Yaakov Nimrodi, Israel’s first military envoy to Iran, dies at 97
Baghdad native moved from Iraq to Mandatory Palestine shortly after birth, served in Haganah, Palmach, and took part in secret IDF operations, including first-ever targeted killing
Michael Horovitz is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel
Yaakov Nimrodi, an IDF intelligence officer who later became Israel’s first military attache to Iran, died on Monday aged 97.
Nimrodi passed away at Sheba Medical Center after an extended battle with illness.
Nimrodi was born in Baghdad in 1926, and two weeks later moved with his family to Mandatory Palestine.
In the 1940s, Nimrodi joined the Haganah, Israel’s pre-state militia, with the assistance of Yitzhak Navon, who served as Israel’s fifth president from 1978 to 1983.
Nimrodi then joined the Palmach, the elite strike force of the Haganah in 1947, before going on to serve in the Israel Defense Forces and Mossad spy agency once the state was established.
During his career in the IDF, Nimrodi led several highly sensitive operations, some of which remain classified.
He took part in Israel’s first-ever targeted assassination in 1956, killing Mustafa Hafez, an Egyptian colonel who recruited Palestinian refugees to carry out cross-border attacks on the Jewish state, with a bomb hidden in an envelope.
In 1955-1959 Nimrodi set up and headed the Mossad’s office in Tehran, aiding Jews from neighboring Iraq fleeing to Israel, and establishing a valuable spy network.
From 1960 to 1969, he inked defense deals with Iran as the IDF’s first military attache in Tehran.
Israel had close ties with Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution turned Tehran into a bitter foe that, to this day, vows to destroy the Jewish state.
During his time in that role, he took part in Operation Diamond, which facilitated the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew a MiG-21 fighter jet, the most advanced Soviet plane at the time, and landed it in Israel in 1966.
The plane provided valuable insights for American and Israeli scientists.
After his successful career in the military, Nimrodi became a businessman. His focus remained for some time on Iran, where he built dozens of desalination plants.
Nimrodi acquired the Maariv newspaper in 1992 and appointed his son Ofer as editor-in-chief. At the time, the paper was engaged in an intense rivalry with the Yedioth Ahronoth daily.
Nimrodi was convicted of obstruction of justice and handed a suspended sentence for a wiretapping scandal involving the rival paper, for which his son Ofer was also convicted and went to prison in 1998.
Nimrodi is survived by his wife Rivka, his children Ofer, Samdar, and Yael, 15 grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren.
Another daughter, Ruth, was killed on a trip to the Sinai when her vehicle ran over a landmine in 1996.
In a statement, Ofer Nimrodi praised his father as a “Zionist, an Israeli hero, a man of vision and action, generous in his soul, a charming family man, and a father like no other.”
