Target Tehran: A new book focuses on Israel’s Determination to Stop a Nuclear Iran
BOOK REVIEW: Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination – and Secret Diplomacy – to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East
by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar / Simon & Schuster
Reviewed by Andy Dunn, former CIA Deputy Assistant Director
The Reviewer — Andy Dunn retired from the CIA in November 2021 after a 29-year career as an analyst and Agency leader. He last served as Deputy Assistant Director of the Near East Mission Center from 2020 to 2021 and as Chief of Analysis in the Iran Mission Center from 2018 to 2020. Iran and the violence perpetrated by its proxies and partners in the region were the major focus of these units. Previous assignments included multiple leadership jobs in the Counterterrorism Mission Center and two war zone tours.
REVIEW — Target Tehran, by Jerusalem Post editors Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar, is a well sourced, thorough, and often riveting recounting of Israel’s decades long efforts to disrupt Tehran’s nuclear program and establish ties with those Arab states which mostly share Jerusalem’s perception of the regional threat posed by Tehran. While the authors’ portrayal of Mossad sometimes borders on fawning and Simon & Schuster’s editors should have devoted more energy to trimming repetitive and sometimes speculative passages, reading Target Tehran is time well spent by anyone interested in an informed and generally well written Israeli perspective on the decades-long conflict between Jerusalem and Tehran over the latter’s nuclear ambitions.
The book opens with an extended recounting of Mossad’s gutsy theft of Iran’s nuclear weapons archives from a generic and poorly protected warehouse in Tehran in January 2018. Little of what is described in the authors’ retelling of the planning, execution, and exploitation of the archive is new; Prime Minister Netanyahu and Mossad’s comically vain but effective chief at the time, Yossi Cohen, have spun this story for every politician and journalist and intelligence officer willing to listen for years, and who can blame them?
Where the book adds value is by placing the operation in the broader context of the time: Netanyahu’s successful campaign to persuade President Trump to withdraw the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The Israeli Government launched an effective and protracted PR campaign aimed mostly at U.S. audiences and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA,) hitting home again and again Tehran’s pattern of deceit regarding its nuclear weapons program up until at least the early 2000s.
The authors rightly note that little of what the archives revealed was new to the IAEA (or Iran watchers in the Israeli and U.S. governments) at a strategic level. Nonetheless, the heist provided reams of useful and sometimes damning details of Iran’s surreptitious nuclear weapons program and was an information warfare gold mine for Israel.
Target Tehran then turns to explaining the origin and history of Israel’s to-date successful covert efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Two foundational pillars of the Islamic Republic are ejecting the United States from what Tehran judges to be its rightful regional sphere of influence and the destruction of the State of Israel. The latter goal was plainly and frequently stated beginning in 1979 by the ayatollahs who have for too long, mis-governed Iran, and the book chronicles Jerusalem’s shifting focus from collection on to disruption of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.
Ariel Sharon, who became Prime Minister in 2001, hired Meir Dagan as chief of Mossad in 2002. Dagan pushed Mossad to more aggressively target Iran’s nuclear program, and much of the rest of the book authoritatively details Jerusalem’s energetic, daring, and controversial covert campaign to that end. Many senior Israeli officials (and some former U.S. officials) used this forum to brag, both on and off-the-record, and the book is dense—too dense at times—with details about actual or suspected Israeli sabotage of nuclear facilities and assassinations of nuclear scientists over several decades.
Target Tehran devotes considerable ink to detailing Jerusalem’s decades-long parallel efforts to build security ties to Arab states to contain Iran. Mossad has been at the forefront of building these ties, and the book thoroughly examines its quiet engagement with Saudi, UAE, Bahraini, and, to a lesser extent, Sudanese and Moroccan officials.
Yossi Cohen in particular was a persistent and effective advocate for establishing these ties, which culminated with the Trump administration facilitating the signing the Abraham Accords in September of 2020 between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain.
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The authors hammer home their assessment of the importance of expanding the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia, which they repeatedly (but not persuasively) characterize as the Holy Grail that would transform Middle East geopolitics.
Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman features prominently as a behind the scenes advocate of improved ties; Bahrain, for example, undoubtedly received MbS’s nod of approval before signing on to the Abraham Accords. But, in the one major analytic shortcoming of the book, nowhere do the authors discuss the risks and limitations of further tying Israel’s security to the Saudi Crown Prince, whom some see as an erratic sociopath with a mostly transactional view of international relations. They also fail to explain how deepening and formalizing ties to a country with an expensive but consistently ineffective military soundly defeated by Iran and its Houthi allies in Yemen and not capable even of defending major Saudi domestic infrastructure from low-tech Iranian drones, would be the game changer the authors claim it would be.
U.S.-Israeli relations, of course, feature prominently in the book. Oft-repeated themes include acknowledging Israel’s dependence on the United States for its security, tempered by Jerusalem’s growing doubts about the U.S. security commitment and concern about our hot and cold engagement with Israel on combatting Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S. assassination of IRGC-Qods Force Commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in January 2020—and the behind-the-scenes engagement and squabbling about that operation between the two countries—is covered extensively, as are Israeli concerns about a potential Biden administration re-engagement with Tehran on the JCPOA.
The last chapter—dramatically titled “The Mossad Promise”—opens with a recounting of a fictional unilateral Israeli attack in September 2024, on nuclear sites in Iran precipitated by further advances in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.
The book concludes with a quote from David Barnea—Mossad’s current chief—at a December 2021 awards ceremony, where the authors quote him saying, “Iran will not have nuclear weapons, not in the coming years, not ever. That is my promise, that is the Mossad’s promise.”
The authors rightly cast a skeptical eye on that promise, acknowledging that Iran is now closer than ever—diplomacy and covert action notwithstanding—to having the ability to build a nuclear device if and when it chooses to do so. Barnea’s promise rings at least somewhat hollow, all the more so in the aftermath of Israel’s failure to anticipate and deter the early-October Hamas massacre that has sparked a war with that Iranian-supported terrorist group.
This reality left me asking one question the authors chose not to tackle in even a cursory way: how might Israel adjust to a world where Tehran has the bomb? Iran’s progress toward a nuclear device has been uneven but inexorable, despite Mossad’s heroics. What would Jerusalem’s Plan B look like?
Target Tehran earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 Trench Coats
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