Israel’s Secret War

Nekudat Ha Al-Hazor: Hamodiyin Ha-Israeli Mul Iran Ve-Hizballah
(Point of No Return: Israeli Intelligence Against Iran and Hizballah)
By Ronen Bergman
607 pages, Tel Aviv: Kinneret, 2007 (in Hebrew)

On Aug. 22, 1988, a senior Israeli military intelligence officer briefed the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. At the time, the war between Iran and Iraq, the longest war in the modern history of the Middle East, had been brewing for eight years. The officer stood before the committee and reported, "Based on our best sources, our assessment is that the war will continue for many long years." On the way back to his office, the officer heard on the radio that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, had agreed to a cease-fire with Iraq.

This is just one of the many examples that Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman recounts in his new book, Nekudat Ha Al-Hazor: Hamodiyin Ha-Israeli Mul Iran Ve-Hizballah (Point of No Return: Israeli Intelligence Against Iran and Hizballah), in which he argues that Israeli intelligence has failed time and again in its wars against both Iran and Hezbollah for the past 30 years. Despite its excellent reputation, he says, Israeli intelligence is just as susceptible to mistakes and inefficiencies as any other.

In researching Point of No Return, Bergman made an impressive inquiry into the Iran-Hezbollah-Israel triangle. He interviewed hundreds of individuals from Argentina to Bosnia to collect material about Iran’s involvement in terrorist operations around the world. He pored over classified military intelligence reports. He amassed an outstanding number of details, many of them previously unknown, from which he wove his story. And Bergman knows how to tell a story. As a national security reporter for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, he has covered such varied episodes as the 1973 Yom Kippur War to Palestinian involvement in terrorism, intelligence operations to Iran’s nuclear program.

Point of No Return is a fascinating book. Bergman details a myriad of security issues involving Iran, Hezbollah, and Israel, though many of them are not related to intelligence activities. In covering some of these cases, Bergman exposes new and important information. He adds new facts regarding Israeli military assistance to Iran during the 1980s, mostly as part of the "Irangate" deal, which ended as a fiasco for the United States and, to a lesser extent, Israel. Bergman reveals that Israel had already started to supply large amounts of military equipment to Iran in 1980 and continued to do so until 1988. He thoroughly investigates the two major terrorist attacks carried out in 1992 and 1994 against Israeli and Jewish sites in Argentina, and he explains how both attacks were initiated by Iran and Hezbollah as revenge for the Israeli Air Force’s killing of Hezbollah’s former secretary-general, Abbas Musawi. Bergman discloses that the decision to kill Musawi was made in a matter of minutes, without understanding its full, long-term strategic implications.

Bergman’s account isn’t all bad news, though: The book does highlight some intelligence victories. One was in the period from 1979 to 1981, after the Iranian regime’s rise to power, when the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, carried out a courageous operation to rescue 40,000 Jews from Iran. The agency helped most of them escape by flights to Europe, and the rest crossed the border to Turkey, and even to Pakistan and the Gulf states.

But, in Bergman’s story, intelligence failures have overshadowed any success. Indeed, such failures are not rare. Any intelligence system is highly problematic, and failures take place in most of the dimensions of their activities: in gathering information and assessing it; in the organizational structure of the systems; in coordination and cooperation between intelligence services; and in the relationship between intelligence communities and politicians. Israeli intelligence is no exception. Israel has an excellent intelligence community, one of the best, which has achieved many successes since its establishment. Yet, Israeli intelligence has also suffered a number of failures — the most notorious of which was the mistaken analysis in the run-up to the Yom Kippur War. Hence, the fact that even Israeli intelligence has failed in some cases in its struggle against Hezbollah, and to a lesser extent against Iran, should not surprise anyone. As a well-informed journalist, Bergman should understand this. However, his account ignores the difficulties inherent in intelligence work and suggests an unfair balance between Israeli successes and failures.

And, to be fair, Iran and Hezbollah are hard nuts for any intelligence community to crack. It is difficult to penetrate Iran’s inner circle of decision-makers and to understand Iranian foreign and security policy. Iran has suffered enormously, especially in the military and economic arenas, as a consequence of its deteriorating relations with the United States. And yet, the Iranian fundamentalist regime prefers to pay this price, because it regards its isolation from the United States as one of the pillars of the Islamic Revolution. For that reason, it will be difficult to understand and predict Iran’s future strategy if it eventually acquires nuclear weapons. Will Iran use the bomb to try to eliminate Israel, as its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has implied? The problem is that any decision to contain Iran’s nuclear capability will have to rely on intelligence — and any such assessment, which probably will not be supported by qualitative information, could be mistaken.

As for its struggle against Hezbollah, Israel has indeed had its share of setbacks. The 2006 war in Lebanon exposed serious deficiencies in how the Israeli military forces prepared for war, as well as in the decision-making process from the top down. Yet most of these failures were not those of intelligence. To be sure, Israeli intelligence failed to gather accurate and updated information regarding Hezbollah’s military positions along the border. It was also unable to identify the exact location of Hezbollah’s thousands of rockets — many of which were hidden inside private homes.

Yet Israel saw some important achievements during the recent war with Hezbollah. One of them was the devastating aerial attack, based on excellent intelligence, which destroyed most of Hezbollah’s arsenal of long-range rockets. The official commission of inquiry that was appointed to examine the conduct of the war concluded that the military intelligence branch provided its political and military clients with a correct, reliable, and clear picture of the organization prior to the war, despite problems in gathering information. But Bergman is not interested in these wins: Against the dozens of pages about failures, there are only 20 lines about successes.

Point of No Return has other drawbacks. The book’s power is the details, the new description of events. The analysis of the various issues, however, adds little to the understanding of Iranian behavior. In many cases, it summarizes past thinking and studies on the subject — and today there is much literature on the Iranian challenge. Some of Bergman’s sources are far from objective, and their reports need verification. And his descriptions include factual errors. For example, he claims that the Iranian uranium-enrichment plant in Natanz was exposed in October 2003, when it actually was revealed in August 2002; he says that Iran has completely denied international inspectors access to the Lavizan military research site, when the inspectors in fact visited Lavizan in June 2004 and in January 2006 (of course after the Iranians had razed its facilities).

Fact-checking issues aside, though, Point of No Return will help readers understand why Iran, and its terrorist surrogate, Hezbollah, has become a grim challenge for the United States, the Western world, moderate Muslim and Arab regimes — and of course, Israel. And by documenting its international reach, Bergman ably illustrates how Iran has earned its label — accorded by every U.S. administration since 1984 — as "the most active state sponsor of terrorism." More important, one must remember that the real challenge pertaining to the Iranian threat lies ahead of us — if and when Iran acquires nuclear weapons. Fighting Iran’s involvement in terrorism and containing its nuclear threat will mean collecting valuable information, as well as minimizing intelligence failures. Point of No Return reminds us that this is no easy task.