Iran was once an ally of Israel and the US, but after the 1979 revolution that disposed the shah, alliances shifted
W
ith the US now in open warfare with Iran in a long-heralded conflict triggered by fear for Israel’s existence, it is worth recalling the prescience of the Israeli spy in Tehran who saw it all coming.
As the Mossad station chief in Tehran in the late 1970s, Reuven Merhav was the Israeli foreign espionage agency’s man on the ground charged with safeguarding Israel’s sensitive intelligence relationship with its closest Middle East ally, Iran under the rule of its pro-western monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
In a scenario that throws the current state of warfare between the two nations into sharp relief, Israel and Iran had fostered close ties since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948.
