Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, who headed the Israeli spy agency between 2016 and 2021, made three unannounced visits to Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, surprising the country’s president with the unannounced visit and not coordinated, and ended up being effectively expelled. Cohen’s behavior is unprecedented in the least known, nor is the expulsion, the Hebrew newspaper points out. Ha’aretz.
In 2019, Cohen visited the Congolese capital three times. In the first, he was accompanied by billionaire Dan Gertler, whom British authorities suspect paid a $360 million bribe in exchange for mining rights in the country.
Cohen met the President of the Republic, Felix Tshisekedi, who the first time the Mossad chief appeared unexpectedly in his office did not know what to think, but the second time he began to suspect that Cohen might interfere in the politics of the country, supporting its ally but also rival Joseph Kabila, who had been president from 2001 to January of that year – Tshisekedi had just succeeded him in the post. Previously the investigative TV show UVDAof Israel, reported that in 2015 Kabila hired a private Israeli company to spy on his opponents.
During Cohen’s third visit, Tshisekedi welcomed him again, again without an appointment, but after a few words from the Israeli about the cooperation between the two countries, the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo decided to ask everyone except Cohen to leave the room. , then informing the head of the Mossad that he was not welcome in the country and that he should go straight to the airport, leave and not return. “The head of the Mossad was effectively expelled – an unprecedented and humiliating step”, underlines the Ha’aretz.
The newspaper notes that although military censorship allowed the dissemination of this information by the site TheMarker, including that Cohen had superior approval (presumably from then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), remains uncertain what was the reason for the visits or why the Mossad chief decided to show up by surprise and not book advance appointments—a behavior that has left many former agency officials using the word “madness” to describe the affair.
The fact that Cohen ter pressured the US authorities to lift the sanctions they had imposed on Gertler in late 2017 (then-President Donald Trump’s administration did so days before his term ended) raises suspicions about who helped whom, says the Ha’aretz.
Many at the spy agency are still trying to figure out what could have happened to this totally unusual behavior – no one could recall a similar action from a distance. At best, the newspaper’s sources speculate, it was the result of Cohen’s arrogance. At worst, sooner or later a less noble motive may be exposed and “many people will see in this behavior that of a mafia state”, concludes the Hebrew daily.
This isn’t the first scandal involving Cohen: he’s been accused of revealing secrets to a woman he was having an affair with, as well as her husband (which he denies); was heavily criticized for stating in an interview that Israel was responsible for an attack on an Iranian nuclear power plant and on the death of an Iranian scientistand is suspected of several ethical breaches, including receiving a $20,000 gift from an Australian businessman.