By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Target Tehran

The empire created by Iran’s chief terrorist, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani, killed in Iraq in 2020 by a U.S. drone strike utilizing Israeli intelligence, is fast crumbling. The Assad regime in Syria, the Islamic Republic’s sole state ally in the Middle East, has fallen to Sunni Salafist jihadists. Lebanese Hezbollah, the brightest star in Tehran’s constellation of regional terror proxies, has seemingly been neutered by Israel, and its influential leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is no more. The land bridge, the terror highway connecting Tehran to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, now has a gaping hole in it.

An IDF soldier

None of this was foreseeable on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas, an Iran-backed Palestinian terror group, burst forth from the Gaza Strip and killed 1,200 Israelis in addition to taking more than 200 hostages. Nor was the breadth of the response from other Iran-backed proxies to broaden the war and support their fellow Axis of Resistance member foreseeable: Hezbollah from Lebanon on Oct. 8, Shiite militias from Iraq on Oct. 17, and Houthi rebels from Yemen on Oct. 19. But one year later, Israel has withstood Iran’s “ring of fire,” Hamas has been decimated in Gaza, and many of its leaders, such as Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, and Saleh Arouri, have been killed.

No doubt 2024 was a historic year in the four-decade-long Israel-Iran war. Not once, but twice, Iran brought its attacks out of the shadows and directly launched a barrage of projectiles—including ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead—at the Jewish state. In response, Israel’s military retaliation against Iran’s second attack struck a reportedly active and undeclared nuclear weapons facility.

But before Iran’s string of military defeats and overt setbacks, came a decades-long covert war by Israel against the regime’s nuclear program. In “Target Tehran,” Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar, two Jerusalem Post correspondents, chronicle Israel’s efforts to expose and thwart Iran’s atomic quest. “Target Tehran” is a book rich with case studies detailing how Israel pursued a “death by a thousand cuts strategy” against a regime that has claimed that Israel would not survive to see the year 2040.

The book opens in the middle of an ingenious heist, Israel’s 2018 seizure of Iran’s “atomic archive” from a warehouse in Tehran province, home to the country’s capital city. The archive was a treasure trove of material documenting past crash efforts to develop a small nuclear weapons arsenal and present the world with an atomic fait accompli. Caught initially in 2002 trying to build secret nuclear facilities, Iran layered on lie after lie to the international community in diplomatic efforts designed to buy time for development of its nuclear program. Beginning with the theft of the archive, the authors establish early on that personal, professional, and occasionally even political drivers can play a role in Israel’s shadow war.

The U.S. military base at al-Tanf sits astride the main highway from Baghdad to Damascus, blocking the lower branch of   the land bridge’s southern route

Although other studies, notably Ronen Bergman’s “The Secret War with Iran,” have chronicled earlier rounds in Israel’s covert war against the Islamic Republic, “Target Tehran” focuses specifically on Israel’s efforts since the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The 2015 nuclear deal did not require a cessation of uranium enrichment, as stipulated in at least five UN Security Council resolutions between 2006 and 2010. Instead, it offered temporary caps governing Iran’s level of enrichment purity and domestic stockpiles of enriched uranium. Worse, it did not require the destruction of centrifuges—the machines that enrich uranium—but rather their disconnection and storage. Indeed, one reason Tehran has been able to rapidly grow its nuclear capacity since leaving the deal in May 2019 (one year to the day after the U.S. left the accord in May 2018) is this retained centrifuge capacity, coupled with irreversible gains in nuclear knowledge.

Israel’s clandestine efforts to expose Iran’s nuclear designs aimed to devalue this flawed deal and present the world with incontrovertible evidence of Iran’s long-term intentions. “Target Tehran” posits that logic as driving Israel’s daring raid to seize this archive. Although Washington’s rationales for leaving the 2015 accord were multifaceted and driven by both strategic and political considerations, the retention of this nuclear archive likely did not sit well with the Trump administration, which came into office seeking initially to renegotiate or “fix” rather than “nix” the deal. 

Of note, this language framing the fate of the deal was first employed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his 2017 speech to the UN General Assembly. To be clear, Iran did not admit the theft when it happened. But upon leaving office in 2021, President Hassan Rouhani—who was in his second term as president at the time of the heist—reportedly claimed, “The secrets that the Zionists came and took from inside [the country], published and showed to [former U.S. President Donald] Trump [led him] to abandon the [nuclear] agreement.”

Nuclear experts have gradually seconded the value the archive offers, cautiously noting the need for the International Atomic Energy Agency to investigate weaponization-related claims from the archive as well as to use the documents to investigate lingering uncertainties insufficiently addressed by past probes. The value of the archive continues to grow given investigations by the agency into suspected nuclear sites where traces of uranium have been found, as well as more recent Iranian promises to work with the agency despite past instances of stonewalling.

A Maxar closeup satellite imagery of the Parchin Military Complex in Iran

“Target Tehran” is replete with quotes from Mossad officials and other high-level Israeli decision-makers documenting the deliberations behind the moves constituting Israel’s covert war against the Islamic Republic. Often reading like a spy novel, Bob and Evyatar’s reporting provides more detailed accounts of Israeli operational planning than have prior journalists’ stories. They address several Israeli clandestine operations, including the use of cyber tools and even assassination of key scientific and administrative contributors to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Given the more recent scope of operations covered, readers from academic, policy, media, and lay backgrounds will all find something to cherish in the book’s pages. 

Furthermore, those with an interest in Israeli domestic politics will especially appreciate the light that “Target Tehran” sheds on both the continuity and the evolution of efforts under five Israeli prime ministers, as well as multiple Mossad chiefs, to undermine Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In so doing, the book offers insight into stylistic and substantive changes in Israel’s covert operations rooted in each leaders’ respective risk tolerance as well as perception of the threat from Tehran. 

Expectedly, the authors describe the now well-known Olympic Games operation, better known as the Stuxnet cyberattack. But their more important contribution is bringing to light the more recent series of cyber skirmishes between Tehran and Jerusalem. Unlike the realm of traditional espionage, where Israel holds a considerable advantage, the cyber domain constitutes more of a level playing field for the two states. The wide array of targets chosen by Tehran for cyber-enabled retaliation when faced with Israeli covert successes is particularly striking. These targets have included everything from critical infrastructure, such as water treatment facilities, to private medical clinics, as well as data from an Israeli LGBTQ dating site and the cellphones of high-ranking officials such as opposition leader and former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and Mossad Director David Barnea.

When it comes to assassinations, Bob and Evyatar give only brief attention to pre-2015 episodes, such as the reported killing of the father of Iran’s ballistic missile program, Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, in 2011. They focus on more recent killings, such as Israel’s targeting of Iran’s chief military nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, in 2020, which receives an entire chapter. The authors confirm what more recent stories in the press suggested, that Fakhrizadeh was killed with a remote-controlled gun “smuggled into Iran in pieces and secretly assembled there over a period of eight months by a team of twenty operatives that also tracked Fakhrizadeh’s every movement.” 

What makes “Target Tehran” particularly compelling reading is its attention to Israel’s covert diplomatic efforts to isolate Iran. The authors trace over a decade of Israeli moves to establish deeper security and intelligence relationships with nations on the Iranian periphery, such as the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and chief among them, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Here, the book painstakingly details efforts to develop at first a covert relationship based on a shared perception of threat from a rising Iran and then efforts in both Jerusalem and Washington to work with Arab ambassadors to make those relationships overt. These initiatives, begun long before the Trump administration, led to the breakthrough known as the Abraham Accords, which saw high-level diplomatic ties established with Bahrain and the UAE in the fall of 2020. Critical to this effort was Israel’s ability to employ a mix of strategies, cautiously building consensus against the Iranian threat where possible and offering an alternative to the nuclear deal by daring to envision a more expansive regional order that integrated Israel into the Muslim world beyond the peace treaties agreed to with two of its neighbors.

The book ends by zooming in on what would be the crowning achievement of that diplomatic effort, establishment of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. As to that goal, “Target Tehran” strikes an optimistic tone, no doubt a product of its publication in early 2023, well before Hamas’s attacks in October of that year, the resulting hot wars Israel has been engaged in, and the Saudi foot-dragging that has followed.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud arrives at the BRICS summit in Kazan on Oct. 24, 2024.

While “Target Tehran” focuses on covert exchanges between Israel and Iran, it provides important context for Israel’s recent conventional military successes. Recognizing the broader array of domains in which the Israel-Iran conflict is constantly unfolding is particularly important for understanding the post-Oct. 7 Middle East.

Thus, the book’s focus on covert and diplomatic efforts still results in an important contribution. With Iran’s proxies handicapped across the region, Tehran today is increasingly rattling the nuclear saber, with political elites, military officials, and even media outlets trying to bolster Iran’s battered deterrence architecture by threatening to double down on its atomic program. Here, the words of Mossad Director Barnea that close “Target Tehran” set both the reader and the policymaker up for an eventful 2025: “Iran will not have nuclear weapons … not in the coming years, not ever. That is my promise, that is Mossad’s promise.”

 

 

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