The ghosts of Shirobad

Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar, both veteran Jerusalem Post journalists, have chronicled the consequential years of former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen from 2016 to 2021, when Israel’s spy operations targeted Iran’s nuclear scientists, military establishment, and nuclear secrets.

Cohen, a favourite of the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, oversaw the infamous 2018 operation in which Israeli intelligence agents infiltrated a warehouse in the Shirobad district of Tehran and extracted a large archive of Iranian nuclear documents. 

The book captured minor interesting details like how Mossad built a replica of the Shirobad warehouse in an Israeli training facility, complete with identical safes purchased from the same European manufacturer. Israeli agents practised the break-in for months, timing themselves against the rotation of Iranian guards.

On the night of the operation, they sneaked in while wearing workmen’s clothes through a warehouse, cracked open 32 safes, and loaded 100,000 paper files and 163 compact discs onto trucks and drove across the border into Azerbaijan and then safely into Israel.

Netanyahu later used these documents to prove to the international community and the United States (US) that Iran lied about its nuclear programme, and built consent towards the eventual tearing up of the Iran nuclear deal by US President Donald Trump, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Bob and Evyatar detail it with a journalist's eye, and the book is packed with more such moments, like the Stuxnet cyberattack, considered the world’s first known “cybersuperweapon”, which destroyed nearly 1,000 Iranian centrifuges in 2010, and the 2020 assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, who was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun.

The authors clearly admire Mossad, and who wouldn’t? The agency has pulled off operations that seem right out of a screenplay, but even they understand that tactical brilliance does not always equal strategic victory. 

In the latest war, Israel has used decapitation as a strategy by assassinating Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; senior leaders like Ali Larijani; and other military commanders, but the argument on whether this strategy has worked or not is missing from the book.

The writing is fine. It’s not beautiful. Both authors are newspaper guys who write short paragraphs, and sometimes that works, causing the heist chapters to fly by. But there’s a stretch in the middle where they list numerous assassinations, and then it starts to blur. Another scientist on another motorcycle. Another car bomb or “target eliminated”. I found myself skimming through them. They could have cut three of these references and lost nothing.

To their credit, the authors widen the lens when examining regional diplomacy. The book offers a rare insight into the clandestine relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence authorities that has stayed behind the curtains for quite a while. 

What surprised me was the diplomacy. I didn’t expect to know about backchannel meetings between Israeli and Saudi intelligence officers. But the book makes a good case for this quiet work, building relationships with Gulf states over a decade. 

It also mentions the Abraham Accords (peace deal in which the United Arab Emirates or UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan recognised Israel in 2020) didn’t come from nowhere. This came from Saudi Arabia and the UAE generals, who were terrified of Iran and decided Israel was the lesser evil. The authors showed how that decision was made in hotels in Cyprus and Geneva. It spotlighted how Israeli strategists offered a new regional order for the Gulf states. It revealed that some Gulf Arab states have been more apprehensive than Israel about Iran’s nuclear programme and its military actions and influence in countries like Iraq and Syria, and were vehemently pushing for US actions against Iran from behind the scenes.

The authors are careful not to overclaim; they note that Saudi Arabia, “the great prize”, has not yet normalised relations. They acknowledged that the Palestinian issue remains a concern and will remain. But they also established that Israel can have peace with its Arab neighbours without addressing the Palestinian question.

But here too, the argument is presented vaguely. Post Israel’s war on Gaza, the Palestinian cause remains at the core of the West Asia conflict, Israel’s relations with Arab states hang in the balance, and normalisation with Saudi Arabia looks distant now.

Target Tehran acknowledged that Iran’s nuclear programme is not destroyed; it is delayed. The scientists Mossad has killed have been replaced by younger, angrier recruits. The centrifuges Stuxnet destroyed have been rebuilt with better technology, and the nuclear archive stolen from Tehran represented past work, not future capability. 

Then there is, inevitably, the elephant in the room. Six months post-publication, on October 7, 2023, the Palestinian militant group Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis. Mossad had no idea of it.

The Jewish Book Council said it best: “One cannot help reading these words with Hamas’ October 7 attack in mind.” I don’t blame the authors for not predicting the future. No reviewer should. But reading Target Tehran now, while knowing what came after, is an uncomfortable experience.

So who is this book for? It is a must-read for policy or a spy nerd. These details you won’t find anywhere else. If you like nonfiction thrillers, you’ll enjoy the first half and get bored in the middle. 

If you’re looking for a balanced assessment of Israel’s strategy, this isn’t that book. It’s too close to its sources. It admires Mossad too much. It asks the hard questions about tactics but not about the bigger picture.

Bob and Evyatar are working on a sequel. They will have much to account for, but even a sequel will struggle to keep up with the events. As I write this, Israel and the US are in the middle of a fragile two-week ceasefire with a much emboldened Iran. 

Meanwhile, Israel continues to strike Lebanon, with over 2,000 killed since the war began, and the two sides cannot even agree on whether Lebanon is covered under the truce. 

While, the talks in Islamabad collapsed on April 12 after 21 hours of negotiations. US Vice-President J D Vance said that he presented a “final and best offer’’ that Iran refused to accept it. Oil prices are at $114 a barrel, at the time of writing.

 The question at the heart of every negotiation is the same one that  Cohen and his teams tried to solve: how to stop Iran from getting the bomb. The ghosts of Shirobad are not resting. Neither, it seems, is anyone else.

Target Tehran by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar  Published by Simon & Schuster

Pages: 368,  Price: ₹699

The next book that the Blueprint will feature: China’s Wars by Vijay Gokhale