Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to dispatch Mossad chief Yossi Cohen to Washington in the coming weeks to lay out Israel’s demands of the Biden administration for any new version of the Iran nuclear deal, Channel 12 news reported Saturday night.
The network said Cohen, one of Netanyahu’s most trusted colleagues, is to travel to the US within the next month and will be the first senior Israeli official to meet US President Joe Biden. He is also expected to meet with the head of the CIA.
On Saturday evening, the Prime Minister’s Office’s announced that Israeli National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat spoke by phone with his new American counterpart Jake Sullivan, in the first confirmed high-level conservation between Israeli officials and the Biden administration.
“The two agreed to soon discuss many topics on the agenda, including the Iranian issue, regional matters and advancing the Abraham Accords,” the PMO said in a statement.
In the US, Cohen and his team are expected to present the Biden administration with all the information gathered by Israel on the progress of Iran’s rogue nuclear program, according to the report, and demand what amounts to a radical overhaul of the 2015 deal with far more stringent commitments from Tehran to ensure it cannot attain nuclear weapons.
The TV report further said Cohen will set out what Israel believes are core components to which the Iranian regime would have to commit under the terms of any resumed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Netanyahu publicly lobbied the Obama administration in vain against the deal, successfully encouraged president Donald Trump to withdraw from it, and has urged Biden to reconsider his declared intention to rejoin it. READ MORE
