Mossad mishap involved Palestinian recruits studying at Turkish universities

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Even if the Turkish media is exaggerating in its reports on the arrest of 15 Turks and Palestinians suspected of working for the Mossad, and even if the arrests were given a tailwind by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political considerations, we shouldn’t make light of it.

MK Ram Ben Barak, the current chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and a former deputy director of the Mossad, hinted Saturday night that there’s something to this story. The Prime Minister’s Office refused to comment on the Turkish reports.

The Turkish intelligence agency MIT claimed in its briefings that it had surveilled members of the network for about a year and discovered their encrypted communications gear, their meetings with agents recruited in Switzerland and Croatia and payments of tens of thousands of euros that went from hand to hand. Reading between the lines, it seems the Mossad recruited or tried to recruit Palestinian students from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who were studying at Turkish universities, with a focus on those studying in departments with some connection to military knowhow.

LISTEN: What the ‘Mossad ring’ busted in Turkey was doing there

Presumably, these include the engineering, physics and chemistry departments. All are subjects that could be useful to Hamas in, for instance, improving its rocket and drone development capabilities.

In the past, the Shin Bet security service has revealed that Hamas set up a headquarters and branches on Turkish soil. But all attempts to get them closed ran into a wall of Turkish evasion or outright refusal. Turkey has also become fertile ground for Iranian intelligence, sometimes in cooperation with MIT; this is another reason for the Mossad’s interest in the country.

In recent years, assassinations of Palestinian engineers working for Hamas in Malaysia and Tunisia have been attributed to the Mossad, as has the abduction of a Palestinian engineer from Ukraine.

The Head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, Hakan Fidan.etv channel

For decades starting in the late 1950s, there was extremely close cooperation between the Mossad and MIT with regard to common enemies like Syria, Iraq and Iran. But this honeymoon ended when Erdogan became prime minister in 2003. Military and intelligence cooperation gradually waned until it finally ended completely.

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There were reports in the past of attempts to create channels of dialogue with the Turks and of meetings between former Mossad directors Tamir Pardo and Yossi Cohen and the director of MIT, Hakan Fidan, but none of this produced any results. Moreover, a few years ago, it was reported that Fidan had helped Iranian intelligence uncover Iranians working for the Mossad.

Judging by the Turkish reports of the newly discovered network, its members evidently weren’t high-quality agents recruited by the Mossad. Rather, they were collaborators or agents used for what is known as “basic coverage,” part of the mosaic from which intelligence is built.

But either way, mishaps and even outright failures are the daily fare of any intelligence agency, even the most professional. Therefore, we shouldn’t be shocked and blame the Mossad, Cohen or current director David Barnea – as long as the Mossad has conducted or is conducting a thorough investigation, with no whitewashing, to examine why the network was brought down and what lessons should be learned so that this won’t happen again.

At the same time, senior Mossad officials must realize that they can’t rest on the laurels of professional achievements hidden from the public’s eye. The organization’s conduct and visibility in the public arena is also extremely important to the health of Israeli democracy. And on this issue, there is definitely room for questions.