Israel’s (not-so) secret plan to prevent a nuclear Iran and create a new Middle East

On the eve of January 31, 2018, a team of agents under the command of the Mossad broke into a secret warehouse on the outskirts of Tehran and extracted an archive containing tens of thousands of highly classified documents detailing the full record of Iran’s efforts to become a nuclear weapons power.

The revelation of the archive’s contents showed that “Iran had for years been lying to the international community about its nuclear program, falsely claiming that it was only for civilian use,” write Ilan Evyatar and Yonah Jeremy Bob in “Target Tehran: How Israel is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination — and Secret Diplomacy — to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East.” The book hit shelves in late September.

Evyatar and Bob claim Israel’s decision to go after Iran’s nuclear archives had been made two years earlier, in January 2016, by then newly appointed Mossad director Yossi Cohen and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to the authors, Netanyahu and Cohen wanted evidence that would convince the Trump administration to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal signed by the Obama administration in 2015.

Their book documents a decades-long Mossad-led effort — which has included sabotage and assassinations inside Iran — to prevent the Islamic Republic from becoming a nuclear power.

As part of their research, both authors had extensive access to Cohen, who directed the Mossad until 2021 and who planned and directed many of the operations that are the focus of “Target Tehran,” including much of the secret diplomacy that led to the Abraham Accords. READ MORE