The Grunis Committee, which is supposed to approve Roman Gofman's appointment as head of the Mossad, does not, unfortunately, examine the candidate's suitability. Gofman is, to put it mildly, unfit for the position. It does, however, examine the "Boy Affair" — and rightly so.
The story of the recruitment of a 16- or 17-year-old boy named Uri Elmakayes for intelligence operations was exposed by Michael Hauser Tov in Haaretz two years ago. It is a jaw-dropping affair: the notion that a brigadier general would know that a teenager was being held in the Shin Bet's detention cells and not show up the next day to say, "I was the one who recruited him," is inconceivable. Yet Gofman denied these facts.
Contrary to what has become established in the public mind, Elmakayes was not arrested for publishing the information passed on to him by two IDF officers, the more senior of whom was directly subordinate to Gofman. The investigation began after Elmakayes published two explosive reports on the Telegram channel he operated, one of them about Israel attacking a facility for producing drones in Iran. The Mossad, it turned out, had planned to leak this information to a foreign newspaper, and Elmakayes's post spoiled the leak. In addition, Naftali Bennett's political adviser, Shimrit Meir, "liked" the report, thereby indirectly validating it.
A covert investigation was opened, and at its conclusion Elmakayes was arrested. To be clear: the reports for which he was arrested had been passed on to him by two soldiers in Unit 8200. Possessing and transferring the information led to indictments against both of them; one has since served a prison sentence.
From the very beginning, Elmakayes told his interrogators that he had been recruited by IDF officers, but the investigators did not want to hear about the information that had resulted from that recruitment and instead focused on his other reports. Eventually, Elmakayes and his lawyers, Orit Hayoun and Dean Kochavi, proved to the prosecution that he had indeed been recruited, and that the reports for which he had been charged had already been published elsewhere. More than that, the system did not even bother to remove most of the reports from his Telegram channel, which was never taken offline.
When Cyber Prosecutor Haim Wismonsky realized that Elmakayes had indeed been recruited, he decided to withdraw the indictment against him.
Where was Gofman during the 44 days that Elmakayes was detained? Why did he not act to secure his release from harsh house arrest, even when he was facing an indictment that could have sent him to prison for decades?
Gofman's version is that he was completely unaware that Elmakayes had been recruited. All he knew was that one or two reports had been passed on to him for publication, reports that had already appeared on ynet. In the investigation by HaMakor, conducted by Itai Rom and me, we published the correspondence between Officer C., who was subordinate to Gofman, and Elmakayes. This was emphatically not one or two reports; it was much more, and Elmakayes had also been recruited to engage with Syrian users and others. C. claimed that he had Gofman's backing for the operation. In effect, he claims that the designated Mossad chief blatantly lied at the expense of a young and talented boy.
At an early stage of the relationship between C. and Elmakayes, C. was seized by panic. "I was required to cut off contact," he wrote to him, "unfortunately. This is above me… We didn't speak, you don't know me… If they ask — we don't know each other. You saw things online and that's it." Twenty-four hours later, he resumed contact as if nothing had happened. Who was the person "above him" who understood how problematic it was to recruit a teenager for military missions, and who authorized the resumption of contact? The military refused to publish its internal investigation into the matter.
If it is indeed proven that Gofman knew about the recruitment, allowed Elmakayes to languish in a Shin Bet facility, and then continued to deny everything — he cannot be head of the Mossad. Full stop. This reflects a type of character that should be disciplined and removed from the military, not promoted to head a prestigious intelligence service whose integrity and judgment we are supposed to trust.