Who is Yossi Sariel, the Israeli spymaster who quit 8200 intelligence unit?

Even as Israel continues to pound Gaza for nearly a year into its war with Hamas, the country’s military surveillance unit called 8200 has faced a high-profile resignation.

Yossi Sariel, the head of the unit tasked with preventing any attack on Israel besides locating hostages and tracking Hamas leaders like Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, resigned yesterday.

“The responsibility for 8200’s part in the intelligence and operational failure falls squarely on me,” said the 46-year-old commander of the spy agency, which works under Aman, the top Israeli military intelligence apparatus, referring to Hamas’s October 7 attack.

But Sariel also added that Israel’s October 7 failure happened not only due to his unit’s shortcomings but also because of the malfunctioning of the whole Israeli military and political system.

“In the years before and months before, as well as on October 7 itself, we all failed as a political and operational system in being unable to connect the dots to see the full picture and prepare to face the threat,” said Sariel in his resignation letter.

Sariel’s 8200 unit has long been known for its notorious tactic of prying into Palestinians’ personal lives through eavesdropping and other cyber tactics, which even some Israelis have found unacceptable.

One of the former members of the unit told Financial Times in an extensive report that the 8200 leads asked them to spy on family members and neighbours of any Palestinian who might plot against the Israeli state, demanding to gather information related to even medical and financial conditions.

Who is Sariel?

The Haifa-born military intelligence operator joined the army’s intelligence apparatus when he was 19, like many other young soldiers of the 8200 unit, which has a strength of around 5,000 personnel, making it the largest single unit in the Israeli military.

After working as a cyber officer at the beginning of his career, he became the head of the research division responsible for intelligence gathering on the Israel-Hamas front in the north. Then, he worked in the Central Command, becoming the head of Aman’s operational division.

In 2021, he was appointed to lead the 8200 unit as a brigadier general. While Sariel led the agency with a focus on using AI technologies to develop “target machines”, which are allegedly designed to attack targets Israel sees as its enemies, he has been accused for many civilian deaths and injuries as well as the ongoing large destruction in Gaza.

In April, Sariel’s closely-guarded secret as head of 8200 was revealed by The Guardian in a major lapse when he failed to protect his personal information despite publishing a book under a pen name.

His book, The Human Machine Team, was about bringing “a radical vision” on AI’s potential power to form a new association between military staff and machines.

Some of Sariel’s critics say that the 8200 head was poisoned by a “technological hubris”.

What’s the 8200 unit?

The 8200 unit, called shmone matayim in Hebrew, was originally established in 1952 under different names four years after Israel’s founding by a UN vote.

Some even think that the unit, called Shin Mem 2 or information service in Hebrew, predates 1948, going back to the British Mandate period of the 1930s. At that time, the group “bugged phone lines of Arab tribes to learn about planned riots,” according to a Forbes report.

Many analysts see it as the equivalent of the US National Security Council, which functions under the Department of Defence. The 8200 is also under the Israel ministry of defence.

"Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale,” said Peter Roberts, the director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think-tank specialised on defence and security.

“They are highly focused on what they look at — certainly more focused than the NSA — and they conduct their operations with a degree of tenacity and passion that you don't experience elsewhere," Robert added.

The unit recruits its personnel right after Israelis graduate their high schools and sometimes even high school kids share their projects with the 8200 leads through different presentations.

After serving several years in the 8200, most of these youngsters end up either forming their own companies in the Silicon Valley or reaching top echelons of the IT world.

While some Israelis see this as the innovative power of their country, others are concerned that many of the former notorious unit’s employees now occupy top positions in tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.