🇮🇱 In a direct and unprecedented disclosure to the Israeli Supreme Court, Mossad Director David Barnea asserts that the agency operates in a state of near-total legal autonomy, without a “Mossad Law” or any formal oversight mechanism comparable to those governing other agencies. Barnea explicitly states that for 99% of its activities, the Mossad has no obligation to report to its supervisor, and acknowledges that its operations are often carried out in outright violation of the laws of the foreign countries in which it operates. This “vast gray area,” he argues, is a structural necessity for the Mossad’s mission, but one that places an immense and singular burden of responsibility on the person leading the organization.

Drawing a sharp contrast with the wider Western intelligence community, Barnea writes that “unlike the heads of Western intelligence agencies,” the Director of the Mossad operates with “almost absolute freedom.” According to Barnea, the chief alone determines both the strategic objectives and the methods used to achieve them, without the external checks, balances, and legal constraints common in other democratic states. Because the Mossad exists largely outside standard legal frameworks, he argues, the personal integrity and moral restraint of its director become the final and only barrier preventing strategic disaster or a dangerous abuse of power.

Against this backdrop, Barnea frames his opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s choice for the next Mossad chief, Roman Gofman, not as a routine professional disagreement, but as an extraordinary warning about character, judgment, and “purity of values.” He argues that Gofman’s history of bypassing military procedures and disregarding established protocols demonstrates a willingness to cross boundaries that a Mossad director must know how to impose on himself. In Barnea’s view, placing a leader who “seeks shortcuts” and “violates procedures” at the helm of an organization that already operates abroad beyond the law and at home with virtually no oversight would pose an unacceptable strategic danger to the State of Israel.

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