“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is the maxim that Israel and the Islamic Republic applied in the 1980s. This collaboration may be shocking with the episodes experienced in recent weeks in the Middle East, but, at that time, both countries shared an enemy that also wanted hegemony in the region: Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Until the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran was one of the few exceptions in the Muslim world to demonstrate a friendly attitude toward Israel. Although Tehran initially voted against the plan to partition Palestine in 1947 – the Shah of Persia Mohamed Reza Pahlavi was prophetic when he assured that this decision would bring decades of violence – relations quickly normalized.
The understanding between Washington and Tehran influenced. The Shah's regime was the second Islamic country to recognize the Jewish State, only behind Turkey. On a more practical note, the harmony between both countries led Iran to become one of the main suppliers of oil to Israel. Military collaboration was also important.
Despite this positioning of their government, Iranian clerics did maintain a more bellicose discourse against Israel, which represented the country's official policy once a theocracy was established in Tehran with the 1979 revolution.
Israel welcomed Iranian friendship in its early stages as a state. This fit perfectly with Prime Minister David Ben Gurion's strategy of seeking “alliances on the periphery.” That is, Israel had to reach agreements with non-Arab countries that were on the periphery of the Middle East and North Africa, such as Iran, Turkey or Ethiopia.
After the Islamists came to power in Iran, with Ayatollah Khomeini at the head, in the official discourse of the Islamic Republic Israel became the “Little Satan” (the US was the “Great Satan”), and Tehran cut off relations of all kinds in the bud, at least in appearance.
As has happened with other revolutions throughout history, the force of events forced us to look for more pragmatic ways. When Iraq invaded Iran on September 22, 1980, the ayatollahs had to put ideology aside and look for anyone willing to sell them weapons on foreign markets.
Iranian arsenals were full of American and Western military equipment, generally a consequence of the shah's generous purchases. An aid tap that had been cut off with the Islamic revolution, and in particular after the taking of hostages at the US embassy, between the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1981, since, among other sanctions, Washington imposed an embargo of weapons.
On the other hand, Israel saw Iran's need for weapons as an opportunity to recover its lost influence in the Persian country and damage Saddam Hussein's regime, which was emerging as the great Arab power opposed to the Jewish State. He also valued obtaining succulent income from the military equipment market.
Shortly after the Iran-Iraq conflict began, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (of the conservative Likud) offered spare parts for Tehran's aviation. Then the aid was increased with the transfer of a good part of the weapons captured from the PLO Palestinians in the Lebanon campaign in 1982. An aid of unsophisticated equipment, but which was vital for the ayatollahs' regime in the early stages of war.
At all times, the Israelis sought Washington's approval. With the embassy hostage crisis still on the table, Jimmy Carter's government was very reluctant, but it didn't take long for a change to occur in the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan's arrival to power in January 1981 gave the green light to sales of Jewish military equipment to Iran, as long as it was not sophisticated material and was carried out in secret.
The Reagan administration's change of heart is explained by pragmatism in geopolitics. The Islamic Republic continued to be an enemy in the official discourse, and even the invasion that Saddam Hussein had launched was viewed favorably, but a quick victory that would turn Iraq into the hegemonic power in the Middle East was not desired either, since it was a Soviet ally. So Washington was interested in a long conflict that would wear down both sides.
The ayatollahs also wanted as much discretion as possible. Their official speech continued to criticize the Little and the Great Satan, so they could not publicly admit that they received Jewish aid with Washington's blessing.
With the desire to hide the sales, complex operations were launched that mobilized intelligence agents and arms traffickers. Transactions between Israelis and Iranians were preferably carried out through third countries such as Cyprus (by air), Syria or Turkey (via land routes to Iranian territory).
There were also more direct exchanges. Information published by newspapers such as The New York Times spoke at the time that Danish merchant ships hired by Israel had made up to six hundred trips to transport weapons between the port of Eliat, on the Red Sea, to Bandar Abbas, in Iran.
The figures for these arms sales vary greatly depending on the source consulted, which gives an idea of the secrecy of many operations, but, in any case, they place Israel as one of the main suppliers of military equipment to Iran during the war with Iraq.
The Institute for National Security Studies at Tel-Aviv University, an Israeli think tank, put arms sales to Iran between 1981 and 1983 at 500 million dollars at the time. American journalist Seymour Hersh, on the other hand, raised the amount to 2 billion annually in an article published in 1991 in The New York Times.
At the end of 1984, the US arms trade between Iranians and Israelis went one step further. Once again, there was a curious coincidence of geopolitical interests, this time, involving several continents. At the time, the Reagan administration wanted to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua by helping the Contra insurgents, but to achieve this, it needed “alternative” income.
The problem for this White House policy was that the US Congress had put legal impediments – the Boland amendments – to funding the Contras due to their links to drug trafficking and human rights violations.
Despite this legal constraint, the Reagan administration was not willing to give an inch in its struggle with the Soviets, much less in Central America – the traditional “backyard” of the US. Thus, Washington decided to look for alternative ways. A complex intelligence operation was designed in which weapons would be sold to Iran and, with the resulting capital, the Contras would be supported.
With that sale, Washington also sought to free seven American hostages held by Hizbullah in Lebanon, an organization over which Tehran had enormous influence. Thus, the White House avoided its own maxim of not negotiating with terrorists.
In addition, this time the Iranians would receive more sophisticated weapons – such as state-of-the-art anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles – as opposed to the more basic material transferred at the beginning of the decade. The purchase and sale operations involved well-known names in arms trafficking of the time such as the Saudi Adnan Khashoggi, and also had the presence of Mossad agents.
Israel would act as an intermediary in this arms sale in order to avoid the theoretical US embargo on Iran. Another geopolitical incentive was that the Jewish and American governments believed that, in this way, they could influence the moderate sectors of the Islamic Republic, since there was some fear that Tehran would end up becoming a Soviet satellite.
This entire network would become known as the Iran-Contra scandal. It was discovered on October 5, 1986, when the Sandinistas shot down a plane and captured Eugene Hasenfus, a former Marine who confessed to working for the CIA. Shortly after, the news also appeared in the Lebanese press, leaked by Mehdi Hashemi, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer at odds with his country's dealings with Americans and Israelis.
Shortly after, the story spread all over the international media. Ronald Reagan had to give explanations on November 13 of that year. The US Congress formed an investigative commission into Iran-Contra, but the president's direct involvement could never be proven. In fact, there were only light sentences for two soldiers: Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter.
In addition to this arms marketing, the Hebrew-Iranian collaboration also produced exchanges of intelligence information to attack the common enemy. As all this demonstrated, in the early 1980s, the nuclear program that worried the Israelis was the Iraqi one.
Since his time as vice president, Saddam Hussein had sought to obtain nuclear technology, particularly from France. His will crystallized in 1976 with the beginning of the construction of the Osirak reactor at the Tuwaitha research center (17 kilometers south of Baghdad). The project was based on the atomic collaboration agreement between France and the Arab country, which, on paper, excluded any military application of that technology.
Israel did not accept such arguments and always believed that Hussein sought to obtain the bomb. A true suspicion as explained by an exiled Iraqi scientist, Khidhir Hamza, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist in 1998, when he confirmed that, in the 1970s, the Iraqi dictator launched a secret military nuclear program.
As has been seen in recent years with Iran and its atomic projects, Israeli intelligence was suspected of carrying out a series of operations against the construction of the Osirak reactor. For example, machinery was sabotaged in France itself before being transported to Iraq, or the murder of Yahya El Mashad, an Egyptian scientist who directed Baghdad's nuclear program, was attributed to Mossad.
Israel did openly acknowledge that its aviation destroyed the Osirak reactor on June 7, 1981 in Operation Opera. Ten Iraqi soldiers and one French technician were killed (although the Hebrew military attacked on a Sunday afternoon to avoid casualties among foreign personnel). The facilities were destroyed, and the Begin government claimed that, thanks to the attack, Saddam's nuclear ambitions were set back a decade.
According to historian Tom Cooper, an expert on conflicts in the Middle East, in the months before the attack, Iranian reconnaissance planes photographed Osirak and that information was passed on to the Israelis. In fact, Tehran's aviation had unsuccessfully attacked Iraqi nuclear facilities six months earlier.
The attack sparked unanimous international condemnation. Even the US voted in favor of a UN Security Council resolution condemning the events and vetoed the delivery of F-16 aircraft to Israel. In the Jewish State, in the midst of the electoral campaign, there was also controversy. Labor leader Shimon Peres accused Begin of risking the lives of the military to gain ground at the polls. In any case, Begin's Likud finally won.
The changing balance of power in the Middle East ultimately turned Iran and Israel into two great rivals, and the passage of time buried that collaboration. The growing weight of Hizbullah in Lebanon and the rise of Tehran as a regional power after the weakening of Iraq due to the 1991 and 2003 wars were the starting points to configure the escalation of tension that both countries have witnessed in recent weeks.
