Mossad Chief Cohen Kicked Out of DRC, on a Mission That Could Jeopardize Israel
By Gur Megiddo
Israeli paper Ha'aretz, May 19, 2022
Original article link
here, archived full article
here
Former senior Mossad officials
described Yossi Cohen’s conduct as ‘madness’ after three trips
to Congo on Israel’s behalf for problematic purposes that are
barred from publication. The visits weren’t coordinated with
Congo’s government and ended with him being deported
From left: Democratic Republic of
Congo's then-President Joseph Kabila; then-Mossad Director Yossi
Cohen;
and Congo's President Felix Tshisekedi.Credit:
Tiksa Negeri/REUTERS, Meged Gozani, Carlo Allegri /
The military censor has barred publication of information
about former Mossad Director Yossi Cohen’s visits to the
Democratic Republic of Congo in 2019.
New information obtained from defense officials by TheMarker
shows that the purpose of these trips, which Cohen made on
Israel’s behalf, was controversial, problematic and some
would even say dubious. This information intensifies the
questions around his conduct in this affair, which led to
his activities being exposed.
As first reported by Bloomberg News, Cohen visited Congo
several times in 2019 while he was still head of
the Mossad. He was accompanied by billionaire Dan
Gertler, who is suspected by the British authorities of
paying an enormous bribe, $360 million, in exchange for
mining rights in Congo. The American and Swiss authorities
suspect Gertler of similar crimes.
Later, Cohen worked to get the U.S. administration to remove
the sanctions it imposed on Gertler in late 2017.
Bloomberg reported that Cohen
made two visits to Congo during this period. TheMarker
has also learned of a third visit. During each of these
visits, Cohen met with Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi.
His visits to Congo came as a surprise to Tshisekedi, who
was shocked to discover that the head of a foreign
intelligence agency was in his country with no official
invitation or advance warning.
Fear of a coup
Sources familiar with the details of the affair said that
Cohen appeared in the president’s office on his first visit
with a present in hand and was granted an unplanned meeting
with Tshisekedi. At this meeting, Cohen offered his
assistance on various issues, such as obtaining defense
technology. Several of the president’s aides were present at
the meeting, as was Gertler.
The surprised president didn’t know what to make of Cohen’s
visit, but at this stage he apparently voiced no suspicions of
the Mossad director’s intentions.
Then-Mossad Director Yossi Cohen
attending a military ceremony in 2018.
Credit: Meged Gozani
The date of Cohen’s second visit to Congo is known: October
10, 2019. That day, Tshisekedi flew in his presidential
plane from the eastern city of Goma to the capital,
Kinshasa. Shortly after he took off, another plane in his
entourage also took off but crashed soon afterward.
According to various reports, aboard that aircraft were
the president’s driver, several employees of the president’s
office and some soldiers. Nobody survived the crash, these
reports said.
When he arrived in Kinshasa, the president’s aides once
again discovered he had an unexpected guest – Cohen.
Cohen arrived in a private plane (it’s not clear whether or
not this was Gertler’s plane) and spent a few hours at the
airport before his meeting with the president, according to
TheMarker’s sources. One person present at the meeting said
that when Cohen and Tshisekedi met later that day, Cohen
asked the president whether it would bother him if the
Mossad chief advised former President Joseph Kabila on an
issue of interest to Israel. Tshisekedi, who by this point
knew that Cohen had also met with Kabila during his previous
visit, agreed.
Kabila, who is considered close to Gertler (and whom
international investigators suspect of taking bribes from
him), had a complicated political relationship with
Tshisekedi at that time: they were partners, but also
rivals.
Tshisekedi was elected only in early 2019, and his new
government relied on a coalition with Kabila’s party. But
Kabila continued to wield great political power, which posed
a threat to Tshisekedi – the first president to take office
after roughly a quarter century in which Congo was ruled by
either Kabila or his father, Laurent Kabila.
After Cohen’s second meeting with Tshisekedi, and because of
his connection to Kabila, the president’s staff became
suspicious of the Mossad chief’s motives. Some of
Tshisekedi’s aides even voiced fears that Cohen was helping
Kabila acquire arms for a coup attempt.
Congo's President Felix
Tshisekedi speaking at the United Nations in 2019.
Credit: Carlo Allegri / REUTERS
Congo’s president loses patience
A few weeks later, Cohen made his third trip to Congo, this
time at the head of a larger delegation. Once again, he held
an unscheduled meeting with Tshisekedi and some of the
president’s staff at Tshisekedi’s Kinshasa office.
“Cohen once again spoke in vague slogans about cooperation
between the countries,” one source said. “But Tshisekedi was
out of patience.”
At one point, Tshisekedi asked his staff to leave the room
so he could be alone with Cohen. At the end of their brief
conversation, Cohen was told to go directly to the airport,
escorted by local security forces, and leave the country and
not return. The Mossad chief was thus effectively deported –
an unprecedented and humiliating step – following a series
of unscheduled meetings.
The purpose of Cohen’s trips with Gertler to the central
African country remain a mystery to this day. But what has
previously been reported is that after these events, Cohen
and Israel’s ambassador in Washington at the time, Ron
Dermer, put pressure on the
Trump administration – and especially then-Secretary of
the Treasury Steven Mnuchin – to suspend the sanctions
imposed on Gertler and his businesses. Five days before the
end of President Donald Trump’s term in January 2021,
the sanctions were indeed suspended.
The suspension wasn’t formally announced; instead, the
administration sent a letter to Gertler’s lawyers that they
could show to banks to get Gertler’s accounts unfrozen.
After TheMarker broke this story and the international media
picked it up, the suspension was revoked under current
Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen just weeks after she
took office.
One potential beneficiary of the temporary lifting of the
sanctions was a lawyer who worked for both Gertler and
then-Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, Boaz Ben Zur. As TheMarker has
previously reported, the sanctions led to Gertler’s bank
accounts being frozen, making it hard for him to pay Ben Zur
and other professionals who had done work for him.
A year before the sanctions were temporarily unfrozen, Ben
Zur told a confidant that Gertler owed him a lot of money
for unpaid legal bills, but the lawyer “trusted Gertler” to
pay him the moment he could.
Democratic Republic of Congo's
then-President Joseph Kabila in 2013.
Credit: Tiksa Negeri/REUTERS
A security purpose?
Israel boasts of its status as being the only democracy in
the Middle East, but when it comes to freedom of the press,
it isn’t completely democratic. The military censor has the
power to prevent or restrict publication, and it has made
and is still making use of that power in this affair – and
not just with regard to this report.
In fact, Bloomberg’s March 2021 scoop about Cohen’s trips to
Congo had been reported by Raviv Drucker of Channel 13
television a few months earlier, but under severe censorship
restrictions that gutted the report of most of its content.
Drucker reported that a “senior figure” had visited Congo,
but was forbidden to identify Cohen as that person.
This Wednesday, a report on the issue will air on the Kan
public broadcaster’s “Zman Emet” (“Real Time”) program, but
it too will be subject to censorship.
Despite this censorship, TheMarker has been permitted to
publish some new details. First, contrary to popular belief,
Cohen didn’t fly to Congo on his own behalf, or to conduct
“personal business,” as several senior officials in both
Israel and Congo speculated after Bloomberg first reported
on the visits.
These trips were approved “at the political level,” to quote
the phrase used by several sources who spoke to TheMarker.
That term almost certainly refers to Netanyahu, the prime
minister at the time, but it’s not clear whether the trips
were also approved by the security cabinet or some larger
forum.
Second, even though several defense officials who spoke with
TheMarker defined the purpose of the surprise visits as “a
national security interest,” they don’t clearly fit that
bill. One could even say they are far from fitting it.
Third, nothing in the information obtained by TheMarker
provides any explanation as to why the Mossad director had
to go to Congo personally. That part of the story is
evidently hiding some serious negligence, and the defense
establishment isn’t allowing the necessary public discussion
of it, ostensibly for reasons of national security. It’s
hard to avoid the impression that defense officials’
considerations are at least as much about Israel’s image,
and even Cohen’s image and that of the organization he
headed, as they are about national security.
You don’t have to be a former Mossad chief to understand
that for the Mossad director to personally make a surprise
visit raises the risk of that visit coming to light. And
indeed, nobody disputes that the visit did become widely
known, because Cohen’s presence threatened the Congolese
president, who deported him.
Dan Gertler.
Credit: Simon Dawson / Bloomberg
Dozens of people, if not more, were aware of this
exceptional event – and from there, the road is short to the
article published by Bloomberg and the subsequent articles
published in Israel and other countries.
What was going through Cohen’s mind when, while still
serving as Mossad director, he simply showed up in a foreign
country without either coordinating his visit in advance or
making any attempt to conceal his presence? Numerous former
senior Mossad officials have been breaking their heads in an
attempt to solve this riddle in recent months.
Many have used the word “insanity” in their bewilderment
over Cohen’s actions, and all of them say they can’t recall
a similar incident in the organization’s history. In the
best case, they speculate, Cohen’s unusual behavior was the
result of his extreme arrogance.
Cohen declined to comment for this report.
Who was helping whom?
It’s also possible to say, without breaking any rules, that
none of the information obtained by TheMarker provides
sufficient explanation as to why Cohen needed the
involvement of Gertler and Kabila – two people with bad
reputations in the West – when on the face of it he could
have achieved his goal without them.
The questions about this issue matter, because Gertler’s
involvement in this mission legitimized the later efforts by
Cohen and Dermer to help him by asking the U.S.
administration to ease sanctions on him. Dermer was quoted
by Bloomberg as saying that Gertler “has lots of
relationships in the region that are important to Israel’s
interests.” But it’s not clear why Gertler was asked to help
Cohen, and it seems doubtful that his help was truly needed.
It’s not inconceivable that, sooner or later, the full
details will be revealed by some foreign media outlet that
isn’t subject to Israeli censorship. If the purpose of the
trips is revealed, the ugly sides of Israel’s conduct will
also come to light, and many people will view its conduct as
that of a mafia state.
The Congolese capital of
Kinshasa, where then-Mossad chief Yossi Cohen was a
regular visitor in 2019.
Credit: MONUSCO / Michael Ali
This risk is the other side of the coin of describing
Gertler as an asset to Israel’s national security. Gertler
and Kabila both possess sensitive information whose
disclosure could severely harm the country. That’s far from
being a desirable situation.
As for the public discussion within Israel, it’s reasonable
to assume that if the details are revealed, a public debate
will erupt between those who are shocked and those who view
Cohen’s actions as legitimate in light of the challenge they
were meant to address. In contrast, there will likely be
much less of a debate about the arrogant, negligent way the
issue was handled.
If and when this information does come to light, the defense
establishment will also have to answer to the public for its
conduct in censoring details about the affair. The issues
that will be on the agenda are whom the defense
establishment was protecting by barring publication, to what
extent the system’s considerations were really about
national security, and to what extent it was simply covering
the mistakes of its own members – and perhaps its own ass.
The Prime Minister’s Office said on behalf of the Mossad
that “anything done by Yossi Cohen, if it was done, was in
the framework of his job as head of the Mossad, with
permission and authorization from the authorized parties.”
Full disclosure: Gertler has filed a libel suit against
TheMarker seeking 9 million shekels ($2.7 million) in
damages.
