By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Seven months ahead of time, Roman Hofman (Гофман, Gofman), military secretary (advisor) to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since April 2024, has been nominated as the new director of Mossad, succeeding David Barnea whose term ends in June 2026.
Netanyahu’s move cuts Gofman’s tenure in the prime minister’s office prematurely short; it also pre-empts Barnea’s attempt to promote succession candidates of his own with intelligence service which Hofman lacks.
According to the Israeli Government announcement, Hofman, an artillery specialist and tank commander, qualifies for the post with “creativity, initiative, stratagem, deep recognition of the enemy, absolute discretion, and the safeguarding of secrets. These qualities, as well as his leadership and courage, were evident at the outbreak of the War of Redemption, when he rushed from his home and fought in person against Hamas terrorists in the Western Negev, where he was severely wounded.”
The nomination of an outsider, promoted for his “aggressively offensive nature” in the Gaza war since October 2023, the December 2024 war against Syria, and then the June 2025 war against Iran, and as a personal trustie by Netanyahu, is running into criticism inside Israel, although it is not unusual for former army generals to be moved into the Mossad. This criticism of Hofman is not for a lack of enthusiasm towards genocide and other war crimes by the Israel Defence Forces.
Yevgeny Krutikov, a former Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer and now a security analyst for Vzglyad, has just published an assessment of the Hofman appointment; he reveals not so much what the Russian intelligence services are expecting, but what they want Hofman and Netanyahu to know they think. Krutikov’s conclusion is that the move is a “result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political games, which does not correspond well with the real tasks of the country’s intelligence community. As a result, we will see a temporary reduction in so-called ‘offensive’ operations, and we can even predict a decline in the effectiveness of the Mossad, maybe even high-visibility failures.”
Krutikov doesn’t mention that Hofman was sent to Moscow by Netanyahu in September 2024 “to promote the [Gaza] hostage deal”. It isn’t clear what language Hofman used, since he reportedly cannot speak English and left his Russian-speaking home in Belarus as a boy of thirteen. Subsequent Israeli reporting from March of this year indicates that Hofman has returned to Moscow for negotiations on “strengthening cooperation between Israel and Russia in the interests of Israel’s security…also [the] Russian role in Syria.”
While there is no Russian report of who received Hofman at the Defense Ministry or General Staff, Krutikov’s report indicates he is unrespected, untrusted, unliked.
Source: https://vz.ru/world/2025/12/8/1379355.html Translation into English is verbatim; pictures have been added.
December 8, 2025
Appointment of a native of the USSR predicts difficult times for Mossad
By Yevgeny Krutikov
Israel’s Foreign intelligence Service (Mossad) will receive a new head, Roman Hofman [Роман Гофман], a native of the Belarus Soviet Socialist Republic. Why is he considered a hero in Israel, what role does the Israeli political leadership assign to the new head of intelligence, and why does this appointment itself bring little good to the Mossad?
“I have decided to appoint Major General Roman Hofman as the next head of Mossad,” the Israeli prime minister said in a statement. According to Benjamin Netanyahu, Hofman accompanied him “during the most difficult period” for Israel, “showed courage, responsibility and rare professional abilities.”
In the former Soviet Union, Hofman’s appointment as head of Israel’s main intelligence service has attracted special attention because of his background. The fact is that Roman Hofman was born in 1976 in the city of Mozyr in Belarus, and moved to Israel with his parents in 1990 at the age of thirteen. Despite the fact that Hofman grew up in a family of provincial Soviet intellectuals, he is now a devout Jew and a good family man with three daughters.
In Belarus, this appointment caused understandable excitement, however, mainly at the household level. However, it was not possible to find living relatives of the new head of the Mossad in Mozyr, since everyone had left.
In Israel, the future general began his studies at a military boarding school in the settlement of Eli in Samaria, which is something like our Suvorov military school. He is a tankman, and his whole rapid military career has been associated with the armoured forces. At the same time, he received the rank of brigadier general only in 2019, when he headed the Ha-Bashan reserve division. But he did not command it for long and went on to head the National Training Center of the Israeli ground forces. Now in Israel they emphasize that he does not have sufficient experience of “generalship” (in Israel, the rank of brigadier general is considered an intermediate step and is “not quite a general”); that is, the leadership of large military units and large teams. Notwithstanding, this ios a rewarding lucrative business.
For Prime Minister Netanyahu, this is a landmark appointment. Roman Hofman is now very popular both in the army and in Israel as a whole. The fact is that on October 7, 2023, on the day of the mass invasion of Hamas militants, Hofman, on his own initiative, drove his car from his house in Ashdod to Sderot, which had actually been captured by Hamas. At 7 a.m., he and a small group of volunteers from the local police, long before the arrival of army reinforcements, personally engaged in a shooting battle, killed two Hamas members, and was seriously wounded in the thigh.
The video of this fleeting collision, recorded by surveillance cameras, is very popular in Israel today.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch
It is natural that as a result of such a significant testimony of personal bravery at a critical moment for the country, Hofman became one of Israel’s military heroes. He managed to understand what was going on even before it reached the rest of the generals, the intelligence and political leadership of the country. He became invulnerable to any serious public criticism. The only thing he is remembered for is literally his name. Most of these emigrants from the USSR change their names to Hebrew ones, but Roman did not do this.
In April 2024, Netanyahu appointed Hofman as his military secretary (something like a chief military adviser) and finally awarded him the rank of major general (aluf). Against the background of the harsh criticism of all state, and especially military and intelligence, structures which began in Israel after the failure of October 7, Netanyahu needed to bring new heroes closer to himself.
An attempt to shift responsibility for the October 7 failure on to the leadership of intelligence agencies led to a conflict between Netanyahu and the head of the Mossad, David Barnea. This conflict quickly turned into a personal one, as Barnea found nothing better than to respond to criticism by starting to dig directly under the prime minister, interfering in the sphere of domestic politics (corruption scandals), to which the Mossad, as a foreign intelligence agency, should not be related at all.
There is reason to believe that Hofman’s appointment to the post of head of Mossad is mainly due to Netanyahu’s desire not to put intelligence under his personal control at all, but at least to avoid the political risks associated with the independence of those Mossad directors who were previously appointed on a party-coalition basis, like David Barnea. In addition, Barnea’s appointment as head of the Mossad was initially temporary, as it was carried out during a pre–election period – these are the rules. Barnea’s term of office was limited to five years.
Left to right: Roman Gofman as Military Secretary; Prime Minister Netanyahu; Moddas director David Barnea.
In addition to the fact that Hofman really has no serious experience in commanding large units (and the Mossad employs up to 2,000 people, the exact data is classified), he completely lacks any experience in intelligence work.
Before being assigned to the Ha-Bashan division, he studied for several months at the Israel Defence Forces National Security College, but this educational institution is related to security only in name — it is purely an army university. Without that it was impossible for Hofman to obtain the rank of brigadier general. So it was just a formality.
The Mossad is a complex system in which it is necessary to coordinate the work of many of its components, and not only plan sophisticated operations, which in itself requires not only specific experience, but also a special mindset. Hofman does not have such knowledge and professional experience. It’s going to take a couple of years to figure out how it all works. If Hofman’s work is limited, like Barnea’s, to five years, it will inevitably lead to disruptions in intelligence activities, no matter how much intelligence and personal courage the new appointee may have distinguished for himself.
The mere appointment of an iconic figure to a senior position is not enough. At some point, Hofman will be asked: where are the results? There have been plenty of examples of such unexpected personnel decisions in history, including at the end of the Soviet Union. It didn’t lead to anything good.
Netanyahu sees the Mossad as an offensive structure. As a former special forces soldier, high–profile stories of sabotage and kidnappings like Operation Pager in Lebanon are closer to him than consistent work on the introduction, recruitment of agents and extraction of classical intelligence data.
This in itself spoils the image of the Mossad, since such operations make a loud sound, but are often perceived in the domestic society and in the world at large as not entirely ethically correct. The “collateral damage” among the civilian population, as, for example, in the course of the same story with the Lebanese pagers, looks ugly.
September 18, 2024: source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-78ziMAvM
In general, Hofman’s appointment is the result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political games, which does not correspond well with the real tasks of the country’s intelligence community. As a result, we will see a temporary reduction in so-called “offensive” operations, and we can even predict a decline in the effectiveness of the Mossad, up to high-visibility failures. It is not entirely clear what will happen to the intelligence service, which is traditionally based on the support of the Jewish diaspora, and in those countries where there is none – on the recruitment of national minorities, migrants and vulnerable segments of the population.
As for the “Belarusian” origin of the new head of Israeli foreign intelligence, it is unlikely that it will play any positive role in relations with the countries of the former USSR. Roman Hofman is a pure product of Israeli education and upbringing. It is noteworthy that he does not speak English (which, by the way, is considered a negative factor for a Mossad employee, since the close coordination of this structure with the United States is no secret to anyone).
On the other hand, the founding father of the Mossad and its first head, Isser Harel (right) (Israel Halperin) He was also a native of Belarus, the son of a wealthy businessman from Vitebsk. And this is probably the only thing that unites them. After all, it was Isser Harel who glorified Israeli intelligence and created its modern look and image, including his personal involvement, for example, in the kidnapping of Eichmann.
In the case of Hofman, there is no reason to say that under his leadership, the Mossad will regain its former glory. It will be possible to talk seriously about the results of Hofman’s activities no earlier than within two years. And if Netanyahu resigns, Hofman, as his personal appointee, will lose his post, and the Mossad will “return to its roots,” since the personnel of the Israeli intelligence service will probably take the appointment of the tank soldierr with hostility, some of them as a personal insult. And so the Mossad is likely going through a difficult period.
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