Mossad in the context of "June 2025 Israeli strikes on Iran"

"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" (Russian: «О культе личности и его последствиях», romanized: “O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh”) was a report by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956. Though popularly known as the Secret Speech (Russian: секретный доклад Хрущёва, romanized: sekretnïy doklad Khrushcheva), "secret" is something of a misnomer, as copies of the speech were read out at thousands of meetings of Communist Party and Komsomol organizations across the USSR. Khrushchev's speech sharply criticized the rule of the former General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin (died March 1953), particularly with respect to the purges which had especially marked the later years of the 1930s. Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership cult of personality despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals of communism.

The speech produced shocking effects in its day. Reports state that some listeners suffered heart attacks and that the speech even inspired suicides, due to the shock of all of Khrushchev's criticisms and condemnations of the government and of the previously revered figure of Stalin. The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, raised on panegyrics and permanent praise of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia, Stalin's homeland, where days of protests and rioting ended with a Soviet army crackdown on 9 March 1956. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad received a copy of Khrushchev's speech from the Polish-Jewish journalist Wiktor Grajewski and leaked it to the West.

Dror Ze'evi (born 1953, Haifa) is an Israeli historian who studies political, social and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey and the Levant.

Ze'evi's father, Benjamin (Benny) Zeevi [he], was deputy head of Mossad, and his mother, Galila, is an interior designer. Ze'evi grew up in different cities around Israel and the world, including several years in France and Britain. He served as an intelligence officer in the IDF until 1983, and was awarded the rank of Lt. Col. during his reserve service.

Otto Adolf Eichmann (/ˈaɪkmən/ EYEKH-mən; German pronunciation: [ˈʔɔto ˈʔaːdɔlf ˈʔaɪçman] ; 19 March 1906 – 1 June 1962) was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party, an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a convicted war criminal, and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960, he was tracked down and apprehended by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, and put on trial before the Supreme Court of Israel. The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.

After doing poorly in school, Eichmann briefly worked for his father's mining company in Austria, where the family had moved in 1914. He worked as a travelling oil salesman beginning in 1927, and joined both the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932. He returned to Germany in 1933, where he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, "Security Service"); there he was appointed head of the department responsible for Jewish affairs – especially emigration, which the Nazis encouraged through violence and economic pressure. After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Eichmann and his staff arranged for Jews to be concentrated in ghettos in major cities with the expectation that they would be transported either farther east or overseas. He also drew up plans for a Jewish reservation, first at Nisko in southeast Poland and later in Madagascar, but neither of these plans were carried out.

The Eichmann trial was the 1961 trial of major Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann who was captured in Argentina by Israeli agents and taken to Israel to stand trial. Eichmann was a senior Nazi party member and served at the rank of Obersturmbannführer in the SS, and was primarily responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution. He was responsible for shipping Jews and other people from across Europe to the concentration camps, including managing the shipments to Hungary directly, where 564,000 Jews died. After the end of World War II, he fled to Argentina, living under a pseudonym until his capture in 1960 by Mossad.

Eichmann was charged with fifteen counts of violating the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law. His trial began on 11 April 1961 and was presided over by three judges: Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevy, and Yitzhak Raveh. He was convicted on all fifteen counts and sentenced to death. He appealed his conviction to the Israeli Supreme Court, which confirmed the convictions and the sentence.