‘This friend of ours will soon be an enemy’: how Iran became Israel’s foe

Iran was once an ally of Israel and the US, but after the 1979 revolution that disposed the shah, alliances shifted

With 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.

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