How the Pentagon engineered a fake war to prevent a real one
I’ve spent much of my career reporting on the American military’s misdeeds and worse, especially during the Vietnam War, but it’s time now to applaud the brilliance of the Pentagon planning staff and the operational officers who did what America assured Iran’s religious and military leadership it could do: allow Iran to respond to yet another Israeli assassination by flinging more than three hundred drones and missiles toward Israeli targets that as many as possible would be shot out of the sky before hitting ground there. It was a huge gamble, and it paid off.
The Pentagon was essentially resisting—a word I choose to use—the foreign policy of the Biden White House and NATO by secretly approaching one of Iran’s closest allies—Russia—and persuading a senior general there to reassure Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s 84-year-old supreme leader, that America had the know-how to make the strategy succeed.
Imagine it: two of the Biden administration’s most entrenched enemies—Russia and Iran—trusting and working with the Pentagon and its leadership to prevent a deadly retaliation for yet another Israeli assassination of an Iranian general and six other Iranians in Damascus.
I am not allowed to name the American senior military officers and advisers who made the unusual faux missile attack happen. But it’s important to say that President Joe Biden, whose foreign policy team was not involved in the process, accepted the high-risk plan and publicly urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political career and personal freedom depend on keeping the war in Gaza going, and the rest of the Israeli leadership not to respond to Iran. That they might launch a counterattack remains a possibility, of course, according to press reports in Israel.
“The Pentagon planning staffs were asked to come up with a military solution to a political problem,” one involved official told me. “Otherwise the Ayatollah would attack and Bibi would do ‘his thing’ in response. We had to get involved now, and not later. And so we thought about where we are and where we wanted to be. And we got to be involved now, and not later. That meant we had to control the Iranian response.”
The obvious fear was that Netanyahu’s response to a successful drone and missile attack would be, as in Gaza, overwhelming. A major Israeli retaliation could easily lead to an unwanted war in the Middle East.
The senior planning staffs throughout the Pentagon had direct contacts with their peers throughout Europe, and there was immediate consultation with air force leaders in Europe that circumvented dealing with the political leadership there. “And who knew the Iranians the best?” the official asked rhetorically: “The Russians and the Brits.” Iran’s strongest ties in Europe are in fact with Britain and Russia, whose military leaders shared the concern about the extreme danger of an Iranian response to Israel.
There was an informal chat between the Americans and a ranking general in Russia who was asked what he thought Iran wanted. The answer was very Russian, so I was told: “They just want revenge and to prove that their dicks were just as big as anyone else’s.” There was a similar, and more conventional, chat with a senior British officer.
Out of these conversations evolved the ingenious plan: Why not get the air forces of our allies in Europe and the Middle East to agree to work together, under American leadership, and, with Iran’s approval, take advantage of the rapid progress in anti-missile and anti-drone defenses to let the Ayatollah fire off this missiles and have his revenge, while understanding the that air forces of America, Europe, and the Middle East would track and destroy them all?
During the secret planning, the official said, America’s allies were told: “We are going to share all the information about the fired Iranian drones and missiles we collect.” There was a tough session with a senior Israeli official who was informed, the American official said, that Israel had two options: one,”win easy” and let the American coalition destroy the missiles; or two, “lose the hard way” and respond with violence to the failed attack. “If you chose the hard way,” the Israeli was told, “you’re on your own.”
Throughout the process, Pentagon leaders were assembling their plan without formally consulting President Biden or anyone in the White House. “The White House only knew that the Iranians” wanted to respond in kind to the Israelis, the official said. At that early point in the military planning, he added, “the White House had no need to know more.”
It was believed that there would never be formal approval for such a radical strategy, although Biden, to his credit, when later told that the Ayatollah had agreed to mute his revenge, publicly joined in urging the Israelis not to respond to the failed Iranian missile attack.
The drones and missiles fired off by Iran were easy targets. An American fleet of Navy attack planes were augmented by fighters from Jordan, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, whose access to nearby air bases enabled them to get refueled and stay on the defense and in the air for hours. The Iranian leadership conveniently fired off its missiles and drones over a nine-hour period, adding to the success of the missile and drone hunters: the long interval gave some of the fighters a chance to refuel. Two American AWACs—specially equipped E-3 sentry planes—that had the most advanced warning and tracking systems were on station to help guide the missile-hunting aircraft to their targets. (The US Navy utilized its own versions of the AWACs: E-2 Hawkeyes). The American-led operation was a total success, with only a few weapons penetrating Israel’s borders. The only known casualty was a seven-year old Bedouin girl. She was struck and severely injured by shrapnel that fell through the roof of their home in the Negev desert, near Israel’s important Nevatim air base, where advanced aircraft are stationed that are capable of delivering nuclear weapons. It is thirty kilometers northwest of Dimona, the Israel nuclear reactor that has been churning out nuclear bombs for more than five decades.
I was told by a knowledgeable Israeli that officials at the airfield were explicitly advised, presumably by Iran, that the missiles that fell near or at the airfield were not meant for the reactor at Dimona. The Israeli military officially released photographs of the damage to the grounds at the air base.
The operation “had to have a zero scenario,” the American official told me, in terms of insuring that an Iranian ballistic missile did not escape the international armada and strike a major city in Israel. But, he added, “the guys who fly have a lot of faith and believe they can do anything with the AWACs. There was no margin of error.
“It was gutsy.”
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