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Inside Israel’s pyramid of spies

The Cradle | August 7, 2026

No state or security body offers a single, systematic account of how Israeli agents are used, why they are recruited, or what services they ultimately provide. Outside experienced state institutions, universities and research centers rarely undertake such scrutiny. Israeli academia is the notable exception.

Israeli universities form part of the wider intelligence ecosystem through research, graduates, and seminars conducted with the security services and military. They produce personnel, assess institutional performance – as they have done since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood – and examine intelligence work in detail.

The Second Annual Israeli Conference on Intelligence Studies, held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on 28–29 October 2025 under the title “Intelligence Transformations After Failure,” is one open example. No comparable body of work has emerged from Arab and Islamic institutions.

Accounts from current and former security practitioners, alongside cases involving agents both living and dead, reveal an intelligence pyramid: a layered system of recruitment, cultivation, and deployment built around the value of the intelligence sought and the risks demanded of each spy.

Level one: Building the picture

At the base of the pyramid is information gathering, a task common to almost every category of recruited agent, though the value and type of information vary widely. Israeli services generally separate the agent or cell collecting intelligence from the cell carrying out an operation. The roles sometimes overlap, but collection remains the gateway to action.

An agent may gather information during a probationary phase, without knowing what it will be used for or whether others are working alongside him, simultaneously or in sequence, inside or outside the same organization.

Then come the “mosaic collectors,” who move beyond isolated fragments. They, too, may not see the complete picture, but their assignments are more complex. Instead of passing a single detail or photograph, they may track a person’s movements and relationships in depth, or map an entire process, such as an organization’s purchase of motorcycles or communications equipment.

One recent Lebanese case involved a detainee later released by the judiciary despite the sensitivity of his alleged mission. According to security sources familiar with the file, he was instructed to mount specialized equipment on a vehicle and drive through selected areas, harvesting data from internet routers in homes and institutions and attempting to penetrate them.

A second, recurring example comes from Palestine: the penetration of external training chains. Trainees sent to courses in Lebanon, Syria before the government’s fall, and Iran before the war on Gaza were exposed.

At times, the training bodies themselves were compromised and discovered concealed cameras in equipment covers. The breach then operated at three levels – inside the organization, along the training chain, and within the host institution.

Higher up are agents with access to sensitive files or influence inside a faction’s military or security apparatus. Their task may be to construct a picture of a company, battalion, brigade, division, or specialist unit. No single member normally sees an entire arena or organization; that degree of access is usually confined to a political bureau, military, or jihadi council.

One battalion in northern Gaza was penetrated before the current war, specifically in 2021. The agent held considerable authority and ranked roughly third in its command structure, yet still lacked a complete map of the battalion’s tunnels.

Israeli handlers therefore supplied him with military boots resembling those worn by resistance fighters. A tracking device was hidden inside, and he was told only to walk through the tunnels, allowing Israel to chart the network.

After the breach was discovered – having paralyzed operations in that area during the Sword of Jerusalem battle – the agent fled to Europe. A counterintelligence operation later lured him back to Gaza by making him believe suspicion had passed.

He was arrested, and the source of the breach was exposed. Security sources inform The Cradle that the discovery spared the battalion from destruction in the latest war and helped turn the border area into a persistent problem for Israeli forces until the final stages.

The battalion commander responded through trial and error, creating separate tunnel routes and branches and preventing any one fighter from moving through all of them or taking part in the entire excavation process.

Yet the same agent escaped prison shortly before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. That extraordinary story lies beyond the scope of this investigation, though one detail is telling: another agent facilitated his escape.

At the top of this first level stands the source of “golden information” – intelligence decisive to a major operation, particularly an assassination. It may reveal a figure who has never been photographed, identify a safe house, or confirm a target’s presence during the final moments before a strike.

Some such agents have been killed by mistake; others, sources say, were deliberately abandoned when Israel judged that they had nothing more to offer or could not be extracted.

Technology has made field agents harder to detect and reduced the need for some older practices. At the beginning of the Second Intifada, for example, agents could be ordered to mark a building with a laser before an airstrike.

Such tasks are less necessary today because Israel already possesses extensive maps of public bodies – municipalities, governorates, and ministries – as well as many overt and covert resistance sites.

Israeli military publications openly use the Hebrew term yediat zahav – “golden information” – for decisive, current intelligence extracted from a mass of raw data. In resistance environments, invoking such intelligence can also fuel suspicion that a senior agent exists, even when the information was obtained through technical surveillance.

Where the source is human, investigations repeatedly show that an Israeli service may spend years and large sums cultivating one person for a single disclosure. The assassination of Yahya Ayyash is a prominent example.

The collaborator who enabled the operation was bound to be exposed because he supplied both the identifying information and the instrument of assassination – a booby-trapped mobile phone. With no plausible alternative suspect, an escape or extraction plan had to be prepared in advance.

Level two: Agents in the field

Information gathering already demands work on the ground – photography, surveillance, communications, and impersonation among them. Direct field missions require a different class of agent. Security sources estimate that nearly all must meet their handlers inside Israel or abroad and receive either task-specific instruction or broader operational training.

At the bottom are what security practitioners describe as “cheap missions”: assignments carrying minimal risk, with exposure more likely to result from chance or a basic mistake than from the work itself. These include leaving communications devices, messages, or cash at “dead drops.” Such tasks usually require little training and are assigned gradually.

A dead drop is selected after studying a country’s geography and population patterns. One agent leaves the material; another retrieves it without knowing the first and sometimes for an entirely different operation. Many recruits with reasonable collection skills can perform these tasks. They remain below the risk threshold reserved for more experienced and intensively trained agents.

The next rung involves logistics. This involves obtaining communications equipment, buying or renting homes and vehicles, or securing other tools later used by operational cells.

From there, the work can become far more dangerous. Agents may tamper with resistance weapons or insert tracking chips into them, including RPG and Kornet anti-armor rounds and even missiles or their explosive warheads. Others plant surveillance devices. At this point, the agent generally understands exactly what the mission entails.

In one prominent example, a single agent working in a manufacturing workshop belonging to an Islamic organization in Gaza was responsible for the deaths of at least 30 operatives between 2008 and 2012 by planting tracking devices in the rockets they launched, as well as weakening the explosive material in the warheads.

Having joined from another organization, he cultivated an image of exceptional devotion to deflect suspicion, even carrying wounded comrades on his shoulders while performing tawaf around the Kaaba.

Although eventually exposed, he escaped Gaza and, according to the same sources, still holds an official post in a Muslim-majority country.

At the summit are the hardest assignments: planting explosives or carrying out assassinations directly. Israel embraced this route only more extensively during the past decade. For years, a basic assumption among Palestinian and Lebanese investigators held that Israel killed only by Israeli hands. That premise often led inquiries to discount a local perpetrator from the outset.

The 2010 assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai reinforced that belief. The large team seen on Emirati surveillance footage used foreign passports; many were believed to be Jewish. But subsequent cases in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran indicate that Israel has sought to reduce the risks borne by Jewish operatives, Arabic-speaking Israeli agents, and Druze or Bedouin recruits by transferring more of the execution phase to local assets.

The March 2017 assassination of freed prisoner Mazen Fuqaha in Gaza exposed the limits of the old assumption. Fuqaha, a commander in the Qassam Brigades, was responsible for supporting military activity in the occupied West Bank. Investigators faced a missing link. Even after a Palestinian agent confessed, some remained convinced that an Israeli special unit must have entered Gaza to carry out the shooting.

Nearly nine years later, on 5 February 2026, Netanyahu publicly acknowledged Israel’s responsibility for Fuqaha’s assassination. He confirmed that the killing was carried out through recruitment of a Palestinian collaborator, Ashraf Abu Leila, who shot Fuqaha outside his home in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City.

The disclosure was unlikely to have been casual. Its timing came as Palestinian resistance movements were conducting sweeping reviews of their security and military performance after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

The following day, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigation into armed groups in Gaza accused of serving Israel.

The program included material on local militia members used to track targets and carry out armed tasks. One case involved two men assigned to kill a wanted figure with a suppressed weapon. One was captured despite having received little training and not being a long-serving recruit – another departure from the model that prevailed before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

During Israel’s June 2025 war on Iran, Israeli messaging sought to portray every ground operation as the work of Mossad officers. Field investigations and sources following the cases point to a different picture. Iranian Jews living abroad, migrants, and their descendants accounted for only a small share of those allegedly involved.

Many of the operatives proved to be residents of Iran, meaning Mossad personnel had not acted alone as Israeli accounts implied. Some people who helped smuggle equipment into the country reportedly did not know it would be used in military or intelligence operations, believing they were moving civilian goods for profit.

Level three: Re-engineering the enemy

At the highest level, the selection, conduct, and mission of an agent change fundamentally. Israel studies a target organization strategically, seeking to dismantle it or redirect its course. The work demands highly placed, carefully cultivated recruits. An assignment may involve reading a leader’s behavior or tracing ideological currents across an entire movement.

One agent admitted during interrogation that his task had been limited to observing a leader’s social life and political language. He was required to remain close to a figure in an Islamic organization in Gaza who was assassinated in 2003, mapping his community relationships, recording what he said away from the media, and assessing whether he belonged to the movement’s “hawk” or “dove” camp. The findings helped determine Israel’s targeting priorities.

Past Israeli statements and signals support the view that assassinations, particularly of political figures, are not always ordered for immediate military reasons. A killing can create a vacancy in a movement’s hierarchy.

Israeli planners then anticipate who will fill it and whether that successor better suits their objectives. In effect, an organization’s political trajectory can be re-engineered while its members believe they are responding to internal circumstances.

The practice is old. It dates at least to the rivalry between Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). This was a time when Israeli services sought to exploit disputes within and between Palestinian factions and used agents to deepen them.

During periods of intense military escalation, anyone who appears on the radar may be killed as Israel pursues the largest possible number of assassinations. The campaign unleashed after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood marked the largest exception of all.

The US has played a comparable game, sometimes without recruiting a conventional agent. Former CIA officer John Kiriakou described one such method in a podcast released on 29 January 2026, explaining how the agency helped fragment the Abu Nidal Organization.

Unable to penetrate the group directly, the CIA instead planted suspicion. Through direct and indirect contacts, it suggested that a senior member had been recruited. One cadre then killed another on suspicion of betrayal, setting off further internal bloodletting.

The organization was thus driven to destroy itself without the recruitment of a single agent. Its founder, Sabri Khalil al-Banna, better known as Abu Nidal, died in Baghdad in 2002. The author’s security sources maintain that Saddam Hussein had him killed after years of using his organization in external and internal operations, though the circumstances remain disputed and other accounts describe suicide.

A different strategic path requires elevating an agent into the leadership. That person needs achievements to build credibility, even if Israel must allow an operation to appear successful – or announce casualties in its own ranks – to manufacture the necessary record.

A source in Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades reveals to The Cradle that an operative identified as A.N. rose rapidly after an Israeli jeep was apparently destroyed by an explosive along the boundary and Israel announced one death and several injuries. A later transaction involving night-vision equipment exposed him, and he fled into the territories occupied in 1948.

The subsequent investigation found that the jeep had been remotely driven to the site of a bomb reported in advance. The explosion created a filmed “achievement,” giving the agent credibility, quicker access, and a degree of trust that was difficult to challenge.

Once an agent reaches the intended leadership tier, he may be ordered to identify additional cadres for recruitment. Another recurring task is to cultivate financial and moral corruption. The aim is to convince members that their sacrifices are being exploited for private gain. Such tactics work precisely because corruption already exists, to varying degrees, within the structures of several organizations.

One of the starkest cases uncovered by the Palestinian resistance involved a historic leader identified as M.N. He was reportedly not asked to transmit operational intelligence. Instead, his assignment was to magnify organizational failures and obstruct successful work.

Other agents were instructed to arrange commercial deals and partnerships that implicated people who were not directly recruited, widening the perception – and sometimes the reality – of corruption and exploitation.

The effort to create a negative example belongs to the same strategy. Israeli handlers may target the children of leaders whom they have failed to recruit or assassinate. Security pressures and the prolonged absence of a father who once acted as protector and disciplinarian can make those children more vulnerable. Families of martyrs face the same danger.

Palestinian and Lebanese files contain many such examples. The most politically embarrassing involve the sons of a well-known West Bank leader in an Islamic movement, one of whom publicly converted to Judaism and repeatedly entered Israel.

Whether he settled there permanently remains unclear. Such cases are rare, but Israel amplifies them to discredit the movements concerned, dishonor prominent families, and weaken their standing within Palestinian society.

The most dangerous outcome combines two tracks: assassinations designed to reorder an organization and the promotion of an agent into its senior leadership. Together, they open the way to direct influence over decisions and strategy. The danger is greatest after the killing of historic figures who cannot easily be replaced.

Israel’s intelligence services invest for the long term. They study the remaining leaders, their histories of disagreement, and the character of each relationship, then seek to create friction inside the organization. As sources familiar with these files put it, the intended result is to weaken effectiveness, waste effort, and expose structures.

That investment can consume enormous human resources. Specialists may spend a decade or more building a single subject’s biography – from his waking hour and favorite foods to his relationships and most closely guarded secrets.

In several cases, such intimate knowledge has ended in assassination. The spy’s service to Israel is therefore measured by more than the secret he steals or the device he plants. At its highest level, it lies in helping the occupation reshape an adversary from within, long before the target recognizes that its choices are no longer entirely its own.

August 8, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Palestine, Zionism