Unit 8200

Unit 8200   (Intelligence agency)
Formation	2004
Parent organization	Israel/Defense Forces
Headquarters	Camp Glilot, Israel
Leader	Unit 8200/Commander
Interest of	Cybereason, MintPress News, NSO Group
Subpage	•Unit 8200/Commander
An Israeli NSA

Unit 8200 is the Israeli military intelligence division, with responsibility for signals intelligence and code deciphering, but also other missions. Its importance is shown by the fact that it is the largest unit in the Israeli Defence Forces.

Peter Roberts, senior research fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, characterised Unit 8200 as “probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stand[ing] on a par with the NSA in everything except scale.”

Israel's high-tech world is "flooded" with Unit alumni

Unit 8200, whose “alumni” (90% of works there 5 years or less) often go on to create tech companies that frequently maintain their ties to Israeli intelligence and, according to Israeli media reports and former employees, often “blur the line” between their service to Israel’s defense/intelligence apparatus and their commercial activity.

The Israeli media outlet Calcalist Tech published an article which noted that “since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose.”

The article noted that "in some cases, managers of development projects in the Israeli military and intelligence arms were encouraged to form their own companies, which then took over the project,’ an Israeli venture capitalist familiar with the matter told Calcalist Tech.”

This switch was related to the difference in wages between the private sector and the public sector, but also the founding of Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC), a deliberate Israeli government effort to counter the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and to make Israel the dominant global “cyber power.”

Companies with Close Ties to the Unit

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, "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.”
Hanan Gefen (8 February 2007) 

Other companies include Carbyne911, which develops call-handling and identification capabilities for emergency response services in countries around the world, including the United States, where it has already been implemented in several U.S. counties and has partnered with major U.S. tech companies like Google. Carbyne will possibly have access to the data used by all emergency service providers and devices connected to those networks.

The private security agency Black Cube, with Unit 8200 alumni as leaders, is known to have two separate divisions for corporations and governments. The firm was caught attempting to undermine the Iran nuclear deal — then also a top political objective of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — by attempting to obtain information on the “financial or sexual impropriety” (i.e., blackmail) of top U.S. officials involved in drafting the accord.

In 2019, the private U.S.-based, Israeli-founded company Cybereason ran the Operation Blackout exercise simulating sabotage of civilian infrastructure, "terrorism" and psychological operations against American citizens on the day of the US 2020 Election.

Cooperation with the National Security Agency

The US National Security Agency and Unit 8200 have collaborated on numerous projects, most infamously on the Stuxnet virus as well as the Duqu malware. In addition, the NSA is known to work with veterans of Unit 8200 in the private sector, such as when the NSA hired two Israeli companies, to create backdoors into all the major U.S. telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and Google. Many of the key managers and executives in these companies are now former Unit 8200 officers.

Most important SIGINT base

Arguably the the unit's 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 antennae monitor shipping and would have spied on the aid ships in the days before they were seized.

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Unit 8200 SIGINT base near Urim

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.

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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