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It’s a rivalry rooted in esoteric religious debate, but this clash – between the two most dominant figures of Shiite religious authority – promises major consequences, both for Iran’s clerical establishment, and their influence over Shite around the globe. The most immediate impact is being felt in next-door Iraq – as it charts its own in the shadow of its neighbor.

From travel restrictions and publishing bans to currency collapse, the restoration of US sanctions has left researchers in Iran reeling.

BY: DAVID ADAM Sep 13, 2019

As a research scientist, Shahin Akhondzadeh is used to having his papers questioned. But last year, he received a novel reason why a journal was unable to publish his work: his nationality. Akhondzadeh is Iranian and works at the Tehran University of Medical Science. And for the US-based journal and its publisher, that made him a persona non grata.
“A day after I submitted it they told me because you are from Iran we cannot publish this,” he tells The Scientist in a phone interview from Tehran. “We are used to having an unfair situation in politics. But to have an unfair situation in science is very bizarre.”

Akhondzadeh, an expert in psychiatric disease, had previously published in the journal and acted as a peer reviewer for it—and many others—with no concerns raised. And he says he is not the only Iranian scientist affected: medical journals across Europe and the United States are responding in the same way, “Because of the sanctions, we cannot process your manuscript.”

International sanctions against Iran—first imposed by the US after the 1979 hostage crisis and later by the United Nations—were lifted in 2016 after Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program. But President Donald Trump announced last year the US would withdraw from that deal, and restored US controls on trade with the country.

Officially, research activities such as publishing academic papers should be exempt from the restrictions—unless the author is a direct employee of the country’s government. But Akhondzadeh says publishers either don’t know this or they are unwilling to take the risk.

There is also a more practical obstacle that stops Iranian researchers from publishing their work: in November 2018, Iran’s central bank was disconnected from the main global system used to transfer money across borders. Many international banks have followed with their own restrictions and the resulting blockade on currency exchange makes it impractical for Iranian scientists to pay the publication fees required by many open-access journals (although some publishers such as BMJ Publishing Group have waived them).

Such de facto publishing embargoes are highlighted in a new analysis of the negative effects of the US political sanctions on international collaborations and research in Iran published earlier this week. The study—written by several Iranian authors in BMJ Global Health—found that Iranian researchers have been increasingly denied opportunities to publish scientific findings and attend scientific meetings during periods of increased sanctions. And they find it harder to access essential laboratory supplies and information resources.

Money in limbo
In additional to publishing fees, there are journal subscriptions to consider. Akhondzadeh says his university library is overdue on its fees to international publishers, and researchers there expect to lose electronic access to journals at any time. The university has the money and wants to pay its bill, he says, but can’t find a way to do so.

The same problem comes when trying to receive money from outside Iran. Joint projects with scientists in Iran have been suspended by the UK’s Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health, this week’s study says, because the promised funds can’t be transferred.

The Scientist found another example of stalled scientific endeavors. The International Biology Olympiad (IBO), an organization based in Germany that arranges events for school children, is sitting on $130,000 US collected in registration fees for a 2018 event in Tehran that it cannot transfer to organizers there.

“We have found no bank within the European Union that would enable us to transfer the money to Iran,” says Sebastian Opitz, head of the IBO office in Kiel. “As you can imagine, we as a public benefit organization find this situation highly troubling.” Banks have told him the only way to move the money is as cash. Opitz says his organization has so far refused because the lack of transparency is “unprofessional.”

Travel banned
One casualty of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” hard line on Iran was a long-running program of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) that arranged bilateral meetings and organized exchanges of scientists between the two countries. Glenn Schweitzer, director of the NAS Office for Central Europe and Eurasia who ran the engagement program, says it closed down in 2017 when the increased political tensions between the US and Iran along with the Trump administration’s travel ban on residents from a number of Muslim-majority nations made it impractical.

See “As Visa Difficulties Persist, Scientists Push for Change”
Researchers in Iran have also found the travel ban is having a knock-on effect, with colleagues from Europe reluctant to visit because they fear an Iranian stamp in their passport could make it more difficult for them to enter the US. A prior trip to Iran prevents access to common visa waiver schemes that avoid the need to apply for a full US visa.

A biologist at University of Tehran, who wanted to remain anonymous to preserve privacy, says scientists there have resorted to asking colleagues in universities outside Iran to act as intermediates to get basic laboratory services routinely done abroad, such as DNA sequencing. Or they have asked friends traveling outside Iran to take the DNA samples with them and to mail them to the sequencing company from abroad. The biologist says a company that had accepted samples from Iran for sequencing in the past said that “political issues” made it difficult to deal with scientists in Iran directly.

Abbas Edalat, a British-Iranian computer scientist at Imperial College London, says it’s wrong to blame all of the untoward effects on research on President Trump.

“Even after the 2015 treaty, under Obama, there were all these limitations imposed by the United States on Iranians, including Iranian academics,” he says. Under President Barack Obama’s presidency, he says, the US State Department emailed him to say his membership of a visa waiver scheme, commonly used by many visitors to the US because it’s easier than applying for a formal visa, was being canceled because of his nationality. “It’s true that it has become much more accentuated under Trump—there is no comparison—but it all started under Obama.”

The biggest problem for Iranian scientists right now, he says, is the collapse of the country’s currency, the rial. “The budget they have for travel, to go to conferences, to even pay for articles to appear in conference proceedings has been so limited now because of the sanctions that they can’t afford to do that.”

See “Opinion: Broken Promises Caused by the Travel Ban”
Edalat, the founder of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran, was arrested by security officials while visiting Iran in April 2018 and detained for eight months on suspicion of spying. He blames the US and its allies for what he says is understandable nervousness in Iran. “They have created a kind of siege conditions in Iran. All these US military bases surrounding the country and, apart from the sanctions, all these overt and covert operations for regime change. Any country in that kind of condition would have its intelligence services be over-cautious.”

Schweitzer says everybody suffers from the political stand-off. “The Iranians are very good scientific and engineering specialists,” he says. “Global science is missing a piece if the Iranians don’t participate.”

David Adam is a UK-based freelance journalist. Email him at davidneiladam@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @davidneiladam.

Jamshid Chalangi:

In tonight’s program we will pay tribute to the tireless efforts and memory of our dear journalist and sport commentator colleague the late Manook Khodabakhshian who passed away on Saturday.

We all mourn the death of a dear and great friend who loved Iran and its people and died in exile while dedicating his life to the struggle for freedom of his motherland.

He may have left this mortal world but his legacy of offering hope to the millions of young Iranians will live on to shed light on their path to a bright future.

He was born in the province of Khuzestan but his heart to the last minute of his life of public service alway beat for every inch of our country.

He always shared his happiness with others and was the first to rush to share the sadness of them at times of despair.

Along with millions of Iranians inside and outside our country we offer our sincere condolences to Manook’s family for his passing and pledge to follow his struggle for freedom of Iran.

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

We continue the program with paying our respect and tribute to the memory of the veteran sports commentator Manook Khodabakhshian who sadly passed away over the weekend in Los Angeles.

We then talk to our colleague journalist and sports commentator Iraj Adibzadeh.

Manook was a great friend and fellow journalist who always used to ask me if I had any scoop in my news programs.

We began working together in Iran’s national radio station in the early 1970s.

At the time I was also the political editor of Ettelaat daily and in the evenings Manook an I used to practice our broadcasting skills until early hours of the following days.

Iraj Adibzadeh:

I was moved by your stories of the yesteryears. In fact you share a lot with the late Manook as he also had a very good and sharp memory and remembered those old and wonderful days very clearly.

He was a very decent and honest man and a great and trustworthy friend.

His deep knowledge of both English and Italian languages combined with his informed sport commentary made him a unique personality in the world sports journalism in Iran.

He was particularly popular among the Iranian youth as they looked upon him as both a sports commentator as well as a mentor to achieve high position in any field of social life that they were in.

May he rest in peace.

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.”

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

Imagine this was 60 or 70 years ago and one day you wake up and do not see the usual natural world of trees and creeks around you and instead ta sahara and scorching sun have replaced them.

This is Dubai of those days in which our special guest of tonight Mr Faghihi woke up to when he was a young man.

Now in his seventies he is the chairman of the association of foreign trades in Dubai and one of the most prominent businessmen of the Sheikhdom.

Anyone who needs help for a wide range of services, from having a wedding party to insuring their cars, calls at his office in Dubai.

Back in Iran he has built schools, university, old people homes, mosques and clinics for the people in his birthplace of the city of Lar.

And he has provided these excellent services regardless of if a Muslim, Christian, Jew or Zarostean Iranian benefits from them as he does not look at his fellow humans from a religious angle!

So, lets hear the story of his life from himself.

Mr Faghihi;

When I was only 16 years old I accompanied my late father to the Hajj pilgrimage through Dubai.

He went on to Mecca and I stayed over in Dubai. I had lost my mother when I was two years old and were not on good terms with my step mother. So I decided not to go back to Iran.

In Dubai I began working as a bookkeeper at a relative’s company and went back to Iran after six years to do my military service.

After completing my conscription in 1964, in partnership with my brother in law we opened the Halem Fujaira Company.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

In those days Dubai must have only been a long road that connected a few buildings only.

Mr Faghihi:

Dubai came to being in 1832 when two rival clans from Yemen migrated there and each established their own authority in opposing parts of it.

The first official ruler of Dubai was Sheikh AlMaktum who needed some protection from the Iranian people for his authority and 35 armed men from my birthplace had provided this for him.

Jamshid Chalangi:

Tonight we will look at the problems that the Iranian people are facing both on domestic and international stages.

As for the problems that the regime in Tehran is facing, it is reported that a member of the Assembly of Experts who has been exposing the corruption among the regime’s top leaders has suddenly disappeared with his brother, but the intelligence and security organs have not said anything about this news.

We will ask why once the leader of the OPEC and producing more than 4 million barrels of oil per day Iran is now begging to be able to sell only 700,000 barrels of oil a day.

Do the so-called reformists in Iran still believe this regime can reform itself for the benefit of Iran and the Iranians?

How does the regime abuse the Iranian people’s religious beliefs during the holy month of Muharam to sustain its politicalpower?

Our guests tonight to discuss these issues are Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh and Mr Sadeq Zibakalam.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

If at the time of the revolution someone had told me that one day a cleric by the name of Ghapanchi and his brother would come forward and deny all the religious culture that the Iranians had had for centuries I would have never believed him.

However, when you turn a religion into an ideology for ruling over your people then this is the social mess that we have in the Iran of today.

In our time before the revolution the holy month of Muharam had a different meaning and people were sincere in expressing theirreligious beliefs. Even the Shah used to attend religious gatherings at theSepahsalar grand mosque.

But today and under this regime religion has turned into a business run by a bunch of corrupt mullahs and the true faithful express their feelings and beliefs at home and in private.

The regime organizes a march to Karbala but itsbenefits go to Ghassem Soleimani.

Sadeq Zibakalam:

If the spread of Shiaism was not the main objective of the Iranian regime, then we can safely say that it is one of its main aims.

However, my question to the authorities is if we were to carry a national survey today can we safely say that its results shows that having spent astronomical budgets on “religious and cultural organizations” our people are more religious than they were forty years ago before the revolution?

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

We continue the program with talking to our special guest of every Thursday, Dr. Mohsen Sazegara, for his views about news of Iran and the Middle East.

I was listening to Trump’s speech when he said he has saved several trillion dollars for the US in trade deals and that at the same time the Iranian regime has lost an equivalent amount under the sanctions and squandering the Iranian people’s wealth.

He then spoke directly to the Iranians and saidtheir miseries can come to an end tomorrow and they deserve much better than the dire situation they are in.

Mohsen Sazegara:

We need to look at the issue of peaceful protest and transition of power in Iran once again. Time and again the new generation of Iran criticizes my generation and asks us why did we follow a revolutionary path and armed struggle against the Shah, which led to a revolution whose consequences have been disastrous for our country.

With hindsight, looking back at the 1960s if you wanted to be regarded as an intellectual or educated person or a writer andwere not a revolutionary no body would take you seriously.

This was the time of the Algerian civil war, the Vietnam war and the Latin American revolutions. Even Mohammad Reza Shah hadcalled his land and social reforms as White Revolution. Even our religious opposition groups had taken up Marxist ideology.

All in all around 700 people were killed in street clashes during the anti-Shah demonstrations, which were the result of soldiers’ lack of experience on how to handle street riots. But the current regime deceitfully claims that more than 60,000 people were martyred for the victory of the revolution.

And this is the same regime that has executed 5000 Iranians in a matter of few days alone.

So the experience of the last half a century tells us that civil protest has twice the chance of ousting dictators and establishing democracy than revolutionary approach, which involves bloodshed and armed conflicts.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

You mentioned the new and young generation of Iran and one of them recently asked me if we were to have a referendum in Iran today how many people would vote for the continuation of the present regime?

I gave him a modest figure but he said I was wrong, as the figure would be far less.

He also reminded me that our generation was only asking for the Shah to leave without thinking what happens after he is gone, but this generation would not repeat your mistake.

Jamshid Chalangi:

Tonight we will look at how the Iranian regime’s nuclear program has taken the country to the brink of economic collapse to the point that it is now asking for a 15 billion dollars of credit line from Western countries during Javad Zarif’s recent visit to France.

However, the loan has been on the condition that the US government agrees with it and that Iran stops any further breach of its commitments of the nuclear deal.

Tonight our journalist/writer colleague Mr Amir Taheri will share his expert views with us on these subjects.

We begin by reporting on the news of the death of a young Iranian inprison under torture in the province of Fars.

Mr Amir Taheri:

This sad incident is in line with what we have seen all these last 40 years from the regime in Tehran, which is a policy of crackdown on any dissent and the opposition groups or anyone who has a different opinion other than the regime’s rulers.

I was speaking at a gathering of the Somali community in London yesterday who seem to have a similar problem that we Iranians have which is facing a repressive regime in our countries.

While more than 5 million Somali people have left their country, 8 million Iranians have fled Iran and are scattered around the world.

This is because the regime in Iran does not have any plans to manage the affairs of the nation at home and does not conform to any international norms abroad.

The rulers in Iran feel free to do anything they want and do not even respect the laws that they have passed themselves and the nation has to pay a price for their misdeeds.

And when the Iranian people demand their rights and ask the regime to be accountable for its actions they are supressed in reply.

This regime is incapable of providing a decent and peaceful life for the Iranian people and the chaos that we see in every aspect of life in the country is the result of its sheer incompetence.

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

Ahmadinejad has given an interview and while I was reading it I thought to myself that if one did not know him well you would think he is a saint and a man who has would sacrifice his life in the path of his humanitarian beliefs, the way Zeid the saint did centuries ago.

Zeid was the son of Imam Sajad and wanted to take the revenge of his grandfather’s death but refused to damn the Sunni caliphs and respected them and this led to him being killed by his followers.

Ahmadinejad has said that if it were up to him he would not have signed the nuclear deal. We all know very well that during his eight years in office he and his men including Saeed Jalili were constantly haggling with the international community to reach an agreement over regime’s nuclear program to the point of begging them.

Had Khamenei permitted him, Ahmadinejad would have signed an agreement immediately.

Our guest Mr Alireza Sasanian is here tonight again and would tell us more about this now:

Alireza Sasanian:

If the current so-called fight against corruption in Iran was genuine, the first person to be arrested must have been Ahmadinejad himself.

He is a charlatan and a liar who while mayor of Tehran squandered 341 million dollars and falsely claimed it had gone into the municipality’s projects but in fact had been distributed among his cronies and later spent on his campaign in presidential elections.

The Tehran City Council never investigated this theft simply because they were all involved in this massive corruption.

The same corruption method was rampant in the national broadcasting organization both under Larijani and Zarghami who used to distribute gold coins among the staff to keep them silent about the theft of funds by the senior managers.

Now Rouhani has appointed Mr Monsan as the new minister of tourism and cultural heritage. He is a relative of Rouhani and used to be a senior member of staff during Ghalibaf’s tenure as the mayor of Tehran whose corruption is known to everybody.