The other day, an Israeli intelligence officer who shares information with British agencies in London told me about her work. “Iran is the big focus for us. But for the British, it is maybe third on their priority list,” she said.
Fair enough. Tehran may be a grave threat to Britain but due to its apocalyptic obsession with Jerusalem, it poses a far greater danger to Israel. Despite the differences in priorities, however, the Britain-Israel intelligence collaboration has long been very fruitful.
In 2015, for instance, a tip-off from Mossad led British police to uncover a Hezbollah bomb factory in northwest London with three tons of ammonium nitrate hidden in disposable ice packs. And as we saw this week, when it comes to the threat of nuclear weapons, the London-Jerusalem relationship has proven priceless.
When I visited him at his home a few years ago, Ram Ben-Barak, the former deputy director of Mossad, told me that in the early-2000s, British spies had alerted Mossad to rumours about a nuclear programme in Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria.
MI6 didn’t take the reports particularly seriously, he said. Mossad, however, viewed even a slim chance as a great danger and investigated the matter urgently. Thank God they did. On September 6, 2007 the Ehud Olmert government ordered the bombing of Bashar al-Assad’s nuclear programme.
At the time, many voices, both domestic and international, opposed the attack due to fears of escalation and instability. Even George W Bush – hardly a shrinking violet when it came to military action – refused to give it his blessing. Undeterred, Olmert and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, elected to go it alone.
Now that the contemptible Assad regime has collapsed, that decision looks especially shrewd. If Assad’s nukes hadn’t been destroyed by Israeli jets 17 years ago, Abu Mohammad al Jolani, the obscure 42-year-old terror chief who seized power in Syria last weekend, might well have found himself in control of them today.
It doesn’t bear thinking about. This is a man who took up the cause of jihad after being radicalised by the Second Intifada. This is a man who is literally named after the Golan Heights. Would he have been able to resist placing Tel Aviv in the nuclear crosshairs and pulling the trigger?
Olmert’s 2007 decision was taken in accordance with the “Begin doctrine”. This was a pre-emptive counter-proliferation policy established by Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1981, when he ordered the bombing of the nascent nuclear reactor in Osirak, Iraq.
History proved Begin just as right as Olmert. Imagine Saddam Hussein with an atomic bomb, or such weapons falling into the hands of Al Qaeda, Islamic State or other fanatics who later roamed Iraq. Once again, it doesn’t bear thinking about.
Fast-forward to the present, and – as the Israeli intelligence officer pointed out to me – Israel once again faces a potentially existential nuclear threat. MI6 and the CIA may not share Mossad’s urgency but many sensible voices are calling for the application of the Begin doctrine in dealing with Iran.
There may be no better time to strike. Recent months have dealt Iran a powerful blow, leaving it like an octopus without its tentacles. Hezbollah has been degraded by around 70 per cent. Assad has fallen. At home, activists are raising Israeli flags in Tehran and women are uncovering their hair.
Iran’s economy has declined sharply over the last year, with inflation soaring. Bread prices have surged by 200 per cent and other necessities, including housing and water, have risen steeply. The country’s energy infrastructure is working at 70 per cent of its capacity at best and blackouts are a feature of life.
Iran’s steel production, one of its largest exports outside oil, has fallen by 50 per cent. In 2023, its trade with Russia declined by 17 per cent, India by 26 per cent and Turkey by 33 per cent. Exports to China have plummeted, too.
Add to this the destruction of Iran’s Russian-made air defences by Israeli warplanes in October and Mossad’s comprehensive intelligence penetration of the regime apparatus and the Ayatollah is sitting atop a papier mâché fort. We haven’t even mentioned Donald Trump.
If there has been one message to have emerged in intelligence circles in recent weeks it is that Iran’s feared “axis of resistance” was not all it was cracked up to be. Did Russia and China come to Iran’s defence when Israeli planes attacked? They did not. When Tehran rained missiles on the Jewish state last April, however, a coalition of friendly democracies pitched in. It is clear where the true alliance lies.
For years, the Biden administration has been trying to appease the despots of Tehran. Why? It has never been any match for Western might. The time is approaching to point out that the emperor has no nukes.
For now. History may never repeat itself but certain lessons may be drawn. If Iran is allowed to go nuclear, there are two possible futures. Either the regime gets to wield its new atomic muscle across the region or it collapses under the weight of its own brutality and the weapons fall into chaotic hands. For Israel, neither would be tolerable.
One of Biden’s shameful legacies – one of many, including the deplorable Afghan withdrawal – has been to cravenly feed the Iranian beast. But another lesson from history teaches that appeasement never works.
The recent constellation of events has led Iran to its weakest position in decades. The regime is desperate. This week, Rafael Grossi, head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Tehran had drastically escalated its uranium enrichment programme. A wounded animal is most dangerous when cornered.
Whether the White House will get onboard or not, Jerusalem must rip apart the paper tiger of Tehran before it crosses the atomic threshold. Remember when the late John McCain sang “bomb bomb Iran” on the campaign trail? That was 16 years ago. Why the delay? The Begin doctrine worked in Iraq and Syria. It is time to dust it off once again.
