Obama condemned this latest Iranian attempt at deception, which, he warned, might “lead to confrontation.” But the policy of engagement endured. The goal, according to Dennis Ross, was to offer Iran a confidence-building “freeze for freeze” deal, in which UN sanctions would be temporarily suspended in return for a time-limited cessation of Iranian enrichment. Another proposal aimed at preventing Iran from upgrading its stockpile of 3.5 percent low-enriched uranium (LEU) to 20 percent—far closer to weapons grade—supposedly for use in cancer-treating isotopes. The idea was to transfer most of the stockpile to Russia and France which would refine the isotopes and return them harmlessly to Tehran. Such measures, Dennis argued, would “set back Iran’s nuclear clock,” and yield more time for negotiations.
But the Iranians had no real intention of negotiating. Meeting with representatives of the Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany—the P5+1—in early October 2009, the Iranians rejected both “freeze for freeze” and the isotope package. “The Zionist regime and its [Western] backers cannot do a damn thing to stop Iran’s nuclear work,” Iranian president Ahmadinejad trumpeted. Defiantly, Iran unveiled plans to build ten new enrichment plants.
Tehran’s unwillingness to compromise caught the administration off guard. “Mr. Ahmadinejad may not recognize…that this is a very real deadline for the international community,” announced White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. But the secretary of state denied the existence of any firm timetable and even eschewed the word deadline, stressing that America remained ready to negotiate. In a 2010 memo later leaked to The New York Times, Secretary of Defense Gates complained of the absence of any “comprehensive, realistic strategy to stop Iran from assembling all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon.”
Yet, if out of synch on its statements on Iran, the White House was painstakingly disciplined in its attitude toward Israeli preemption. Publicly, the president and vice president stressed Israel’s right to defend itself against any Middle Eastern threat. “Israel is a sovereign country and can best decide how to protect its citizens,” went the administration’s official line. Off camera, though, the message was “Don’t you dare.” While willing to wield the Israeli military threat to intimidate the Iranians and prod the P5+1 into supporting tightened sanctions, Washington quietly quashed any military option for Israel. When, at the Pentagon, I probed U.S. defense officials about the meaning of “all options on the table,” I was answered brusquely, “Make no mistake about it, the way Israel handles the Iranian issue will determine the future course of your relations with the United States.”
Meanwhile, the Iranian program progressed unimpeded. Thousands of new centrifuges churned out enough LEU for two nuclear devices. Some of the machines were reconfigured to enrich to 20 percent, and on February 11, 2010—Iranian Revolution Day—Ahmadinejad announced that the Islamic Republic had now become “a nuclear state.” If it decided to, he boasted, Iran could enrich to 100 percent.
The White House once again seemed shocked by the news. Despite subsequent claims that it never expected the negotiations to succeed, the Obama administration scrambled to deal with their failure. Suddenly, the P5+1 had to be galvanized into a unified front armed with sanctions. “Iran had become a kind of national security black hole,” Gates remembered, “pulling into its gravitational force our relationships with Europe, Russia, China, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states.” The interests of India and Japan, which imported much of their oil from Iran, had to be reconciled with those of Brazil and Turkey, which sought to assert their independence from American policy making. German manufacturers and Swiss banks had to be persuaded to forfeit their lush Iranian accounts.
All of this took time, which Israel did not necessarily have. “We can’t coordinate our clocks to the Iranian nuclear clock, which is running faster,” Netanyahu told Biden in their November 2009 meeting in New Orleans. The prime minister had shown restraint while Obama’s attempts to reconcile with Iran ran their course. He even held back Ehud Barak, who adopted a more militant stance. The following month, while addressing an AIPAC audience in Chicago, I was called offstage by an urgent phone call from Washington. Israel’s defense minister had come out against the isotope compromise package, saying it violated Security Council resolutions demanding the cessation of all Iranian enrichment. Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon was furious and demanded that Barak issue an immediate clarification. I got Barak on the line, convinced him to publish a retraction, then went back and resumed my speech.
Now, as 2010 began, Netanyahu’s patience was thinning. Demanding the imposition of “crippling sanctions,” he likened the Iranian program to a “fast-moving train” outrunning the international community’s “beaten-down car.” His motorized metaphor did not reflect Israel’s dilemma as much as that of a cattle driver. Over the heads of the P5+1, Netanyahu had to crack the whip of threatened IDF action against Iran without actually lashing its back. And he had to keep cracking without losing the powers’ belief that he could thrash Iran.
Nevertheless, the P5+1’s sluggish pace persisted and six months passed before the Security Council approved another sanctions resolution. Even these strictures, which further targeted the nuclear program and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, fell short of the all-out embargo of Iran’s economy that Israel favored. And even then, Obama made clear, “these sanctions do not close the door on diplomacy.”
Not surprisingly, the Iranians once again slammed that door in Obama’s face. They arrested three young American backpackers and imprisoned them for spying. They began fueling a Russian-made nuclear energy plant at Bushehr and hosted an international tour—off-limits to Americans—of the heavy-water facility at Arak. The regime brazenly hampered international inspections of nuclear sites and further tested long-range missiles. The Iranian military, Haaretz reported, tried out nuclear triggers at its Parchin base southeast of Tehran, and then sanitized the area.
Diplomacy, nevertheless, continued, and with equally futile results. Two more sessions of P5+1 talks—in Geneva in December 2010 and in Istanbul one month later—produced no more progress than the previous rounds. “The United States has never entered a serious war, and has never been victorious,” Ahmadinejad vaunted, and accused America of conducting the 9/11 attacks to justify global aggression. “We have documents proving that Washington is the root of world terrorism.”
—
More than the peace process, more even than QME, the Iranian issue compelled me to tread cautiously. It wedged me between a prime minister who believed it his historic duty to defend Israel against an imminent mortal threat and a president who saw that same danger as less lethal, less pressing, and still addressable through diplomacy. “Dealing with Iran requires strategic thinking of the highest order,” Israeli security advisor Uzi Arad often reminded me. Dealing with Iran also necessitated the utmost degree of diplomatic tact. Stepping into television studios, I could almost hear the eggshells cracking.
While emphasizing the homicidal madness of Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs—their Holocaust denial and fetish for terror, their genocidal rants—I had to sidestep the fact that Washington was willing to overlook their insanity in exchange for a nuclear deal. I had to swear that American and Israeli leaders were on the same page regarding Iran when, in reality, they often worked from different books. I had to point out the multiple perils to Israel posed by a nuclear-enabled Iran but without admitting any fear. “Iranian rulers could accomplish in a matter of seconds what they denied Hitler did—kill six million Jews,” I told Jeffrey Goldberg in an Aspen Ideas Festival interview, only to receive a reproachful phone call from Ehud Barak. “Israel can defend itself,” he said. “Period.” I had to maintain Israel’s overriding interest in a negotiated solution—after all, we had the most skin in the game—while doubting the possibility of reaching one. And I had to dodge the same question, over and over, on TV: when is Israel going to attack Iran? “That’s too hypothetical,” I responded, or, “we’re not there yet.
” Just once, I hungered to reply, “Three P.M., next Tuesday.”
Mostly, though, I had to say nothing. By the beginning of 2011, reports of covert Israeli actions against Iran emerged in the media. Nuclear scientists were assassinated in the streets of Tehran and ultra-sophisticated computer viruses were said to have wormed their way into Iranian centrifuges and caused them to self-destruct. Such acts, journalists speculated, averted the risks of striking Iran militarily while setting its nuclear program back indefinitely.
Again and again, I was asked to comment on these reports, and each time tersely but honestly answered, “I really know nothing.” Complicating my task was the alleged American role in the operations. While firmly disassociating itself from the assassinations, the White House kept silent regarding assertions that the United States and Israel had collaborated on the cyberattacks. David Sanger, a dogged Times reporter, suggested that the administration viewed cyber-cooperation with the Israelis as a way to rein them in militarily—in short, as another chibbuk hug.
“Think of the campaign against Iran as a ten-story building,” I often heard Israeli intelligence officials tell visiting American leaders. “You are willing to climb only to the second floor, while we’re willing to go to the roof.” That image summed up Israel’s quandary. The White House openly opposed some of Israel’s purported actions against Iran but then denied reports that it had teamed up with the Israelis on others. And the administration’s willingness to cooperate with Israel—according to Sanger—may have aimed more at staying the hands of the Jewish State than delaying the steps of Iran. While I had no problem fielding questions about Israel’s responsibility for the operations, I was ambivalent about shrugging off those regarding America’s.
In the end, it hardly mattered. For all their storied successes, the supposed secret ops failed to halt Iran’s nuclear program. While the number of centrifuges topped ten thousand, Iranian engineers dashed to produce more advanced models capable of quadrupling the output. With no solution in sight, Iran’s 20 percent stockpile—the foundation of the HEU necessary to produce a nuclear weapon—mounted.
As a child in Cold War America, I had participated in nuclear air raid drills in which our teachers instructed us to huddle under our desks and hold our coats over our heads. I retained haunting memories of those exercises and the siren’s spooky wail. Now, many decades later, I reexperienced that fear, compounded by the fact that at stake was my family’s fate and the future of the Jewish people.
Conflagration
Sirens indeed sounded across northern Israel on December 2, 2010, though not because of any attack. Rather, the alarms rang in response to the deadliest fire in Israel’s history. Within hours, immense flames engulfed much of the Carmel mountain range and roared toward the city of Haifa.
The blaze decimated woodlands that took generations to cultivate and which Israelis rightly prized. One of the only areas on earth to enter the twenty-first century with more trees than it finished the nineteenth, the Jewish State regarded reforestation as a testament to its own rebirth. Jews throughout the world remember dropping coins in the puskhe—Yiddish for charity box—for Jewish National Fund conservation and receiving gift certificates of Israeli saplings planted in their honor. And like many American Jewish kids, I sincerely believed that somewhere in Israel stood trees with my name on them. I came to know better, but continued to rejoice in Israel’s forest-furred slopes. Which is why Palestinian arsonists routinely ignited them, scorching both our hills and our hearts.
Whether set by terrorists or ignited by negligent teens—the cause was never fully determined—the Carmel fire destroyed more than trees. Charging at more than five hundred yards per minute, fifty-foot walls of flame trapped a bus carrying Prison Service officers trying to evacuate Palestinian inmates in a high-security correctional facility located in the fire’s path. The conflagration made no distinction between Jews, Arabs, and Druze. Forty-four people were killed, including Israel’s highest-ranking female police officer and a sixteen-year-old volunteer.
And Israel quickly exhausted its means of extinguishing the blaze. Supplies of retardant—the carrot-colored powder dispersed by air—ran out, and Israeli firefighters were overwhelmed. The wildfire ravaged the Carmel Nature Reserve, Israel’s jewel, and blackened the edges of outlying communities. Some seventeen thousand people were evacuated. Urgently seeking assistance, Netanyahu phoned the heads of thirty states, and a great many—Greece, Cyprus, Russia, Spain, Britain, and the Netherlands—responded. Even Turkey and the Palestinian Authority sent help. But still the inferno leapt, descending on densely populated neighborhoods.
Thousands of miles away, in Washington, the flickers emanated not from the embers of incinerated forests but rather from the decorations sparkling on the South Lawn. The multicolored glow played on the White House’s walls as I entered the president’s annual Hanukkah reception. Even in crisisless times, the event seemed, to me, surreal. Between the holly wreathes, mistletoe, and spangled trees that seasonally bedeck the Lincoln Room, Jewish leaders—many of them wearing kippas and even black Hasidic hats—nibbled latkes. The irony struck me when I first attended the party, during the Bush years, and it might have tickled me again but for the disaster devastating northern Israel. Instead, the syncretic glare of Hanukkah and Christmas lights merely sickened me.
Just outside the gate, my cellphone rang. Netanyahu, on the other end, sounded as I never heard him before, truly frightened. “We need firefighting planes, big ones. Go to the president now and ask for help.” I informed him that, fortuitously, I was just entering the White House and would soon see Obama. “Quickly,” the prime minister urged me. “The fire’s nearing Haifa.”
Once inside, I found the beneficent Susan Sher, the first lady’s chief of staff, and informed her of the situation. “No problem,” she said. “Let’s go.” Susan took me to the library where the president was preparing for photo ops with the guests.
“Mr. President,” I began, “Prime Minister Netanyahu just phoned me. A catastrophic fire is burning in northern Israel. Dozens of people are dead, sir, and Haifa’s threatened. The prime minister has instructed me to ask you for your urgent help. Israel needs you.”
Obama, as usual at ease in his evening suit, seemed to stiffen. He leaned toward me as I spoke, nodded gravely, and then pivoted toward Reggie Love, his personal aide. “Reggie,” the president said without hesitation. “Make a list with Ambassador Oren. Get Israel whatever it needs.”
I sincerely thanked the president and conferred for a few minutes with Reggie. The physically imposing but soft-spoken former basketball star wrote furiously as I ticked off our pressing requirements: retardant, special firefighting units, and, above all, “scoopers.” The last were planes, some as large as 747s, capable of sucking in thousands of cubic meters of seawater and releasing them over flaming forests. “Scoopers, right,” Reggie assured me. “I’m on it.”
Forgoing the party, I left the White House for my Residence and yet another cheerfully incongruous event. As part of my continuing outreach to influential American communities, I organized a dinner with prominent LGBT leaders, among them press commentators and administration officials. The idea was to highlight Israel’s accomplishments in the area of gay and lesbian rights—the IDF, for example, never enforced the equivalent of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Celebrated Israeli singer Ivri Lider, a creative and ultracool role model for gay people worldwide and, as it happened, a relative of mine by marriage, was the guest of honor. Together with Angela Buchdahl, the first Asian American rabbi and a cantor whose singing voice validated her first name, Ivri led us in singing traditional songs about dreidels and eight-day miracles. The ambience was truly luminous, but as we lit the menorah, I remained fixated on distant, monstrously larger flames.
Excusing myself from my own table, I phoned the chief firefighter of California and the Quebec company that leased fire-extinguishing planes, frantically seeking scoopers. The search went on long after the guests departe
d, by which time I had completed a self-taught crash course in combating forest fires. Discovering that North Carolina possessed one of America’s three available scoopers, I recalled that among my guests that evening were Kathy Manning and Randall Kaplan, a Greensboro couple dedicated to Democratic and Jewish causes. I woke them in their hotel room and asked them to contact the office of North Carolina governor Bev Perdue and request to borrow the state’s scooper. They did, without hesitation, at 2 A.M., only to hear that the scooper was grounded for lack of parts.
I next rushed back to the White House, to the West Wing situation room set up especially for dealing with the Carmel disaster. Reggie Love faithfully carried out his presidential instructions. Representatives of the NSC and the Pentagon sat around a table issuing orders to scour U.S. military warehouses for seventy tons of retardant and to fly C-130 Mobile Air Fire Fighting Systems (MAFFS) from west of the Rockies to northeast of the Nile. Of the eleven planes in the United States, Israel received eight. A team of Hotshot crews—firefighting commandos trained to parachute into mountainous terrains and battle blazes on their own—hurriedly left Boise, Idaho, that night en route to Tel Aviv.
After dawn, I learned that, just after the Hanukkah reception, President Obama had secretly flown to Afghanistan. Landing in Kabul, the first call he made was to our situation room. And the first question he asked was “Did Israel get its planes?”
Israel got its planes, though they arrived after the fire was already extinguished. But the retardant did reach Israel in time for the operation, as did the Hotshots. Together with other caring countries, Americans helped put out a fire that, if left unquenched, might have left swaths of Israel smoldering. “The United States intends to pursue a full-court press in offering assistance to Israel,” Obama promised Netanyahu in a ten-minute condolence call. Though he may have missed the basketball allusion, the prime minister appreciated the sentiment and thanked Obama warmly.
Ally Page 25