In Secret War in Iran, Some Rules Restrain the Mossad

By: Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman

Aimed — it seems — at keeping America’s attention firmly on the unacceptable danger of Iran building nuclear weapons, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are hinting that an Israeli attack on Iran could come at any time.

Officials in Jerusalem and in Washington have suggested, however, that they believe Netanyahu has been privately asked by President Barack Obama not to attack until after America’s election day; and many Israeli strategic analysts believe that a military strike can indeed wait until then. However, Netanyahu is trying to maintain the pressure, not only on Iran but on the United States, bydeclaring that time is running out for a peaceful solution. He barely conceals the fact that he would prefer that the U.S. carry out the attack on Iran.

The prime minister is not saying publicly that Israel’s foreign espionage and operations agency — the Mossad — is highly active, day and night; and its main focus, for eight years now, has been Iran’s nuclear program. The agency’s director from 2002 through 2010, Meir Dagan, made a pointof redirecting the Mossad’s priorities: with a lot less emphasis on Palestinian politics and militant groups, and a laser beam of attention on Iran.

We reported last month that at least four assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran were carried out by Mossad operatives. The Israeli attackers were part of an elite unit within Israeli intelligence, called Kidon (the Hebrew word for Bayonet). Since its creation, in the wake of the Palestinian terrorist attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, many espionage experts have concluded that Israel’s assassins respect no rules and know no boundaries.

We’ve learned, however, that the Kidon unit does respect an unwritten regulation adopted by Israel’s secret agencies about half a century ago: not to use local Jews as spies or saboteurs in their home countries. This is relevant consideration in Iran, where around 25,000 Jews live — long after most moved away in the wake of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

The restriction is somewhat ironic, because Israeli secret agents have devoted a lot of their energies to protecting or rescuing Jews. Intelligence agency chiefs have always felt obliged to be guardians of their brethren, far and wide. Two units of Israel’s intelligence community — Nativ, which specialized in helping Soviet Jews, and Bitzur, part of the Mossad — organized Hebrew education, self-defense, and secret emigration to Israel. The Israelis learned — at a painful cost of seeing Jews tortured and executed in Egypt and Iraq in the 1950′s — not to use local Jews as spies inside what the Mossad calls “target countries.”