Eliezer Tsafrir, a senior Mossad and Shin Bet official whose career spanned Israel’s formative decades and who served as the last Mossad station chief in Tehran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, died on January 18 at the age of 92.
Known as "Geizi," Tsafrir’s intelligence career began in Israel’s War of Independence and extended through the Cold War-era Middle East, placing him at the center of some of Israel’s most consequential clandestine operations, particularly in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, and Lebanon.
Nowhere was that more evident than in Iran, where Tsafrir served during the collapse of the Shah’s regime and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – witnessing firsthand the moment one of Israel’s most important regional relationships imploded.
Born in Tiberias in 1932 to a Kurdish Jewish family that had emigrated overland from northern Iraq via Syria during the Ottoman period, Tsafrir became involved in security activity at a young age. During the 1948 War of Independence, he carried messages between IDF positions in Tiberias.
“From age 14, during Israel’s War of Independence, he carried messages between IDF positions in Tiberias,” Raz told Radio North 104.5. “He served as an intelligence officer in Israel’s other wars, always in the field.”
He later served as an intelligence officer in the Sinai Campaign of 1956 and the Six-Day War of 1967. He joined the General Security Service (Shin Bet) in the early 1950s, serving for 12 years, including as coordinator for Arab villages in the Jerusalem area. In 1962, he was recruited to the Mossad, then still a relatively young organization.
Much of Tsafrir’s career revolved around two pillars of early Israeli strategy: the “periphery doctrine,” which sought alliances with non-Arab states such as Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia, and the “strategy of minorities,” which aimed to build ties with non-Arab communities across the Middle East.
Appointed head of the Mossad station in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1974, Tsafrir oversaw Israel’s clandestine assistance to Kurdish forces fighting Baghdad, an operation logistically dependent on close cooperation with pre-revolutionary Iran and its intelligence service, SAVAK.
“We supplied weapons, conducted courses, and gathered intelligence on the Iraqi army,” Tsafrir recalled in a 2021 interview with The Jerusalem Post. Kurdish officers within the Iraqi military provided Israel with a rare intelligence window on a key regional adversary.
That mission ended abruptly in March 1975 following the Algiers Agreement between Iran and Iraq, which resolved their dispute over the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Iran withdrew support for the Kurds overnight, leaving Tsafrir and a small Mossad team exposed as Iraqi forces advanced. Tsafrir was evacuated via Iran shortly before Iraqi troops closed the border.
“If they had reached us, they would have made us into shashlik,” Tsafrir later joked, recalling his narrow escape via Iran.
Tehran, revolution, and a final request
Following Kurdistan, Tsafrir was appointed Mossad station chief in Tehran. He assumed the post during a period of close Israeli-Iranian strategic cooperation and remained in place as Iran entered its most turbulent phase. His family lived in Iran, and his son remembers a country that, at the time, felt open and familiar.
“Warm people. A big country. Very comfortable living,” Raz Tzafrir recalled. “It was the only place besides Paris with an Israeli school. There was a huge Israeli community.”
That world collapsed in 1978. As protests spread, Tsafrir’s mission shifted from cooperation with Iranian intelligence to monitoring unrest and eventually to evacuating Israelis as the revolution gathered force.
The defining moment came when Tsafrir was summoned to meet the Shah himself.
“They told me the Shah wanted the Mossad to kill Khomeini in Paris,” Tsafrir later recounted. Israel refused. Decades later, he would describe that decision with regret.
“In retrospect, I regret it,” he said. “We could have saved the whole Iranian nation from this situation and Israel from the nuclear threat.”
As Tehran descended into chaos, Tsafrir oversaw the evacuation of more than 1,300 Israelis. His son remembers standing on the balcony at night, hearing gunfire, watching a city burn.
“We were evacuated on the last El Al plane to leave Tehran,” Raz said. “My father stayed for months longer to get out all the Israelis and Jews who wanted to leave.”
In February 1979, revolutionary forces seized the Israeli Embassy in Tehran, raising a PLO flag on its roof. Tsafrir coordinated the final evacuation of the remaining 34 Israeli citizens with US assistance and departed Iran with them, marking the end of Israel’s diplomatic and intelligence presence in the country.
“That was the end,” he said simply.
“Thirty-four Israelis left – but there was a Jewish community of 84,000 still remaining," he recalled to the Post in 2021. "We couldn’t interfere, but we brought as many EL Al planes as possible, so that as many as possible could leave. There was a guy called Tzion Bar Yitzhak – afterwards I recommended that he light a torch on Independence Day – and he went around all the communities, not only in Tehran, and explained how if they wanted to leave, to get to El Al and so on, and large numbers left. After the revolution, we continued from Europe, activating contacts to get Jews out, using smugglers.”
After leaving Iran, Tsafrir served for three years in Latin America, where he worked on tracking Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele and strengthening security for Jewish communities. In 1983–1984, he served as Mossad station chief in Beirut, during Israel’s alliance with the Christian Lebanese Forces and the early emergence of Hezbollah.
His final appointment was as adviser on counter-terrorism to prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Tsafrir retired from the Mossad in 1992.
In retirement, Tsafrir published three books on his intelligence career and gave extensive interviews to Israeli media. He continued advising senior Israeli officials on Iran into his later years. His assessments of Iran, in particular, grew more foreboding with time.
“Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, and if they obtain them, they will use them against us,” he warned repeatedly, advocating preemptive action.
In interviews as late as 2023, he said he continued advising senior Israeli figures. Some of his predictions would later be cited during the brief but intense Israel-Iran 12-day war last June.
Tsafrir’s apartment north of Tel Aviv was filled with reminders of a life lived across borders – photographs with Kurdish leaders, Lebanese figures, and Mossad chiefs.
Tsafrir’s career exemplified an entire generation of Israeli intelligence officers who were shaped by regional fluency, cultural familiarity, and long-term engagement rather than formal diplomacy. His work in Kurdistan and Iran, in particular, remains central to understanding Israel’s pre-1979 regional strategy and its abrupt collapse with the Islamic Revolution.
He is survived by his children and grandchildren.