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Mossad Director David Balnea was some of the most notable successes in his celebratory history and was not intended to be an intelligence agent. In his youth he served as the team leader of the Israeli Army’s most elite commando unit, and later came to New York to study for his business career.
After earning a master’s degree in finance from Pace University, he won jobs at an investment bank in Israel and later at a brokerage. This is the first step towards a career where the biggest danger was unexpected changes in global financial markets.
The world of Balnea was shaken in November 1995 when extremist right-wing Israelis assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally. Rabin signed the 1993 Oslo agreement with Jaser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Agency, to promote two states’ solutions to decades of conflict between Arabs and Jews.
“Rabin’s assassination shocked him like many other Israelis,” recalls David Meydan, who is considered the leader of Balnea, a retired senior Mossad operative. He said the murder prompted Balnea at age 30 to rethink everything and look for “some meaning in his life.” A friend suggested that he apply for Mossad and after passing the necessary physical and psychological tests, he was accepted into the agency’s trainee program.
Barnea showed the tricks of spotting, recruiting and running agents working in the country of Mossad, which are hostile to Israel. A year after he joined Spy Agency, he became the litigation officer for that Tutsumet, or Junction’s division.
Meidan said Balnea has essential qualities to succeed in the role of “emotional intelligence and empathy.” His foreign posts included years in the European capital. There, Mossad colleagues said he had proven attractive, focused and determined.
The quality of the latter was clear from a young age. Balnea was born in 1965 in Ashkelon, Israel. His father, Joseph Bruner, left Hitler’s Germany in 1933 for British Palestine, and eventually served as vice-colonel in the early days of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Israel secretly recruits Iranian opponents to attack its country from within
At the age of 14, Balnea’s parents registered him at a military boarding school. He becomes a fitness fanatic and runs and cycles whenever he has the chance. When it was time to do the necessary military service, Balnea acquired the coveted place in Ceretto Matocal.
When he began his career as a spy in the 1990s, Mossad’s main focus was Palestinian terrorism. Arabic-speaking Barnea has proven to be proficient in running agents within and around PLO and other organizations.
He was part of Mossad’s leadership when he decided to raise the ranks and make information about Iran in Iran the top priority in 2002. This shift reflects growing concerns about Iran’s secret nuclear program and its relationship with strong regional proxies such as Hezbollah.
In 2019, Barnea was Mossad’s vice-chief and was appointed director of its operations. Among the agency, he stood out as an Iranian scientist, a defender of offensive operations targeting nuclear presence and Iran’s growing arsenal of missiles.
In November 2020, Balnea oversaw the operation that assassinated Mohsen Faklizadeh, a physicist and general of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, who was responsible for the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear programme. After months of surveillance by non-Israeli agents, Mossad was able to grasp Faklizadeh’s travel patterns. Plans to park a Nissan pickup truck on the side of the road and install a unique, remotely controlled machine gun in the bed have been hatched. The weapons included sophisticated cameras and artificial intelligence software, which allowed him to identify Fakhrizadeh and shoot only him.
The operation was managed from Mossad headquarters north of Tel Aviv, where the agency director of Yossi Cohen, whose boss, was joined by the command center. They could see the nuclear physicist’s car approaching, then a gun fired and slammed Faklizadeh several times, sparring his wife, who was sitting next to him.
Seven months later, Balnea was appointed head of the Mossad by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is the 13th man who has done his job.
For the next few years, Balnea was built on the strengths of Faklizadeh’s operations and recruited scores for non-Israel agents for businesses within Iran. These agents played a key role in the June airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program, identifying the homes of nuclear scientists and knocking out Iran’s air defenses.
Heim Tommer, a top-ranked colleague at Mossad, said that Balnea may not be as “strategic, charismatic or glamorous” as some of his predecessors, but he has proven himself to be “the highest rank operator.”
Mossad’s success under Balnea includes the explosive pager that broke Hezbollah, the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, the Hamas political leaders who were visiting Tehran, and the commando attacks that destroyed Iranian air forces and allowed Israel to strike nuclear functions without losing their planes.
These missions represent a prominent shift for Israelis in the Intelligence Election community, many of whom felt that Hamas had failed the country after the attack that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and lured 251 after October 7, 2023.
The Mossad supervision has served the general public for five years, so the Balnea, or Daddy, known to the staff, can be replaced in mid-2026. However, his term of office could be extended as a recognition of his success.
“These are historic days for the people of Israel,” Balnea told a gathering of operatives at Mossad headquarters after a brief war in June, referring to his close cooperation with the CIA. “The Iranian threat that has put our security at risk for decades has been significantly thwarted, along with the support of our allies, the United States, thanks to extraordinary cooperation with Mossad, which was run alongside the Israeli Defense Forces that led the campaign.”
Yossi Melman is Israeli intelligence agency and commentator for documentary filmmakers. Dan Raviv is a former CBS correspondent and host of the “The Mossad Files” podcast. They are co-authors of Spy Against Armageddon: In the Secret War of Israel.
