Yesterday, Eli Lake and Josh Rogin, that indispensable team of foreign-policy reporters, wrote in Bloomberg View that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency had “gone rogue” and was actively seeking to undermine its government’s stand on Iran sanctions. Today, a denial was issued by the head of the spy agency, Tamir Pardo, who said in a statement that he never told U.S. senators visiting Israel that he opposes additional sanctions on Iran. What’s going on here? As the fight between the Obama administration and congressional advocates of more sanctions on Iran heats up, the injection of this “rogue” element into the discussion tells us more about the political implications of this battle, both in the Senate and in Israel, than it does about the merits of the issue.
The first thing to understand about the sanctions debate is that the administration is desperate to stop the adoption of more sanctions. That’s not because, as the president claims, they will hurt the cause of diplomacy. That is an illogical, indeed, indefensible, assertion since the bill proposed by Senators Mark Kirk and Robert Menendez would only strengthen the president’s hand in the talks over the future of Iran’s nuclear program. If Iran really believed there would be serious consequences for its failure to agree to a deal (the sanctions would only go into effect once the talks failed), it would be more, not less likely to make a deal that might, in contrast to the interim deal signed in November 2013, actually halt their progress toward a bomb. But since Obama’s objective is clearly a new détente with the Islamist regime, his priority is keeping its leaders happy, not backing them into corner and forcing them to surrender their nuclear assets.
Thus, Israel’s interest in Congress adopting a new round of sanctions is clear. Why then are some people in its legendary spy agency speaking as if the Jewish state ought to agree with Obama’s stance? Again, it’s complicated. Israel’s army and intelligence establishment is as divided by politics as the rest of the country. Many in the upper echelon of the Mossad clearly dislike Netanyahu and have sought to undermine him in the past, particularly when a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities seemed to be more of a possibility in 2011 and 2012. That opposition was based more on the preference on the part of some of the spies for more covert activities as opposed to the overt use of force and not because they think Iran wasn’t a deadly threat to both Israel and the West. Similarly, today there are some disagreements as to whether diplomacy can or will succeed.
But the willingness of someone in the Mossad to deliver a message to visiting senators that contradicted the stand of their government is more a matter of the antipathy some there feel for the prime minister than to a belief that the threat of more sanctions will somehow scuttle diplomacy.
By the same token, the floating of this story is more about the effort of the administration and senators who oppose the Kirk-Menendez bill to halt its momentum. Among those under suspicion for trying to sandbag it are Senator Bob Corker, the new Republican chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, who is floating his own bill about Iran that wrongly ignores the need for more sanctions but which rightly tries to obligate the president to bring any new deal with Iran to Congress for approval. The competition between the two bills is, however, helping the administration oppose both of them but, not for the first time, Senate cloakroom intrigue appears to be taking precedence over the best interests of the nation and international security.
But the real danger at the heart of this tempest in a teapot is the fact that some in the intelligence field think their expertise entitles them to run freelance foreign-policy operations in opposition to their government’s policies.
Those members of the Mossad who are playing this game are not alone. Senior U.S. intelligence officials did the same thing in 2007 when they wrote and then leaked a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear program that made the astounding claim that Tehran had ceased working toward building a bomb, an assertion that contradicted the official stand of the Bush administration at the time. As it turned out the NIE was dead wrong and the details of the current talks about the extent of its infrastructure and stockpiles prove this. Like the Mossad leak this week, the chance to undermine Bush’s efforts to build support for sanctions against Iran or even the possibility of using force was too tempting for some intelligence personnel who despised the president.
But whatever you think about sanctions or Iran’s nuclear threat, the willingness of some intelligence workers to go around the government is not something that should be tolerated. Such leaks are not a case of whistleblowers calling attention to corruption. Rather, this is an attempt to circumvent the normal workings of democracy. When either spooks or soldiers try to shake loose of civilian supervision, for whatever reason, the system totters. No intelligence agency or a faction within one in a democracy can have its own foreign policy. That is the business of elected officials. If those officials don’t listen to the intelligence people, the latter can resign and bring their complaints to the people. But they may not operate as a government within a government if democracy is to prevail.
To its credit, the Mossad has now walked back the efforts of its “rogue” element and presented a united front with the Cabinet. The debate about sanctions can proceed and be decided, as it should, on the merits of the issue rather than internal Israeli politics or senatorial feuds. But no matter what happens, both Israelis and Americans should be worried about the willingness of spies to try and make or break the governments they’re supposed to serve.
