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April 25, 2025 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
59:56
20250425_was-jeffrey-epstein-a-spy-for-israel-mossad-debate
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Mossad's True Mission 00:02:39
The Mossad saves lives, Israeli lives, American lives, European lives.
They serve Israel's interests, which is not the same thing as America's interests at all.
You believe that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent.
I believe that he was an Israeli access agent.
Epstein was what he is, but he was not a Mossad agent because Epstein is famous and infamous.
Oh, Israel must have something to do because it's Jewish.
If I were a Mossad officer, I would have targeted him from my first day on the job.
We would have been absolutely not.
Gentlemen, we do not dare to do anything related to espionage in the United States of America.
Weren't you the guy that tapped Bill Clinton's phone?
Whatever people think of the Mossad, they're probably the last people on earth you want hunting you down.
The Mossad is Israel's elite national intelligence agency with a mandate for vast foreign spying and covert operations.
It is directly linked to many well-documented Israeli deeds, including the theft of Iran's nuclear archive and hunting down Nazis after World War II.
But in the public imagination, Mossad is linked to a lot more than that.
If you spend 15 minutes on X, you'll find it's blamed for pretty much everything from JFK's assassination to 9-11.
More plausibly, many authors and journalists have linked the Mossad to Jeffrey Epstein, the Jewish financier, they argue, provided young girls to powerful people as a honey trap and used the incidents to blackmail them for Israeli intelligence.
Well, critics of thus cultural Mossad obsession say it's another version of an old trope, which essentially blames Israel for everything.
In a special edition of Uncensored, we're taking a deep dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly history of an agency whose founding motto was, By deception, thou shalt do war.
Joining me for what will be a fascinating conversation is the former head of the Mossad between 1999 and 2001, Danny Yatom, former CIA agent and the host of CIA Declassified on UNIFYD TV, John Kiriaku, the author of Provoked, how Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine, Scott Horton, and Harvard law professor and author of The Preventative State, Alan Dershowitz.
Well, thank you all for joining me.
Danny Yatom, let me start with you because you actually ran Mossad for two years from 1999 to 2001.
For those who don't know what Mossad is, how would you best describe it?
Defining the Best Agency 00:06:09
Well, I will describe it as almost the best intelligence and security organization in the world.
And if I exaggerate and it is not the best one, it is one of the three best ones.
And in terms of what Mossad does on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, what is the majority of Mossad time spent doing?
There are a few main goals that Mossad should achieve during the years.
One is to fight terrorism, mainly out of the boundaries of the state of Israel.
The second one is to fight non-conventional capabilities and to make sure that hostile countries and enemy countries will not have nuclear capability.
And nowadays we are talking about the possibility that Iran will acquire nuclear capability and Mossad Mus Maybe one of the most important goals or missions of the Mossad is to make sure that Iran never will have a nuclear capability or any other non-conventional weaponry.
And in addition to it, it deals with gathering strategic information or strategic intelligence and enter it into the process of decision-making by the prime minister and his team.
Okay, Scott Holtson, do you think Mossad is a false for good or not?
Well, they serve Israel's interests, which is not the same thing as America's interests at all.
And on the topic of Iran's nuclear program, for example, they forged what was purported to be an Iranian scientist's so-called smoking laptop back in the W. Bush years.
And they pretended that this laptop proved that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons program.
And all of it was eventually debunked, but it helped heighten the risk of war between Iran and the United States over this alleged nuclear weapons threat.
And as we talked about on the show last week, Pierce, Iran has a latent nuclear capability.
They've proven that they've mastered the fuel cycle, but the Ayatollah said he doesn't want nuclear weapons.
And America's intelligence agencies and Israel's intelligence agencies have continually reaffirmed that they have not made the decision and changed that decision.
Essentially, I think the consensus is among the reasonable experts on this is that if we don't threaten them, and especially if we don't attack them, then they're not going to make nukes.
If we do attack them, they might.
And they're saying, essentially, if you don't attack us, we won't.
So it's a standoff, and we could leave it at that.
I mean, they have mastered the fuel cycle literally 20 years ago in 2005.
They started spinning these centrifuges and proving that they can enrich uranium-235.
And so I'm not saying the Ayatollah is the most responsible player in the world or anything like that, but it's clearly heightening tensions against them, which increases the threat that they would then make the decision to break out toward a nuclear weapon, and then we would have Israel lead the United States into another disastrous war in the Middle East.
Alendoshwis, you're shaking your head there.
Well, should Israel really trust and depend on the possibility that maybe Iran is not going to develop a nuclear weapon?
Just two days ago, Ayatollah Khamani said he was determined to destroy Israel.
Rafsanjani, the former liberal head of Iran, said if Iran develops a nuclear bomb and drops it on Tel Aviv, it will kill 3 million Jews.
And Israel is a one-bomb state.
It will end Israel.
Israel will then retaliate and drop a bomb on Tehran.
It will kill 10 million Muslims.
But the trade-off will be worth it because it will be end of the Zionist entity and Islam would still survive.
Life is always a question of probabilities and possibilities.
And in my new book, The Preventive State, I go through all the options that governments have to try to prevent likely, sometimes even unlikely, scenarios.
And the CIA, as well as the Mossad, are there to minimize the likelihood of devastating experiences.
You ask if a Mossad is good or if it's evil.
I actually defended two young men who were arrested, Mossad agents in Cyprus, back in the 1990s.
And I got a letter from the former head of the Mossad, the man who preceded the guest.
And here's the way he ended the letter.
And this tells you everything you need to know.
May we all live to see the day when a profession such as mine gives way to more pleasant occupations.
Still, there is still some time and a way to go before this comes about.
Look, we know the Mossad is necessary.
The question of whether it's good, evil, intermediate, those are matters of degree and opinion.
But the idea that Israel, one of the smallest nations and the most hated nations in the world, one of the most frequently attacked nations, attacked since even before it was established, could do without the Mossad is preposterous.
The Mossad saves lives, Israeli lives, American lives, European lives.
It prevents terrorism.
Ends vs Means Debate 00:03:06
And like all intelligence agencies, it does things we wish it didn't have to do.
As the former head of the Mossad said, we hope for a day when that profession is not necessary.
But tragically, we're not even close to that.
So two and a half cheers for Mossad.
It does a great job.
It's more like the CIA than it is like any other intelligence agency.
And on balance, it does a great deal of good, not only for Israel, but for the world.
I mean, Alan, the Israeli historian, author, and politician Michael Bar-Zohar said of the Mossad, the dirtiest action should be carried out by the most honest men.
Does the end justify the means to you?
You're a very, very high-profile and very highly reputed lawyer.
Are you comfortable with the way that the Mossad has conducted itself over the decades from a legal perspective?
Or sometimes, is it justified for the Mossad to behave illegally if the ends justify the means?
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If the Mossad could have prevented the Holocaust, if it could have prevented October 7th, if it could have prevented some of the other devastating events, the killing of so many American Marines in the barracks in Lebanon, then you might say, yes, the means, even if they sometimes exceeded the limits of acceptable law, would be justified.
If not, I mean, your previous guest talked about the Mossad forging a laptop, but then they went in and they discovered that, in fact, the Iranians, although they had promised and had a fatwa against having developed nuclear weapons, were developing nuclear weapons all the time that they promised they weren't.
Stealing Secrets and Laws 00:05:14
That's not true at all.
The ends don't generally justify the means, depending on the means.
But when the means are calibrated and when the ends are cataclysmic, you sometimes need to take the kind of preventive action that we wish we wouldn't have to take.
We don't live in a perfect world.
We live in a world that has had holocausts and genocides and all kinds of horrible things to the extent these can be prevented by largely legal activities.
And remember, the vast majority of what the Mossad does just looks up things and goes into public and open sources and tries to get the best conceivable intelligence it can.
But it also has to engage in terrible actions.
Yes, it has to kill people who have killed Israelis in order to send a deterrent message.
After the terrible Munich massacres, Golden Meir said every single person who was involved in killing Israeli athletes will be killed.
And the Mossad did it and they made one mistake.
They killed one innocent person.
That's typical of the way intelligence services operate.
Mostly they do preventive action, mostly they do good, and sometimes they overdo it and sometimes they make mistakes.
That's why we have the rule of law.
Okay, John Kariaki, you said this.
We saw, this is the CIA when you were there, we saw what the Israelis were getting away with in these prisons that they had in the West Bank and in Gaza.
Nobody raised any objection at all.
So we thought, well, if the Israelis can do it, we can do it.
The president said we could, and the Justice Department said we could.
And so we did.
You've also separately described Mossad saying that it has a negative, disproportionate, and widespread influence on the U.S. national security state.
So you're clearly not a fan of the Mossad.
Why?
Well, the job of really any traditional intelligence service is to recruit spies to steal secrets.
And that's great because every country's leaders need those secrets in order to form the best possible policy.
But when the secrets are being stolen from the U.S., the major U.S. defense contractors, from Capitol Hill, from the U.S. intelligence community, from the State Department, there's a problem there.
I remember when I first joined the CIA, and this is going back 35 years, there was a declared Mossad officer in the Israeli embassy and a declared Shinbet officer, and the FBI was able to identify 187 additional Israeli intelligence officers at work in the United States clandestinely.
I would say, why?
Why would they steal secrets when we give them 99% of everything that we already have?
Doesn't the United States steal secrets from Israel too?
Of course they do.
No, actually, no.
The Israelis were off limits to us at the CIA.
We were not permitted to.
I don't believe that.
I don't believe that for one second.
I have information definitely that the United States has stolen secrets.
I know it for a fact, and I don't think you can credibly dispute that.
Well, you know, Jeff Stein.
Go ahead.
Well, Jeff Stein, the great intelligence speech reporter from Newsweek, would report every year on an intelligence report that the FBI would put out about the worst counterintelligence threats in the United States, and it was Russia, China, and Israel.
And eventually, what happened was it caused such a scandal after time after time of this coming out that Dianne Feinstein ended up changing the rules so that they didn't have to issue the report anymore, so that Jeff Stein wouldn't be able to report on it anymore.
But they were alleged by the FBI counterintelligence division to be the most damaging spies in America, only after our supposed adversaries, Russia and China.
In fact, at the CIA, hang on, hang on.
Hang on one second.
I want to ask Danny, actually, because you ran Mossad.
Did Mossad steal secrets from the CIA, for example?
As far as it was published, nowadays no, the answer is no.
Probably it was the situation until the polar defair.
Once the polar defair happened and it became a big crisis that influenced the worst, the situation, the relations between Israel and the United States, the Mossad stopped working on an American soil.
On the contrary, I don't know if you know, but there are very, very close and intimate relations between Mossad and CIA and between Shinbet and FBI.
And we are working together.
We are sharing information.
And as a matter of fact, our best ally is the United States.
And our best ally to the Mossad is the CIA.
Deterrence and Nuclear Iran 00:15:35
I would like also to refer to the issue of nuclear Iran.
Only today, the chair of the IAEA Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran made few essential steps in its way to acquire a nuclear capability.
What we know are facts because we have the information.
And according to our information, Iran has the capability, of course, to enrich uranium to the level which is needed 90%.
Today, Iran admits by itself that it enriched uranium already to the level of 85%.
The last element which Iran has to add in order to become a full-fledged nuclear country is the weapon system, what we call, so that you take the enriched uranium, you add to it the system that I referred to, and you got a bomb.
Iran can do it according to the evaluation and assessment for some like between half a year to a year.
Now, Iran, as Professor Dershowitz said, threatened already to destroy Israel.
Shall we wait until Iran will have a nuclear capability?
And shall then we wait, deposit our lives in the hands of the Iranians until they will drop or they will not drop a bomb on our heads.
This is a totally different threat.
It is not the regular threat because once the Iranians will use a nuclear bomb, then it will be the end of the state of Israel, the end of the Jewish people.
This is why some five to six American presidents said loud and clear publicly that they will not allow Iran to become nuclear.
And this is what Israel says, and this is the policy of Israel.
We will never allow Iran to have a nuclear bomb because it will be a threat to the very existence of the state of Israel.
And we want to live, not to die.
Danny, you talk about nuclear weapons and you don't want Iran to get them.
Just to be clear, does Israel have nuclear weapons?
The answer is that Israel will not be the first one to introduce nuclear capabilities, nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
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In other words, yes, they have 200 atom bombs.
So here's the thing.
Of course, this is nuclear weapons.
What he said was, what he said, Piers, actually proves my point.
If it's true, and I haven't seen the reports, but if it's true that they've enriched up to 85%, that just proves my point.
Donald Trump moved a bunch of B-2 bombers to Diego Garcia and ramped up the threats against Iran on the eve of the negotiations, which they are in the middle of, to their credit.
And so clearly the Ayatollah is strengthening his hand by saying, oh, yeah, we'll all enrich up to 85% and get closer to the threshold there.
So that just proves that these threats, the maximum pressure, sanctions, and the endless threats against Iran aren't productive.
They're not going to give up their entire nuclear capability, no matter what we do.
And then importantly, it also proves that we need to wait.
Let me finish, and I promise I'll let you response, sir.
And then he's saying we cannot allow, we cannot allow.
What's the alternative?
What's he saying?
He's saying America has to go to war with Iran to destroy their nuclear capability and or regime change in Tehran.
And I say fight your own wars.
That's not in America's interest.
It was not the Shiites that knocked our towers down.
It was the radical vanguard of the bin Ladenites, the Sunnis that did that to us.
Mercenaries from our own allied Sunni states, not Iran, not Syria, and not Hezbollah, that did that to us.
Our government has us doing the wrong thing, running around chasing Israel's goals, trying to accomplish Israel's goals in the region and jeopardizing Americans and our lives and our prosperity.
You're making the point that Iran will have a nuclear bomb.
Why?
I don't understand the former.
Danny, just to be clear.
Danny, Danny, if I may interrupt you, you said that you implied Israel has no nuclear weapons.
I've asked Prime Minister Netanyahu that question before and he denied it too.
But Scott Horton says you have 200 nuclear weapons.
Why would Israel not just be open about that?
I mean, everyone assumes you do have a large nuclear capability.
Everybody else who has nuclear weapons is open about it.
Why is Israel not allowed to say whether it has or not?
Because since many years ago, Ben-Gurion, the founding father of the state of Israel, who was also the first prime minister, decided that in relation to the question of nuclear capabilities, Israel will be vague, and we continue to be vague.
If you want to get an answer, ask my prime minister.
This is not a policy that I decided upon.
Well, I did.
I did.
You didn't have any.
Okay, okay.
The main problem is we are talking now nonsense.
Sorry, to be that blunt.
Why is it important if Israel has or has not?
Israel never has any country.
Israel never ever threatened a country that Israel is going to destroy this country.
This is the only thing that...
No, the point is that you can deter Iran.
The point is that you deter people who want to die.
We cannot deter people who want to die.
We must have to prevent Iran, otherwise...
Don't you remember that just recently, about a year ago, the Iranians were the first ones to launch NISA missiles against Israel?
So how can you be so naive?
Sorry, how can you be so naive?
They launched already against Israel.
Netanyahu and Barack both cannot deter Iran.
They do not fear a nuclear first strike, that they know that Iran wouldn't dare attack Israel.
They only fear a brain drain from Israel.
And they fear that Hezbollah would have greater freedom of action against them on their northern frontier if Iran had also a nuclear deterrent.
Netanyahu and your family, Hezbollah.
Alan, I want to talk to you about the events of October the 7th and what then happened afterwards.
I mean, I'll come to Danny for an explanation at his end.
But it seems to me that if Mossad is as good as it claims to be and Israel claims it to be, how on earth did the Mossad not know about October the 7th?
Well, first of all, the Mossad has no jurisdiction over Gaza.
They have jurisdiction over areas outside of the region.
So if it was anyone's fault, it was the Shinbet's fault.
But it was Israel's fault.
It just shows that intelligence is imperfect.
It makes mistakes.
Sometimes it makes mistakes by over-exaggerating the threat, as it may have in 1967, and sometimes by underestimating the threat, as it did in 1973, and sometimes by ignoring the threat, as it did on October 7th.
That doesn't mean that, or the way the United States underestimated the threat for Pearl Harbor.
We've all made horrible, horrible intelligence mistakes.
The question is, do you err on the side of prevention or do you err on the side of allowing the disaster to occur?
Now, one of your guests said, well, the United States shouldn't be bombing Iran.
Well, Israel hasn't asked for that.
All Israel asks for is a guarantee that Iran will never develop nuclear weapons.
And if that takes an attack by Israel, by Israel, in retaliation for the attack that Iran made on Israel, sending thousands of missiles, that the United States should not prevent that from happening.
Israel doesn't want to do that if it doesn't have to.
If the United States, through Trump and Australia, through sanctions, can prevent it, that would be better.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, but Alan, let me ask you, why should Israel be able to have nuclear weapons, but Iran not be able to have them, given that they are neighboring countries in the Middle East, and given that clearly, from Iran's perspective, if they're now facing the jungle drums of war, they have every right, do they not, to fear that Israel may unleash a nuclear attack on them.
Why are they not allowed to defend themselves with their own nuclear deterrent?
For a very simple reason.
Israel is a country that is democratic, that is responsive to the will of the people.
Israel has had nuclear weapons, believe me, for the last 50 years.
They've never used them.
They've pledged they would never use them.
Iran has nothing to fear from Israel's nuclear capacity any more than it does from the United States or from England or from France.
But the Iranians have threatened to use the nuclear weapons.
They have called for the destruction of Israel.
Israel has never called for the destruction of Iran.
It is totally non-symmetrical, non-symmetrical.
You cannot deter people who believe that the best thing they can do is die in the name of Allah.
You cannot deter them when the only deterrence is in the world to come.
Whereas Israelis are deterred by the fact that they want to live in very different cultures.
Why haven't we?
Why haven't they made nuclear weapons yet?
Because they haven't been able to, because they know that if they get close to the line, Israel will destroy them.
And the United States may destroy them, and other countries may destroy them.
They have been deterred.
They have been playing a game of trying to get just up to the line, but not over the line.
But they can easily get over the line.
And you cannot tell Israel that it must risk its 10 million people in order to make sure that your predictions may be true or may not be true.
It's probabilities.
Israel has the right to base on probabilities.
There's a 25% chance that Israel will be destroyed.
I want to bring in the right to take prevention of action.
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Okay, I want to bring in John Kerryake.
John, the CIA dropped the ball with 9-11.
It seems that Mossad, in fact, all Israeli intelligence, dropped the ball with October the 7th.
People are kind of incredulous that you can have intelligence agencies this sophisticated, this well-resourced, this well-manned, where both the United States and Israel did not get any good intelligence which should help them prevent the two worst attacks on their land that we've seen in modern times.
Can you explain it?
Yeah, the CIA years ago made the mistake of getting away from the development of human intelligence.
They so embraced technology and electronic intelligence that they just kind of pushed human intelligence and human recruitments off to the side.
In fact, when the 9-11 attacks occurred, we didn't have a single source, not just inside Al-Qaeda, but even on the periphery of Al-Qaeda.
I think the Israelis probably fell into the same trap where you're intercepting everything, every phone call, every email, every text message, perhaps even messages exchanged on game systems or gaming platforms.
That's not the same as human intelligence.
And I think that they both got away from those traditional methods and paid a very terrible price for it.
I mean, Danny, you know, how did Mossad not have any intelligence about October the 7th, given that 3,000 mass terrorists poured over the border in such a clearly well-planned and orchestrated terrorist attack?
It seems to defy all I know about Mossad and its capabilities that nobody at Mossad seemed to have a clue what was going to happen.
The Hamas Intelligence Failure 00:09:29
The 7th of October 2023 is the most horrific day in the history of the state of Israel and in the history of the Jewish people since the end of the Holocaust.
In less than one day, 1,200 innocent people, infants, young people, young people, elderly people were brutally slaughtered.
Now, we have to admit it is the biggest failure of our intelligence apparatuses and the Israel Defense Forces and our government since the creation of the state of Israel.
Because it started with misconception.
And the misconception on the political level led by the Prime Minister was that we can continue and manage the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and there should not be an end to it because Israel is doing well.
We are fighting from time to time an attempt of the Hamas to attack us and we retaliate and of course we are much stronger.
So this was one misconception.
The second one which was a fault, which is a fault of the military and a fault of the intelligence, that Hamas was deterred.
Hamas was not deterred.
Hamas put a trap that we swallow in order to make us believe that Hamas is deterred and Hamas will never ever will initiate an attack against Israel.
It was a big mistake.
And the third one was that Hamas cannot operate more than 70 to 100 their commando fighters, the terrorists, because they are not capable.
They do not have the capability to manage such an attack.
And we fall into these two very deep traps.
And at the beginning, we were caught under total surprise.
Look, I remember the surprise that we were caught off during the Om People War.
I was a young major fighting the Egyptians in the Sinai desert.
We were totally under surprise.
But what happened on the 7th of October was even worse because we had to fight first and foremost in order to clean Israel from all those terrorists that conquered almost all our villages which belong to the border,
which are situated along the border between Gaza Strip and Israel.
So we were strong enough in order to come back on our legs and the rest is history.
We fought against Hamas and we are still fighting.
We need an I with some 48 or 42 years of experience, both in the military and in the Mossad, I myself cannot explain to myself how did it happen, how could it happen?
And therefore, in order to get the answers, we need to have a national inquiry committee that the Prime Minister avoided until now.
But if we want to know the exact line of events that happened during mainly the 7th and the 8th of October, we need a national inquiry committee.
And this is something that we will have to persuade the government to have.
Okay.
Scott Halton, what's your sense about this?
I mean, there are some conspiracy theories that people at Mossad must have known and indeed did know.
What do you believe?
So, no, I don't agree with that, but the people who make that case, they have many strands to put together, including the New York Times reporter Ronan Bergman, who he reported that Shimbed, I guess, did have the complete war plan a year before the attack.
And I don't know if that's the entire story, but there are other reports in Israeli media along those same lines, too.
And then I think what the gentleman was just saying is right, but very crucial for people to understand what he's really saying is, or he's kind of acknowledging implicitly that Gaza is an Indian reservation, right?
Israel conquered and took this territory in 1967.
And what happened here was because of these assumptions that Hamas, nah, they won't do anything.
I have a friend who said that he was stationed over there with Israel working on some anti-missile stuff.
And they would say, now Hezbollah, those guys could fight, but Hamas, they're like the crips of the bloods or something.
They're nothing.
And they would just downgrade him and disrespect him and thought.
And so, but the point being then, that what happened, because of that attitude, because they had automatic machine guns out front, like on idiocracy, right?
What happened was they got completely caught with their pants down, derelict of their so-called duty to keep these people imprisoned on a Saturday morning.
But then, so what's the point there?
The point there is to illustrate the absolute power imbalance.
The reason we call this October 7th, and even he included October 8th, fine if parts, if some skirmishes lasted past midnight, we don't call it the second week of October or the autumn of 23.
The whole thing basically was over by dinner time because what happened here was essentially what was supposed to mostly be a mass kidnapping raid that did include a lot of murders of innocent people as well.
That went wild.
They couldn't believe, I guess, how easy they had it.
And so they went further than they had even planned on doing, apparently.
But nobody thought that they were invading Israel and destroying Israel or that they posed a threat to Tel Aviv or to the IDF or anything like that.
And so, but then what that means is the point being, they could have just been under siege worse, again, more this whole time.
We haven't had to have this massive bombing campaign this whole time.
And I know I read up a little bit on Mr. Yatam here and I saw where a year ago he was saying we should have a ceasefire and negotiate over the hostages.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the Gaza Strip.
And the new reports say that Hamas is estimated to have 20,000 fighters.
In other words, they did nothing.
It's Stanley McChrystal's insurgent math.
10 minus 2 equals 20.
The more innocent people you kill, the more fighting-aged males you drive into the insurgency, the longer the guerrilla campaign goes.
In other words, just like with the Taliban and the Pashtuns in Afghanistan, you can drop H-bombs on them all, but you cannot pacify them any other way.
And so by waging this counterinsurgency, all of the people 2005.
Yeah, but in 2005, Israel left the Gaza.
It gave it over to the people of Palestine.
It said, build on the Mediterranean line.
You have it.
From 205 to 206, let me finish.
From 205 to 206, there were no restraints.
They could have built a wonderful, wonderful community.
They didn't.
They voted for Hamas.
Hamas took over.
Hamas then murdered the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas then sold thousands of rockets into Israel.
Hamas, the people of Gaza could have been free in 2005 when Sharon, who was a hawk, said, We're going to give it over to you.
We're giving it back unconditionally.
I was in his office when he made that decision.
He told me about it.
And I said to him, Prime Minister Sharon, let me finish.
I said, Prime Minister Sharon, you're making the right decision to get rid of the settlers in Gaza.
You're making the wrong decision to give up the soldiers in Gaza.
There must continue to be a military occupation until there's actual peace.
I wish he had followed my advice, but between 2005 and 2006, nobody was to blame for what happened in Hamas except what happened in Gaza, except Hamas.
So let's put the responsibility to the people.
I don't want to belong.
I don't want to put in a completely good state.
Operation Mossad Thinking 00:14:59
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I don't want to have a wider debate about the war.
I'm talking specifically for the purposes of this debate about Mossad.
John, I want to come to you about something that you stated, which is that you believe that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent.
I believe that he was an Israeli access agent.
You know, if a foreign intelligence agency wants information from very highly placed sources or from very important sources, they're not going to be able to recruit those sources directly.
So you recruit somebody who has access to those sources.
And I think that that's most likely what Jeffrey Epstein was.
I don't know the union of Jeffrey Epstein.
I was in Israel writing a book, and one day Jeffrey Epstein called me.
I was his lawyer.
And he said, I've never been to Israel.
I'd like to come there and meet some people.
Can you get a lunch together for me with six of Israel's smartest people?
And so I arranged a lunch in the Tel Aviv Hotel at which the president of the Supreme Court, the dean of this, the dean of that, he didn't know any Israelis.
He absolutely didn't know anybody.
I took him on a trip to the Shook.
We bought a couple of souvenirs.
He got on the plane that night.
He knew Ayebrock afterward as a matter of they did business together, but not when he was the prime minister at all.
And the idea that the Mossad would retain somebody like Epstein is just preposterous.
Epstein was what he is, but he was not a Mossad agent.
And the idea is so conspiratorial and so absurd.
It just focuses on, because Epstein is famous and infamous.
Oh, Israel must have something to do because it's Jewish.
At bottom, it's a core anti-Semitic notion.
If you're Jewish, you must have some connection with Israel and you must be doing bad things and you must be a spy for Israel.
It is so preposterous, so absurd.
Epstein was many things, but he was not a very Mossad.
If I were a Mossad officer, I would have targeted him from my first day on the job because he had access to Israel.
You would have been fired then.
There would have been a lot of people.
Absolutely not.
Important people with important information.
You are dealing with fake information.
Let's go to somebody who may know the answer for sure.
Danny.
Yeah.
Yes, talk to us about Jeffrey Epstein.
Remember, I reiterate what I said some 15 minutes ago.
Since the Pollard affair, we do not dare to do anything related to espionage in the United States of America.
Weren't you the guy that tapped Bill Clinton's phone?
I know Clinton very well because I met him, President Clinton, because I met him a lot of times when I was the chief of staff of Barack and participated in all the rounds of talks with the Syrians, Palestinians, Jordanians, and the Americans.
I was part of the group being in Camp David.
I know him very, very well.
I appreciate very, very well President Clinton.
And I think that he has all the other presidents as well assisted Essentially, the state of Israel, you have to understand, we are a small country.
We are surrounded by enemies.
Till now, all the terror organizations are with the aim to kill as many Israelis and as many Americans, by the way, as possible.
The Iranians call us the little Satan, and you, they call the big Satan.
So we need to have very good and professional intelligence apparatuses.
Okay, but Danny, let me ask you.
Danny, let me have.
Danny, let me just jump in.
Yes.
Danny, let me ask you something.
As a former head of Mossad, if Jeffrey Epstein had been working with Mossad, would you even tell us?
No.
Would you admit it?
Exactly.
As far as I understand, as far as you have to believe.
How do you know that there is God?
You just said you wouldn't tell me.
If you believe God exists.
Yeah.
It is a question of belief.
Either you believe me.
But you just told me you wouldn't tell me if he had.
I didn't believe.
Speaking of.
I did not meet Epstein ever.
I know him.
I don't know him.
Sorry.
I don't know him.
I don't think that's a good question.
Let me give you a fact.
Let me give you a fact.
Let me ask Alan.
Because it was a stupid.
Okay, we're talking over each other again.
I'm going to make.
Hang on, hang on, please.
Everyone's talking again.
Hang on, Alan.
Alan, let me ask you a question.
Let me ask you a question.
Alan, let me ask you a question.
Have you ever worked with Mossad?
Yes, I represented Mossad to help get two people out of Cyprus.
I did it pro bono, and I got this letter from the head of the Mossad thanking me for doing it.
Let me tell you another thing.
I was Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer.
I know everything about him.
If he had worked for the Mossad, he would have told me that, and I would have used it as a way of trying to reduce his sentence.
He didn't tell me that.
He told me nothing like that.
So there's no way in which he worked for the Mossad and didn't tell me that he worked for the Mossad, because I could have used that to get him an even shorter sentence than the one he got.
There is no possibility that he did that.
Of course, I'm so proud of the fact that I helped to get two people out.
Let me tell you what happened.
They were arrested by Cyprus on the theory that they were working as spies for Turkey.
Those were the days when Turkey was close to Israel.
I was able to prove that, in fact, they were there in order to prevent an attack from terrorists on Israeli people who were coming as tourists and sailing their boats there.
As soon as I was able to persuade the Cypriot authorities that that was the case, they freed them.
And that was a wonderful moment.
They came home in time for Rosh Hashanah for the Jewish holiday.
And I got this wonderful letter from the head of the Mossad saying, thank you.
I hope someday we will no longer have the profession I need to have.
That's the attitude of Israelis.
We wish everybody wishes there wouldn't be war, there wouldn't be fighting.
Remember what Bill Clinton said?
They offered the Palestinians at Camp David 96% plus 4% of Israel plus all of Gaza.
And Arafat walked away and started the Intifada.
It's all the Palestinian leadership fault.
No fault.
I'm going to bring things back to Mossad.
Ask Bill Clinton.
He'll tell you the same thing.
Yeah.
Okay, but we're moving away from Mossad.
I want to just ask Danny before we conclude this.
Danny, the Mossad has done some extraordinary things.
You know, the way it tracked down the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, in 1960, down to Argentina and brought him to trial in Israel was seen as a landmark moment in justice for the Holocaust, of course.
Scott, you mentioned Ronan Bergman.
He has detailed Operation Wrath of God, when the Mossad tracked down and killed multiple Black September operatives after the attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which went on for many years.
And as Alan rightly said, there was one mistaken killing of a Moroccan waiter in Norway, which was part of the incident called the Lillehammer Affair.
But there's no doubt that the overall Operation Wrath of God was enormously successful.
And it showed that the Mossad never gives up in tracking down Israel's enemies.
The more recent incident which has happened, Danny, which people presume to have been orchestrated by the Mossad, was of course the Pager attack on 3,000 members of Hezbollah.
Can you confirm that that was an operation by the Mossad?
I can confirm that it was an operation of the Mossad because the Prime Minister of the State of Israel confirmed it a few weeks ago.
And how long would something like that take to prepare?
And how much patience does the Mossad have, whether tracking down individual enemies or taking on a terrorist organization like Hezbollah?
It is an extraordinary operation.
It was very, very successful, and it helped us to crack down Hezbollah.
It takes a long time.
You need to collect all the information.
You need to collect all the intelligence that's possible.
You need to find the right people that you recruit in order to help you to do that and that and that.
And at the end, it is the way Mossad thinks.
This is a thinking out of the box.
Therefore, so many people appreciate it and admire Mossad due to such an operation.
Do you think the...
Well, let me just ask you actually, Danny, before I go to the others, but do you think that that was the greatest operation by the Mossad that you can recall?
Or was there something that you thought was better?
No, I cannot say that this one is the greater or the most big operation.
There are many.
Most of them are not known.
And this is the way it should be.
We should speak about Mossad and operation of Mossad as little as possible.
You can imagine that there are many other operations, some at the magnitude of this pager operation that you don't know and you will never know.
And not necessarily it is an operation that killed people.
It might be an operation to collect information, vital information, and to make out of it an intelligence that helps us, this intelligence, to secure the state of Israel.
Okay, John, the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Mossad.
Where do you sit in those three descriptions when you look at the Mossad in totality?
When I was at the CIA, CIA officers on mas had the highest respect for Mossad's abilities to carry out operations.
The Mossad is far more streamlined than the CIA is.
They can make decisions far more quickly.
Money is never a problem for them.
And, you know, we can certainly talk about the human effects of something like the Pager operation, but that operation was absolutely brilliant from its inception. to its execution.
People can argue whether it was a violation of international law, etc.
But in terms of an intelligence operation, absolutely brilliant.
And I know, even though I'm no longer in the CIA, I know that there were a lot of people talking the next day about why in the world the CIA hadn't thought of that when they were going after Al-Qaeda 20 years ago.
Scott Halton, the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Mossad.
Where do you conclude on that pendulum?
Well, I mean, speaking of Hezbollah, in Viktor Ostrovsky's book, By Way of Deception, he says that the Mossad knew that Hezbollah, or I guess proto-Hezbollah at that time, was making a giant truck bomb and decided explicitly not to warn the Americans before the Beirut attack that killed 241 American Marines in 1983.
I have to wonder if that's why Ronald Reagan went ahead and pulled out at that time instead of doubling down.
It's because he knew of their treachery.
That's again in the book by way of deception.
And it just goes to highlight the vast daylight and discrepancy between the interests of the nation state of Israel, which as the gentleman said, of course, they're a very small nation state.
It's in their interest, obviously, to get America to do what they want.
But it's not in the American people's interest to have a world empire at all.
Donald Trump just ran and won on America first.
And that doesn't mean Israel instead.
And right now, look at how they have us in a conflict with the Houthis in Yemen.
And they're talking about in the Wall Street Journal, arming up Sunni militias to fight against the Houthis.
Who do you think that means, Pierce?
That's AQAP, the guys that tried to blow up the plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.
Al-Qaeda, real-ass Al-Qaeda, enemies of the United States.
They are the Houthis' enemies.
And, you know, before Barack Obama stabbed them in the back in 2015, America was passing intelligence to the Houthis to use, to kill Al-Qaeda with.
And then he turned around two months later.
That's in January of 2015.
Anyone can read it in the Wall Street Journal.
Two months later, he turned around and stabbed them in the back and took Al-Qaeda's side against them.
And we've been fighting as Al-Qaeda's air force, helping Saudi and UAE, and now with our own Navy and threatening to send in even ground forces or intelligence officers to support ground forces against the Houthis there.
They bombed an apartment building and bragged about it, got caught bragging and boasting about bombing an apartment building.
The Israelis bragged, they were the ones who furnished the intelligence of where to bomb this guy's apartment complex where his girlfriend in Yemen.
Pursuit Effectiveness Quibbles 00:02:16
So it's America first or Israel instead.
And I say America first.
Okay, I think it's America first.
It seems to me that whatever people think.
Well, Alan, Alan, I'm going to ask you a specific question.
Whatever people think of the Mossad, one thing that seems indisputable to me, given its long history, is that they're probably the last people on earth you want hunting you down, which is a testament to their extraordinary operational skills.
You know, people can quibble about individual operations and legality and so on.
I don't think many people would quibble with the extraordinary effectiveness of the Mossad when they are in pursuit of something or somebody.
I agree.
And I think that's a virtue and a positive thing.
I think that it helps save lives.
And all the conspiratorial theories won't really wash the idea that Israel allowed the bombing of the soldiers in Lebanon.
The end result of that was to get the United States out of Lebanon, which is the last thing that Israel wanted, the last thing that the Mossad wanted.
Of course, it's absurd that Israel would somehow want the United States soldiers to be killed, or that it's Israel's fight against the Houthis.
The Houthis are stopping transportation of boats of countries all over the world, especially Americans.
Israel is entitled to fight its own battles.
All it wants to be sure is that America doesn't stop it from destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities if Iran gets close to the line where it can get nuclear weapons.
Israel is not asking for American citizens on the ground.
It's asking just for Americans.
We're doing its job to protect its citizens.
Okay.
But Mossad on the bottom of it has been a great contribution to world peace.
Okay.
We'll leave it there.
Fascinating conversation about Mossad and, of course, all the strands that come off it.
I thank you all very much indeed for joining me.
Fascinating World Peace Strands 00:00:24
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