The Islamic Republic of Iran is a formidable regime. Despite crippling sanctions that have caused major shortages in power and food and cut its economy off from the global banking networks, and despite Israeli and American sabotage, it has succeeded in building a nuclear programme which has brought nearly to the threshold of weapons capabilities. It has also transformed itself over the past two decades into a regional power, with varying degrees of control over Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. All this while crushing any signs of dissent against the theocratic overlords.
It comes somewhat as a surprise therefore that Iran’s efforts to carry out secret operations outside the region have been such an abject failure. In their attempts at assassinations and abductions in the west and the far east, Iran’s agents are rarely successful and often picked up by local security agencies long before even getting close to their targets and their bombs, if they even manage to set them off, seldomly cause actual damage. More Mr Bean than James Bond. You’d have to go back to the Burgas bombing in 2012, when five Israeli tourists were killed in Bulgaria, to find a successful Iranian-planned terror attack against an Israeli target abroad, and that had been subcontracted to Hezbollah.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that urbane and cosmopolitan Iranians with western education, and there are many of those, are normally used to being regarded as enemies of the regime, rather than working on its behalf as secret agents. Otherwise it’s hard to explain why the latest assassin, allegedly sent by Tehran on a revenge mission against Israelis in Cyprus, was an Azeri with a Russian passport who seems to have been easily picked up, in possession of a revolver with a silencer, shortly after he crossed over from the Turkish-occupied zone.
Contrary to some early reports, his target wasn’t even the online-gambling tycoon Teddy Sagi. Just Israelis in general. The Cypriot security services probably also had a useful tip-off from a friendly intelligence service in the region.
That doesn’t mean of course that Israel’s leader should be complacent (they aren’t) or be crowing too loudly over their own intelligence coups – which is what Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was doing on Monday at the opening of the Knesset’s winter session.
Even Mr Bennett’s closest aides found it difficult to explain why he had felt the need to add in to the text of his speech the cryptic statement that “last month, women and men of the Mossad embarked on operation which purpose was to locate information on Ron Arad. It was a complex, wide-scale and daring operation. That’s all I can say for now.”
Whatever the accuracy of the reports that have appeared since then in various Arab media outlets claiming that the secret operation involved the abduction of an Iranian general and his interrogation in an African country, or Israeli teams exhuming bodies in Lebanon and taking DNA samples, there was absolutely nothing to be gained from publicising the operation and quite a bit of potential damage to be caused.
Israel has spent massive resources since Ron Arad’s F-4 Phantom fighter-jet crashed in Lebanon in 1986 in trying to locate his whereabouts. There is no evidence he was alive after 1988 and the assessments of Mossad and the IDF’s Intelligence Branch concur that he was either killed at some point by his captors or died of mistreated wounds at least quarter of a century ago. Still, efforts to reach a more certain conclusion and if possible, locate his remains, remain ongoing. The ethos of not leaving even one soldier behind is that powerful and those efforts will continue, for Ron Arad and for dozens of other Israeli servicemen who went missing in action since Israel’s foundation. Lost month’s operation was one of many in an ongoing decades-long campaign which is rarely, if ever, helped by publicity.
So why did Mr Bennett do so?
There are two possible explanations and neither of them do him much credit. One is that this was the mindless act of an excitable and inexperienced new prime minister who has yet to get used to the fact that having Mossad, Shin Bet and the Israeli Atomic Energy Agency under his direct control, makes him the sole custodian of all of Israel’s darkest secrets. The other is that he was cynically imitating his much more experienced predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had on occasion used his knowledge of Mossad operations for domestic political purposes, to puff up his own image as an aggressive and daring leader and to deflect public attention from less attractive aspects of his premiership. To Mr Netanyahu’s credit, when he revealed a Mossad operation, he either made a grand show of it, as with the press conference in 2018 when he revealed that Israel had purloined the contents of the Iranian nuclear archive in Tehran, or he slyly had the information leaked to a friendly journalist for maximum. Whatever the true explanation, Mr Bennett hasn’t helped his image by disclosing official secrets to the public. He’s only come off as a clumsy and impetuous neophyte.
Naftali Bennett is the most prominent of a new generation of Israeli tech entrepreneurs who unlike Teddy Sagi, feel they’ve made enough millions to last them a lifetime and have moved on to a second career in politics. Coming close on his heels in the millionaire-politician league is Nir Barkat, the former two-term mayor of Jerusalem and now Likud Knesset member.
Upon his first election as mayor in 2008, Mr Barkat made a big deal out of his refusal to accept a salary and that he was serving the public for “a shekel a year.”
This week, it transpired that he was still making a good deal of money when his name emerged in the “Pandora Papers” project, a joint investigation by news organisations around the world in to a leaked cache of files on offshore companies owned by the wealthy and powerful in dozens of countries. According to the files, one of the main holding companies owned by Mr Barkat was based in the tax-haven of the Virgin Islands. While there is no allegation of financial wrongdoing, the report does raise the question of whether a public servant who pride himself on taking just a shekel a year from the taxpayer should apparently arrange his business so he can pay less taxes.
Mr Barkat responded angrily in a tweet, saying that “I’m not surprised by the attacks against me now. You know well from where these attempts to take out right-wing and Likud leaders come from.” In another statement he said that “it’s hard to detach the political interests that were involved in this ridiculous ‘investigation’ from the fact that Barkat is seen as one of the leaders who could return Likud to power.”
No-one so far has disputed the veracity of the Pandora Papers and their publication certainly wasn’t motivated by a desire to harm him politically. There’s a long list of public figures who have been damaged by the revelations and he hardly comes anywhere near the top. Perhaps his angry tone is the telling response of an ambitious politician frustrated at being stuck on the backbenches without a prospect of challenging for the Likud leadership.
Like his Likud colleagues, Mr Barkat is frustrated to find himself on the opposition benches without any sign of the new government, despite its prime minister’s indiscretions, failing to keep the show on the road. Next week the Bennett government will mark four months in power and is on-track the pass a new state budget in the coming weeks, all but ensuring its survival for another year at least.
But Mr Barkat has a further cause for frustration. He is currently the leading leadership candidate in the polls among Likud members to replace Benjamin Netanyahu. But the ex-prime minister who will celebrate his 72nd birthday in a couple of weeks is proving an energetic leader of the opposition and is so far showing no sign of retirement. Mr Barkat has used his ample personal resources to hold lavishly catered events for party members and has a large team of well-connected advisors (much larger than that of Mr Netanyahu). And while it’s nice to be leading the other potential challengers in the polls, none of this is much use when there’s no vacancy at the top.
