Episode 40: You still need real life spies to win wars, with Yossi Cohen

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Former Mossad director Yossi Cohen joins the podcast to talk about the war with Iran (spoiler: It isn’t over), the ayatollahs' regime (which won’t be easily felled), and his assurance that there are still strategic surprises in Mossad’s quiver.

We discuss the stubborn Israeli insistence to continue investing heavily in HUMINT, or human intelligence - spies - in an age when other major agencies have turned away from classic spycraft to cyber, signals intelligence and AI.

And we discuss how Gaza could be rebuilt and rehabilitated, who’s responsible for the failures of October 7, why Yossi has called for new elections and Yossi’s own political aspirations.

This episode was sponsored by Jason and Lauriel Klinghoffer in honor of the memory of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, two Israeli embassy staffers who were murdered in Washington, DC on May 21, 2025. They were fatally shot outside the Capital Jewish Museum after attending an event for young diplomats. Yaron and Sarah were planning to get engaged. May their memory be a blessing.

Please join us on Patreon to support this project: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.

If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [email protected]⁠.

Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ask Haviv Anything. This is a special episode. Again, I say that a lot. This time I mean it. We're going to have Yossi Cohen, the former director of the Mossad, responsible for some of its most astonishing operations and capabilities in recent years.
0:23.0	We're going to talk to him about everything, about the state of Israeli society, the war in Gaza, the war in Iran, the war with Hezbollah, the state of intelligence in an age of AI and surveillance and ubiquitous cameras and why the Israelis cling stubbornly to human intelligence
0:40.3	and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
0:42.3	And we're going to talk about his own political future,
0:46.3	which has been something that Israelis have been debating over the last few days.
0:50.3	The whole thing, the whole gamut.
0:52.3	Stay with me. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that
0:56.9	this episode is sponsored by Jason and Loreal Klinghofer in honor of the memory of Yaron Leshinsky
1:03.2	and Sarah Milgram, two Israeli embassy staffers who were murdered in Washington, D.C. on May 21st,
1:09.5	2025. They were fatally shot outside the Capitol
1:12.5	Jewish Museum after attending an event for young diplomats. Yohan and Sarah were a couple.
1:18.7	They were planning to get married. They were young. Their whole lives were ahead of them.
1:24.6	And they were gunned down in cold blood by someone who thought he was part of
1:30.3	globalizing the Intifada. May their memory be a blessing. I also want to tell you that we actually draw topics for this podcast
1:41.3	and get a tremendous amount of advice and wisdom and help from our Patreon
1:46.4	community. You can subscribe for as little as $5 a month and you can take part in stimulating
1:54.1	debates. People share links. They share all kinds of interesting content. And they suggest episode topics. Patreon subscribers also join
2:04.7	our live streams which we do once a month, send in questions, comments, following
2:09.2	an episode, etc. So if you'd like to be part of that community that's being built around
2:14.5	this podcast, please go to www.patriot.com slash ask
2:19.6	chaviv anything. I hope to see you there.
2:23.1	Yossi, hi. How are you?
	...

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