Distrust
set allies to snoop on each other after split over Iran nuclear deal; each kept
secrets
By ADAM ENTOUS
The U.S. closely monitored Israel’s military bases and
eavesdropped on secret communications in 2012, fearing its longtime ally might
try to carry out a strike on Fordow, Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear
facility.
Nerves
frayed at the White House after senior officials learned Israeli aircraft had
flown in and out of Iran in what some believed was a dry run for a commando
raid on the site. Worried that Israel might ignite a regional war, the White
House sent a second aircraft carrier to the region and readied attack aircraft,
a senior U.S. official said, “in case all hell broke loose.”
The two
countries, nursing a mutual distrust, each had something to hide. U.S.
officials hoped to restrain Israel long enough to advance negotiations on a nuclear deal
with Iran that the U.S.
had launched in secret. U.S. officials saw Israel’s strike preparations as an
attempt to usurp American foreign policy.
Instead of talking to each other, the allies kept their
intentions secret. To figure out what they weren’t being told, they turned to
their spy agencies to
fill gaps. They employed deception, not only against Iran, but against each
other. After working in concert for nearly a decade to keep Iran from an atomic
bomb, the U.S. and Israel split over the best means: diplomacy, covert action
or military strikes.
Personal
strains between President Barack
Obama and
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu erupted
at their first Oval Office meeting in 2009, and an accumulation of grievances
in the years since plunged relations between the two countries into crisis.
This Wall
Street Journal account of the souring of U.S.-Israel relations over Iran is
based on interviews with nearly two dozen current and former senior U.S. and
Israeli officials.
U.S. and
Israeli officials say they want to rebuild trust but acknowledge it won’t be
easy. Mr. Netanyahu reserves the right to continue covert action against Iran’s
nuclear program, said current and former Israeli officials, which could put the
spy services of the U.S. and Israel on a collision course.
A shaky start
Messrs.
Obama and Netanyahu shared common ground on Iran when they first met in 2007.
Mr. Netanyahu, then the leader of Israel’s opposition party, the right-wing
Likud, discussed with Mr. Obama, a Democratic senator, how to discourage
international investment in Iran’s energy sector. Afterward, Mr. Obama
introduced legislation to that end.
Suspicions
grew during the 2008 presidential race after Mr. Netanyahu spoke with some
congressional Republicans who described Mr. Obama as pro-Arab, Israeli
officials said. The content of the conversations later found its way back to
the White House, senior Obama administration officials said.
Soon after taking office in January 2009, Mr. Obama took
steps to allay Israeli concerns, including instructing the Pentagon to develop
military options against Iran’s Fordow facility, which was built into a
mountain. The president also embraced an existing campaign of covert action
against Iran, expanding cooperation between the Central Intelligence Agency and
Mossad, the Israeli spy agency.
Mossad
leaders compared the covert campaign to a 10-floor building: The higher the
floor, they said, the more invasive the operation. CIA and Mossad worked
together on operations on the lower floors. But the Americans made clear they
had no interest in moving higher—Israeli proposals to bring down Iran’s
financial system, for example, or even its regime.
Some
covert operations were run unilaterally by Mossad, such as the assassination of Iranian nuclear
scientists, according to U.S. officials.
The first
Oval Office meeting between Messrs. Obama and Netanyahu, in May 2009—weeks
after Mr. Netanyahu became prime minister—was difficult for both sides. After
the meeting, Mr. Obama’s aides called Ron Dermer, Mr.
Netanyahu’s adviser, to coordinate their statements. Mr. Dermer told them it
was too late; Mr. Netanyahu was already briefing reporters. “We kind of looked
at each other and said, ‘I guess we’re not coordinating our messages,’ ” said Tommy
Vietor, a
former administration official who was there.
In 2010,
the risk of covert action became clear. A computer virus dubbed Stuxnet,
deployed jointly by the U.S. and Israel to destroy Iranian centrifuges used to
process uranium, had
inadvertently spread across the Internet. The Israelis wanted to launch
cyberattacks against a
range of Iranian institutions, according to U.S. officials. But the breach made
Mr. Obama more cautious, officials said, for fear of triggering Iranian
retaliation, or damaging the global economy if a virus spread uncontrollably.
Israel questioned whether its covert operations were
enough, said aides to Mr. Netanyahu. Stuxnet had only temporarily slowed
Tehran’s progress. “Cyber and other covert operations had their inherent
limitations,” a senior Israeli official said, “and we reached those
limitations.”
Mr.
Netanyahu pivoted toward a military strike, raising anxiety levels in the White
House.
The U.S.
Air Force analyzed the arms and aircraft needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear
facilities and concluded Israel didn’t have the right equipment. The U.S.
shared the findings, in part, to steer the Israelis from a military strike.
The
Israelis weren’t persuaded and briefed the U.S. on an attack plan: Cargo planes
would land in Iran with Israeli commandos on board who would “blow the doors,
and go in through the porch entrance” of Fordow, a senior U.S. official said.
The Israelis planned to sabotage the nuclear facility from inside.
Pentagon
officials thought it was a suicide mission. They pressed the Israelis to give
the U.S. advance warning. The Israelis were noncommittal.
“Whether this was
all an effort to try to pressure Obama, or whether Israel was really getting
close to a decision, I don’t know,” said Michéle Flournoy, who at the time was
undersecretary of defense for policy.
Mr.
Obama, meanwhile, was moving toward diplomacy. In December 2011, the White
House secretly used then-Sen. John
Kerry to
sound out Omani leaders about opening a back channel to the Iranians.
At the
same time, the White House pressed the Israelis to scale back their
assassination campaign and turned down their requests for more aggressive
covert measures, U.S. officials said.
The
president spoke publicly about his willingness to use force as a last resort to
prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon—“I don’t bluff,” Mr. Obama said in
March 2012—but some of Mr. Netanyahu’s advisers weren’t convinced.
In early
2012, U.S. spy agencies told the White House about a flurry of meetings that
Mr. Netanyahu convened with top security advisers. The meetings covered
everything from mission logistics to the political implications of a military
strike, Israeli officials said.
Warning signs
U.S. spy
agencies stepped up satellite surveillance of Israeli aircraft movements. They
detected when Israeli pilots were put on alert and identified moonless nights,
which would give the Israelis better cover for an attack. They watched the
Israelis practice strike missions and learned they were probing Iran’s air
defenses, looking for ways to fly in undetected, U.S. officials said.
New
intelligence poured in every day, much of it fragmentary or so highly
classified that few U.S. officials had a complete picture. Officials now say
many jumped to the mistaken conclusion that the Israelis had made a dry run.
At the
time, concern and confusion over Israel’s intentions added to the sense of
urgency inside the White House for a diplomatic solution.
The White
House decided to keep Mr. Netanyahu in the dark about the secret Iran talks,
believing he would leak word to sabotage them. There was little goodwill for
Mr. Netanyahu among Mr. Obama’s aides who perceived the prime minister as
supportive of Republican challenger Mitt
Romney in
the 2012 campaign.
Mr.
Netanyahu would get briefed on the talks, White House officials concluded, only
if it looked like a deal could be reached.
The first
secret meeting between U.S. and Iranian negotiators, held in July 2012, was a
bust. But “nobody was willing to throw it overboard by greenlighting Israeli
strikes just when the process was getting started,” a former senior Obama
administration official said.
Israeli
officials approached their U.S. counterparts over the summer about obtaining
military hardware useful for a strike, U.S. officials said.
At the
top of the list were V-22 Ospreys, aircraft that take off and land like
helicopters but fly like fixed-wing planes. Ospreys don’t need runways, making
them ideal for dropping commandos behind enemy lines.
The
Israelis also sounded out officials about obtaining the Massive Ordnance
Penetrator, the U.S. military’s 30,000-pound bunker-busting bomb, which was designed
to destroy Fordow.
Mr.
Netanyahu wanted “somebody in the administration to show acquiescence, if not
approval” for a military strike, said Gary Samore, who served for four years as
Mr. Obama’s White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass
destruction. “The message from the Obama administration was: ‘We think this is
a big mistake.’ ”
White
House officials decided not to provide the equipment.
Messrs.
Obama and Netanyahu spoke in September 2012, and Mr. Obama emerged convinced
Israel wouldn’t strike on the eve of the U.S. presidential election.
By the
following spring, senior U.S. officials concluded the Israelis weren’t serious
about a commando raid on Fordow and may have been bluffing. When the U.S.
offered to sell the Ospreys, Israel said it didn’t have the money.
Former
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who
championed a strike, said Mr. Netanyahu had come close to approving a military
operation against Iran. But Israel’s military chiefs and cabinet members were
reluctant, according to Israeli officials.
While
keeping the Omani talks secret, U.S. officials briefed the Israelis on the
parallel international negotiations between Iran and major world powers under
way in early 2013. Those talks, which made little headway, were led on the U.S.
side by State Department diplomat Wendy Sherman.
Robert
Einhorn, at
the time an arms control adviser at the State Department, said that during the
briefings, Mr. Netanyahu’s advisers wouldn’t say what concessions they could
live with. “It made us feel like nothing was going to be good enough for them,”
Mr. Einhorn said.
U.S. spy
agencies were monitoring Israeli communications to see if the Israelis had
caught wind of the secret talks. In September 2013, the U.S. learned the
answer.
Yaakov
Amidror, Mr.
Netanyahu’s national security adviser at the time, had come to Washington in
advance of a Sept. 30 meeting between Messrs. Netanyahu and Obama
.
On Sept.
27, Mr. Amidror huddled with White House national security adviser Susan
Rice in
her office when she told him that Mr. Obama was on the phone in a
groundbreaking call with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani.
Mr.
Amidror had his own surprise. During a separate meeting in the Roosevelt Room,
he told several of Mr. Obama’s top advisers that Israel had identified the tail
numbers of the unmarked U.S. government planes that ferried negotiators to
Muscat, Oman, the site of the secret talks, U.S. officials said.
Mr.
Amidror, who declined to comment on the White House discussions, said that it
was insulting for Obama administration officials to think “they could go to
Oman without taking our intelligence capabilities into account.” He called the
decision to hide the Iran talks from Israel a big mistake.
U.S. officials said they were getting ready to tell the
Israelis about the talks, which advanced only after Mr. Rouhani came to office.
During the Sept. 30 meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, the president acknowledged the
secret negotiations. The secrecy cemented Israel’s distrust of Mr. Obama’s
intentions, Israeli officials said.
Mr. Samore, the former White House official, said he
believed it was a mistake to keep Israel in the dark for so long. Mr. Einhorn
said: “The lack of early transparency reinforced Israel’s suspicions and had an
outsize negative impact on Israeli thinking about the talks.”
Israel
pushed for the U.S. to be more open about the Iran negotiations. Ms. Rice, however,
pulled back on consultations with her new Israeli counterpart, Yossi
Cohen, who
took over as Mr. Netanyahu’s national security adviser, according to U.S. and
Israeli officials.
In exchanges with the White House, U.S. officials said,
Mr. Cohen wouldn’t budge from demanding Iran give up its centrifuges and
uranium-enrichment program. Israeli officials said they feared any deviation
would be taken by the U.S. as a green light for more concessions.
In one
meeting, Mr. Cohen indicated Mr. Netanyahu could accept a deal allowing Iran to
keep thousands of centrifuges, U.S. officials said. Soon after, Mr. Cohen
called to say he had misspoken. Neither side was prepared to divulge their
bottom line.
In
November 2013, when the interim agreement was announced, Mr. Samore was in
Israel, where, he said, the Israelis “felt blindsided” by the terms. U.S.
officials said the details came together so quickly that Ms. Sherman and her
team didn’t have enough time to convey them all. Israeli officials said the
Americans intentionally withheld information to prevent them from influencing
the outcome.
Listening in
As talks
began in 2014 on a final accord, U.S. intelligence agencies alerted White House
officials that Israelis were spying on the negotiations.
Israel denied any espionage against the U.S. Israeli officials said they could
learn details, in part, by spying on Iran, an explanation U.S. officials didn’t
believe.
Earlier
this year, U.S. officials clamped down on what they shared with Israel about
the talks after, they allege, Mr. Netanyahu’s aides leaked confidential
information about the emerging deal.
When U.S.
officials confronted the Israelis over the matter in a meeting, Israel’s
then-minister of intelligence said he didn’t disclose anything from
Washington’s briefings. The information, the minister said, came from “other
means,” according to meeting participants.
Ms.
Sherman told Mr. Cohen, Israel’s national security adviser: “You’re putting us
in a very difficult position. We understand that you will find out what you can
find out by your own means. But how can we tell you every single last thing when
we know you’re going to use it against us?” according to U.S. officials who
were there.
Mr.
Netanyahu turned to congressional Republicans, one of his remaining allies with
the power to affect the deal, Israeli officials said, but he couldn’t muster enough votes to block it.
U.S.
officials now pledge to work closely with their Israeli counterparts to monitor
Iran’s compliance with the international agreement.
But it is
unclear how the White House will respond to any covert Israeli actions against
Iran’s nuclear program, which current and former Israeli officials said were
imperative to safeguard their country.
One clause in the agreement says the major powers will
help the Iranians secure their facilities against sabotage. State Department
officials said the clause wouldn’t protect Iranian nuclear sites from Israel.
Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA, said
the U.S. and Israel could nonetheless end up at odds.
“If we
become aware of any Israeli efforts, do we have a duty to warn Iran?” Mr.
Hayden said. “Given the intimacy of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, it’s going
to be more complicated than ever.”
From Michael Oren’s “Ally”, page
276:
“Finally, after many months of attentiveness, I
reached my conclusion. In the absence of a high-profile provocation – an attack
on a U.S. aircraft carrier, for example – the United States would not use force
against Iran. Rather, the administration would remain committed to diplomatically
resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, even at the risk of reaching a deal
unacceptable to Israel. And If Israel took matters into its own hands, the
White House would keep its distance and offer to defend Israel only if it were
counterstruck by a hundred thousand Hezbollah missiles.”
My
Amazon review of Michael Oren's "Ally"
Would any sane Israeli PM trust an
American President who supports the Muslim Brotherhood and has capitulated to
Iran?
