In his three-and-a-half years as the Mossad’s spy chief, Cohen, 58, has transformed the organization into a hard-hitting, risk-taking, history-altering machine. This applies to the Iran arena, to hunting down Hamas’s weapons development, and to convincing African nations as well as Sunni Arab states to go more public about their ties with Israel.
He is the gutsy spy who personally ordered and managed the Mossad’s daring raid to steal Iran’s secret nuclear archives from the heart of Tehran in January 2018. His meeting with Pompeo two months later, but before anything was publicly revealed, was to update him on what the Mossad had found.