The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran

By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti – September 2019

In July of 2017, the White House was at a crossroads on the question of Iran. President Trump had made a campaign pledge to leave the “terrible” nuclear deal that President Barack Obama negotiated with Tehran, but prominent members of Trump’s cabinet spent the early months of the administration pushing the mercurial president to negotiate a stronger agreement rather than scotch the deal entirely. Thus far, the forces for negotiation had prevailed.

But counterforces were also at work. Stephen K. Bannon, then still an influential adviser to the president, turned to John Bolton to draw up a new Iran strategy that would, as its first act, abrogate the Iran deal. Bolton, a Fox News commentator and former ambassador to the United Nations, had no official role in the administration as of yet, but Bannon saw him as an outside voice that could stiffen Trump’s spine — a kind of back channel to the president who could convince Trump that his Iran policy was adrift.

As a top national security official in the George W. Bush administration, Bolton was one of the architects of regime change in Iraq. He had long called not just for withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., as the 2015 nuclear deal was known, but also for overthrowing the Iranian regime that negotiated it. Earlier that July, he distilled his views on the matter in Paris, at an annual gathering in support of the fringe exile movement Mujahedeen Khalq, or the M.E.K., which itself had long called for regime change in Iran. Referring to the continuing policy review in Washington, he repeated his belief that the only sufficient American policy in Iran would be to change the Iranian government and whipped the crowd into a standing ovation by pledging that in two years, Iran’s leaders would be gone and that “we here will celebrate in Tehran.”

The document that Bolton produced at Bannon’s request was not a strategy so much as a marketing plan for the administration to justify leaving the Iran deal. It did little to address what would happen on Day 2, after the United States pulled out of the deal. But Bolton’s views were hardly a secret to those who had spoken to him over the years or read the Op-Ed he wrote in The New York Times in 2015: Once American diplomacy had been set aside, Israel should bomb Iran.

Trump pulled out of the Iran deal in May 2018, just weeks after Bolton took over as his national security adviser, and now the president is navigating a slow-motion crisis. This June, attacks were launched against oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, and the United States pointed the finger at Tehran; in July, Britain impounded an Iranian tanker near Gibraltar, and Iran seized a British-flagged tanker in the gulf. American spy agencies warn of impending attacks by Iranian proxies on American troops in the region, and over the summer, Israel launched flurries of attacks on Iranian proxies in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The least surprising outcome of America’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran, though, is that Iran now says that it, too, will no longer abide by the terms of the deal — a decision that could lead Tehran to once again stockpile highly enriched uranium, the fuel to build a nuclear bomb.

The president and his advisers have cited all these acts as evidence of Iran’s perfidy, but it was also a crisis foretold. A year before Trump pulled out of the deal, according to an American official, the Central Intelligence Agency circulated a classified assessment trying to predict how Iran would respond in the event that the Trump administration hardened its line. Its conclusion was simple: Radical elements of the government could be empowered and moderates sidelined, and Iran might try to exploit a diplomatic rupture to unleash an attack in the Persian Gulf, Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East.

Ilan Goldenberg, a senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration, recalls the standoff in the years before the Iran nuclear deal as a kind of three-way bluff. Israel wanted the world to believe that it would strike Iran’s nuclear program (but hadn’t yet made up its mind). Iran wanted the world to believe it could get a nuclear weapon (but hadn’t yet made a decision to dash toward a bomb). The United States wanted the world to know it was ready to use military force to prevent Iran from getting a bomb (but in the end never had to show its hand). All three were taking steps to make the threats more credible, unsure when, or if, the other parties might blink.

Trump’s abrogation of the Iran deal has revived the poker game, but this time with an American president whose tendency to bluster about American power but avoid actually using it has made the situation in recent months even more volatile.

“President Trump cannot expect to be unpredictable and expect others to be predictable,” Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, said during a speech in Stockholm in August. “Unpredictability will lead to mutual unpredictability, and unpredictability is chaotic.”

Trump’s immediate goal appears to be to batter Iran’s economy with sanctions to the point that the country’s leaders will renegotiate the nuclear deal — and its military support for Hezbollah and other proxy groups — on terms that the administration deems more favorable to the United States. But it is also based on a gamble that Iran will break before November 2020, when the next American election could bring a new president who ends Trump’s hardball tactics.

This is all in aid of what the president’s advisers see as the larger goal, one embraced not only by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel but also by the Arab states in the Persian Gulf: a realignment of the Middle East, with Israel and select Sunni nations gaining supremacy over Iran and containing the world’s largest Shiite-majority state.

It is a wholly different vision than the one advanced by Obama, who committed to keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon but accepted the notion that Iran would become a counterweight to Saudi Arabia’s influence in the region. The two countries would have to “share the neighborhood,” as he put it, an idea that some Trump-administration officials sneer at. As one coolly explains, “We’ve decided to deal with Iran as it is, rather than as we’d like it to be.”

Those who were closest to Obama in the early days of his administration say he had a cleareyed transactional plan for bringing peace to the caldron of the Middle East. “We avoided an unnecessary and uncertain war, brought the Iranians to the table, gained time and space for negotiations and achieved an unprecedented and successful arms-control agreement,” says Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser from 2010 to 2013. The deal, he said, “prevented Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and gave the international community unprecedented visibility into Iran’s activities,” all of which is in the “overwhelming interest of the United States.”

Trump’s withdrawal from the deal, compounded by the events of recent months, has revived fears not just that the United States could take military action against Iran or quietly bless an Israeli strike but also that all the parties could stumble into a conflict out of hubris, miscalculation or ignorance. A strike on Iran, however limited in its design, could unspool widespread chaos in the form of retaliation by Iranian proxy groups on American forces in the gulf region, escalating attacks on commercial ships that could send oil prices skyrocketing, waves of Hezbollah terrorist strikes against Israel, cyberattacks against the West and ultimately more American troops being sent to stamp out fires wherever Iran has influence — from Lebanon to Syria to Yemen to Iraq.

The story of how this simmering crisis began is in many ways a story about the complexities of America’s relationship with Israel, a story that has never been fully told. It is the story of a war narrowly averted, an arms agreement negotiated behind Israel’s back, two bedrock allies spying on each other and a battle over who will ultimately shape American foreign policy. Interviews with dozens of current and former American, Israeli and European officials over several months reveal the startling details of how close the Israeli military came to attacking Iran in 2012; the extent to which the Obama administration felt required to develop its own military contingency plans in the event of such an attack, including destroying a full-size mock-up of an Iranian nuclear facility in the western desert of the United States with a 30,000-pound bomb; how Americans monitored Israel even as Israel monitored Iran, with American satellites capturing images of Israel launching surveillance drones into Iran from a base in Azerbaijan; and previously unknown details about the scope of Netanyahu’s pressure campaign to get Trump to leave the Iran deal.

Netanyahu recently eclipsed David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, but once again he is fighting for political survival, with another vote to determine his future as prime minister set for Sept. 17. In a wrinkle of history, some of his opponents are the same people who vigorously opposed his push to strike Iran several years ago.

Regardless of the outcome of the election, the landscape of the current Iran crisis could change quickly, and Trump even said during the recent Group of 7 summit that he might meet in the coming weeks with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran. That prospect has set off alarms in Israel, where some officials raise fears in private that the American president in whom they had invested so much hope has gone wobbly. But Netanyahu, at least publicly, says he isn’t worried. In an interview in August in his office in Jerusalem, he acknowledged the possibility that Trump, like Obama before him, might try to avoid a war and instead attempt to reach a settlement over Iran’s nuclear program.

“But this time,” Netanyahu said, “we will have far greater ability to exert influence.”

2. ‘Total Mutual Striptease’

The first public revelation about a clandestine uranium-enrichment program in Iran came in the summer of 2002, as America was preparing for war with Iraq. Western intelligence services had found that scientists at a nuclear facility near Natanz, in north-central Iran, had begun an effort to enrich uranium ore. A dossier of these findings leaked to a group affiliated with the M.E.K., which went public with the information at a news conference in Washington. The Bush administration, preoccupied with Iraq, chose to pursue a path of negotiation with Iran, coupled with sanctions. For many Israeli officials, the revelation reinforced a conclusion that they had already drawn: The United States was making war on the wrong country.

The Israeli leadership grew even more concerned in 2005, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran. Ahmadinejad immediately made known his views about Israel, unleashing fiery rhetoric calling for the end to the nation and calling the Nazi extermination of Jews a myth. He increased support for militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah — and, American and Israeli analysts agreed, he also began to accelerate the nation’s nuclear program. In a nation built by survivors of the Holocaust, the moves confirmed for many that Iran presented an existential threat.

Israel’s leadership at that time was going through an uncertain moment. In January 2006, Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, suffered a stroke that left him in a vegetative state. A deputy, Ehud Olmert, stepping up to replace him, gave a free hand and endless resources to the clandestine campaign that the Mossad, Israel’s civilian intelligence agency, was running to stop, or at least delay, the Iranian nuclear project. In 2007, Ehud Barak, a former prime minister, became Olmert’s defense minister and issued a written order to the Israeli military’s general staff to develop plans for a large-scale attack on Iran. But Olmert thought that many were exaggerating the immediacy of the Iran threat. His own position, he recalls now, “was that it was not Israel that should lead a military operation, even with the knowledge that Iran might indeed succeed in getting a bomb. Just as Pakistan had the bomb and nothing happened, Israel could also accept and survive Iran having the bomb.”

Netanyahu, then in the leadership of the conservative Likud party, took a starkly different position. He had gone to high school and college in the United States, earning a business degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and working at the Boston Consulting Group, where he became friends with the future Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. During his first term as prime minister — from 1996 to 1999 — he warned a joint session of Congress that only the United States could prevent the “catastrophic consequences” of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Now the Likud leader was once again enlisting Israel’s closest ally into what Uzi Arad, one of his former top advisers, describes as “a personal crusade against the Iranian threat.” Speaking at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, in Washington in 2007, Netanyahu demanded more sanctions on Iran. He also met with Dick Cheney, then the vice president, and, according to Arad, warned that if the West failed to present a credible threat of military action, Iran would surely get the bomb.

In Cheney, Netanyahu had found the right audience. The Pentagon’s military and civilian leadership had little appetite for another war of pre-emption, and by then neither did the president. But Cheney, like Bolton, had long taken a more expansive view, and he continued to argue for military action against Iran well into George W. Bush’s second term.

During a meeting with Bush in May 2008, the vice president sparred with Robert Gates, the defense secretary, over the wisdom of a strike against Iran. Gates argued that a military move against Iran by the United States or Israel would strengthen radical factions in the Iranian government and rally the country behind the Iranian regime. Gates said that Olmert should be told in the most direct terms that Israel should not launch a unilateral attack. Cheney disagreed on every point, saying that a strike on Iran was necessary and that at minimum the White House should enable Israel to act. Gates recalled Cheney’s thinking in his memoir: Twenty years on, “if there was a nuclear-armed Iran, people would say the Bush administration could have stopped it.”

That same month, Bush arrived in Jerusalem for his last visit to Israel as president. Olmert hoped to get American and Israeli spies to share more intelligence about Iran, and he used a private meeting at his residence to make his case. When the aides had cleared the room, according to an official who was familiar with the conversation, Olmert moved in to seal the deal. “Come, let’s open the books and be transparent with each other,” he said. Bush agreed, a decision that led to far greater intelligence cooperation between American and Israeli spy services — a “total mutual striptease” in the words of one of Olmert’s former aides. This cooperation would culminate in the Olympic Games operation, which deployed sophisticated computer malware, including the Stuxnet virus, to sabotage Iranian nuclear facilities. This was one path forward to containing Iran.

But Bush was also made keenly aware of the other path. One night during his visit, Olmert invited him for a dinner at his residence with the members of his national security cabinet, including Barak, the defense minister, who like Cheney had taken an increasingly hawkish position on Iran during internal discussions. As Olmert tells the story, he and Bush walked alone into a side lounge after the dinner. As the two men relaxed in leather armchairs, Olmert smoking a cigar, the prime minister told Bush that Barak was waiting and wanted an audience.

Bush was reluctant, according to Olmert. “I understand that it is politically important for you to let him in,” Olmert recalls Bush explaining, “but you know my position on the Iran issue. I am unequivocally against an attack.”

Olmert persisted. Bush eventually relented, and soon Barak was in the room, smoking a cigar and sipping a whiskey. He delivered a comprehensive lecture about the Iran threat. Finally, Bush cut him off. “He banged on the table like this,” Olmert recalls, “and he said: ‘General Barak, do you know what no means? No is no.”’

Barak, for his part, remembers much about the affair differently, including Bush’s reaction. In Barak’s version, when he finished making his case to the American president, Bush turned to Olmert but pointed a finger directly at Barak. “This guy scares the living shit out of me,” Barak recalls him saying. (A spokesman for Bush says the former president does not recall either of these conversations.)

Looking back at that meeting, Barak now sees Bush’s position as somewhat irrelevant. “The truth is that Bush’s warning did not really make any difference for us,” he says, “because as of the end of 2008, we did not have a real, feasible plan for attacking Iran.”

Barak was already looking toward the future. “We knew that anything that happened after that would, in any case, be under a different president.”

3. ‘Obama Is Part of the Problem’
Netanyahu began his second term as Israel’s prime minister just months after Obama took office in 2009. Despite their ideological differences, Netanyahu had some cause to believe that the new American president might be a more willing partner in his effort against Iran. Though Obama first gained attention for his opposition to the Iraq war, he frequently raised the Iran threat during the campaign and told an Aipac audience in June 2008 that he would “always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel.”

During their first meeting in the White House in May 2009, anxious aides waited outside the Oval Office as the two leaders met alone. It was an interminable meeting, and some may have figured that the savvy, experienced Israeli prime minister was lecturing the young American president about the Palestinians and the hard truths of Israeli security.

But when the door opened, it was Netanyahu who appeared shell-shocked, Arad recalls: “Bibi did not say anything, but he looked ashen.” It was hours later when he told aides that Obama had attacked him and implored him — actually demanded him, in Netanyahu’s view — to freeze Israel’s settlements in the West Bank right away, with “not a single brick” added in the future, according to an Israeli official with direct knowledge of the meeting. “Bibi left that place traumatized,” Arad says. Speaking now, Netanyahu says that “Obama came from another direction, one that adopted most of the Palestinian narrative,” and ruefully cites the “not a single brick” line to argue that the American president was against him from the very beginning. (A former Obama-administration official with knowledge of the White House meeting says that Obama did not in fact use that phrase.)

The relationship between the two governments was warmer at the cabinet level. Netanyahu had brought in Arad to be his national security adviser, and Arad established a direct link with Obama’s own national security advisers — Gen. James L. Jones and then Donilon — to discuss the Iranian nuclear program.

American and Israeli officials met regularly in person and even more frequently over encrypted video conferences. The Obama administration insisted on total secrecy about the meetings, and an urgent issue was already on the agenda: the continuing construction of a secret nuclear facility, buried deep inside a mountain, not far from Iran’s holy city of Qum.

The Fordow fuel enrichment plant was discovered in April 2008 by a source working for British intelligence, which in turn passed rudimentary details about the plant to American and Israeli spy agencies. Unlike the Natanz plant, Fordow was too small to produce usable amounts of civilian nuclear fuel, making it likely that it was created solely for the drive toward a nuclear weapon.

American and Israeli officials were now faced with the fact that ongoing covert operations to sabotage Iran’s nuclear effort had failed to halt the program. The Israeli perspective, as advanced by Barak, was relatively simple: The world was running out of time before Iran entered what Barak called the “zone of immunity,” the point at which the nuclear program was so advanced and so well defended that any strike would have too little impact to be worth the risk. The United States, with its bunker-buster bombs that could penetrate deep into underground facilities, could wait to strike. But, Barak argued, Israel had no such luxury. If it was going to act alone, it would need to do it sooner. Some American military planners derided Barak’s tactic as “mowing the grass” — a small-bore effort that would need to be repeated again and again — but it might have been more like a way to get the United States to move first. “Barak would tell us, ‘We can’t do what you do, so we need to do it sooner,’ ” says Dennis Ross, who handled Iran policy at the National Security Council during Obama’s first term. “We interpreted that as designed to put pressure on us.”

A parade of top American officials began flying to Israel during Obama’s first term to take the measure of the Israeli planning and to convince Netanyahu and Barak that the United States was taking the problem seriously and that Iran was hardly on the brink of getting the bomb. “Our message was that we understand your concerns, and please don’t go off on a hair trigger and start a war, because you’re going to want us to come in behind you,” says Wendy Sherman, a top State Department official in Obama’s administration.

One of the first to make the trip was Robert Gates, whom Obama had asked to stay on at the Pentagon. He arrived in Israel in July 2009, just weeks after the Green Revolution brought thousands of protesters into the streets of Tehran. The Iranian government seemed fragile, and Netanyahu told Gates he was convinced that a military strike on Iran would do more than set back its nuclear program; it could instigate the overthrow of a regime loathed by the Iranian people. Besides, Netanyahu said, as Gates recalls in his memoir, the Iranian response to the attack would be limited. Gates pushed back, just as he had a year earlier against Cheney.

He said Netanyahu was misled by history. Perhaps Iraq did not retaliate after Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, just as Syria did nothing when Israel bombed a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. But Iran was very different from Iraq and Syria, he said. His meaning was clear: Iran was a powerful country with a capable military and proxy groups like Hezbollah that could unleash serious violence from just over Israel’s borders.

The relationship between Obama and Netanyahu continued to fracture. Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador in Washington at the time, recalls that Netanyahu began to say that “Obama is part of the problem, not the solution.” The uncomfortable relationship was apparent to all sides. Arad recalls that when he accompanied Netanyahu to Washington in 2010 for another meeting with Obama, Vice President Joe Biden threw his arm around Arad and said with a smile, “Just remember that I am your best fucking friend here.”

4. ‘A Highly Complicated Affair’
Obama took the possibility of a sudden Israeli strike seriously. American spy satellites watched Israeli drones take off from bases in Azerbaijan and fly south over the Iranian border — taking extensive pictures of Iran’s nuclear sites and probing whether Iranian air defenses spotted the intrusion. American military leaders made guesses about whether the Israelis might choose a time of the month when the light was higher or lower, or a time of the year when sandstorms occur more or less regularly. Military planners ran war games to forecast how Tehran might respond to an Israeli strike and how America should respond in return:

Would Iran assume that any attack had been blessed by the United States and hit American military forces in the Middle East? The results were dismal: The Israeli strikes dealt only minor setbacks to Iran’s nuclear program, and the United States was enmeshed in yet another war in the Middle East.

The White House eventually made the decision that the United States would not join a pre-emptive strike. If Israel launched such a strike, the Pentagon wouldn’t assist in the operation, but it wouldn’t stand in Israel’s way. At the same time, Obama was quietly ordering a buildup of America’s arsenal around the Persian Gulf. If Israel was going to trigger a war, the thinking went, it was better to have forces in the region beforehand rather than rush them there after the fact, when Iran would surely interpret the deployments as a surge to support Israel. Aircraft-carrier strike groups and destroyers with Aegis ballistic-missile defense systems moved through the Strait of Hormuz; F-22 jets arrived in the United Arab Emirates, and Patriot missile batteries were sent to the United Arab Emirates and other gulf allies. Some of the deployments were announced as routine moves to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We didn’t want the Israelis to mistake it for a green light,” one Obama-administration official says.

What they didn’t know was, at least at that time, whether Netanyahu had the ability — or even the real will — to pull off a strike.

It was a complicated question, and one that was the subject of considerable debate even at the highest levels of the Israeli government. In November 2010, Netanyahu and Barak convened a private meeting at Mossad headquarters to discuss a recently devised Iran attack plan with the chiefs of Israel’s defense establishment.

According to Barak, the conversation quickly became contentious when Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the military chief of staff, told the room that despite major advancements, the Israel Defense Forces had not yet crossed the threshold of “operational capability.”

Ashkenazi’s statement punctured the optimism that had been building around a strike. “The moment he says there’s no operational capability, then you have no choice,” Barak recalls now. “Hypothetically, you can fire him if you want to, but you can’t say, ‘Let’s go.’ ”

Another influential official spoke up: Meir Dagan, the longtime head of the Mossad, who had been directing Israel’s secret war on Iran. His credentials as an Iran hawk were hardly in dispute, and he was coming to the end of a national security career that began in the mid-1960s, so he had plenty of political capital to burn. He told Netanyahu and Barak that a military campaign would be foolish and could undo all the progress the covert campaign had made. Dagan saw the proposed campaign as a scheme by two cynical politicians seeking the widespread public support that an attack would give them in the next election.

Yuval Diskin, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, was also against an attack. Barak and Netanyahu may not have been interested in the guidance of their advisers, but they did “not have the authority,” Diskin told them, to go to war without government approval. Netanyahu had to back down.

The Israeli prime minister became increasingly suspicious of his senior advisers. He now accuses Dagan of leaking the attack plan to the C.I.A., “intending to disrupt it,” a betrayal that to Netanyahu’s mind was “absolutely inconceivable.” Within a year, Dagan, Ashkenazi and Diskin, along with Uzi Arad, were no longer in their posts.

If Netanyahu hoped his handpicked replacements would be more compliant, however, he would soon be disappointed. Many others in the government, including Benny Gantz, the chief of staff who succeeded Ashkenazi, were also against the attack, according to three officials who were part of the decision-making process at that time. For Gantz, who is now running against Netanyahu for the job of prime minister, it was a practical matter. “Even those who have not seen the intelligence understand that it would be a highly complicated affair and — if the impact it would have on other countries is taken into account — a strategic affair of the highest level,” he says.

5. ‘We Were Running Out of Time’
Netanyahu’s relentless pressure on Obama may have had an unintended consequence. The American president, with limited information about what the Israelis might do, increased his urgent pursuit of a major new initiative: a clandestine negotiation with Iran.

For Obama, the J.C.P.O.A. would be the centerpiece of his foreign-policy legacy; it was not just a deal but a framework for regional stability — a way to shut the Pandora’s box his predecessor blew open in 2003. For Netanyahu, though, it would be the ultimate betrayal — Israel’s closest ally negotiating behind its back with its most bitter enemy.
The effort began in late 2010, with Dennis Ross and Puneet Talwar, two of Obama’s top national security advisers, aboard a commercial aircraft bound for Muscat, Oman. The country’s ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, was helping mediate the sensitive negotiations around the release of several American backpackers who had been detained in Iran under suspicion of being spies. Now Oman would help the United States open a back channel for far more ambitious discussions.

Inside one of the sultan’s palaces, Ross and Talwar delivered a message that Obama wanted the Omani ruler to give to only Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: The United States thought there was a chance for a peaceful denouement to the nuclear standoff with Iran but was prepared to take military action if Iran rejected diplomacy. The United States could accept Iran’s harnessing nuclear power for civilian use, but any military purpose for its nuclear program was intolerable.

Obama had long believed that there might be a sliver of hope for a nuclear deal, and the White House had already begun a campaign of punishing economic sanctions designed to pressure Tehran into negotiations. But some former administration officials said the prospect of an Israeli military operation gave energy to the diplomatic push. “Did the Israeli pressure affect our decision to begin talks?” Ross says. “Without a doubt. Unless we could do something that changed the equation, the Israelis were going to act militarily.” Ilan Goldenberg, the former Pentagon official handling Iran issues, says, “We felt we were running out of time.”

Others within the administration disagreed that Israeli pressure played a significant role in the effort. “President Obama’s push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear challenge long predated Prime Minister Netanyahu’s saber-rattling,” says Ned Price, who served as a spokesman for Obama’s National Security Council. “In fact, it even predated his current stint as prime minister.

Candidate Obama pledged in 2007 to seek the very type of diplomatic achievement he, together with many of our closest allies and partners, struck as president in 2015.”

Obama decided to keep the Israelis — and, for that matter, every other American ally — in the dark about the secret discussions. Some in his administration feared that if Obama told Netanyahu about the nascent talks, the Israelis would leak word of them to tank any future deal. “It was too big a risk,” one former senior Obama-administration official said. “The trust between the two leaders was badly frayed by this point. That introduced an element of uncertainty about what Bibi or people around him would do if they had the information.”

The secrecy around the talks remains a freighted subject among many former Obama officials, one that few are willing to discuss on the record. Some believed that the Obama-Netanyahu relationship had grown so toxic that the Israeli prime minister couldn’t be trusted. And, they argue, the strategy worked: Talks stayed quiet long enough for them to mature into serious negotiations and, ultimately, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Others say it was needlessly provocative, sowing further distrust in an already dismal relationship and creating the appearance that the Obama White House wasn’t confident enough in its strategy to defend it to the Israelis. “That was an ongoing debate,” says Wendy Sherman, who was closely involved in the negotiations. “I was on the side of telling them sooner rather than later. It was a very hard call.”