Former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo said in his new book that during his term, the agency rescued Mossad agents in imminent peril at the personal request of then-Mossad director Yossi Cohen.
Pompeo served under then-president Donald Trump as director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2017 to 2018 and as the 70th U.S. secretary of state from 2018 to 2021.
His new memoir, “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” came out on Tuesday.
In his book, Pompeo says that the operation was “one of the most significant clandestine operations ever conducted.”
Pompeo described one of several interactions with then-Mossad director Yossi Cohen without giving the exact date. In the retelling, Pompeo recounts hearing from an aide that Cohen needed to speak with him immediately. The call came shortly after Pompeo had landed in a European capital, and he took the call back on board the flight as it was a classified conversation with the leader of Israel’s intelligence agency.
Pompeo said Cohen calmly but seriously said: “’Mike, we just had a team complete a very important mission, and now I’m having a bit of trouble extracting some of them. Can I get your help?’”
The former CIA director said that whenever Yossi called, he took the call, and vice-versa.
“I was there to help our friends, no questions asked, no matter the risks,” Pompeo said.
“My people swung into action across the world. We connected with his team, and within twenty-four hours we guided them to safe houses. Within the next two days, they were back in their home countries without the world ever knowing that one of the most significant clandestine operations ever conducted was now complete,” recounted Pompeo.
The specific operation is not named, nor is the specific time period detailed. However, some say that the description would seem to be of the 2018 Iran nuclear archives operation.
Israeli intelligence sources are denying that the operation in question was the February 2018 operation of seizing Iran’s secret nuclear archive.
If the CIA was involved, despite Israeli denials, it would be the first public acknowledgment that the US was more deeply connected and at an earlier date to the nuclear archive heist.
The memoir has stirred controversy.
“I wanted to tell the story from my perspective, for four years of the Trump administration, and our effort to put the American people at the front of American foreign policy,” Pompeo said in a Tuesday interview with CBS News.
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