At each other's throats

Sep 4th 2008 From The Economist print edition

The Secret War with Iran
The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle Against the World's Most Dangerous Terrorist Power

By Ronen BergmanFree Press; 432 pages, $27.95.

Published in Britain as “The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Covert Struggle for Control of a ’Rogue’ State”; £16.99
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IF THIS murky tale of spies and their doings can be reduced to a single proposition it is this: Iran and Israel are locked in mortal clandestine combat and for the most part the Iranians, together with their allies in Lebanon's Hizbullah, are running circles around their flatfooted Israeli adversaries. That in itself lifts Ronen Bergman's book above the ordinary. Too many accounts of spying in the Middle East dwell on the high reputation of Israel's Mossad, a reputation which may just conceivably be out of date.

Mr Bergman is a respected investigative journalist working for Israel's biggest-selling daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. His provenance matters because there are few other ways to know whether the tales he unfolds might be true. He claims they are based on thousands of documents, mostly classified, and over 300 interviews, a third of them with people who insisted on anonymity. So a lot of Mr Bergman's revelations need to be taken on trust.

What is undoubtedly true is that since the revolution of 1979 turned Iran into an implacable foe of Israel, the intelligence services of the Islamic Republic and the Jewish state have been at each other's throats. This has not prevented occasional collaboration. In the early 1980s (even before the infamous Iran-contra scandal), says Mr Bergman, Israel sold arms to revolutionary Iran as an operation known as "Seashell", in part to ensure that the war between Iran and Iraq would continue to weaken two enemies but also in a forlorn effort to win back some of the influence Israel had enjoyed in Tehran before the fall of the shah. For the most part, however, the two countries have been in conflict.

Since Iran is far from Israel, the deadliest arena has been Lebanon, where Iran has emerged the clear victor. The Israeli occupation of a "security zone" in southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 embittered the local Shia population, making it easier for their Iranian co-religionists to build Hizbullah into a potent political and military force. During that period, in Mr Bergman's telling, Israel failed miserably to penetrate the Shia organisation. Time and again, long before the war of 2006, Hizbullah surprised Israel with its feats of espionage, novel tactics and new weapons. By contrast, he says, Israel's efforts against Hizbullah looked more like those of a bumbling Inspector Clouseau than a James Bond.

To buttress these claims, the author gives plenty of chapter and verse, describing numerous specific Israeli operations, mostly failures, and naming and quoting some of their former commanders. He also offers a detailed account of the violent career of Imad Mughniyeh, the man he says was responsible for some of Hizbullah's most spectacular attacks, including the bombing of the American marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. A year later, this book claims, it was Mughniyeh who kidnapped William Buckley, the CIA's station chief in Beirut, and who oversaw his torture and death. David Barkai, an Israeli intelligence officer who spent years in vain pursuit of the Hizbullah man, recalls his quarry with respect: more than charisma as a leader, Mughniyeh was able to bring "artistry" to the "technology of terror".

Accounts of intelligence are fascinating when they allow recent hard-to-explain events to be re-interpreted in a new light. One example is the strange affair of Elchanan Tennenbaum, a colonel in Israel's reserves who was taken hostage by Hizbullah in 2000 and for whom Israel later traded a surprisingly large number of prisoners. The reason, says Mr Bergman, is that the colonel was privy to details of "the project", an advanced weapons system with many American components that was supposed to be decisive in a future war.

If Lebanon has been the main arena of conflict between Iran and Israel, the main issue between them has long been Iran's presumed quest for nuclear weapons. Here too Mr Bergman argues that the Iranians have consistently deceived and outwitted Israel and its Western allies. But this story is not yet over" and for those who want it there is reason to wonder whether Iran's defeat of Israeli intelligence has been quite as comprehensive as Mr Bergman claims. One example is the assassination" by Israel, according to Hizbullah" of Mughniyeh in Damascus in February, just as Mr Bergman's book was about to go to press. Another was Israel's discovery, and destruction in September 2007, of what appears to have been a secret Syrian nuclear reactor, which Mr Bergman claims Iran was helping to pay for.

But was Iran really involved? One of this reviewer's own intelligence sources says that Iran was not complicit in and seemed to know nothing about the Syrian venture. Another, who has reason to know about such things, doubts Mr Bergman's claim that a crucial tip-off came from Ali Reza Askari, an Iranian general who disappeared and is thought to have defected to the CIA. Still, spying is a rum business. Sometimes, as Winston Churchill said, the truth is so precious it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. Not every juicy detail in this book is necessarily correct, and few can be easily verified. Mr Bergman's portrayal of Israel's confrontation with Iran will also strike some non-Israeli readers as excessively Manichaean. But it makes nonetheless for an enthralling read.