| Talkback | |
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Title: | Reporting from the Front Line of Israel`s Secret War | |||
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| Name: | Joseph E . post 1 | | |||
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| City: | Givatayim | State: | Israel | | |
| Posted January 2008 Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman`s new book, Point of No Return, has topped best-seller lists there for months. FP sat down with Bergman to get an inside look at the book that intelligence expert Ephraim Kam calls in the January/February issue an "impressive inquiry into the Iran-Hezbollah-Israel triangle." Foreign Policy: This is an impressive book about Israel and the West`s efforts to stop Iran`s race toward nuclear power and attempts to export its Islamic revolution. What is the story behind the book? Ronen Bergman: The book tries to fill in a number of gaps in readers` knowledge about the Iranian nuclear threat, which-despite the December 2007 U.S. intelligence declaration that Tehran has dropped its atomic weapons program-is still one of the greatest security challenges the world is facing today. The idea was to give a historical survey of events that occurred at the time of the shah`s regime and the rise of [Ayatollah] Khomeini to power. [I also wanted] to describe Israeli-Iranian relations at the time of the shah, which reached their peak with a deal code-named "Tsor" and amazingly involved the sale by Israel to Iran of long-range, surface-to-surface missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The book tries then to put everything on a timeline and show how it is all connected. You cannot, for example, understand some of Iran`s acts of terrorism against Israel without knowing about the actions taken by Israel to locate its missing Air Force navigator Ron Arad. My goal was to shed light on the covert activities carried out by Israel and Iran. Without knowing these stories, you can`t really understand the relations between the two countries. FP: How do you collect your information? What were your sources? RB: The book has three main sources: an academic paper I wrote for the Institute for National Security Studies [in Tel Aviv] in 1997 about Iran`s operational use of terror, the 15 years of reporting I`ve done on Iran and Hezbollah for Israeli press, and a year of research and writing for the book itself. There were interviews with 300 people from 20 to 30 countries, as well as some 25,000 documents written by intelligence services, police inquiries, and court hearings alongside hundreds of books and thousands of newspaper clippings to which I referred. Two years ago, I was asked to speak about Israeli intelligence at Oxford University, and I read an internal document about Mossad and Ethiopian cooperation in 1965. At the end of the lecture, a professor in the crowd said that he understands that the document had never been declassified. How, he asked, did I get it? My answer was that I have a mailbox outside my house and that in the morning, when I wake up, documents are there waiting for me. Of course I was kidding, but I cannot say more. The truth is that I was fortunate to discover that individuals sometimes tend to forget that they have secret documents in their private possession when they retire, and in other cases people keep diaries; sometimes they are generous enough to allow me to use them. There are also some cases-and they are very rare-in which the establishment actually cooperates with me. |
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