Abstract
The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle Against the World's Most Dangerous Terrorist Power, by Ronen Bergman. Free Press, 2008. 432 pages, $28
Fallout: The True Story of the CIA's Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking, by Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz. Free Press, 2011. 304 pages, $26.
The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year War with Iran, by David Crist. Penguin Press, 2012. 638 pages, $36.
Israel vs. Iran: The Shadow War, by Yaakov Katz and Yoaz Hendel. Potomac Books Inc., 2012. 254 pages, $30.
Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel's Secret Wars, by Dan Raviv. Levant, 2012. 356 pages, $17.
Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger. Crown Publishers, 2012. 476 pages, $28.
“Around 7:40 a.m. on a cold Monday morning, the couple was stuck in traffic, their car crawling through the wealthy neighborhood of Aghdasieh, near the palace where American-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi spent his last ten years of rule before the revolution caught up with him. As Shahriari's car finally nudged forward, a motorcycle wound its way through the traffic and pulled up alongside it. Suddenly, a faint ‘click’ of a magnet being attached to the driver's-side door could be heard. Then, the motorcyclist sped off. The huge explosion came a few seconds later.”
David Sanger's account of the November 2010 assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari describes a turning point in public perceptions of the ongoing dispute over Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Until then, the discourse had focused on inspections carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), sanctions, potential military strikes by Israel, the United States (or both), and diplomatic initiatives to delay Iran's apparent development of a nuclear weapons option. The assassination suggested to many in the West that a third path was being taken to delay and possibly dissuade Iran through repeated acts of sabotage.
Each of the six books reviewed here emphasizes a different aspect of the conflict between the West and Iran over the latter's nuclear ambitions. Collectively, they contain a wealth of information about the covert component of this conflict, including key actors involved, methods employed, expectations of policy makers authorizing operations, and results achieved. At the same time, the accounts’ reliance on anonymous sources and classified, inaccessible documents hamper critical assessment. Though many of the most interesting assertions cannot be validated or disproved, this review both highlights contradictions between the books and situates these within the relatively thin public record.
The six books consider covert operations against Iran's nuclear activities through widely varying frames. Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman's The Secret War with Iran considers the dispute over Iran's nuclear program as just another chapter in a covert conflict dating back to Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, and focuses on Israel's role. David Crist, a US government historian, follows a similar narrative in The Twilight War, but focuses on the US side of the story. Israeli journalist Yaakov Katz and historian Yoaz Hendel concentrate more narrowly on covert operations against Iran's nuclear efforts, but their Israel vs. Iran picks up the trail much later, focusing primarily on events after the Second Lebanon War in 2006. American reporters Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz tell an only tangentially related story in Fallout, which critically explores the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) infiltration and attempted manipulation of the proliferation ring run by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, joining a rich literature on that topic (an early tranche of these books were reviewed by Mark Hibbs in “Pakistan's Bomb: Mission Impossible,” Nonproliferation Review 15 (July 2008), pp., 381–91). American journalist Dan Raviv and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman's account, Spies Against Armageddon, situates its discussion of the Iran issue in a sweeping history of covert operations carried out by Israeli intelligence since Israel's founding in 1948. Finally, New York Times journalist David Sanger touches on the Iran issue in the context of a broader exploration of President Barack Obama's foreign policy in Confront and Conceal.
Actors and Methods
Scientists seemingly involved in developing weapons of mass destruction for Israel's antagonists have long died in more or less mysterious ways generally ascribed to Israel's intelligence and special operations agency, the Mossad. Continuing this trend, between 2007 and 2012, five Iranian nuclear scientists were killed in apparent assassinations.
Information about the first of these, the 2007 death of Ardeshir Hosseinpour, an expert on electromagnetism, remains murky. As Bergman notes, sharply conflicting accounts have suggested that he inhaled cooking gas at his house, or that an explosion killed him at his laboratory at Isfahan. The four apparent assassinations since November 2010 are much less ambiguous. All (plus one failed attempt on Fereydoon Abbasi, now head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization) involved the use of motorcycles—as a mode of transportation to attach a magnetic “sticky bomb” to a moving vehicle, as a moving platform to shoot at a target with a handgun, or as a means of placing and concealing a remotely detonated bomb.
The authors of all the books under review harbor no doubts as to who is responsible: the Mossad. More specifically, responsibility is attributed to the agency's exceptionally secretive Kidon (“bayonet” or “tip of the spear”) unit, allegedly responsible for assassinations and kidnappings. Raviv and Melman call the use of motorcycles “practically a trademark of Mossad's assassination unit.”
Sanger seeks to convince the reader that the Obama administration was not complicit in these operations and is thus adhering to a political ban on non-combatant assassinations that dates back to Executive Order 11905 issued by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976. While he concedes that US officials “were careful not too ask too many questions,” Sanger asserts that the United States did not intentionally aid Israel in its targeting of scientists.
Raviv and Melman reject the widely held notion that Israel outsourced some operations to dissident groups operating inside Iran, specifically the Mujahideen e-Khalq and the Sunni group Jundallah (Soldiers of God). Rather, they assert, the operations “were ‘blue and white’ operations—Israeli intelligence's term for a fully Israeli project.” Israel had maintained safe houses in Iran since before the 1979 revolution and was now using Jewish ex-Iranians who had fled Iran after 1979 to infiltrate the country and carry out operations. They argue that contract killers “would be considered far less trustworthy, and there was hardly any chance that the Mossad would reveal to non-Israelis some of its assassination unit's best methods.” The assertion is in tension with “confessions” by alleged “Israeli spies” Iran has captured and paraded on television, though, for obvious reasons, their veracity is difficult to assess.
Katz and Hendel provide interesting new details on purported CIA efforts to recruit defectors, a less draconian means of depriving Iran of human capital. One alleged effort, a program called “Brain Drain” launched in 2005, specifically targeted young graduates. Between 2005 and 2008 alone, four Iranian nuclear scientists reportedly defected to the United States and were relocated throughout the country. One defector was allegedly a member of the design team of Iran's next-generation P-3 and P-4 centrifuges. Katz and Hendel quote a former US intelligence officer familiar with the effort: “One scientist points to another and then to another like a family tree. It was like one big happy family.”
The authors also describe the defection of Brig. Gen. Ali-Reza Asgari (also known as Askari), which they term “possibly one of the greatest and most significant modern-day defections from Iran.” Asgari, a former deputy defense minister and senior figure in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), disappeared in Turkey in 2007. He has been described as a “gold mine” for Western intelligence. Iran maintains that the Mossad abducted him and Iranian state media alleged in 2010 that Asgari had died in an Israeli prison. According to Bergman, Asgari provided three key pieces of information: 1) Iran was still trying to enrich uranium by means of cutting-edge laser technologies; 2) Iran had constructed an additional centrifuge enrichment plant close to Natanz; 3) Iran was financing a joint North Korean-Syrian-Iranian nuclear effort. Assuming Asgari was referring to the Qom facility as the “additional centrifuge plant,” it would seem that, in this instance, Bergman received remarkably accurate information, though claims about a joint program with Pyongyang and Damascus seem more farfetched.
Although Katz and Hendel provide the most detailed account of efforts to recruit defectors (at the other extreme, Raviv and Melman do not cover the topic at all), they unfortunately touch only briefly on the mysterious saga surrounding the defection of another high-profile Iranian nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri. Amiri worked as a nuclear physics researcher at the IRGC-controlled Malek-Ashtar University of Technology in Tehran, a suspected front for secret nuclear weapons-related research. In 2009, he disappeared during a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Crist provides more details: “With the Saudis’ assistance, the CIA spirited him in complete secrecy to the United States for extensive debriefings about Iran's covert nuclear weapons program. When he did not return, nervous Iranian authorities investigated, unsure of whether he had defected or been executed by Saudi Arabia or Israel. For his safety, the CIA secretly resettled him in Tucson, Arizona, well away from any Iranian communities.”
Amiri, apparently distraught by his new life in exile, would later produce a series of bizarre videos aired on Iranian television and YouTube, first claiming that the CIA had abducted and tortured him, then asserting that he was living in the United States voluntarily to pursue a graduate degree, only to later again revert back to the abduction and torture story. Sanger, who also covered the story for the New York Times, describes the Amiri case in much more detail than Crist, and sheds light on the strange turns of events. Sanger makes the intriguing assertion that Amiri produced the video claiming his abduction by the United States on instructions from Iranian agents who answered the phone when Amiri was trying to call his family. The CIA then assisted Amiri in the production of the second video, ostensibly to protect his family. Later, after Amiri had apparently made up his mind to return to Iran regardless of the consequences, he apparently made the third video claiming that he had escaped from his American handlers, which was broadcast on Iranian state television.
In July 2010, Amiri returned to Tehran with the assistance of the Pakistani embassy in Washington (Sanger writes that he called the embassy and asked to speak to Amiri but the consulate employee who answered the phone just hung up). After he received a hero's welcome, Iran claimed that Amiri had been a double agent all along. According to Sanger, the CIA had been seriously considering this possibility as well. However, there have also been reports that he has since been imprisoned for treason. The duration and nature of his work for the CIA remains disputed as well. Crist speculates that Amiri may have provided input for the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, while Sanger asserts that he was recruited two or three years before his disappearance in 2009, that he was a critical source for the CIA, and that it was Amiri who told the agency about the suspension of Iran's nuclear weapon effort in 2003.
The shadow war against Iran also introduced an apparent novelty to the world of covert warfare in the form of a campaign of cyberattacks aimed at sabotaging the Iranian program. None of the other books reviewed here can match Sanger's richly sourced account of Operation Olympic Games, the codename for the cyber campaign authorized by President George W. Bush in 2006 and re-authorized by President Obama three years later. The authors all agree that these attacks were joint operations launched by Israel and the United States. On the US side, the agencies involved are identified as the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA). On the Israeli side, the books flag that country's NSA equivalent, Unit 8200 of Aman, Israel's military intelligence directorate.
The operation consisted of a series of attacks against Iran's enrichment plant at Natanz. The weapon was a sophisticated computer worm that became known as Stuxnet after a programming error caused the worm to spread over the Internet, accidentally exposing the operation. Sanger's account makes it clear that there were multiple iterations of Stuxnet, which was repeatedly updated and reprogrammed to attack different components of Iran's Natanz plant.
Sanger describes the development and deployment of the worm in considerable detail, including the first step in the operation, the insertion of a piece of spyware (which Sanger calls “the beacon”) into Natanz to learn more about the plant. The Washington Post reported in June 2012 that the Iranians had discovered a data-mining virus (dubbed “Flame”) that had extracted intelligence from their computer systems for years in preparation for other cyberattacks, including Stuxnet. Sanger's “beacon” and the “Flame” virus likely refer to the same software.
At this point in the story, Sanger's account diverges sharply from Raviv and Melman's. The issue concerns the so-called “programmable logic controllers” Iran purchased from the German company Siemens and uses to run the centrifuges at Natanz. The manufacturer's cooperation would have obviously been very helpful in infiltrating and manipulating the devices, particularly since Siemens’s technicians were still maintaining the systems regularly at the time. Sanger paraphrases US officials stating “that the United States steered clear of the Siemens engineers, for fear of jeopardizing their relationship with Germany's intelligence service” but also noting that Israel allegedly used the engineers as carriers without their knowledge. Raviv and Melman, on the other hand, assert that Germany's intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND, “arranged the cooperation of Siemens, the German company that had sold the system to Iran.”
In January 2011, Sanger and two New York Times colleagues reported that Israel and the United States had tested the malware on P-1 centrifuges Israel had set up at its nuclear complex at Dimona.Footnote1 Strangely, the episode goes unmentioned in Sanger's book. While he covers the United States’s acquisition of P-1 centrifuges from Libya and testing of the worm at various US national laboratories, the alleged testing campaign at Dimona is inexplicably missing. The reader is left wondering if the initial report was incorrect.
Another incident mentioned in several of the books is the November 2011 explosion at an Iranian missile base near Tehran that resulted in dozens of fatalities, including a high-ranking general named Hassan Moghaddam, whom Crist calls “the Werner von Braun of Iran's missile program.” Crist seems to regard an accident as the most logical explanation for the explosion, citing dismal safety standards and ten previous accidents that had allegedly occurred at the facility in recent years. Sanger is more equivocal, discussing the possibility of an accident while not ruling out sabotage, and citing several US officials asserting that they simply do not know what happened. Conversely, Raviv and Melman are unequivocal in attributing the explosion to the “handiwork of the Mossad's long arm,” though they unfortunately do not provide further details.
Old-fashioned industrial sabotage was another measure in the West's repertoire of covert actions. Export controls and sanctions forced Iran to rely on opaque procurement networks to purchase nuclear-related equipment abroad, giving Western intelligence the opportunity to infiltrate those networks or set up their own front companies. One frequently referenced incident, which likely happened in late 2006, involved sabotaged uninterruptible power supply units that destroyed about fifty centrifuges at Natanz. Collins and Frantz provide intriguing insights into how the CIA used its infiltration of the A.Q. Khan proliferation ring to insert faulty equipment into the Iranian program. They describe how the CIA's Counterproliferation Center enlisted the help of Los Alamos National Laboratory to modify vacuum pumps the agency had purchased from a German company and then shipped the altered devices to both Iran and Libya. The CIA also used an asset it had recruited within the Khan network, the notorious Urs Tinner, to make modifications to centrifuge components the network produced at a factory in Malaysia. The alterations were supposed to cause the assembled centrifuges to fail. However, it is not clear if parts produced at the factory were shipped to Iran.
Collins and Frantz also discuss the bizarre and still unconfirmed Operation Merlin, disclosed by journalist James Risen in 2006, which allegedly sought to provide Iran with altered blueprints for the implosion mechanism of a nuclear weapon. The operation was allegedly launched to test how far the Iranians had progressed in their quest for the bomb. Unfortunately for the CIA, the Russian scientist tasked with dropping the blueprints off at the Iranian mission in Vienna reportedly not only detected the flaws, but also wrote a letter warning the Iranians and offering his help in fixing them.
A few of the books hint at an even broader menu of covert actions. Katz and Hendel and Bergman strongly suggest sabotage as the cause of a series of plane crashes that killed dozens of IRGC officers between 2005 and 2007. Unfortunately, they do not provide further details, let alone corroboration, and additional research for this review only turned up reports describing the crashes as “mysterious.” Likewise, Katz and Hendel do not elaborate on their assertion that “warehouses in Europe where equipment for Iran's nuclear program was stored before being shipped mysteriously went up in flames.” Further research did not unearth corroborating evidence in support of this claim.
Expectations, Results, and Unintended Consequences
On the strategic level, the authors unanimously agree that covert action was expected to delay the Iranian program, but that neither the United States nor Israel had any illusions that the impact would be devastating enough to end it. The assassinations, defections, cyberattacks, and sabotage efforts were seen as a tool to buy time to achieve a diplomatic solution, give sanctions more time to bite, extend the window for internal regime change, or postpone the undesirable but inevitable military showdown. Sanger asserts that Washington had a second objective: to prevent Israel from launching a unilateral strike and dragging the United States into a broader conflict in the Middle East. Sanger alleges that the United States launched Operation Olympic Games partly to “convince the Israelis that there was a smarter, more elegant way to deal with the Iranian nuclear problem than launching an airstrike that could quickly escalate into another Middle East war, one that would send oil prices soaring and could involve all the most volatile players in the region.”
Unfortunately, none of the authors consider whether the covert campaign might have done more to undermine diplomatic efforts to stop Iran's progress than it did to aid them. Raviv and Melman hint at the issue: “American officials even went so far as to publicly criticize the unknown killers for spoiling diplomatic hopes, because the chances of negotiations with Iran became slimmer after every attack.” The argument at least merits consideration. How can Iran be expected to engage in civil negotiations when its citizens are being murdered in the streets of Tehran? The fact that neither Katz and Hendel nor Raviv and Melman offer a comprehensive discussion of the potential negative implications of covert action is consistent with the apparent profound pessimism regarding the possibility of a diplomatic solution prevalent among many key Israelis. If one assesses Tehran to be committed to obtaining nuclear weapons, then delay becomes a goal in its own right. Raviv and Melman admit as much: “Yet, any delay at all represented an achievement. Israeli strategic thinking—exercised in Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere—held that temporary disruptions to an enemy's dangerous projects were sufficient cause for taking significant risks.”
As for the United States, while both the Bush and Obama administrations sought to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, Sanger suggests they lacked a strategic plan. A 2010 memo by then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates leaked to Sanger and a New York Times colleague illustrates the point. According to Sanger, Gates lamented that the United States lacked a “comprehensive, realistic strategy to stop Iran from assembling all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon—fuel, design, a detonator.” It seems that for the United States, too, temporary disruption had inadvertently become a goal in itself, even if Sanger tempers the criticism that follows from his observations, perhaps mindful of relationships with high-ranking officials. The apparent lack of a more robust strategy makes it difficult to evaluate the strategic impact of covert action.
On the tactical level, one obvious objective of the covert campaign was the destruction of hard-to-replace human and material assets. As several authors point out, Israel targeted Iranian scientists not only to prevent them from contributing to Tehran's nuclear progress, but also to prevent them from passing their knowledge on to others.
An additional objective, disrupting the Iranian program through psychological warfare, was, as Crist, Sanger, and Raviv and Melman highlight, of equal if not greater importance. Sanger offers a cautious assessment of the psychological impact of the campaign, pointing out that it was “impossible to know, from the outside, whether this strategy was working—or whether it simply was feeding Iran's sense of victimhood and doubling its determination.” Crist is more optimistic: “Regardless of the cause, the sheer number of explosions created a mood of uncertainty and paranoia within the Iranian government. The pervasive sense that outside forces were behind every accident worked to the Americans’ and Israelis’ advantage. It created paranoia that played havoc with Iran's nuclear and missile programs as scientists grew uncertain whether sabotage or design flaws set back their research.” Raviv and Melman's account seems to corroborate Crist's assessment when they assert that the assassination campaign in particular led to so-called “white defections,” meaning that some scientists, worried about their safety, left the program but stayed in Iran. Others, including both Iranian and foreign scientists from China, Russia, and Pakistan, became reluctant to work in the program despite financially lucrative offers. Only North Koreans were apparently still eager to work in the program.
Katz and Hendel also reach the conclusion that targeting human assets had a disruptive impact: “Putting the most pressure on Iranians by 2012 appeared to be the systematic defection or assassination of Iranian scientists affiliated with the republic's nuclear program.” They assert that much of the recent intelligence obtained about Iran's program, including information about the fortified underground uranium enrichment facility near Qom, came from defected scientists. Katz and Hendel and Sanger assert that one of the scientists who gave the United States information about the Qom plant was in fact Amiri. Sanger hints that Amiri may have been inside the facility. If Amiri indeed provided his handlers with information about the Qom plant, it would undercut the admittedly dubious Iranian claim that he was a double agent.
The success of operation Olympic Games is a matter of contention. Katz and Hendel uncritically accept information technology expert Ralph Langer's assertion that Stuxnet was “nearly as effective as a military strike” when they claim that cyberwarfare is “as deadly as a missile and rocket.” Raviv and Melman similarly refer to Stuxnet as a “brilliantly innovative computer worm” and call it the “peak” of the campaign to sabotage the Iranian program. Crist offers no opinion either way, while Sanger presents a more balanced assessment. While he accepts that Olympic Games may have delayed the expansion of Iran's program by a few years, he also concedes that reports by the IAEA do not indicate a reduction in the output of low-enriched uranium. In this context, it is worth recalling that the 984 centrifuges the worm destroyed in a single attack in 2010 were merely spinning, but not yet fed with uranium hexafluoride.
To Sanger's credit, he also acknowledges that the cyber campaign had significant potential for blowback: “The United States lost a bit of the moral high ground when it comes to warning the world of the dangers of cyberattacks.” Sanger also recognizes that the genie is out of the bottle, or, as he quotes former CIA director Michael Hayden: “Somebody has crossed the Rubicon.” The possibility that hostile countries could use the leaked code to develop their own cyberweapons and unleash them against critical infrastructure targets in the United States is a nightmare scenario for US officials.
Collins and Frantz deserve credit for emphasizing that industrial sabotage came with its own risks. On the one hand, if the alterations were too extensive and the Iranians detected them, they could identify the weak spot in their procurement network and possibly fix the damaged items. On the other hand, “if the sabotage was too subtle, the equipment might work at or near expectations, with the end result of helping a rogue nuclear program rather than hindering it.” The authors offer several illustrations. IAEA officials were allegedly skeptical about the US shipment of modified vacuum pumps, fearing that the Iranians would readily detect the alterations. When IAEA inspectors scrutinized centrifuge components lying dormant in a warehouse in Libya, which the Khan network had manufactured in Malaysia, they discovered that the equipment would have worked quite well despite the alterations supposedly made by Urs Tinner. The authors are also clearly not impressed with the botched effort to provide Iran with altered blueprints for an implosion mechanism, hinting that the CIA's desperation to sabotage the Iranian program triggered a reckless and counterproductive operation.
Tit for Tat
The West could hardly expect the Iranians to stand by idly when their scientists started dying and the centrifuges at Natanz began spinning out of control. Iranian reactions were inevitable, whether in the form of stricter internal security and counterintelligence measures or retaliatory strikes. Iran has a longstanding reputation for settling scores; for example, when rockets launched by Israeli helicopters killed Hezbollah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi in 1992, Iran retaliated by blowing up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.
There have been numerous reports of Iranian-sponsored retaliatory strikes, including a failed May 2011 attempt by Hezbollah to kill the Israeli consul in Istanbul, the killing of a Saudi diplomat in Karachi that same month, and the IRGC-linked, amateurish, and thwarted plan to blow up the Saudi ambassador to the United States in a Washington, DC, restaurant. The covert war intensified in 2012. In February, sticky bombs targeted Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia (ironically copying the methods the Mossad reportedly had used in Tehran). Five months later, a suicide bombing killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Other plots were uncovered in Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Kenya, and Thailand. The suspected culprits in each case were either Lebanese Hezbollah or the IRGC's elite Al Quds force, both presumed to be operating under orders from Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and National Security (also commonly known by the Farsi acronym, VEVAK).
Katz and Hendel unfortunately do not explore Iranian retaliatory strikes, a topic that would have fit well into their overall narrative. However, they do not completely ignore the issue of Iran's reaction, asserting that Iran, in 2005, established a counterintelligence bureau, called Oghab-2, tasked with preventing information leaks about the nuclear program, monitoring scientists on overseas trips, and checking equipment for signs of sabotage. They also write that Israel's internal security agency, the Shin Bet, uncovered an Iranian scheme to recruit Israelis at the Iranian embassy in Turkey when they requested visitor visas.
While Bergman explores Iranian state terrorism in detail, his book's publication preceded the more recent attacks. Crist notes briefly that some of the recent strikes were carried out with “less than professional tradecraft.” In one incident in Thailand, an Iranian operative blew off his own legs when a grenade he had thrown at police officers bounced off a tree. It has been suggested that Iran's repeated failures to strike Israeli diplomats and installations triggered the attack on a so-called “soft target,” namely the Israeli tourist bus in Bulgaria.
The authors’ failure to address Iranian retaliatory strikes is revealing. The accounts by Katz and Hendel and Raviv and Melman are clearly written for an Israeli audience and go to great lengths to give the impression that Israel's omnipresent, highly capable Mossad is launching one daring operation after another to delay Iran in its race for the bomb. A serious discussion of Iranian reprisals would only distort this narrative. As for Sanger, he tells the same story from the American perspective: the Obama administration, determined to stop Tehran, has used the nation's capable intelligence agencies to launch an innovative and effective covert campaign, all the while holding off the Israelis from striking Iran unilaterally.
No End in Sight
Bergman presents an intriguing mixture of known and new evidence to inform his narrative of a covert war between the West and Iran that began more than thirty years ago. This includes the numerous assassinations of Iranian dissidents in Europe and the United States at the hands of Iranian hit squads, Iran's establishment of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian-sponsored attacks against US and Israeli targets, e.g. the embassy and Marine barracks bombings in Beirut in the 1980s, and the bombings of a Jewish cultural center and the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in the 1990s. More recently, this war has been waged on the battlefields in Iraq and during the Second Lebanon War. While his broader narrative is compelling, Bergman's account suffers from a multitude of factual errors and inaccuracies. For instance, he asserts that “red mercury” (a nonexistent material and the source of many hoaxes in the 1990s) could be used to build nuclear weapons (and, in an apparently novel twist on the standard misinformation, also missiles!), that Iran had deployed Russian S-300 air defense systems around Bushehr, and that the Isfahan complex contained an enrichment facility.
Crist's account is an excellent complement to Bergman's. He tells the US side of the story, offering fascinating insights into the US Navy's involvement in the tanker war in the Persian Gulf in the 1980s and Iran's fueling of the insurgency in Iraq following the US invasion and occupation in 2003. Bergman's and Crist's accounts help the reader understand the use of covert action against Tehran's nuclear program in the broader context of the confrontation between the West and Iran. They make clear that both sides’ use of covert action against each other long predates the current dispute over the nuclear program.
Katz and Hendel offer a very informative discussion of Iran's sponsorship of Hezbollah and Hamas. However, their account would have benefited from a more critical analysis of these relationships. Few analysts outside Israel still subscribe to the notion that Hezbollah and Hamas are nothing more than subservient proxies that receive their orders from Tehran. And while the authors do not disclose any previously unknown covert operations, they deserve credit for exploring the impact of defections. While some assertions in the book are overly simplistic, they also highlight grave Israeli concerns regarding Iran. One example is the authors’ assertion that “the Iranians’ ability to put a satellite in space means they also are able to put a nuclear warhead wherever they want in the world.”
Raviv and Melman's history of Israeli intelligence provides important background information on Israel's use of covert action against proliferation threats. They point out that Israel has long considered scientists working on unconventional weapon projects as legitimate targets for assassination and intimidation. Examples include the Mossad's Operation Damocles against German scientists working on Egypt's missile program in the 1960s, the 1980 killing in Paris of Egyptian nuclear scientist Yehia Meshad who worked for Iraq, and the assassination of Canadian engineer and Iraqi “super gun” architect Gerald Bull in Brussels in 1990. Their account focuses on the Mossad's operations and pays little attention to the broader political context.
Collins and Frantz sharply criticize the CIA's involvement with the Khan network, including the agency's alleged unwillingness to shut down the network due to a never-ending thirst for information. They also lament the Bush administration's attempts to derail the prosecution of the Tinner family in Switzerland. Their analysis of the risks of industrial sabotage is a valuable contribution to the discussion of covert action against Iran.
Sanger's trump card is his unparalleled access to high-ranking administration officials. His revelations about Operation Olympic Games are stunning and provide intriguing insights into the emerging age of cyberwarfare.
The six accounts reviewed here are rich fodder for analysts seeking to understand both the covert conflict around Iran's nuclear program and the broader implications of enduring tactics like assassination and newer ones such as cyberwarfare. They also suggest a sober prognosis: the covert war between Iran and the West appears far from over.
DISCLAIMER
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policies or positions of any of their past or present employers. The information in this article was obtained entirely from open sources, including the books under review and related journalistic and scholarly sources.
Notes
1. William J. Broad, John Markoff, and David E. Sanger, “Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay, New York Times, January 15, 2011, p. A1, <www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html>.