W. Niederhut

A replay of Trump floating Presidential pardons to Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn during the Russia-gate investigation. Trump floated a pardon to Walt Nauta to stonewall his classified documents investigation. Trump co-defendant in classified documents case was told he’d be pardoned in a second term, notes in FBI interview say | CNN Politics

As AIPAC-funded ethnic-cleansing hawks, Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, call for National Guard deployment against anti-war protesters on college campuses, law professors at Columbia University denounce the arrests and suspensions of students protesting against Netanyahu's Gaza massacre ops. The U.S. mainstream media continues to frame the campus protests as "Anti-Semitic," despite the fact that many protesters are Jewish, (and all Palestinians are Semites.) And, incidentally, the IDF killed another 22 Palestinians in Rafah this weekend-- 18 of whom were children. Columbia Law School Faculty Condemn Administration for Mass Arrests (theintercept.com)

If I wrote the headlines... 🤥 What Was the Role of Pecker in Trump's Stormy Daniels Scandal? David Pecker, Former National Enquirer Publisher, Set To Testify First In Trump’s Hush Money Trial | HuffPost Latest News April 21, 2024

Yes, sadly, NPR, like all mainstream media outlets in the U.S.-- including even Robet McNeil, Jim Lehrer and PBS (!) -- has colluded in selling the Warren Commission Report during the past 60 years. Operation Mockingbird has been highly successful. The shocking, rare exception to the rule was Tucker Carlson's post-Trump presidency commentary -- on Fox News of all media outlets (!) -- about the CIA's alleged role in killing JFK! It stunned all of us-- especially coming from a television commentator who had actively promoted Trump's Stop-the-Steal scam in 2020, and had subsequently tried to cover up Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election by re-framing Trump's January 6th attack on Congress as a Deep State "patriot purge." That was one aspect of Carlson's more general re-framing of any investigations of Trump's serious misconduct as victimization by the Deep State. As for NPR, another rare failure of NPR's generally outstanding reporting was their suppression of any references to Operation Timber Sycamore and our covert Sunni proxy war against Assad's Alawite government in Syria. I used to cringe while listening to NPR's reporting on Syria's civil war while driving to and from work. If I understand it correctly, Mockingbird has always been focused chiefly on covering up public awareness of CIA and military black ops. As in the JFK assassination case, NPR towed the Mockingbird line on the Syrian proxy war. But why is Ben Cole posting this five month-old hit piece on NPR today? Could it be part of the current MAGA-verse ampliganda attacking NPR, in the wake of Uri Berliner's debunked recent hit piece on NPR? Even Donald Trump has now called for de-funding NPR, in the wake of Berliner's bogus attack on NPR. For those who haven't read it, (including Ben Cole) Steve Inskeep recently published an outstanding refutation of Berliner's hit piece on NPR. It can't be said any better. How my NPR colleague failed at “viewpoint diversity” (substack.com)

Ron, In memory of Dickey Betts. I think I'm repeating myself, but my favorite Dickey Betts song has always been, In Memory of Elizabeth Reed. I first heard this masterful instrumental opus on the Live at the Fillmore East album in 1971, and I've been an Allman Brothers fan ever since. The boys could play.

Bill, Thanks for confirming the points I made (above) from the very beginning of this thread-- about Koethe, Hunter, Underhill, Sullivan, Killgallen, Florence Pritchard Smith, Giancana, De Mohrenschildt, et.al.-- without even realizing that you were doing so. But you incorrectly attributed many of my observations about Hit List to Pat Speer, while simultaneously repeating Speer's vague, inaccurate disparagement of Hit List, at the top of the thread. Odd. My point in starting this thread was to draw attention to an historical/forensic reference book that has never really been reviewed or discussed in any detail on the Education Forum, perhaps because Belzer was dismissed as a non-historian-- a mere television actor. You also confirmed my observations (from Belzer) about the temporal clustering of murders of JFK witnesses who were about to testify in investigations, inaccurately attributing them, again, to Pat Speer. At the same time, you must have missed my comments on the thread in which I disagreed with Pat Speer's comments dismissing the significance of Hit List, including his misleading comments about the book's actuarial data. In point of fact, Speer also dismissed the significance of the murders of Koethe, Hunter, and Lee Bowers. As for your sagacious editorial advice, do let us little people know which of Belzer's 50 witness murder cases you would have "edited" from Hit List. Addendum: Here's my March 6th response to Pat Speer and James DiEugenio. Jim, Belzer's hit list of murdered JFKA witnesses is substantial, and the forensic evidence and actuarial probabilities are extremely suspicious-- the diametric opposite of what Pat Speer claimed (above.) All of the identified cases in the book were people who had knowledge about people and events relating to JFK's murder, and many died when they were threatening or scheduled to spill the beans-- e.g., Gary Underhill, the journalist from L.A. (Hunter?) who had been in Ruby's apartment, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Dorothy Killgallen, David Ferrie, William Sullivan, (and a few FBI lab technicians) the officer who filmed the Bethesda autopsy, Giancana, De Mohrenschildt, and dozens more. (I'm naming a few off of the top of my head.) In Lee Bowers case, he was driven off the road by a mystery vehicle into a concrete wall, and he told the EMTs prior to his death that he thought his coffee had been drugged at a local diner, before returning to his car. Bowers had also, reportedly, told family members that he had not reported everything that he witnessed on 11/22/63-- in the parking lot behind the picket fence-- because he was afraid. Curiously, this is the precise opposite of what Pat Speer just claimed (above.) Pat's 0-2 here. My impression from studying the Hit List data is that someone was carefully monitoring these witnesses over time -- tapping phones, etc.-- and ordering hits when they had evidence of impending testimony refuting the Warren Commission narrative. Incidentally, William Sullivan told friends that he thought he was going to be murdered, prior to his Congressional testimony. My hypothesis is that these systematic murders of witnesses were implementations of the 1964 CIA Executive Order instructing Agency personnel to do "whatever is necessary" to promote public acceptance of the Warren Commission Report.

A day most of us here in Colorado will never forget. I was seeing patients at a local inpatient substance abuse treatment facility when the television coverage commenced. One of my former patients was a close relative of the teacher who hid under her desk in the library during the massacre. 25 years after Columbine, survivors say they're still haunted by the attack Since the 1999 massacre, 415 people have been killed in U.S. school shootings. abcnews.go.com/US/25-years-after-columbine-survivors-haunted-school-shootings/story?id=109236523 April 20, 2024

Matt, My question. Is Trump passing gas in court or something more substantial? And, speaking of MAGA fecal material, Bill Barr announced this week that he will vote for Trump! Curiously, Barr called it a choice between playing "Russian roulette" with Trump, or certain suicide with Biden. Calling Bill Barr a despicable toady is an insult to despicable toadies.

Great post. I read about the suspicious details of the Hunter and Koethe murders, in Hit List, but I didn't know the back story about their association with Thayer Waldo. Another journalist who may have been silenced by the JFKA-linked witness murders was Irv Kupcinet, who allegedly knew Ruby and some of his Chicago mob associates, but published nothing about Ruby or the JFK assassination after his daughter was murdered.

Live updates: Israel attacks Iran, explosions in Isfahan, war in Gaza (cnn.com)

Ron, The volume of this video is low in parts. If I recall correctly, Phillip Nelson wrote at length about RFK's hostile relationship with LBJ in his book, LBJ-- Mastermind of the JFK Assassination. RFK, reportedly, referred to LBJ derisively as, "Colonel Cornpone," during JFK's presidency. P.S. I can't picture Hendrix opening for the Monkees. Who came up with that weird venue?

Ron, That 239 beans joke sounds like some old-fashioned Texas Ranger campfire humor. And, speaking of Texas, I know from matrimonial experience that Texans really know how to make great chili. I once wrote a song about this subject, in which I borrowed Oscar Wilde's line about marriage being a relationship in which, "bad words are exchanged by day and bad smells by night." I thought it was funny, but my wife was only slightly amused... 😬

Another MAGA House initiative that doesn't pass the sniff test... 🙄

Steve Inskeep published a detailed expose of Uri Berliner's fraudulent claims about NPR at Substack this week. How my NPR colleague failed at “viewpoint diversity” (substack.com) Pundits throughout the MAGA-verse-- and Donald Trump, himself-- have seized on Berliner's fraudulent article to denounce NPR, and demand that it be de-funded. WaPo published an overview of the anti-NPR MAGA sh*t storm today. NPR editor Uri Berliner resigns after Free Press essay accuses network of bias - The Washington Post Among other errors documented by Inskeep, Berliner's claim about all of NPR's staff being registered Democrats is false. But, more importantly, almost all of Berliner's claims about NPR's journalistic modus operandi are blatantly untrue. Several of Inskeep's points-- e.g., about reporting on Trump's Russiagate scandal and Giuliani's 2020 Hunter Biden laptop "October Surprise"--are the same ones enumerated (above) by Kevin Drum.

Trump rails against wind energy in fundraising pitch to oil executives At a Mar-a-Lago dinner, Donald Trump doubles down on promises to derail a key form of clean energy that competes with fossil fuels www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/04/17/trump-wind-power-oil-executives/ April 17, 2024

Trump keeps dozing off during his felony trial in New York. Someone should make a meme with Trump blathering about, "Sleepy Joe Biden," and Biden responding, "Hold My Beer."

Exactly right, KIrk. Tillerson, Mattis, and McMaster all wanted Trump to uphold the Iranian Nuclear Disarmament Treaty. As I recall, even some Mossad and IDF leaders believed, at the time, that the Iran treaty was in Israel's best interests. Netanyahu never did. When Tillerson, Mattis, and McMaster quit the Trump administration, they were replaced by Iran war hawks, including Pompeo and John Bolton. Then the Orange Mar-a-Lago Boobie withdrew from the Iran treaty and destabilized the entire region. As the authors pointed out, Trump didn't even know who Brian Hook was, during his meeting with Macron. (Hook was the Trump administration's own guy in charge of revising-- and preserving-- the Iran treaty.) As for Biden, IMO, he should have followed Obama's lead, from the start, in dealing with Netanyahu and the Likudniks. During Obama's presidency, Biden had privately told the Israelis that he was "their best friend" in Washington. Paul Rigby posted an interesting article on one of the JFK and Gaza threads about Biden's history with Israel. Now, if I understand the latest news, Biden has, essentially, announced that bombing Iran is up to Bibi-- but that the U.S. will not get involved in an Israeli war with Iran. I'm not a foreign policy expert, but this doesn't make sense to me. For one thing, Tehran is aligned with Moscow. Is Biden passively acquiescing to a wider regional war-- with potential Russian involvement?

Actually, Kevin, the actuarial stats for these JFK witness murders indicates that it is astronomically improbable that they would have occurred by mere chance, when they occurred. That statistical data is reviewed at the beginning of Hit List. But, beyond the astronomical improbabilities, the forensic data about the murders is extremely damning. If people are interested in the subject, they should ignore the internet "spin" and study the facts in the book.

Stormy Monday!! My apologies if I already posted this 1969 recording by Lee Michaels, but I've been listening to this recording-- and album-- for the past 55 years... and it still blows me away!! (Barry "Frosty" Smith on drums.) I noticed that a Hammond B afficionado on YouTube (below) shares my high opinion of this Lee Michael's masterpiece. Enjoy. ave the vinyl.)

The 56 Years thread was a remarkable phenomenon, for more than a year, with a lot of very interesting, informative discussions about history and politics. It was only in the final weeks of its existence that the thread devolved into a repository for redundant MAGA spam-- in lieu of dialogue, critical thinking, and informed discussions. As for the current Water Cooler set up, it has been an interesting forum for discussions about contemporary politics but, unfortunately, some of our lively 56 Year, and Journal of the Plague Year, participants-- Joe Bauer, Paul Brancato, Denny Zartman, Ron Ecker, Cliff Varnell, James DiEugenio, and others-- never got involved in the Water Cooler.

9. ‘A Big Risk’ Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran deal brought the nuclear standoff full circle. Severe economic sanctions, announced in April with the aim of driving down Iranian oil exports, triggered months of clandestine tit-for-tat measures that escalated to the point that, in late June, American forces were within hours of striking Iran before Trump ordered them to stand down, much to the disappointment of his more hawkish allies. For its part, the Mossad has no doubt about who is to blame for the present crisis. Yossi Cohen said in his July speech that the recent attacks in the gulf region are “part of a single campaign” and were “approved by the Iranian leadership and executed — most of them at least — by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and its proxies.” The White House has adopted a guns-or-butter approach to economic asphyxiation: Less money in the Iranian government’s treasury will, the argument goes, force the regime to choose between supporting its suffering population and funding groups like Hezbollah that it uses to expand its influence in the Middle East. American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iranian military and financial support to such groups has in fact been drying up, a welcome outcome for leaders in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have seen their own influence in Washington grow during the Trump administration. But the larger goal — a regional realignment — remains very much in flux. The present crisis has drawn the United States and Israel — and their self-confident leaders — even closer together. Where he once saw opportunity in openly warring with an American president, Netanyahu has used his close relationship with Trump as currency as he fights for his own political survival. Trump is widely popular in Israel, and Netanyahu’s campaign has adorned its party headquarters in Tel Aviv with a portrait of the two men standing together. One senior Israeli official, cracking a smile, said, “Trump is the only one who could beat Netanyahu in the election.” (Another side of the building features a similar portrait, with Netanyahu standing beside President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.) Having served as C.I.A. director and secretary of defense during a meltdown in relations between an American president and an Israeli prime minister, Leon Panetta says there is now danger in the other extreme. “If it looks like the United States is going to do whatever Israel’s bidding is, on any issue, then I think the United States loses any leverage,” he said. “Our fundamental goal has to be to protect our national security interests. What is in the United States’ interest? And yes, we are a friend and an ally of Israel, but I think we always have to maintain a relationship that looks at the bigger picture of that region and what needs to be done to preserve peace in that region.” In recent days, Trump has used support for Israel as a kind of litmus test for American Jews, saying that Jews who opposed him were being “disloyal” both to Israel and the Jewish people. And yet Trump’s last-minute decision to abort the attack in June led to a concern among Iran hawks in both Israel and the United States: that the president ultimately might not have the resolve to confront the threat with military force. The hawks also had reason to fear that two other partners in the anti-Iran coalition — Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. — might read any “softening” of Trump’s position on Iran as a sign that they, too, must adjust their positions out of fear of being left alone to deal with their regional nemesis. Both countries once aggressively lobbied the Trump administration to take a hard-line position on Iran and advocated the United States’ leaving the J.C.P.O.A. But the U.A.E. recently announced a drawdown of its military involvement in Yemen — where Emirati and Saudi troops have been battling a rebel group that receives military support from Iran — and sent a delegation to Tehran to discuss maritime security. Once again, more than a decade after they first raised the subject with American officials, Israeli officials have been considering the possibility of a unilateral strike against Iran. Unlike with Bush and Obama, there is greater confidence that Trump wouldn’t stand in the way. Netanyahu has recently been flexing Israeli muscle around the Middle East — launching hundreds of raids into Syria against Iranian and Hezbollah arms stores and troop concentrations, and undertaking an even bolder operation in July against a base in eastern Iraq that, Israeli intelligence believed, was being used to store long-range guided missiles en route to Iranian forces in Syria. The threat of war could be a bluff, or an election ploy. But it also represents a dangerous confluence of interests: an American president often reluctant to use military force and an Israeli prime minister looking to deal with unfinished business. “I think that it’s far more likely that Trump would give Netanyahu a green light to strike Iran than that Trump would strike himself,” Shapiro says. “But that, you know, is a big risk.” Yaakov Peri, a former chief of Shin Bet, has for years watched Netanyahu speak about the Iran threat in almost apocalyptic terms. He has made a kind of causal study of the man whose presence for more than a decade has loomed over American decision making about Iran, one who doesn’t believe he’s finished. “When Bibi took the Knesset podium to make a speech, we used to play a game and bet how often he would say the name Iran,” he says. “Bibi today is spellbound by his success in putting the issue on the world agenda, by Trump being so deeply involved with it, by the fact that his opinion is listened to — and that he was the prophet of doom who foresaw all of this.” Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for the magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations.” He is a member of the Israeli bar and has a master’s degree in international relations from Cambridge University, as well as a Ph.D. in history. Mark Mazzetti is a Washington investigative correspondent for The Times. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of “The Way of the Knife: The C.I.A., a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth.” Reporting was contributed by Erich Follath, Georg Mascolo and Holger Stark in partnership with the German newspaper Die Zeit.

8. ‘He Has No Political Weight in the System’ Donald Trump inherited a nuclear deal that American spy agencies believed was fundamentally working to keep Iran’s nuclear program in check. But he also inherited a loaded gun: military plans for an Iran strike that had been meticulously refined during the Obama years. Less than two weeks after Inauguration Day, Mike Flynn, the national security adviser, took to the White House lectern and said that the White House was “officially putting Iran on notice” for engaging in a missile test and supporting an attack on a Saudi warship. Flynn had little chance to expand on the vague meaning of “notice”; he was pushed out 12 days later. But Trump, in his first address to Congress, twinned in one sentence a shot at Iran and an embrace of Israel. “I have also imposed new sanctions on entities and individuals who support Iran’s ballistic-missile program and reaffirmed our unbreakable alliance with the state of Israel.” The House chamber erupted in thunderous applause. Trump did pass on early chances to withdraw from the Iran deal, a result of a split in his cabinet: Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson argued that the J.C.P.O.A., while imperfect, was fundamentally working and could be strengthened after further negotiations with the Europeans. Gerard Araud, the French ambassador to the United States, said that he and his European colleagues came to think that Trump would continue his bluster but ultimately stay in the deal. “There was the feeling that, as usual, all politicians are different when they are campaigning and when they are governing,” he says. But tensions boiled over in July 2017 during a meeting at the Pentagon, when Tillerson clashed with Trump and Bannon about the wisdom of staying in the Iran deal — “we all know he’s getting out of the deal,” Bannon snapped at Tillerson, according to one person with knowledge of the meeting. Trump fired Tillerson in March 2018, and H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, quit the same month. Mattis left nine months later. The C.I.A. chief, Mike Pompeo, an Iran hawk since his days as a Republican congressman from Kansas, had taken over as secretary of state and became perhaps the administration’s most influential voice on Iran. And to replace McMaster, Trump turned to John Bolton, who had written the strategy paper the previous summer advocating for Trump to leave the J.C.P.O.A. What remained was to persuade the president to do what he had always said he was going to do: abrogate the Iran deal. The White House, at least officially, was still on the Tillerson track, favoring negotiation over withdrawal. Brian Hook, a lawyer Tillerson brought to the State Department early in the administration, was negotiating with European leaders to carry out what appeared to be Trump’s orders: push to broaden the J.C.P.O.A. to include new restrictions on Iran’s ballistic-missile program and on support for proxy groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. By April, European officials had come to think that their negotiations with Hook were working and a solution was in sight. A five-page draft agreement laid out, in broad terms, new restrictions on Iran’s missile programs and more aggressive inspections of nuclear facilities. Hook regularly reported back on the status of the negotiations, telling other American officials that he thought a deal with the Europeans was possible. But the Europeans were up against a powerful set of players — from Netanyahu to the leaders of the Arab gulf states — who used their representatives in Washington to lean on the White House to break from the Iran deal. Some French and German officials now think that the entire negotiation process was an elaborate charade. “It was a fiction because Trump was not behind it,” Araud says. Once again, policy came down to personnel. “I like Brian Hook,” Araud explained, but he said the French government came to the assessment “that he has no political weight in the system.” (Hook declined to be interviewed for this article.) Trump-administration officials say that the negotiations were undertaken in good faith but that they didn’t make enough progress before Trump decided to pull the plug. A senior administration official says that although the president “felt that he was being generous” in giving several months to allow the talks in Europe to proceed, “it didn’t mean his generosity was limitless.” Even as the European talks continued, Netanyahu was working on a different track. In January 2018, he would later announce, a high-stakes Mossad operation enabled the theft of tens of thousands of documents, videos and photographs being housed in a warehouse on the outskirts of Tehran. The intelligence trove represented a kind of secret history of Iran’s quest for a bomb, and Yossi Cohen, the Mossad director, said in a July 2019 speech that the goal of the operation was to help enforce a strict inspection regime. “The operation enabled us to inform the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency where the Iranians are hiding the nuclear materials and enable the group to destroy them,” he said. But Netanyahu saw far greater opportunities in the intelligence coup, believing that it could help push Trump to finally get out of the J.C.P.O.A. He claims now that even before the election, Trump had told him that he would annul the agreement. “I believed him,” Netanyahu says, “but of course I looked for ways for him to bolster this decision.” That March, Netanyahu met with the president personally to go over highlights from the archive, which he said showed how Iran had lied for two decades about its nuclear program. By the time Netanyahu went on television in Israel in late April to reveal the fruits of the covert operation to the world, the announcement was seen by many in the United States as an 11th-hour effort to influence Trump’s decision. But its work had already been done. According to an official familiar with the arrangements, American and Israeli officials originally discussed a joint news conference in Washington with four participants: Netanyahu and Cohen, the Mossad chief, would disclose the Mossad operation and its fruits; Pompeo would expound on the significance of the findings; and Trump would use the archive as Exhibit A for why the United States needed to abandon the J.C.P.O.A. With the decision made, all that was left to do was tell the Europeans, who were still laboring through negotiations under the impression that there was a chance to salvage the deal. On April 24, 2018 — six days before Netanyahu’s televised presentation and two weeks before Trump’s announcement of withdrawal — President Emmanuel Macron of France arrived at the White House for what would be the first official state visit of Trump’s presidency. Trump seemed to like Macron (their relationship was dubbed “Le Bromance”), and that day Trump and Macron and their wives stood on the South Lawn of the White House and planted a small oak tree. The tree came from Belleau Wood, to the east of Paris, where American troops turned back German forces near the end of World War I. Macron wrote on Twitter that the tree “will be a reminder at the White House of these ties that bind us.” The tree has since died. Trump brought Macron into the Oval Office, where the two men sat alone. Trump became serious, according to an official with knowledge of the meeting, telling Macron he was the first to hear the news: The United States was leaving the J.C.P.O.A. The news was hardly unexpected for Macron, but the French president pushed back nonetheless. He told Trump that the negotiations led by Brian Hook had been successful and that a breakthrough was close. As was reported at the time, Trump was clearly puzzled and seemed to be largely unaware of the negotiations. “Who is Brian Hook?” he said.

7. ‘It’s Complicated’ Obama’s resounding re-election victory did little to improve relations between the United States and Israel. The deteriorating situation brought on a dramatic confrontation at Ben Gurion Airport, shortly after Secretary of State John Kerry landed in Israel on Nov. 8, 2013, for what was supposed to be a quick stop en route to Geneva for another round of Iran talks. As aides to both men listened through the wall, Netanyahu began shouting at Kerry inside an airport lounge, angered that, in his view, the United States had gone back on promises to Israel about elements of the deal. (Asked about the incident, Netanyahu says, “I don’t raise my voice.”) As the negotiations progressed, Obama himself spent hours on the phone with the prime minister, engaged in numerous circular efforts to engage Israel in the details of the proposed nuclear deal. But the relationship was beyond repair. The American president would often return to two estimates that the Pentagon had made for him: An Israeli strike would set back Iran’s enrichment program by only a year or two. The proposed nuclear deal would suspend it for a decade or more, and even after that Iran would still be prohibited from building a bomb. Netanyahu wasn’t buying it. During one conversation, according to Philip Gordon, a National Security Council official who listened in on the phone call, he told Obama he planned to lobby Congress to simply kill the deal. Obama told him he wouldn’t win. In late January 2015, Gordon and other White House officials began hearing rumors that, at first, they couldn’t imagine were true: Netanyahu had been invited to give a speech before Congress to denounce the impending nuclear deal. Gordon immediately dashed off an email to Dermer, the Israeli ambassador. “It’s complicated,” was Dermer’s cryptic reply. Dan Shapiro was furious when Speaker John Boehner’s office notified the State Department of the planned speech, calling it a “punch in the gut” and the hardest moment of his term as ambassador. He called Yossi Cohen, the national security adviser who would later take over at the Mossad. Cohen, as it turned out, was also in the dark. “I found out about it when you did,” he told Shapiro. The speech failed to turn Congress against the deal, and many in Israel now see it as a foolish stunt. “Israel must never take a side in internal American politics,” says Moshe Yaalon, Netanyahu’s defense minister at the time. “Bibi identified with the Republicans, and that was a mistake. His speech in Congress was poking a finger in the eye of the president of the United States. I said all of this to Bibi, but he told me: ‘Forget it. You don’t get it.’ In his view, no one understands America but him and Ron Dermer.” Netanyahu still thinks that’s the case, wryly noting that none of his critics understand “the big secret” of American politics. He says that some of his former cabinet members and generals seemed to believe that the United States consisted of little more than the Pentagon and the White House, but they were wrong. American public opinion was the key, and the ability to shape it in some ways cut to the very heart of Netanyahu’s political persona. “In the last 30 years, I appeared innumerable times in the American media and met thousands of American leaders,” he says. “I developed a certain ability to influence public opinion, and that is the most important thing: the ability to sway public opinion in the United States against the regime in Iran.” Despite his powers of persuasion, Netanyahu was — at least for the moment — unable to prevent a deal. Iran and the United States — along with Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia — approved the final draft of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on July 14, 2015. “Tough talk from Washington does not solve problems,” Obama said in a statement that day. “Hard-nosed diplomacy, leadership that has united the world’s major powers, offers a more effective way to verify that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon.” For some, it was the capstone to Obama’s foreign-policy legacy and a significant step forward in stabilizing the region. For Netanyahu, it was a significant setback, but by no means a permanent one.

6. ‘A Very Unfriendly Act’ In the summer of 2012, American spy satellites detected clusters of Israeli aircraft making what seemed to be early preparations for an attack. Israeli leaders had spent more than a year delivering ominous warnings to Washington that they might launch a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities — and that if they did, they would give the United States little warning and no chance to stop them. One former senior Israeli security official, looking back at that time, said that it wasn’t until then that he believed the prime minister was serious about striking Iran. Tensions had been building between Israel and the United States for months. In December 2011, Obama and Barak met in Maryland at a conference for the Union for Reform Judaism. In Barak’s telling, Obama asked for his patience and gave him assurances that the United States would act decisively if the situation demanded it. The Israeli defense minister’s response was chilly. “It isn’t that I don’t believe you,” Barak recalls explaining to the president. “But I know that you will have to decide in accordance with American interests at that time, and there is no way of knowing where they will lie.” Unfazed, Obama raised the matter of dissent within the Israeli ranks. It was well known, he said, that senior Israeli military and intelligence officials opposed a strike on Iran. This is true, Barak responded, and the dissenting voices were being treated with respect. “They have the right to think otherwise,” he said, but in the end, it was not up to the generals to make the final call. “If they look up, they see us,” Barak said, meaning himself and the prime minister. “When we look up, we see just the sky.” Several weeks later, Barak called Leon Panetta, who had recently succeeded Gates as Obama’s secretary of defense, to deliver an ominous piece of news: Israel was delaying a joint military exercise on Israeli soil that had been scheduled for the spring. The annual exercise, called Austere Challenge, would have involved hundreds of American troops deploying to Israel, and Barak told Panetta that it would be risky to have so many Americans on Israeli soil during that period. Are you going to strike? Panetta asked. Barak was coy, but he didn’t deny that a strike was at least a possibility. “He basically said, ‘Look, we haven’t made a final decision, but we want to keep our options open and, frankly, conducting exercises would limit our options,’ ” Panetta recalls. As a way to calm Israeli concern about the Obama administration’s commitment to keeping Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, Panetta had even taken the extraordinary step of bringing Barak into his Pentagon office and showing him a highly classified video. In a desert in the American Southwest, the Pentagon had constructed an exact replica of the Fordow facility, and the video showed a test of the 30,000-pound massive ordnance penetrator, a bunker-busting weapon the Air Force had designed to penetrate the most hardened of underground defenses. The bomb destroyed the mock-up in the desert. Barak was impressed. The White House also made an effort to send a senior official to Israel every few weeks — to “Bibisit,” as a former senior Obama-administration official put it. There was plenty of business to attend to, but the visits also had the effect of limiting Netanyahu’s options on when he could order an attack. “It did not escape our understanding that having a visit of a senior American official on the calendar probably bought you a couple of weeks — before the visit and then after the visit,” Shapiro says. “For an Israeli official, it meant you knew you could not strike without feeling that you’ve deceived somebody while they were sitting in your office.” But behind the scenes, Israel was indeed preparing for a strike. Its military and intelligence services had cut the time needed for the final preparations — for the attack and for the war that might ensue. “I went to bed every night, if I went to bed at all, with the phone close to my ear,” says Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador in Washington at the time. “I was ready to be called in by Israel and sent to the White House or the State Department to tell them we had attacked, or if they already knew from their own sources, straight to CNN.” Such an attack, which came far closer to happening than has previously been reported, would have been a significant breach of Israel’s relationship with the United States — or at least with the Obama administration. With Obama standing for re-election in a contest that was just months away, some in the White House believed that it was politics, as much as any direct security threat, that was driving Netanyahu’s push for a strike. Netanyahu had courted the candidacy of his old Boston Consulting Group colleague Mitt Romney, Obama’s Republican opponent in the 2012 election. Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s closest political adviser, was in contact with the Romney campaign, which had also taken on John Bolton as a foreign policy adviser. The concern among American officials was that Netanyahu was threatening a strike not just to box Obama in but also to sway the November election in Romney’s favor. (Dermer is now Israel’s ambassador to Washington.) “It definitely crossed our minds that Israel might consider it an advantage to strike in the final phase of the U.S. election,” Shapiro says. The concern was that Israel might believe that it “could force the United States’ hand to be supportive or to come in behind Israel and assist. Because otherwise, President Obama could be accused of abandoning Israel in its moment of need.” According to former American officials, Tom Donilon called senior Pentagon and C.I.A. officials to the White House for a two-day meeting to go over the various situations, and possible American responses, resulting from an Israeli attack. Separately, Gen. James Mattis, the head of United States Central Command, urged the C.I.A. to try to locate Iranian missile launchers — they would be among the first targets of an American campaign if an Israeli strike drew the United States into the conflict. (Donilon and Mattis both declined to comment on the planning process.) Both Donilon and Panetta made urgent trips to Jerusalem to speak to Netanyahu and Barak. Shapiro says, “It was important to convey the message that — in light of our very close coordination on the Iran strategy to that point — it would be viewed obviously as a very unfriendly act to use our politics” to gain leverage. Netanyahu refused to make any promises. Some former American and Israeli officials think that Netanyahu was simply deploying his own maximum-pressure strategy, to push Obama toward either his own strike or even tougher economic sanctions, but never intended to actually send Israeli jets or commandos to attack Iran. Netanyahu continued to face profound opposition to military action from inside the military and the Mossad — “I think they didn’t do it because the I.D.F. didn’t want to do it,” Dennis Ross says. A former senior Israeli security official expressed doubts that Netanyahu and Barak were ever serious about a strike. “I have a feeling that just discussing such dramatic issues gave them great pleasure. I saw the politicians’ excitement over their power,” the official says. “Deep inside them, they do not want to attack, because they realize that you never know how it will end. But dabbling in whether to attack or not, and to do so with a cigar in their hands, that is a big deal for them.” For his part, Netanyahu insists that the threat of an Israeli strike “was not a bluff — it was real. And only because it was real were the Americans truly worried about it.” He pulled back from the brink only because he still could not get a majority of his cabinet to support him. “If I’d had a majority, I would have done it,” he says. “Unequivocally.” It is possible that Barak’s vigorous efforts to persuade the Americans to join an effort may have inadvertently helped scuttle it, thanks to an incident that added considerably to the tension within Netanyahu’s cabinet. On a trip to the United States in mid-September 2012, just weeks before the election, Barak took a break from official visits to speak privately with Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, who had since moved to Chicago and been elected mayor. When the discussion turned to Iran, Emanuel was characteristically blunt: Netanyahu and Barak were completely misreading American politics, he said, and they shouldn’t assume that Obama would allow the Israeli leaders to dictate his options. Netanyahu soon received a report from the Israeli Embassy about the meeting, accompanied by whispers that Barak had gone rogue and was telling his American counterparts that he was trying to hold “crazy Bibi” back from attacking Iran. Amidror called Yoni Koren, Barak’s chief of staff, and reproached him for not reporting the meeting with Emanuel. Netanyahu went on Israeli television and mocked Barak for going to the United States to “play the role of the moderate savior.” Barak fired back, saying he had gone to the United States to “reduce tension” between the two sides — implying that Netanyahu had potentially damaged Israel’s most important strategic relationship. There is no evidence that Barak had turned on Netanyahu, but the incident ruptured their long alliance. Barak no longer supported a strike. It wasn’t because of anything that happened in Chicago, he says. The timing was wrong. “It became clear that calling a strike was becoming more and more complicated,” he says. The window of time between a planned joint military exercise and the American election was too tight. In October, the strike was called off. “It is one thing to strike alone,” Barak says, “and a totally different thing to draw the United States into a confrontation that it doesn’t want to be a part of.”