Following his appointment of David Zini to lead the Shin Bet security agency, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now named Roman Gofman as the next director of the Mossad. Gofman is a talented officer, but none of his talents are relevant to the job he is about to take on, apart from the fact that he has served for the past year and a half as Netanyahu's military secretary. It seems that this proximity, and the personal loyalty forged along the way, drove the appointment rather than any of the professional justifications Netanyahu listed in the announcement.
The Mossad is not a political posting. It is a profession. The same is true of the Shin Bet. Yet in both cases Netanyahu appears to have mistaken a senior army rank for professional suitability. Just as Zini lacked the qualifications to head the Shin Bet, Gofman lacks the qualifications to lead the Mossad. His IDF resume is impressive, but it has nothing to do with the work of the Mossad. He has never held an intelligence position, nor has he handled special or covert operations. Over the past year and a half he may have observed such missions as military secretary, but that is far from true expertise.
In the past, the Mossad has at times been led by commanders from outside the organization. Meir Amit, who previously headed the IDF Intelligence Directorate; Zvi Zamir, formerly head of the Southern Command; Yitzhak Hofi, former head of the Northern Command; Danny Yatom, a former head of the Central Command; and Meir Dagan, who had served as deputy head of Operations and as a corps commander. All arrived with far more relevant military experience than Gofman, whose current role is his first as a major general. Most of those external appointments were made in difficult periods when the Mossad lacked a natural internal successor.
That is not the case today. Since Meir Dagan stepped down, the Mossad has been led by three strong directors, Tamir Pardo, Yossi Cohen and David Barnea, each of whom strengthened the agency's standing and capabilities. Barnea cultivated three candidates to replace him, including two of his deputies. Netanyahu would have needed a very strong reason to overlook them. He had none, especially when several of them were involved in the very operations Netanyahu himself has touted over the past two years, from the pager operation in Lebanon to the elimination of senior operatives in terrorist organizations and various achievements in Iran.
Gofman's appointment is not only a slap in the face to the internal candidates. It is a vote of no confidence in the Mossad as a whole, despite Netanyahu's frequent praise for the agency. It is no surprise that tempers are boiling in the Mossad's headquarters, from the director general's office downward. Inside the agency, the feeling was that Netanyahu made this call brazenly, without even the pretense of a struggling organization that requires outside intervention, as he claimed with the Shin Bet. This was a purely personal appointment, rooted in the interests of one man rather than the interests of an entire country.
Anyone searching for a silver lining may find it in the IDF, where some breathed a sigh of relief. In recent weeks rumors circulated that Netanyahu was considering a reshuffle that would end with the dismissal of IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, and Gofman being appointed in his place. That will not happen for now, but Zamir surely knows that nothing is final. The power base Gofman built for himself in the Prime Minister's Office will be something his successor is likely to preserve, knowing it could ultimately pave the way to a coveted position. All that is required along the way is personal loyalty, and everything else be damned.
