Reporting from the Front Line of Israel’s Secret War

Foreign Policy: This is an impressive book about Israel and the Wests efforts to stop Irans race toward nuclear power and attempts to export its Islamic revolution. What is the story behind the book?

Ronen Bergman: The book tries to fill in a number of gaps in readers knowledge about the Iranian nuclear threat, whichdespite the December 2007 U.S. intelligence declaration that Tehran has dropped its atomic weapons programis still one of the greatest security challenges the world is facing today.

The idea was to give a historical survey of events that occurred at the time of the shahs regime and the rise of [Ayatollah] Khomeini to power. [I also wanted] to describe Israeli-Iranian relations at the time of the shah, which reached their peak with a deal code-named Tsor and amazingly involved the sale by Israel to Iran of long-range, surface-to-surface missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

The book tries then to put everything on a timeline and show how it is all connected. You cannot, for example, understand some of Irans acts of terrorism against Israel without knowing about the actions taken by Israel to locate its missing Air Force navigator Ron Arad. My goal was to shed light on the covert activities carried out by Israel and Iran. Without knowing these stories, you cant really understand the relations between the two countries.

FP: How do you collect your information? What were your sources?

RB: The book has three main sources: an academic paper I wrote for the Institute for National Security Studies [in Tel Aviv] in 1997 about Irans operational use of terror, the 15 years of reporting Ive done on Iran and Hezbollah for Israeli press, and a year of research and writing for the book itself. There were interviews with 300 people from 20 to 30 countries, as well as some 25,000 documents written by intelligence services, police inquiries, and court hearings alongside hundreds of books and thousands of newspaper clippings to which I referred.

Two years ago, I was asked to speak about Israeli intelligence at Oxford University, and I read an internal document about Mossad and Ethiopian cooperation in 1965. At the end of the lecture, a professor in the crowd said that he understands that the document had never been declassified. How, he asked, did I get it? My answer was that I have a mailbox outside my house and that in the morning, when I wake up, documents are there waiting for me. Of course I was kidding, but I cannot say more.

The truth is that I was fortunate to discover that individuals sometimes tend to forget that they have secret documents in their private possession when they retire, and in other cases people keep diaries; sometimes they are generous enough to allow me to use them. There are also some casesand they are very rarein which the establishment actually cooperates with me.

FP: In the book, you point to many failures that occurred over the years in the fight against Iran. Was this your goal when you set out to write the book?

RB: I set out to write a book about the secret war with Iran. After I finished, I realized that it was actually a book about the failures during that war. History wrote itself perfectly.

FP: Where is Iran on the nuclear timeline today? And is it such a great threat to Israel as the government makes it out to be?

RB: There are different assessments among the intelligence agencies about Irans progress. The recent American National Intelligence Estimate report demonstrates those differences over the way Iran is perceived to be, or not to be, progressing with its nuclear program.

People are always making comparisons with the claims made before the Iraq war, which turned out not to be true. But this is wrong; there is a difference between the two. The Iranians speak openly about their nuclear program. The Iranians even claim that they are more advanced than they really are. There is no disagreement that they are developing nuclear capabilities.

The question is whether their program has a military application. Ernst Bergman, one of the founding fathers of the Israeli nuclear program (who some mistakenly have stated Im related to) once said that there is no such thing as a nuclear program for civilian purposes and then another program for military purposes. They are one and the same.

The Americans, in the NIE, did not say that Iran is not developing a nuclear program. What they said was that from 2003 on, they do not have proof that Iran is moving forward with its military program. Israel claims differently, and I cannot say which is correct.

FP: Over the years, we have seen estimates of the date that Iran will have nuclear weapons change quite often. Once it was 2003, then 2005, 2010, and now 2009. As someone plugged into the intelligence community, how do you explain this constantly changing timeline?

RB: There are three explanations: The first is that there is a lack of knowledge, since we dont really know what is going on there. The Iranians are very sensitive to intelligence infiltrations, both electronic communications and human intelligence. Secondly, the intelligence community has its own agenda, and it too was traumatized by Iraq and by their having warned of something that [wasnt there]. We in Israel are traumatized by not knowing about the relationship between Iran and Pakistani scientist [and nuclear black marketeer] A.Q. Khan. And thirdly, there are more and more delays in the Iranian program, due to international efforts.

FP: There were major intelligence failures ahead of the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006. Are Israel and the West in a better place today?

RB: We are today in a better place. What happened in Syria on September 6, when Israeli jets bombed a nuclear installation built by Iran and North Korea, was a sign that we are back in business. That operation was a combination of exact intelligence and a great operation by the Israeli Air Force.

The Iranian threat was right in front of our eyes from the beginning, when Khomeini came to Tehran in 1979, and wethe Westpreferred to look the other way.

A problem for the Israeli intelligence community has always been that it is part of the general society and as such suffers from the same problems, such as the opportunism that leads gifted people to prefer to make more money than to work in intelligence. The Mossad has been suffering from organizational and human resources problems for a while now, and that is because there is no one above them to give them direction. There is the prime minister, but he does not have the time to give the agency the attention it needs. There is not even one effective authority in the country that oversees the Mossads activities continually and professionally.

The intelligence gathered about Iran has gotten better in the past few years. The improvement began from when Meir Dagan became head of the Mossad and made Iran not only the agencys top priority, but basically its only priority. The Mossad almost doesnt get involved in other issues. There are achievements vis–vis Iran, but there are still huge holes [with] no solutions.

FP: What type of feedback do you get from the defense establishment with regard to your reporting and your book?

RB: No organization likes to be criticized, and most of the time the Mossad feelsas an organizationthat the criticism is too harsh and that I publish too many secrets. In this book alone, 750 corrections to the manuscript were made by the military censorship.

But inside the organization there are people who cooperate without being mentioned and getting credit, because they think that the citizens of the state of Israel deserve to know the truth.

FP: What are you working on next?

RB: If I had time, I would want to write a book on military and intelligence cooperation between Israel and Africa.

Point of No Return is being published in English in May by Simon and Schuster/Free Press. The book will be called The Secret War with Iran and will be very different from the Hebrew version. It will include a number of operations and affairs that did not appear in the Hebrew book and which closely concern the European and American publics. For example, there is an extensive chapter on the abductions of hostages in Lebanon and the disclosure of the operational file on the man who was on top of [the FBIs] Most Wanted list before Osama bin Laden, namely Imad Mugniyah, the supreme military commander of Hezbollah, who has the blood of hundreds of Americans and Frenchmen on his hands. It will also bare new details of the Iran-Contra affair that will be very embarrassing to George [H.W.] Bush.

Interview: Yaakov Katz, military and defense correspondent at the Jerusalem Post.