Propaganda wars

For many months, the US and Iran have been holding indirect talks in a Viennese hotel with Chinese, Russian, UK, French and German diplomats, in order that the US might return to the 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) nuclear deal. This was designed by President Obama to delay a hypothetical Iranian ability to assemble a nuclear device – but which Donald Trump deliberately and spitefully collapsed (on behalf of his friends in Israel and Saudi Arabia) three years later. These talks have the blessing of William Burns, the current CIA director, who was involved in the original project of bringing Iran in from the cold. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) continues to monitor Iranian sites with complex tamper-proof surveillance systems.

President Biden would like to return the US to the treaty, not least because if US sanctions were lifted Iran could export another one million barrels of oil per day, while putting onto the market the 100 million barrels it has in offshore storage. A similar logic informs his sudden desire to bury the hatchet with Venezuela, as well it might given the subtraction of Russian oil and Gulf Arab inability to pump more. The main obstacle to a US return to the JCPOA is that Biden faces congressional opposition should he drop Trump’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a foreign “terrorist” organisation. In fact it is a parallel army, created when elements of the regular armed forces (notably the air force) could not be trusted after the Revolution of 1979.

Speaking of terrorism, for the last two years Israel’s national intelligence agency, Mossad, has stepped up its murderous campaign against Iranian participants in that country’s nuclear activities. This has civil and military components, though Iran is a signatory to the NPT, and Israel is not.

The latest phase began in late 2020 with use of a remotely operated machine gun to kill Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the scientific manager in charge of Iran’s programme, as he drove to work one morning. In June, two young Iranians, one an aerospace engineer, the other a geologist, died from poisoning in cities 400 miles apart. They joined a lengthening list of Iranian engineers and scientists who have fallen from high balconies or been killed by mystery motorbike assassins in drive-by shootings, or after limpet bombs have been attached to the cars they are driving in. In May, Colonel Sayyad Khodaei, a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) external Quds force, was shot dead by motorcycle gunmen outside his home in a Tehran suburb. That follows the Americans’ drone strike on the Quds force chief Major General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, as he and his entourage exited Baghdad airport, after tentative talks with Saudi Arabia had commenced. Kurdish baggage handlers working for the Israelis helped identify which SUV Soleimani was sitting in. Apparently, SEAL snipers were strung along the exit road in case the drone missiles missed their target. In the event, the “Shadow Commander”, a national hero in Iran and beyond, had to be identified by a garnet ring on a severed hand. Ironically Soleimani was involved in clandestine diplomacy to reduce tensions with the Saudis, which is probably why Mike Pompeo ordered his assassination.

The western media tends to salivate over these acts of Israeli derring-do, glossing over the fact that Israel is engaged in murdering officials and scientists of another state with which it is not at war. This reflects the reality that the US is not prepared to enable Israel – with long distance aerial refuelling tankers and powerful bunker-busting bombs – to mount a full-blown attack on multiple installations in Iran. Some big dogs refuse to have their tails wagged, even in election years.

Israel has been in the business of assassinating people for a long time. In the 1950s, German engineers hired by Egypt’s President Nasser were attacked with parcel bombs – never mind that secretaries tended to open their mail. Following the 1972 Black September terrorist attack on Olympic athletes in Munich, teams of Israeli killers tracked down the culprits, managing to mistake a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer for Palestinian master terrorist Ali Hassan Salameh, with whom the CIA were in secret talks to dial down attacks on Americans in Beirut. (The CIA were not pleased when Salameh was eventually killed in 1979, having treated him and his wife to a holiday at Disneyland.)

These lethal mishaps give the lie to the claim that Israel only acts after the most scrupulous preparation and with the cabinet conducting the equivalent of moral philosophy seminars before teams of killers move in. Absurdly, any idea that vengeance is afoot (the post-Munich operation was called Wrath of God) is denied, while the efficacy of targeted assassinations is asserted rather than proved. In fact, Israelis are no less immune to bloodlust than anyone else, and they can also view hammers as the automatic response to any nail.

The reason why so many people in the West seem to accept thuggish behaviour by Israel is that despite being armed with about 300 nuclear warheads, it does a fine job of depicting itself as beleaguered, while the assassins themselves are literally written into other country’s scripts. We are not talking about espionage officers and agents – about whom there are excellent movies like The Angel or Sacha Baron Cohen’s moving depiction of Eli Cohen in The Spy, in which Cohen insinuated himself into the circle of Syrian defence minister Amin al-Hafiz. Rather, Mossad killers are actively lauded in such long-running TV series as NCIS, though why a Mossad killer (played by Chilean beauty Cote de Pablo) should be assigned to a service dealing with naval drug smugglers and wife-beaters remains obscure. Apparently, Mossad even has a film liaison office in LA to ensure its characters are always portrayed as morally aware, thoughtful types.

Although little can be done to shift popular perceptions of a service that kills on a regular basis, we can ask whether killing works? Certainly, is not hard to find this claim, most recently made by the Australian-born neocon Danielle Pletka, who says targeted killings degrade capacity and demoralise enemy forces. Specifically, Pletka says that: “It will not end Iran’s weapons program, but it can slow it down. It will not end Iran’s missile program [NB which is not illicit] but it will cause many Iranians who might have signed up to think twice about the risks.”

The reason why so many people in the West seem to accept thuggish behaviour by Israel is that despite being armed with about 300 nuclear warheads, it does a fine job of depicting itself as beleaguered

This is nonsense. Since the killing of Fakhrizadeh, Iran has enriched 55lbs of uranium to 60 per cent strength and another 463lbs to 20 per cent. At the time of Fakhirzadeh’s murder, Iran was enriching to 4.5 per cent which was slightly above the 3.67 per cent threshold specified by the 2015 JCPOA. Parallel cyber or arson attacks on Iran’s closely monitored facilities therefore saw no diminution of Iran’s capacity to acquire critical elements of a future nuclear device. Once Iran has 90 per cent enriched uranium it could move to make a nuclear warhead – and it is a small leap from 60 to 90, by the way – though that is a political decision for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and key stages like miniaturising a device for a ballistic missile warhead have not been passed. In fact, one could argue that Israel’s murder and sabotage campaign has accelerated Iranian eagerness to have the parts for a future nuclear device. Producing some 140,000 science graduates a year, there is no shortage of able candidates ready to fill “unexpected vacancies” either, in a programme that has national prestige. Competent scientific managers like Fakharizadeh are ten a penny too – he was hardly Robert Oppenheimer, an illustrious physicist in his own right.

As a matter of general principle, we should not celebrate states that operate like cowboys on the loose – whether they are Russia’s FSB and GRU, Saudi General Intelligence or the Israelis. If you do then you open the way to other forms of illegality. For example, the private sector Israeli electronic surveillance outfit NSO used Pegasus software to intercept the phones of the likes of a Polish chief prosecutor, Princess Haya of Jordan and her British divorce lawyer Fiona Shackleton, FT editor Roula Khalaf and 180 journalists from Azerbaijan to Mexico. With honourable exceptions like the FT or Guardian there is remarkable reluctance to investigate or report on these outrages (which in the case of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi resulted in his gruesome murder in Istanbul inside the Saudi consulate). Who dares wonder why acts of outright murder are apparently justified when committed by Israel, but not when the killers are Russians? But then, nobody is going to make a sympathetic film or miniseries about GRU killers even as the western entertainment industry celebrates Israel’s allegedly scrupulous ‘operators’.

Michael Burleigh’s “Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder” is published by Picador in paperback in August