46 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
out to him?” More often, the heads of the
nation’s security services propose names,
which must then be approved by the
Prime Minister. Targets are ranked in
order of importance, based on the urgency
of the threat, the difficulty of the killing,
and the potential costs and benefits.
Though Israeli intelligence has a formi-
dable reputation, its resources are limited
by American standards, and it can’t “cover
the world,” a C.I.A. veteran said. “They
cover the shark closest to the boat.”
In the years after the Mughniyeh kill-
ing, Mossad worried more about Iran’s
nuclear program than about Suleimani’s
paramilitary activities. Suleimani was of
special concern to U.S. forces; his mili-
tias were known for using an especially
devastating explosive, which was de-
signed to pierce the exterior of armored
vehicles. During the most intense pe-
riod of fighting of the Iraq War, starting
in 2007, Suleimani avoided setting foot
in Iraq; he appeared to think that the
Americans might kill him. In fact, Ste-
phen Hadley, Bush’s national-security
adviser, said, “I’m not aware of any con-
templation of getting Suleimani.” On
occasion, Mossad officers brought up
Suleimani with American counterparts,
according to Stephen Slick, a former
C.I.A. station chief in Tel Aviv. “They
would just sort of drive it by and see if
they got a rise out of anybody,” he said.
In 2011, the Obama Administration
considered setting up a meeting with
Suleimani to deliver a blunt warning.
The messenger would be Vice Admiral
Robert Harward, a Navy SEAL who had
grown up in Tehran and spoke Farsi. In
theory, his mission would be to “impress
upon Suleimani the ramifications if he
continued fucking with our forces” in
Iraq, a former U.S. military officer said.
In one White House meeting, accord-
ing to the officer, General James Mat-
tis, then the head of Central Command,
deadpanned, “If Harward is not im-
pressed, we’ll have a pistol in the toi-
let”—a reference to “The Godfather.” It
wasn’t clear whether everyone in the
room realized that he was joking. (Mat-
tis declined to comment.) Around the
Pentagon, the option became known as
“two men enter, one man leaves.”
Until 2013, Suleimani remained rel-
atively unknown to the general public.
A former Israeli security official told me
that, if Israel had wanted to kill him,
that would have been the time. Sulei-
mani was trying to shore up Assad in
Syria, and the civil war, which had begun
in 2011, would have provided Mossad
with ample cover—at least two dozen
of Suleimani’s colleagues in the Revo-
lutionary Guard died in combat there.
But by 2014 Suleimani had become in-
ternationally prominent. Leading Shia
fighters against ISIS in Iraq, he had be-
come a frequent presence in news sto-
ries and social media from the region.
On the battlefield, Shia militia mem-
bers posed with him for selfies. The Su-
preme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
“considered him very much like a son,”
Brennan said. Israeli officials concluded
that Suleimani had become too famous
to dispatch without risking war with
Iran. “The moment he became a celeb-
rity, it’s a different ballgame,” the for-
mer Israeli security official said.F
or all the coöperation between Israeli
and American intelligence, they have
had some of their most divisive disputes
about assassinations. When Israel set out
to kill the perpetrators of the 1972 Mu-
nich massacre, the list of targets included
Black September’s chief of operations,
Ali Hassan Salameh. But Salameh was
an informant for the C.I.A., which con-
sidered him a “crown jewel” in its net-
work during the war in Lebanon, accord-
ing to a former C.I.A. officer in Beirut.
Mossad pressed the C.I.A. for infor-
mation about Salameh. “We didn’t want
to burn the source,” the former C.I.A.
officer said. “I remember telling head-quarters, ‘In my opinion, don’t do it.’”
The officer met regularly with Salameh.
“I remember telling him, ‘You know the
Israelis are coming after you,’” he said.
“He was very flamboyant. He had the
world’s shittiest tradecraft. And he had
no problem rolling around town in his
Chevy station wagon. I told him, ‘You
are a fool. People know where you’re
going.’ He said, ‘No, they’ll never get me.’And I said, ‘Well, you’re certainly invit-
ing them to. Do me a favor, when you
come to see me, can you park four or five
blocks away?’” In 1979, Mossad killed
Salameh with a car bomb. C.I.A. officers
were furious.
America and Israel frequently hid in-
telligence from each other. In the eight-
ies, Israel offered little of what it knew
about Mughniyeh, “probably because they
wanted to kill him themselves,” Baer said.
“And the last thing they needed was this
shit leaking out in the Washington Post. ”
In other cases, U.S. officials withheld in-
formation because they disagreed with
Israel’s choice of targets. During the 2006
war in Lebanon, the U.S. considered Nas-
rallah, the head of Hezbollah, a political
leader, and therefore off limits. But Israel
saw him as a military commander. “We
were concerned that Israel might target
Nasrallah,” John Negroponte, the direc-
tor of National Intelligence at the time,
recalled. Negroponte directed U.S. agen-
cies to withhold specific details on Nas-
rallah’s whereabouts, which Israel could
use to find and kill him. “Those were the
marching orders,” he said.
The relationship improved the fol-
lowing year, when Mossad discovered
that North Korea was helping to build
a nuclear reactor in Syria. The Bush Ad-
ministration, which was already at war
in Iraq and Afghanistan, refused a re-
quest by Israel to destroy the reactor. In
a phone call, Olmert told Bush that Is-
rael would do it alone. “You don’t want
to know when. You don’t want to know
how,” he said. For three months, Israeli
fighter jets trained for the mission using
a fake target in the middle of the Med-
iterranean. Only three of the sixteen crew
members knew the real target; the rest
were informed hours before the attack.
On September 5, 2007, Israel destroyed
the reactor but made no claim of respon-
sibility. Its intelligence services had cal-
culated that Assad would prefer to pre-
tend as if nothing had happened rather
than risk an even costlier confrontation.
As predicted, he kept quiet.
In the late two-thousands, Mossad
decided to launch an assassination cam-
paign without its American partners; the
targets were a number of Iranian nuclear
scientists. By law, American spy agen-
cies had to withhold information that
might help Mossad kill anyone whom
the U.S. was not authorized to kill. More-