Netanyahu Picks David Barnea to Chair  Mossad,   Takes Helm next week

Last December, Israel's Prime Minister (PM) Benjamin Netanyahu put Barnea forth as his nominee to replace Cohen as the chief of the Mossad.

Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit on Monday announced that he had cleared the way for David Barnea, the Mossad's current deputy chief, to succeed Yossi Cohen as head of the famed spy agency.

A few months ago, Mandelblit had frozen the appointment saying that it should wait for a new permanent government to be finalized, according to the Jerusalem Post.

However, the attorney-general said on Monday that the political situation currently looks like there may be no new government in place by June 1 when Cohen steps down.

Accordingly, he said that a transition government's general legal objection to making major appointments could be overruled out of necessity for having a new chief in place next week.

The appointment was later approved by the Civil Service Advisory Committee, led by former Supreme Court justice Eliezer Goldberg.

Generally, the prime minister has almost complete discretion on who runs Israel's elite spy agency. Technically, the agency is a part of the prime minister's office so no cabinet or Knesset approvals are needed.

Barnea, 56 and father of four, has served as deputy chief since 2019 and beat out “A,” a former deputy chief, for the job.

Besides serving in an elite IDF reconnaissance unit, he has served in a wide variety of Mossad pisions, but especially as head of the Tsomet spy recruitment pision from 2013-2019 where he won four intelligence awards and as deputy head of the Keshet electronic eavesdropping pision.

The appointment of Barnea was praised at the time to The Jerusalem Post by both former Mossad chief Danny Yatom and former Mossad deputy chief Ram Ben Barak.

Both Yatom and Ben Barak are intense critics of Netanyahu, so their support signaled that Barnea is broadly respected within the intelligence community.

At the same time, the impression is that Barnea is likely to be an aggressive risk-taking Mossad chief along the lines of Cohen.