GOVERNMENT

Yossi Cohen

Director, Mossad

The director of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, for the last five years, Yossi Cohen was asked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July 2020 to extend his tenure in the role due to the present “security challenges facing the State of Israel.” Cohen agreed, and will begin a six-month extension in January 2021. In the interim, Cohen has been participating in the warming of relations between Israel and a growing list of Arab countries, visiting Bahrain in October for meeting with the heads of the Gulf nation’s national intelligence and strategic security bodies. In April, Cohen warned that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Iran had been much more serious than the Tehran regime was willing to admit. “The numbers the Iranians are reporting about are not true,” Cohen told a briefing. “The numbers of infected and dead I know about are much higher.” (Photo: Wikimedia / Creative Commons License)