THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 47
over, President Obama was pursuing a
very different strategy. In July, 2012, his
Administration opened secret negotia-
tions with the Iranians over its nuclear
program. When Mossad learned about
the talks, it stopped killing the scientists
and scaled back other espionage mis-
sions that could jeopardize the Ameri-
can initiative and hurt relations with the
C.I.A. “We had to change our attitude,”
the former Israeli intelligence officer said.
But Israel’s conflict with Suleimani
was intensifying. In 2013, Israel started
bombing Iranian weapons shipments in
Syria, before they could be transferred
to Lebanon. In 2015, it expanded its list
of targets in Syria to include bases that
Suleimani was establishing for his proxy
forces. The Israeli military called their
approach “the campaign between wars”—
an effort to beat back Suleimani’s forces
with air strikes and deception. Suleima-
ni’s weapons shipments and foot soldiers
were relatively easy targets. When he
tried to deploy forces on Syria’s border
with Israel near the Golan Heights, Is-
rael responded by killing seven Iranian
officers, and also Jihad Mughniyeh,
the twenty-three-year-old son of Imad
Mughniyeh. “The message there was
‘Stop fucking around with Hezbollah on
the Syrian border. We will attack you,’ ”
an Israeli official said. Israel conducted
frequent bombings, and met little resis-
tance in Syria. The ravaged nation had
become “nobody’s land, where everybody
did whatever they wanted,” the Israeli
official said. Norman Roule, an Iran spe-
cialist who recently retired from the
C.I.A., said, “The campaign between
wars showed that Israel could manage
the Suleimani threat.”
The Obama Administration, which
had signed a nuclear agreement with
Iran in 2015, kept its distance from Isra-
el’s campaign against the Quds Force; it
made a point of withholding “actionable
intelligence” that could help Israel accel-
erate its attacks. The message, according
to a former U.S. diplomat involved, was
“Be careful. Know what you’re hitting.”
He added, “Everybody was going to
blame us for whatever happened.”
B
y the spring of 2017, with Assad’s
hold on power in Syria assured and
ISIS losing ground in Iraq, Suleimani
began shifting more attention to fight-
ing Israel and other U.S. allies. The
Trump Administration was divided on
how to deal with the threat he posed.
Some of the most hawkish White
House advisers sought military options
to counter him and his proxy forces in
Syria. But Mattis, then the Secretary
of Defense, and General Joseph Dun-
ford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, among others, were wary of
diverting resources from the campaign
to eliminate ISIS, and didn’t want U.S.
forces to get drawn deeper into the re-
gion’s conflicts.
Trump sent mixed signals. “It was a
chaotic time,” a former Trump Admin-
istration official recalled. “The White
House called up routinely with extraor-
dinary orders—‘Get out of South Korea’;
‘Let’s stop NATO’; ‘Bomb those guys.’”
In some cases, Mattis and Dunford
told their underlings not to respond to
requests from White House staff for
military options to pressure Iran. Some
officials at the Pentagon and the State
Department became concerned that
hawks in the White House were ma-
nipulating the records of internal meet-
ings—known as the “summary of con-
clusions”—to make it appear as if
hard-line proposals on Iran had broad
support.
Trump received frequent briefings
on the operations of the Quds Force,
but Suleimani’s name came up only oc-
casionally, a former senior Trump Ad-
ministration official recalled. In Febru-
ary, 2018, an Iranian drone loaded with
explosives penetrated Israel’s airspace.
White House officials wondered if Su-
leimani was trying to provoke a major
conflict. “If Trump hadn’t paid atten-
tion to Suleimani before that, that event
certainly put him in the President’s
mind,” the former senior Trump Ad-
ministration official said.
In the spring of 2018, Mattis lost a
crucial ally in Cabinet meetings when
Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, was
fired and was succeeded by Mike Pompeo.
John Bolton became national-security
“Hi, Beth. Is it possible you accidentally took
my umbrella and I took yours?”
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