For a quarter century, Uzi Arad was one of Mossad’s top
spies. He rose to become the director of its intelligence division. He
later gained fame as a top aide to Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party leader who has campaigned longer and
harder against the Iran nuclear deal than almost any other leader. Arad,
who served as the national-security adviser from 2009 to 2011, broke
with his former boss over the agreement. He travelled to Washington this
week to lobby—primarily among Republicans in Congress—to save the
controversial agreement at a pivotal juncture.

Next week, President Trump is expected to announce that he believes Iran
is not fully complying with the accord that he dubs the “worst deal
ever.” In a break with the five other world powers that negotiated the
deal, he is expected to say that the historic agreement is not in the
U.S. national interest. Trump’s long-awaited Iran policy—nine months in
the making—concludes that Tehran has violated the spirit of the deal
because of its missile tests, support for terrorists, intervention in
Middle East conflicts, and human-rights abuses. Trump will instead
announce a comprehensive strategy to deal with all of Washington’s
issues with Tehran—reversing the Obama Administration’s approach to
eliminate the nuclear threat as the first step in negotiations on all
flash points.

In the run-up to Trump’s speech, Washington is awash with last-ditch
efforts to save the deal. How Congress responds will be vital. It has
sixty days to decide whether to re-impose sanctions. If Congress does
not impose sanctions, the deal could drift in a kind of policy
purgatory.

Arad has long experience tracking Iran. In secret negotiations, he
interacted with Iranians in the mid-nineteen-eighties, as the
revolutionary regime was hunting for arms during its long war with Iraq.
He had the Mossad account for the Iran-Iraq war. I talked to Arad as he
wrapped up his efforts to save the deal on Thursday. The interview has
been condensed and edited for clarity.

Why are you doing so much to preserve a deal that your own Prime
Minister has rejected?

I have never been opposed to the deal. There were two ways of stopping
the Iranian program. One was the direct approach—bombing. It is one of
the easiest things to do. Big facilities, fixed facilities. If there is
something that has been waiting to be bombed, it’s that. But that would
have called for drastic action, so the preferred approach has always
been to stop the program as a result of an agreement. I do not think
that Israel should have come out against the principle of negotiations.

We could have gotten a better deal. I know that the initial negotiating
positions of the five plus one, in their own assessment as to the give
and-take, expected better results. But the dynamics of negotiations are
such that you never know. And, besides, the Iranians were very good.

What would it cost to depart from the agreement now?

You would lose all those limits imposed on the Iranians. They could
declare themselves still upholding the agreement with the other five
[parties]. They could say, “We will abide by it. If America wants to
walk out, let it walk out. Let them re-impose sanctions without
assistance from some of the allies.”

Which parts of the accord did you think were weak?

The military sites. The fact that they are refusing, of course, makes
you uneasy. This has got to be done; otherwise, the inspection is
flawed. Very flawed. It’s difficult, as Iran is very big. Remember that
[enrichment facilities] at Natanz and Fordo were supposed to be
secret. The uneasiness over the possible existence of other secret sites
should always be there. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, but it runs against
the spirit of the agreement to have an inspection regime which leaves
such a loophole, which they insist on, with Russian backing. That has to
be corrected, because that is integral to the agreement.

The sunset clauses—that is a highly unstable situation to be in. That,
too, has to be amended or through a supplement, because it is, again, it
is against the declared purpose of the whole exercise. Agreements should
not be renegotiated, they should be strengthened, and that has been done
with previous arms-control agreements throughout history. There’s never
been an agreement to end all agreements.

The missile issue, separately. Iran, from Day One, their delivery
capacity has never had anything to do with air. They’re working on
missiles. That is a very troubling thing that should be arrested. If
there would be no nuclear capacity, there is no real justification for
some of those missiles.

Iran, by and large, has complied with the more fundamental steps it had
to take. Certain things at the margins can be corrected through
diplomacy. At the moment, you don’t have the allies for anything—not for
sanctions, not for improving on the agreement. And then you have to move
to the other matters on the agenda—Syria, terrorism, and even missile
development.

What kind of response have you had in Washington, especially in
Congress? If Trump “decertifies” Iran, Congress would then have sixty
days to decide whether to impose sanctions lifted as part of the
deal.

It is interesting to see that they are reflective. Republicans, some of
them, will not necessarily follow anything the President says one way or
another. They keep some independence of action. They don’t like the
condition in which they may be thrust into—making the unpleasant
political choices that the President may want to avoid. So it was
interesting to see the range of reaction.

How do your views reflect the thinking among the Israeli intelligence
community and the Israeli foreign-policy community?

Qualitatively, it is the majority. What I did in the last few months is
talk to people I think very highly of. One is very respected in the
field of science but has been in the intelligence community, is a
general by rank. Another is a very senior bureaucrat from the atomic-energy establishment. A third one is a former head of military
intelligence. All of whom, from Day One, did not think that the
agreement was the catastrophe that it was described to be. Quite the
contrary.

You mean by your own Prime Minister?

Yes. When the possibility of withdrawing by the U.S. became an option,
or when the Israeli Prime Minister called for “fix it or nix it,” one of
them said, in Hebrew—in Hebrew things always sound so much better—“it
would be a folly” to do so.

What are your concerns about Iran’s ambitions in the region when it
comes to the Shiite crescent or the land bridge to Lebanon? What are the
prospects for a direct conflict, once Syrian war ends, between Israel
and Hezbollah?

Without trying to demonize or criticize the Iranians, the policies
they’ve been pursuing in the Middle East have been expansionist in the
most unpleasant way. I don’t think you’ll find many Israelis who
expected—if we’re coming to the end of the civil war in Syria—that the
product would be an established Iranian military presence on Syrian
soil, with proximity to Israeli borders.

Why are they doing that? Are they not afraid? If there were to be any
hostilities, they would be sustaining a terrible blow. But yet they’re
doing it.

What would a war with Iran look like—for either Israel or the
United States?

At one point, in my dealings with my American friends, I proposed a
game. I said, “Let’s exchange roles. We’ll plan the American military
options. You plan ours in a war with Iran.” With all the toys in the
American store, I started to plan sorties from Tampa, Florida, in which
you come back in the evening to have pizza after you unloaded all that
from high altitude. For Israel, it’s difficult, the military option. I
talked to a commander of the [Israeli] Air Force and said how much my
heart goes to those young pilots who exercise for this thing and had to
fly very long [routes], with refuelling midair and sometimes flying
very low. The very exercises were extremely demanding. We did practice,
and it could have been done.

What would it have achieved?

[When] this country went to war in Iraq, I remember, in Washington,
the belief that weapons can change minds and hearts. Weapons never do
that. Weapons know only one thing, to destroy. That they can do with
certainty. All the rest is hypothetical. Yet that was a war when the
objective was democracy.

In Iran, had there been a military strike, the purpose was in very
simple terms. Destroy A, B, C, D, E, F, most of them fixed targets,
cannot be moved. I can’t think of a simpler thing ever. Within hours the
whole thing would have been destroyed. Now, consequences, of course. The
decision was taken not to do it.

Do you think that Netanyahu was sincerely interested in taking that
step?

Personalities matter. Bibi in his own heart really wanted to be the
savior of Israel. He had two precedents: [Prime Minister Menachem]
Begin, in 1981. Begin had the decision to take whether to strike Baghdad
in 1981. I was in the Mossad, I was asked what would be the
consequences. I expected strong international condemnation. Opinion was
divided within the Israeli community, not by institutions. Yet Begin
took the risk, and it succeeded. And it was a neat operation, and it
threw back the Iraqi program a few years.

Now we come to that event that no one has admitted to having done in
Syria [which was building a secret nuclear facility in 2007]. [The
former Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert ran the risk that the Syrians would
retaliate. And that’s a war. So, why did he do it? Maybe he should have
reconciled himself to saying, “Let them have it. We’ll have a balance of
deterrence,” instead of igniting a war. So if it was him, he decided in
favor, so he took the steps.

Now comes Bibi. And he has these two former Prime Ministers, none of
whom he respects. So, in his own heart, I think that he thought that he
would probably lead that strike that would essentially eliminate the
Iranian threat. And he invested in preparing that possibility. They are
still hinting that it is still an option.