Unit 8200

Unit 8200
Parent organization	Israel/Defense Forces
Type	intelligence agency
Interest of	Cybereason, MintPress News, NSO Group
Subpage	•Unit 8200/Commander

Unit 8200 is the signal intelligence and code deciphering arm of the Israel Defence Forces. It is the largest unit in the IDF and is headquartered at at Camp Glilot, north of Tel Aviv.

In 2004 a Knesset committee recommended turning the unit into an autonomous entity separate from the Defense Ministry, along the lines of its US equivalent, the National Security Agency.

Most important SIGINT base

Arguably the the units most important and powerful SIGINT base is located near the village of Urim in the Negev desert Map. This from Nicky Hager:

Israel’s most important intelligence-gathering installation is only a 30km drive into the Negev desert from Beersheba prison – where those taking part in the Gaza aid flotilla were briefly detained this June. The base has rows of satellite dishes that covertly intercept phone calls, emails and other communications from the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia. Its antennas monitor shipping and would have spied on the aid ships in the days before they were seized.

The unit also has listening posts on the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights, but they are focused almost exclusively on Syrian, Lebanese and Iranian signals interception.

Tech sector alumni

A Forbes article by Former Unit 8200 member Gil Kerbs, stated that "Israel's high-tech world is "flooded" with Unit alumni, as entrepreneurs and company founders or junior and senior executives.":

"Take Nice, Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology," says [former Unit 8200 commander Hanan] Gefen. "Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse's main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit's technology. Look at Metacafe, one of the hottest companies today. Eyal Herzog, one of the founders, is also an 8200 alumnus and he accumulated a huge amount of relevant experience in the Unit."

People

Commanders

• Aharon Zeevi Farkash
• Yair Cohen
• Hanan Gefen

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/October 7	“Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan. Hamas had "decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope," analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division. But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet. On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing. The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times. The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out. The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off. “In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.”	Ronen Bergman Adam Goldman	2023
Nicole Junkermann	“The chairman of the board of directors is Ehud Barak, the 10th Prime Minister of Israel, the 14th Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, former Minister of Defense and former Head of Military Intelligence for Israel. Ehud Barak has had a long history as one of the more public faces of Israeli covert operations. Before he was Prime Minister, Ehud Barak was a big name in the IDF. (...) Another of Carbyne’s directors and board members is Brigadier Pinchas Buchris, the former Deputy Commander of an elite IDF operations unit and former Commander of the IDF 8200 Cyber Intelligence Unit. Amir Elichai is the Founder and CEO of Carbyne, he is also a former Israeli Army officer who served in various positions in the special elite forces and the intelligence corps. Alex Dizengof is Carbyne’s Co-Founder & CTO. He’s described as a Software Architect and Algorithms Developer. Dizengof had previously developed machine learning algorithms for robots and mobile platforms, as well as cyber security software for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office. These people have always been serious Israeli State assets and it would be naive to think anything has changed. It seems that Nicole Junkermann has some serious partners, and it makes me wonder whether or not Jeffrey Epstein’s original meeting with the then recently graduated Junkermann was as a recruiter for the Mossad.”	Johnny Vedmore Nicole Junkermann	17 July 2019

 

Employee on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed	End	Description
Isaac Herzog	Major	1978	1983	End date an estimate

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