Published: 28 June 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
YOSSI SAT ACROSS FROM ME and opened his bag. He was a nice looking and well-built elderly man. He took out four passports: two from the United States, and one each from Costa Rica and Britain. Each passport had his picture, but under a different name. His American passports had the same picture, but different names. I asked him how he got them.
“Quite simple,” he said. And he described to me how he did so. I was amazed how easy it seemed. In his youth in the 1960s, Yossi had been an agent in the Mossad, Israel’s national security agency.
In the early 1960s Yossi was living in Italy. He was then a Mossad agent. At the time, Mohammed Hussein Heikal was the editor of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. This newspaper was the de facto voice of the Egyptian government led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. In 1957, Nasser installed his longtime friend and confident Mohammed Heikal to be editor of the newspaper.
The Mossad came up with a plan on how to get information about Nasser’s personal feelings and thoughts about Israel from his closest confidant, Heikal. The plan involved secretly kidnapping Heikal’s brother, who lived in Italy, and smuggle him to Israel. Once in Israel, they could use him to pressure Heikal to provide them with information about Nasser.
The Mossad assigned Yossi, who was fluent in Italian, to help kidnap Heikal’s brother. Yossi and four other Mossad operatives were to go to the brother’s apartment and abduct him.
FULL STORY Yossi and the Mossad (Tablet)
Illustration: The Tablet
