. I’m Noam Weissman. And this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. If you are interested in saying what’s up, please be in touch at noam@unpacked.media. That’s noam@unpacked.media.
This is a very special episode, because what you’re about to hear is a live episode with the one and only legendary Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman.
We recorded this conversation last month as the last stop of the 2025 Unpacking Israeli History road show, in front of an incredible crowd at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.
This was a guest and a conversation I’ve wanted to have for a very long time. If you like Israeli history, Ronen is the guy. I don’t want to give you any spoilers, but you’re really going to like this one. Ronen is probably the most well-connected Israeli I’ve ever met, and his stories are insane.
So let’s get into it. Yalla, let’s do this.
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Tonight’s conversation is everything Unpacking Israeli History is about. It ought to be smart, human, funny, a little messy, and deeply meaningful, another word, which is a word I heard from someone I had lunch with today, accessible. And I can’t think of a better guest to help us do that than one of the world’s foremost authorities on Israeli intelligence, journalist, bestselling author, and someone whose work has inspired my own, please join me in welcoming the incredible Ronen Bergman.
Sling
Ronen Bergman, this is super exciting. I’m just looking at our pictures up there for a second. The two of us are smirking. We’re smirking. I look like there’s something enchanted going on. You look like something naughty happened. That’s what I’m looking at right there.
It’s a real privilege, Ronen. It’s a real privilege to have you on this show. So here’s who Ronen Bergman is. He is a senior correspondent for Yedioth Aharonoth, a staff writer for the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner for how he covered the war, the author of Rise and Kill First, The Secret History of Israel’s Target Assassinations. A remarkable book.
And according to the IRGC in Iran, a Mossad assassin. I didn’t expect that to get a cheer. It’s not true, I think.
Ronen: You know, my wife Yana says, well, this is just ample proof that how poor Iranian intelligence is, because if they would know you, they know that you have no navigation skill. the last thing that any Mossad you as part of it, you’ll just go nowhere, just get stuck in the middle of Tehran and nothing would happen. So we’ll stick with your story.
Noam: Well, it’s a good part of your bio. It’s an exciting part. And this book, it really, it took me over the edge. I studied Israel, Israel education for many years, but the way you tell the stories in this book, I became obsessed with it. And as you heard claps from everyone in this room, you did something remarkable with that book. We did a whole Unpacking Israeli History podcast on the Mossad, and it’s actually our most downloaded podcast for Unpacking Israeli History is the history of the Mossad. And we used your book a lot for that. And don’t worry, we gave you credit. That’s the story there.
Ronen: It was you.
Noam: Yeah, that’s how the book sales take place.
Ronen: Thanks.
Noam: You have interviewed more intelligence operatives than almost anybody out there, and what you do is there’s a human side of the story. You share the moral compromises, you share the impossible choices, the sleepless nights, the uncertainty, the mistakes, and that’s what makes a really good storyteller in general.
And what I love is the way you tell the story of Israel is not by painting it in some fantasy picture, but you show the shades of gray, the decisions made in the shadows, and it makes it into a real Israel. I think that’s why all of us think it’s interesting and refreshing and insightful, because it’s more of the real story, not black and white, but really great. So without further ado, let’s talk about those shades of gray. Is everyone here ready for it?
Okay? So I’m gonna say, here we go, Ronen, join me, yalla.
Audience: Let’s do this!
Noam: Thanks. That’s good. That’s good. LA. Yeah, pretty good. One nothing, LA.
Ronen: Very disciplined audience.
You know, what’s the one thing that keeps me really concerned before coming here to speak to all that’s like to any other non-Israeli audience. What was the number one concern? What to wear. Yeah, you know, I I always stand puzzled in front of the closet in the hotel and I think Should I put a jacket should I put a tie should I put because we are not the Israelis are not very accumulated in custom with, to social codes, politeness, and also, and the dress code.
You know, in Israel, Israelis, we speak about spies and ties, that’s where I’m gonna go. I once had an interview with someone called Oleg Godyevsky. Godyevsky was the number one ever recruited spy by the US inside the Soviet Union. He was the KGB station chief in London until he decided, he came to realize that Ronald Reagan was right and they were the empire of evil and volunteered. And then they tried to discover him and he was smuggled. Then he was asked by the British intelligence to fly over to Israel to debrief Mossad about the KGB attempts to infiltrate Israel.
And there he recalled, in any interview we had, there I was flying 747 jumbo jet, first class, at the expense of Mossad. And then I noticed something very odd. The booze were free, and I was the only one drinking. And when I reached Israel, I realized that this is the country with the smallest number of two things, drunk people and ties. Now, I saw that the rabbi has a tie, and so I another one tie, so it’s not fully.
Noam: LA doesn’t do ties and where I live, South Florida, Miami doesn’t do ties. We have such a connection with Israel. Okay, so we’re not gonna be talking at much more about ties. Yeah, but you and I we both wore black and black. You look great. You look great.
Let’s talk about Israel. You spent decades talking to people who have built their lives around secrecy undercover people trained to manipulate other people So How do you talk to people who don’t talk? The Mossad, Shin Bet, intelligence. Like, revealing secrets that, I don’t know, they never told anyone.
Ronen: So yeah, of course, that’s the most important element of the work. It took me eight and a half years to write Rise and Kill First. And one of the main reasons is because I interviewed 1,000 people and some of them I interviewed a few times. So it took so long. And none of these, none, zero, got permission to speak. So the first thing that Random House, Penguin Random House, when I gave them the transcript and the draft, asked, why did they talk?
And of course, each one has her or his, mostly his reasons, but I think that at the end of the day, what could be seen as something to hide or a disgrace in other places, to kill people for the safety of the nation, in Israel, these people are seen, with all good reason, as the forefront.
As the narrator of Star Trek said at the beginning, we are the final frontier. Space is the final frontier. They are the final frontier. They are seen, they take the first front in order to defend Israel. And they want people, at the end, they want people to know and leave their footprint in the history of Israel.
And there is no, I think, the Western world, there’s no country in the world where intelligence and special operations have a more decisive and consequential impact on the history of the country.
And if anyone, one of them, was not very willing to cooperate and being interviewed, I did to him the one thing that makes all Israelis more ballistic than anything else. By the way, I told him that someone else took credit for his operation.
Audience: Hahaha.
Ronen: Now, as sophisticated as these people are with all their experience with, base human design, base. They said, he’s primitive. Now I’m going to tell you the whole story.
Noam: That’s great. Okay, so, okay, that’s a fascinating answer. But I spent years running a high school that was focused on moral dilemmas. So I think a lot about the question of moral dilemmas, about moral quandaries. I presume you care about Israel’s security, that you care about, to an extent, how Israel’s perceived in the broader world, how Israel’s PR is. You have a big responsibility. So how do you think about the ethical quandary of perhaps sharing stories that could put Israel in a precarious position.
Ronen: So first of all, I don’t think that these stories put Israel in any kind of a race. the contrary, I think that it’s hard to assess and measure, but I think that part, or maybe even the most important part of our national security, our secret weapon, is being a democracy.
Now, if I would be an American journalist writing about the CIA, you wouldn’t ask this question. well, I don’t want to judge about the CIA, but that it’s, American intelligence agencies would be seen as important for American national security. And the need to make sure that these agencies are working efficiently and according to the law and all the other measurements to make them doing their job.
And I think that the fact that we are a democracy, the fact that we are able to criticize the administration, the fact that we are able to shed light, this is by far, and I have many, many, many, many examples of places where we publish something and then this something was fixed. I would say more, I regret not publishing more before October 7 about the, what’s the opposite of being ready? Unready? Ready.
Noam: Unprepared. Being what? Unprepared.
Ronen: The unprepared intelligence agencies in Israel and the defense establishment to war. I didn’t. When I saw that nobody listened on October 6th, we’ll come back to this later on October 6th, 50th anniversary to the Yom Kippur war, October 6th, 2023, I published an open Israeli daily I worked for where I said that because the lessons, because the Yom KippurWwar was never investigated thoroughly and properly, the right lessons were not made, the right, I would say, deduction and and changes were never implemented. And this is why, this is how I ended, this is why Israel is exposed to another preemptive surprise attack, strategic surprise attack by the enemy. This is 24 hours published, 24 hours before the October 7th surprise.
Now, if I regret, it’s not for not publishing or publishing too much, but maybe publishing too little and warning too little about that.
Ronen: October 6th you publish this
Noam: Wow, I’m gonna get back to that. I’m gonna get to October 7th in a bit. But you’ve spent years doing research. What has surprised you the most after reviewing classified documents, untold hours of writing, 1,000 people that you met with? What has surprised you the most?
Ronen: I sat with someone from the CIA who was in charge of the Iranian portfolio for a very long time, and he asked, at the end of the day, what’s the difference? The difference between an Israeli intelligence operative going to work and an American or French or British. And I think the one thing that surprised me most was always the embedded additional thought or mindset that each employee of the Israeli intelligence agencies carries with her or with him to work every day. Now, everybody worldwide, they want to earn a little bit of money, they want to feel fulfillment, they want to be interested in their work, they want to be promoted, but the Israeli operative or intelligence officer or cyber expert going to work in the, the massive Israeli intelligence agencies has one additional thought and that additional thought is that it’s up to him or her. They are the final frontier if they eff up. Sorry. Can I say that in a shul?
Noam: Yeah, it’s a that people do. It’s a normal thing to say in here.
Ronen: So if they, you know, I met this woman from, now she works for Shin Bet.
Noam: FBI in Israel.
Ronen: Something between the MI5 and the API. So anyway, internal security. She left, she has a second degree in computer engineering from the Technion. She left a very prestigious job with one of the main startups in Israel. At the point she left it and moved to Shin Bet, her salary was sliced to two. And if she would continue, then of course the gap would be much, much bigger. And I asked her, said, why did you, and she has two kids, she’s expecting a third, she’s married. I said, you left a prestigious dream job with no shifts, very easy, good salary. In order to do that, where you’re being called every day, this was even before the war, now she basically left home for the war. And she said, you know, the action I have here, I cannot get anywhere. And second is that anything I do here is immediately, if it’s successful, it’s immediately deployed. But the dark flip of that coin, flip side of that coin is that if I do not perform, then people might get killed tomorrow. Maybe someone I know, maybe someone from my family. The necessity, the need, that it’s not the CIA that if they eff whatever up, if something would happen in Malaysia or in somewhere, it will happen in Israel.
Noam: So there’s an accountability, a responsibility that’s up to them.
Ronen: That’s different. Responsibility, it’s up to them. This is what makes Israeli intelligence different than any. Now, it’s not all glorious. Sometimes the Israeli James Bond looks more like Inspector Clouseau, but it’s always there. It’s always pending, so it’s beating. It’s up to them.
Noam: That’s the ethos. So I want to get into some tough questions. You mentioned October 6th, and I want to get into October 7th. I think that when I think about questions that I know so many people grapple with, all of us, is how in the world could October the 7th have happened? How could it have happened? There’s people who say, well, it doesn’t make sense that the country with the best intelligence, could have the worst intelligence failure. doesn’t make sense that that could happen. Was it incompetence? And then what people start saying is, well, it’s not incompetence. Maybe there’s conspiracy theories. And people come up with conspiracy theories for how the 7th of October could happen. Did Israeli intelligence fail? Were things ignored? Were things miscommunicated? Why was there such a blind side for a country with such amazing military, amazing intelligence? Why did that happen?
And I think I’m allowed to share this. You’ve written a book about this very subject with your New York Times colleague, Mark Mazzetti. So just tell us everything and maybe this October 6th story that you’re talking about that you wrote that I haven’t read yet, but maybe there’s something there.
Ronen: So first of all, as you said, we are writing a book halfway through and hope to have this out by the next October 7. This is the book to try and answer your question. And we have already done, I don’t know, like five or six hundred interviews and we have really thousands, many thousands of pages of Israeli internal intelligence and military correspondence, but also now we have the Hamas side, we can see so secret top secret Hamas documents that regrettably were not in the hands of Israel before the war now brought from Gaza. And I have been reading them throughout the day and I’ve also been watching, this is an experience I don’t recommend to anyone. I’ve been also watching Pandora. Pandora is the secret throw of 12 terabytes of 400,000 videos that were created on October 7 and were collected by Israeli military intelligence. Now, I’ve been watching this for the first half a year after the war, every night. It’s not an experience I recommend anyone, it’s really horrible, but it gives you an insight into what exactly happened.
Now, what you are asking, the question is, perfect storm. Perfect storm in the intelligence terminology means that everything was working against Israel. Now, it’s like the, you say the cotton that you give kids in circus, the…
Noam: Cotton candy? Cotton candy.
Ronen: Yeah, that melts under your every place you touch, but this is not sweet at all. Every place you touch crumbles and didn’t function. Nothing worked from the political level to the National Security Council, to the military, to the intelligence. And so one thing I would urge everybody to completely, completely ignore, which these are the conspiracy theories. Now I understand that
Noam: We should ignore the conspiracy theories.
Ronen: Ignore, there’s nothing there, nothing, zero. Now I understand that you ask how come such a powerful intelligence establishment, military, one of the main superpowers of the region, not D1, failing so badly. And I would even add, how come it’s not just the same countries, it’s not just the same establishment, it’s not just the same agencies.
But the the actual same people, the same teams that miserably failed on October 7, one of the biggest intelligence failures in the history of intelligence, have also performed so wonderful and so successful on the next battle vis-a-vis Hezbollah and Iran. Now, the short answer to all of that is that Israel was preparing for, there was the war that Israel was preparing for, the war against Hezbollah and Iran, and there is the war that Israel was preparing or knew that it will never have against Hamas. The wisdom was that there will never be anything more than, you know, limited rounds of hostilities from time to time against Hamas, that this is the marginal issue where someday, earlier or later or earlier, there will be a war with Hezbollah and there will be a war with Hamas, with Iran, sorry.
In fact, just to give you just an understanding, everybody heard about the pagers. When the chief of the Shin Bet wanted to deploy the same kind of operation on Hamas, so they’ll have pager operation or any other device that can explode once they hit the button in Tel Aviv, he was forbidden. He was forbidden because they were afraid that if this is exposed in Hamas immediately, they will search for that in all other members of the axis of resistance. And because they said it’s much more important to have that inside Hezbollah, we are not going to risk it with Hamas. Between 2006, where Israel didn’t perform very well in a war with Hezbollah. Between 2006 and 2023, 70% of the overall resources, manpower, attention, bandwidth, focus of overall Israeli intelligence community, 70% were invested into preparing for the war with Hezbollah.
So, and much of the rest was to Iran. So only something like 5% to 7% of everything was to prepare for the war with Hamas. But more than anything…And this goes to why I was trying to warn on October 6th. It’s vanity. Hubris.
Look, when the Yom Kippur War ended, someone said, maybe this was all deception. Maybe they deceived us. And there was a Mossad investigation team that came with the understanding that this was not a deception because they said, the Egyptian intelligence is not capable of running such a deception against Israel. Think of this sentence, my enemy cannot run a deception against me because he’s too stupid. This by itself.
They were speaking about intelligence supremacy or superiority before the October 7 war. When you are an intelligence officer and you say, have intelligence superiority, even if you have, once you said that, you lost because you don’t have, you’re not logically questioning the fact that maybe someone is totally deceiving you.
And when we read the documents of the small military council of Hamas in the two years before the war, we see what Sinwar is saying and how he anticipated the Israeli adversary would react. It’s frightening to see how good those assessments were. He said, do not do any military drills or exercises in hiding. Shin Bet will notice and they think that you are trying to hide something. Do it in the open. Bring TV. When you do it in the open, they will think that you don’t mean it, that you are not going to, this is just for show off. And this is exactly what the Israelis thought, that this is just for show off.
Noam: Wow, that was fascinating. Really fascinating. By the way, are you warm? Are you hot? Do you want it? Should we take off our jackets? Want to take it off? This is not prepared.
Okay, let’s just be in t-shirts. Okay. There we go. All right. Okay. I just want to make sure you’re comfy. Much better. Okay, you feel better, right? Now we’re in Israel. Okay.
That was intense. I want to do a lightning round with you right now, we brought out a buzzer, it’s like this.
Ronen: Then I continue.
Noam: And then you continue, exactly. So I will do my best with the timekeeping, but 90 seconds per question, or else you get this… Noam buzzer. So, ready? All right, let’s go.
Noam: What, in 90 seconds? What is the most dramatic Mossad operation and why?
Ronen: I have an answer, but I’m not sure I can tell you without the need to kill you all afterwards.
Noam: Okay. I’ll think about this. Okay, all right, fine. So let me go to, that was less than 10 seconds. Okay, let me try another question, Ronen. What’s a story that makes you go, what? Like the most absurd story ever. Mossad, 90 seconds.
Ronen: I once interviewed someone called Zvi Aharoni, who was the guy who got the confession from Eichmann. Like he asked the question.
Noam: So explain, Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the final solution.
And he was there in the team that caught him and he asked him the question and he confessed that he is not Ricardo Klement but Adolf Eichmann.
So when I met him, he told me that bizarre story which I thought he is completely fantasizing that, there was a guy, a psychiatrist working for the Israeli military, who thought he can hypnotize a Palestinian guy and send him like a program assassin to kill Yasser Arafat. What? And they chose a guy that was in prison. They took him from prison. He said he’s the right guy to manipulate and brainwash. And he had a special room where he had like pictures of Arafat popping up and he had to shoot them. And he was programmed with special code words.
Anyway, at a certain point, that guy, the psychiatrist, psychiatrist who was a very famous professor for psychiatry in Tel Aviv University. He said, okay, the guy is ready, he’s fully programmed, he’s going and they helped him to cross the Jordan River in one stormy night. Arafat was in Jordan and he gave him the code words and he said, okay, he’s fully programmed, he has a gun, he has a compass, he has all the gear and the radio. He is going to kill Arafat like a zombie.
And then, so he crossed the river and then the next morning they got their informants from Jordan saying that the first thing the guy did, he went to a police, the Jordanian police station and said, these stupid Jews, they thought that they propped up me. Here is my gun, here is the equipment, let me go and to salute to Yasser Arafat, the big leader, and I went to join the PLO.
Noam: You have crazy stories. People, anyone here watch Fauda ever? How about Tehran? Persian community, LA side, okay great. Anyway, are they semi-accurate or are total fantasy, what are they? And should people be ready to have their bubbles burst right now?
Ronen: So first of all, both of them, great, great series. I know some of the creators, really great, I really like watching them. I just want to attract attention to maybe a small fact. You know, these guys from Fauda, from the secret unit, they speak Arabic with this Yiddish accent. They go, they go, this guy goes to a Hamas senior operative in Ramallah and say, I was born in Ramallah and I’m part and I want to probably become part of Hamas. And the guy from Hamas says, yes, sure, of course, you sound like you were born in Ramallah. Of course he believes it. It’s very hard to be a secret operative.
You know, I was, Rafi Eitan, the guy who sort of like the mastermind behind abducting Eichmann and was commanding the operation. He said that in the 50s and the 60s, it was so easy for us to forge passports that sometimes we forge passports of countries that do not exist. Now, with all the biometrics, et cetera, even if you solve the question of the accent. But you, the accent, it’s like I would come to all of you and say, I was born in LA and I did not leave LA for one day in my life. It will take you a fragment of a second to understand I’m lying, right?
I got a call once from a French, this is about Fauda, about Tehran. I got a call from a French, very, very, very distinguished journalist. Yeah, okay. It works. Okay. He says, Ronen, I want to interview you about Mossad operations in Iran. said, yeah, sure. he asked me question, I give you that. And then at a certain point he says, Ronen, oh, I think you got it wrong. I said, okay, let me hear that. Maybe I’ll learn something new. He said, in the TV series Tehran, they do it differently. I said, I thought it’s a documentary, the series that I missed. said, this is the documentary. He said, no, no, the one on Apple. I said, not trying to be polite and not insulting. said, sir, you know it’s with actors. He said, yeah, but it’s about true stories. It’s all true. Now, it’s a great series, but there’s no connection between Mossad operations and what is happening in Tehran. It’s just different, very different.
Mossad chief Yossi Cohen once told me that everybody looking at James Bond, what he does with the gun once he pull out the gun. He thinks of how did he get the gun? Meaning just that, just getting the gun, it’s not easy. And what we see in the real, just to conclude, the the reality of intelligence, especially Israeli intelligence, is not more exciting or less exciting from, I think it’s more, but it’s just totally, totally, totally different than anything we see in TV series.
Noam: So are people’s bubbles burst? You feel OK? How do you feel? Everyone should still watch Fauda and Tehran. No, no. All right, who’s your favorite Israeli prime minister?
Ronen: Now, to avoid any kind of a killing field here, but truly, it’s Levi Eshkol.
Noam: Wait one second, who here knows Levi Eshkol? Alright, you’re happy you are lying. Okay, Levi Eshkol, why is he your favorite?
Ronen: Because he brought Israel, I think, to modern age in terms of finance, in terms of the industry. He was the Ministry of Finance before the Ministry of Treasury, and also he was there to stand firm vis-a-vis the military establishment, not go to war too early, the Six-Day War, and not too late. And I think that in terms of being the best, my favorite Israeli prime minister that only worked in order to advance Israel.
He has his pants wrapped up to his chest. He looks very sort of nerdish kind. And by the way, when he was appointed prime minister, he lost his first wife, and this was before marrying his second wife. And he was known to be sort of a womanizer. So the chief of the Shin Bet, Amos Manor, assigned the team of bodyguards and he says, you see these guys? They are very good trained. They will be with you 24-7. They will take a bullet for you. And don’t worry, he winks. You can do whatever you want. They won’t tell anyone. So Eshkol, who had a very good sense of humor, said, why not? Let them tell everybody.
Noam: It’s such an interesting pick. is a very well, he was the prime minister during the Six Day War. And when you think of the Six Day War, you think of Moshe Dayan or Yitzhak Rabin, but you don’t think of Levi Eshkol. He was the head of state during Israel’s most miraculous moment in history. So, but he did have the stammering speech answer
Ronen: He was less on how to market himself in the media. These days he wouldn’t survive a second in politics.
Noam: What’s your favorite thing about being an Israeli?
Ronen: Everything. It’s really, it’s…
Noam: And what kind of Israeli are you? Are you a Jerusalem, Tel Aviv? What are you?
Ronen: No, I’m a Tel Aviv person. I did my internship with the attorney general. I’m a lawyer by training. So I lived there for a year. It’s a little bit too congested with history. 5,000 years of history hovered over you every day. It’s really intense. No, it’s a better nightlife in Tel Aviv as well.
I think, look, the kind of friendship, and no offense to anyone else, but the kind of friendship and openness which people sometimes with all good reason see as bluntness that takes place among Israelis is something that I was not able to find anywhere else in the world. And this is something I really like, it really represents me and what I really want to be is my relationship with people.
Noam: That’s beautiful. Thanks. New York City or LA? I’m kidding.
Ronen: All right, I take the fifth.
Noam: You know I’m sitting answer that or maybe one answer, okay You’re in LA just say LA.
Okay, so we’re in segment four We’re now at the section about I love this section. It’s about MVPs, unsung heroes. There’s a podcaster named Bill Simmons any of you hear of him before?
Okay, I love Bill Simmons. He’s my podcasting Rebbe, and he does this thing, he does MVPs, unsung heroes. So I want to know your MVP’s and unsung heroes for a few major different moments in Israeli history.
The first one is operation finale 1960 I’ll just remind everyone Adolf Eichmann is in our, he’s the architect of the final solution and he is captured by the Mossad. Who is your MVP and your unsung hero? A little Israeli history here.
Ronen: So my MVP here is a German prosecutor called Fritz Bauer.
Noam: Fritz Bauer.
Ronen: Fritz Bauer, and again, not so many people heard about him. Fritz Bauer realized he was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and he wanted to prosecute Eichmann in Germany.
And he realized that the German administration is so deeply, deeply, deeply infiltrated by former Nazis that there’s no way in the world that he can bring Eichmann to justice in Argentina. He issued his extradition from Germany, but then he realized that the German ambassador to Buenos Aires is former SS, not someone who is likely to help him.
So what he did was to ask for the extradition of Eichmann from Dubai. Now Eichmann was not in Dubai, this was just to attract attention to that place. And at the same time he went to Israel twice. And he, at the beginning he just offered, but then he almost threatened Ben-Gurion, and aggressively promoted the need to bring Eichmann. And when this was not addressed the first time in 1958, he came back again and he said to to Ben-Gurion and the chief of Mossad Yisrael, are you nuts? I just told you where Eichmann is and his allies and where he lives in Buenos Aires. Why aren’t you bringing him to justice? And then they sent Zvi Aharoni for a field trip he recognized.
But the code name was dybbuk. Achman was dybbuk. They used all sorts of really…
Noam: What does dybbuk mean?
Ronen: Dybbuk is the demon, a demon possessing a body. They had all sorts of really bad, bad code names for all the Nazis. Cholera, amigedo, all of these. So he recognized him and then they brought him to trial.
And what is, I think, most telling about Ben-Gurion is the page of, know, Ben-Gurion was writing everything. Everyone who came to see him, that’s one of the most valuable records of Israeli history. And everything he did, he wrote in a page. So the page where they came to, the deputy chief of staff comes to, to the Negev, where he lived to tell Ben-Gurion that they captured Eichmann. So Ben-Gurion said, Karoz, that’s the guy, he came to tell me that they got Eichmann in Buenos Aires. I asked him if they are sure it’s him. They said yes, they searched his armpit and they found the remains of the tattoo of the SS number. I said if it’s him, it’s a good operation. And then the rest two-thirds of the page, he writes about a new book that he read from Spinoza. That’s a prime minister that’s just amazing. They captured Eichmann, but he’s still reading Spinoza of that day. Unbelievable.
Noam: So he’s your MVP. How many people here know that name? Okay, fewer people. Okay, now we know. How about this one? You could do unsung hero or MVP, but this is a story that everyone knows. The beeper blast in Lebanon last year, 2024. Who’s the MVP or the unsung hero? The unsung hero is the person that doesn’t necessarily get the, he’s not in front and center, doesn’t get the attention, but there’s an MVP, the most valuable player, and then the unsung hero.
Ronen: So first of all, I think this is the most consequential operation Mossad has ever done.
Noam: Just say what happened.
Ronen: So there are two operations basically. One operation is the walkie talkie. All of them, by the way, it’s all called button operations. Button operations, it means that you, it’s an operation that ended much, much, much, much before it even happened. Because you sort of planned something inside that embedded into the core of the enemy, into the foundation of a bunker, into the supply chain of valuable equipment or gear that the enemy needs. So for example, this is, most of, until now, they never used, until this war, they never used the button operations. There were many. So for example, in the 80s, a country that I cannot disclose the name of, but, you know, it’s North of Israel and its name started with an S. They were searching for new helmets for their pilots. For their pilots.
And Mossad established a special front company in Europe that would supply them with these modern helmets that were great and had a cherry on the top was a small pack of three grams of explosives. And in dual-state scenario, the pilots of this Air Force would take off and they will explode their skull from remote. This country has disassembled, its air force was completely destroyed.
They never used that. With Hezbollah, what they wanted to do is to make sure that they are not able to open to start the preemptive surprise attack on Israel. The first thing they did was to sort of understand that Hezbollah is looking to change their walkie-talkie wireless radio to a Japanese kind called ICOM, which is encrypted. And they were able to intercept the supply chain and replace 15,000 of them.
But the point, the problem is that they will use this only in battle. And they were looking for something that they can explode even if they are not going in just in days of sort of regular conduct.
And then 2018, a woman, this is the unexpected hero, an intelligence officer in Mossad said, we should follow Hezbollah, Let’s say H.
Noam: Who is this?
Ronen: No, we cannot say the name. The name is confidential.
Noam: We have the name.
Ronen: She stood up in one of the meetings at Mossad Chief’s Yossi Cohen was Mossad Chief, and said, we should follow them to the realm of communication where Hezbollah are using. And that realm were pagers. Now, anyone here had a pager? When on the 16th of September, when they exploded the pagers, and there were 3,500 of them. got a message. The initial reports from Lebanon were that Israeli Air Force is bombing Lebanon in thousands of places. So I got an encrypted message from the New York Times headquarters in London. And someone asked me, why is Israeli Air Force bombing Lebanon in so many places? I said, it’s not the Air Force.
And they said, so what is that? I said, these are pagers. They said, what are pagers? I said, these things from the 80s that you give emergency aid forces and physicians. And the answer was, Ronen, come on, again with your nonsense and your jokes. Be serious. I said, no, these are pagers, those from the 80s. They said, Ronen, we know you. Stop that. We are serious. What is happening in Lebanon? I said, no, these are pagers.
Why, do I have a minute for this? Why are pagers? Pages because Nasrallah, secretary general of the organization, he hated these things.
In March 2024, he gave a speech in El Manar and said to everybody, you think that there is a Mossad agent under every bed and around every corner, but the truth is that you are giving, you are feeding Israeli intelligence with all the needed intelligence they need because you use these cursed things, the cell phones, because he was traumatized because he believed that Israel in 2008, in 16 of February 2008, Israel killed his best friend and colleague and deputy, Imad Mughniyeh, the most important, I think the most important terrorist ever lived on the face of this planet, the military chief of Hezbollah. He believed that they killed him with the help of these things. He was not wrong because Mughniyeh had, was living in Damascus for most of the time.
He had his personal interests because he was meeting with Iranian intellectuals in Damascus, but also personal issue. He had a legal Shiite wife in Beirut and three mistresses in Damascus. And the people from 8 to 100 putting surveillance on them.
They called us, so one wife in Beirut and three mistresses, they called the operation, everything in Israel has a code name, they called it Four Weddings and a Funeral. And on the entrance to the, they were giving like a hive of rooms in Mossad headquarters to do their job, but on the entrance, they still keep the writing someone did, they said, pnly God forgives, we set up the meeting.
And one of the guys…One of the guys from A200 who commanded the team, he said, you know, this guy, Imad Mughniyeh, is being frightened. He’s being wanted by 41 countries. Just his name sends echoes and thunder of terror in every place where he gets, and countries are so afraid of him. But he has four wives. You cannot imagine what sort of hell this wife gives him. One is calling him and said, if you don’t marry me, I’ll commit a suicide. The other one is saying if you don’t marry me, I’ll go to speak with your wife and tell her what is happening here. and He said this guy the terrorists he was devoting so much time to relax the four the four wives That he was speaking with them over cell phone and this is what let Israeli intelligence have enough to identify him and kill him.
Pagers do not, they only receive information. They don’t send information. So from the point of view of field security, it’s wonderful. Hezbollah were already using pagers of a company called Apollo. Nice, cool, like small devices. But the problem was that when they fell on the ground sometimes, if everyone who had, especially someone with no coordination like me, every time you get it from the pocket, it falls on the ground.
So Hezbollah started to send back the damaged devices. And Apollo, you know, they were a little bit in a business problem until a miracle happened to them. And they get a call from a company in Eastern Europe and said, listen, we heard that you have a problem with your clients. We know how to solve it. We can produce a much better one, not as sexy, a bit bigger, but very much, call it Apollo with capital R, rugged. And you can drop it, you can put it in your aquarium, can dust it, nothing would happen. When they brought it to Netanyahu, unweaponized of course, he wanted to check it so he threw it on the wall to check that it’s not being broken. There’s a crack on the wall but the pager is safe. And this is how they were able to supply Hezbollah, following the advice of this woman, with 4,500 of these devices exploding in the same minute.
Now, one of the enjoyments of working for the New York Times is that we have people in contact with everybody. And one of us, Farnas Fasihi, who was covering Iran, has a source in the Revolutionary Guard who was in Beirut that moment. Luckily for him, he didn’t have a pager. But he tells us the scene. He walks in the street in the Dakhia quarter, where Hezbollah headquarters is. Someone is screaming and he says someone is bleeding and so he rushed to help and then that person is collapsing and that person is he says this was like the the attack of the zombies unbelievable the the not just the people who were injured most of them not killed but injured and so you will have this for life people with no eyes or no testicles as a marking for their humiliation but the fright, the extent of terror, it’s really unbelievable. This will stay, I think, for many, decades to come.
Noam: Last one, last one. By the way, the story of Imad is all over the Rise and Kill First. You talk about it extensively.
Ronen: Yeah, but it’s all in chapter 34 and 35, not, yeah, I’m not scoping myself.
Noam: And then give me the last MVP unsung hero of the Israeli strike on Iran. Who’s that happened this year? Who gave me an MVP unsung hero of that story?
Ronen: So, very briefly, the trick to the opening strike was to hit 25 people at the same minute. They were divided into two groups, one, 12 Iranian nuclear scientists. This was called Operation Narnia. You remember with the lion come from the closet, Aslan? And the other one, the other group were 13 Iranian leaders of the intelligence, the IRGC, the military, etc. 13 of them, this was called Operation Red Wedding.
Noam: From Games of Thrones?
Ronen: Yes. I was just trying to check that you saw it. Anyway, so how do you locate and supply the Air Force with all of these people at the same time? The one most important target was the leader, was the chief of the Air Force of the IRGC, someone called Ali Hajizadeh.
He got a tip from someone from Hezbollah and instead of being at home where they were thinking of killing him, he went to headquarters with all of his command. He went to the bunker.
So Israeli Air Force and intelligence, they adjusted. Instead of attacking his home, they were supposed to attack the bunker. So they were waiting and nothing happened. And then they understand they are going to walk away. Now, how did they know where are those 25 different people at the same time? Because they were not carrying these 25 VIPs. Were not carrying any kind of cell phone, no beeper, no pager, nothing. But they had bodyguards and the bodyguards were carrying cell phones. They were tracking the bodyguards. Just amazing, the intelligence, the breach of security. And they hear that Hajizadeh says, okay, maybe the guy from Hezbollah was wrong. The Israelis are not coming. We are walking away. And it was the Israeli Air Force commander who came with the idea how they needed to keep them at the bunker for another 15 minutes.
So he said, okay, turn, he said to all of the Israeli Air Force at the same minute, turn on the transponders. So instead of being stealth, the whole of the Israeli Air Force became transparent, became obvious, became on the screens of the Iranian radars. So the Iranian commander says, the Israelis are coming, we’re staying in the bugger. And a few minutes after, this is where he was killed. So losing the intelligence, losing the surprise in order to kill, this was, you know, looking behind the horizon.
Noam: Wow, so those are unbelievable stories from the person who knows more about this than probably anyone in the world. And we’re going to do full thank yous later. But I want to start with thanking you, Ronen, so much for joining me. Thanks.
