Opinion

Ex-Mossad Chief: Best Part of My Job Was Having ‘a License to Crime’

Former Israeli Mossad chief (2011-2015), Tamir Pardo, spoke to Israel’s foremost TV news magazine (the video is only accessible via Israeli IP addresses), Uvda about his thirty years’ working for Israel’s foreign spy service.  He was continuing a tradition begun by his predecessor, the late-Meir Dagan, who also did an interview with the TV program after he left his job.  In fact, they both did the interviews for the same reason: they were deeply disaffected from their former boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since so much of Israeli intelligence work is done covertly and under the pall of military censorship, preventing the public from having any inkling of what is done in its name, such interviews draw back the curtain slightly on an otherwise taboo subject in the Israeli media.  As a result, the audience for such events is huge and the public hangs on every word.

Pardo didn’t disappoint.  He mixed a combination of striking candor with feigned humility to present a picture of an experienced Israeli spy who’s been humiliated by his former boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and driven into a sort of forced exile.