Assassination or War? A Secret Backstory of the Israel-Iran Conflict

On January 8, 2011, Meir Dagan met a select group of journalists at the Mossad Academy north of Tel Aviv. It was the Mossad chief’s first interaction with the media. That wasn’t the only surprise. Dagan, seated next to the prime minister’s spokesperson (Mossad is part of the prime minister’s office), went off script—if there was one—tearing into Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who was pushing him out of an office where Ariel Sharon had put him, with the task of disrupting Iran’s nuclear weapons project.

Israel never had any illusions about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Given the Islamic Republic’s hatred for the Jewish state, Israeli politicians and military leaders felt it naïve to even contemplate Iran’s nuclear project could ever be solely for peaceful purposes. Conditioned by the catastrophe and trauma of the Holocaust, the violent birth of the State of Israel, and the lessons from the revolutionary history of Zionism, Israelis had only one way of seeing Iran’s nuclear programme—as an existential threat. They had to shut it down or set it back because it was meant, above all, to destroy Israel.

The Israeli strikes beginning on the morning of Friday, June 13, are different in scale and purpose from the exchanges of missiles and drones last year. This was the big one, to take out and/or damage as many of Iran’s nuclear installations as possible, a use of hard power that Israel had contemplated, threatened and planned for almost two decades but hadn’t undertaken till now. While there were many reasons for the ‘delay’, what hasn’t been revisited is an old debate: about the best means of turning the clock back in Tehran. And the fight between Dagan and Netanyahu back in the day was at the heart of the matter.

“Dagan acted in a number of ways to fulfill this task [given by Sharon]. The most difficult way, but also the most effective, Dagan believed, was to identify Iran’s key nuclear and missile scientists, locate them, and kill them,” writes Ronen Bergman in <Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations> (2018), a book written and published defying the machinations of Israeli authorities to suppress it. It also tells the story of the tussle between Dagan and Netanyahu as Bergman was one of the journalists present on January 8, 2011 at the Mossad Academy. “The Mossad pinpointed fifteen such targets, of whom it eliminated six, mostly when they were on their way to work in the morning, by means of bombs with short time fuses, attached to their cars by a motorcyclist. In addition, a general of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who was in charge of the missile project, was blown up in his headquarters together with seventeen of his men.”

If it feels like déjà vu today, that’s because of how this M.O. has been repeated—with perhaps its most spectacular and shocking achievement in the assassination of the chief of Iran’s nuclear programme, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, with a remote-controlled machine gun in Absard in June 2020—and how it has been copied by others. And nobody has learnt from Israeli intelligence-gathering and targeted killings as much as the Americans. In fact, George W Bush’s campaign of targeted killings of Al Qaeda leaders was taken largely from the Israeli playbook: “The Command-and-control systems, the war rooms, the methods of information gathering, and the technology of the pilotless aircraft, or drones, that now serve the Americans and their allies were all in large part developed in Israel.” (ibid)

On Friday, June 13, targeted killings of the top brass of Iran’s nuclear programme and the IRGC as well as the chief of staff of its regular army revalidated the concept of precision strikes as well as the practice of old-style intelligence work given how the Mossad smuggled weapons into Iran and set them up and how deeply it penetrated the regime’s security apparatus. But that was one half of it. The other half is military strikes on Natanz and later Isfahan and other nuclear sites and military facilities, especially those housing Iran’s ballistic missiles. The severity of Iran’s retaliation and the fact that several people were killed in Israel and neighbourhoods badly damaged means Tehran still had enough ammo left in its arsenal.

Military strikes were always going to meet partial success and invite largescale retaliation—Iran would not be bound by Israel’s moral code of targeting only nuclear sites and military installations with civilian deaths seen as collateral damage. Tehran would go for indiscriminate firing of missiles at all corners of Israel, meaning to hurt civilians first of all.

Anyway, the die is cast and war, limited or otherwise, now goes together with targeted assassinations. It wasn’t always that way.

Around 2011, shortly after Netanyahu’s return to power after the Kadima interregnum, things began to change. Mossad’s covert operations—meaning assassinations and sabotage, often carried out in collaboration with the US and almost always successful—were falling out of favour with Netanyahu and then-Defence Minister Ehud Barak (also a former prime minister). “They decided that clandestine measures could no longer effectively delay the Iranian nuclear project, and that only a massive aerial bombardment of the Iranians’ nuclear facilities would successfully halt their progress toward acquiring such weapons.” (ibid)

Dagan, Bergman says, “strongly opposed this idea… it flew in the face of everything he believed in: that open warfare should be waged only when “the sword is on our throat,” or as a last resort… “Assassinations,” he said, “have an effect on morale, as well as a practical effect. I don’t think there were many who could have replaced Napoleon, or… Roosevelt or… Churchill.””

Moreover, assassination, according to Dagan, “is a lot more moral”. “Neutralizing a few major figures is enough to make the latter option unnecessary and save the lives of untold numbers of soldiers and civilians on both sides. A large-scale attack against Iran would lead to a large-scale conflict across the Middle East, and even then it likely would not cause enough damage to the Iranian installations.” (ibid)

It’s difficult to estimate the extent of the damage caused to Iran’s nuclear facilities in the current round of strikes, but most experts feel it isn’t significant notwithstanding Israeli claims. Combined with the killings of the top scientists, these strikes will certainly delay Iran but hardly stop it from what even the IAEA has come to suspect is the pursuit of weapons-grade uranium. Whether Iran was in a position to make nine or 11 bombs soon is besides the point. All we know is that the two modi operandi have come together for good. But while the success of the assassinations is easily quantifiable, that of the airstrikes is much less so. (Some of that old morality is visible in the fact that Israel has deliberately avoided hitting the nuclear fuel. That would really set Iran back but the Israelis have always been careful not to release radiation into the air just as they had bombed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear sites before they started processing the fuel.)

Dagan, on January 8, 2011, had claimed Netanyahu was behaving irresponsibly and leading Israel into disaster. That assessment, while spot-on in the opinion of many now and then, seems dated today not because Netanyahu is a genius but because of events and Israel’s response to them. While Gaza is one of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes of this century, the fact is that the Iranian regime, which doubtless blessed the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that started it all, can still take tactical calls but is strategically at its weakest since the Iran-Iraq War.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei indeed has no good options. His regime was complacent enough to believe Israel wouldn’t strike before the next round of talks with the US. Nobody was kept in safe places. Warnings not to gather together went unheeded. Most humiliatingly, Iran’s intelligence and security services were severely compromised by penetration. Netanyahu’s endgame of regime change won’t happen that way though; Iranians are not going to rise up and overthrow the regime. But the Ayatollah knows that nobody will voluntarily stand up and fight for it either. All of Iran’s regional proxies are decimated: Hamas barely stands, Hezbollah’s leadership has been wiped out and the outfit is operationally paralysed, the Houthis get pounded all the time, and Bashar al-Assad in Syria has fallen, taking away Tehran’s only state ally in the Middle East. And Israel has now taken out Tehran’s main gas depot and its central oil refinery. Strikes on energy and oil installations will hurt the regime most.

The Ayatollah, at 86, can accept strategic defeat. Or persist in tactical defiance. Sooner or later Iran is going to lose with all hands. Maybe not today. That doesn’t mean it can keep on fighting.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Mohsen FakhrizadehBashar al-Assad AssassinationBenjamin NetanyahuHamasHezbollahIAEAIranIsraelIsrael-Iran conflictMeri DaganMossadnuclear weaponsSaddam HusseinSyriaTehranWar on Terror