How Israel Sabotaged U.S. Nuclear Diplomacy with Iran
Marc Martorell Junyent 11/30/2023
Critical Review of Ilan Evyatar, Yonah Jeremy Bob and Jonathan Davis, Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination – and Secret Diplomacy – to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.
Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The book starts with a heist that represented “an astonishing covert achievement that decisively altered both the balance of forces in the Middle East and U.S. policy.”[1] At least, this is what Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar, both journalists at The Jerusalem Post, claim in “Target Tehran”, their recently published book on Israel’s shadow war with Iran. As in so many other passages of “Target Tehran”, the authors show here a weakness for hyperbolic statements.
The “astonishing covert achievement” they refer to is Mossad’s operation to steal documents related to Iran’s nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran in January 2018. It was certainly astonishing that Israel managed to access some of Iran’s most sensitive information. However, there was nothing truly surprising in the documents obtained during the heist. And yet, they were presented as such by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his well-rehearsed (fifteen times, according to the authors) televised speech in April 2018.
Netanyahu accused Iran of having lied and continuing to lie about its nuclear program after the conclusion in July 2015 of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the JCPOA. On the first point, everyone involved in the negotiation of the JCPOA knewperfectly well that Iran had been carrying out a covert nuclear program. This is why a nuclear agreement was needed in the first place. On the second point, Netanyahu did not present any convincing argument to contradict the IAEA’s assessments that Iran was complying with the JCPOA at that time.
As for the fact that the document heist “decisively altered both the balance of forces in the Middle East and U.S. policy,” this is even more of an over-statement. The normalization process between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain, which culminated in the Abraham Accords in September 2020 and had the external support of Saudi Arabia, had been in the making for years, as the authors themselves explain. And yes, Netanyahu’s speech might have affected U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to abandon the JCPOA in May 2018, but the Israeli prime minister was pushing at an open door as Trump had been referring to the JCPOA already on the campaign trail as “the worst deal ever.”
Target Tehran: By Ilan Evyatar, Yonah Jeremy Bob and Jonathan Davis
Far more interesting than the details of how Israel convinced a U.S. President that needed little convincing to abandon the JCPOA are Israeli long-running efforts to first prevent the nuclear agreement and second, to complicate a return to it after Joseph Biden succeeded Trump. The main narrative thread in “Target Tehran” is Israel’s ingenuity in countering Iran through targeted assassinations, cyberwarfare, and diplomacy with the Arab world. But a more critical approach to the book allows us to read it as the story of how Israel consistently undermined U.S. diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions with Iran.
While negotiations on the nuclear file were ongoing between 2013 and 2015, Israel continued to carry out sabotage efforts against the Iranian nuclear program, former Mossad director Tamir Pardo told the authors. This covert action was simply the secret side of Netanyahu’s very open campaign against the JCPOA, which brought him to criticize Obama’s Iran policy in an address to a Republican-dominated Congress in March 2015.
There are more recent examples of similar dynamics. In May 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had accessed internal IAEA documents and used them to thwart the international agency’s fact-finding efforts. Again, the documents were from the period prior to the signing of the JCPOA, but Israel’s intentions were clear. The Israeli government leaked this information to the WSJ, first obtained in the 2018 heist, during an intense phase of diplomatic efforts to revive the JCPOA.
In “Target Tehran”, we get to know the backstory of this leak. Naftali Bennett, who was Israel’s prime minister at the time, told the authors that “he picked that particular moment to release the intelligence about Iran’s hack of the IAEA because he thought it could push the U.S. away from the nuclear negotiations.”[2] With friends like these, who needs enemies?
One of the biggest weaknesses of “Target Tehran” is that, while it extensively describes how Iran has been fighting back against Israel in the context of the shadow war between both countries, it never really seeks to understand Iranian behavior. For instance, if we are puzzled by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against the production of nuclear weapons, we only need to read the explanation that Harold Rhode, a former American intelligence analyst, gave to the authors in an interview.
Rhode, most probably without an ounce of self-reflection on how he essentializes a whole culture, told the authors that the Persian culture has “perfected the art of deception” and that the Iranians “attach little meaning to words.” The targeted assassination in May 2022 of Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, a colonel in the Revolutionary Guard who had reportedly planned attacks against Israeli targets, is impersonally described by the authors as “a strike at the head of the octopus.”
Compare this with the bizarre description of former Mossad director Meir Dagan, who was “a prickly pear, tough on the outside like the thorny shell of the fruit and soft on the inside like its sweet flesh.”[3] Any claim to a minimum of objectivity is left behind when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi are introduced to us as “socially liberal autocrats,”[4] a concept you will not find in any political science textbook for good reason. More accurate is the description of John Bolton as an “ultra-hard-liner” and the former national security adviser seems to be content with it if we are to judge from his positive review of “Target Tehran” for the WSJ.
Bolton is just one of the key figures Bob and Evyatar had the opportunity to interview in the course of their journalistic careers and research for the book, alongside many others such as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and a succession of former Mossad directors. The authors’ access to these high-profile figures, however, seems to have come at the cost of avoiding uncomfortable but imperative questions. For example, how is it possible that, despite Israel’s undeniable success in killing key Iranian nuclear scientists and disrupting Iran’s nuclear program through cyber weapons and sabotage, Tehran is currently further than ever in its uranium enrichment path?
Under Netanyahu, but also during his brief period out of power, Iran has been the focus of Israel’s covert action. In April 2023, Netanyahu said Iran was “responsible for 95% of the security threats” against Israel. It is true that Tehran supports Hamas both rhetorically and materially. Nevertheless, to present Hamas as an Iranian puppet, as a WSJ report tried to do in the aftermath of Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, which killed 1,200 people, can only be the result of willful ignorance. Although one cannot flatly deny that Iran had some knowledge of Hamas’ plans, both Israeli and U.S. officials have expressed they have no proof that Iran was directly involved in the terrorist attack.
Palestinian armed groups have long had their own agendas, which are mainly the product of the specific situation in Israel/Palestine, and the PLO was fighting Israel long before Khomeini took power in Tehran. The main challenges to Israel’s security have long derived from its occupation of the West Bank and enforced isolation of the Gaza Strip after Hamas militarily took over the territory in 2007. The more than 15,000 Gazans that have been killed in the course of Israel’s offensive against the Gaza Strip after October 7 will not bring Israel any closer to safety and, considering the risk of regional escalation, the opposite appears more likely. For all its military superiority over the Palestinians and Washington’s support for the country, it is difficult to see how Israel can enjoy real peace as long as it remains an occupying power.
[1] Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar, Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination – and Secret Diplomacy – to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023), p. 14.
[2] Ibid., p. 230.
[3] Ibid., p. 35.
[4] Ibid., p. 112.