HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028270.jpg

/ BARAK / 136 of uniformed US personnel. The focus was, of all things, on defense against a missile attack from Iran. I contacted Leon Panetta to see whether we could delay it. The official reason cited by the Americans, when they agreed to do it, did have the merit of being true: that Bibi was coming under pressure to shift our budgetary priorities away from defense toward social and economic issues. But Panetta understood that my request for a delay meant we were at least considering military action. He also realized that if we did launch an attack, it was in the Americans’ own interest for their troops be as far away from Israel as possible. We agreed to reschedule the exercise for October 2012. That meant that if we did decide to attack, we’d have until well into September, when significant numbers of US troops would begin arriving. As we weighed our final decision, I held a series of high-level meetings in Washington: with Panetta, national security adviser Tom Donilon, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama himself. Though not explicitly saying we were ready to attack, I left no doubt that we were seriously considering it, and explained the reasons we believed our country’s fundamental security interests might make it necessary. The message from all of the Americans I met was that the administration shared our basic goal: to prevent, or at least seriously impair, Iran’s drive to get a nuclear bomb. But they continued to believe that non-military pressure was the best way to do it. The Americans knew we were skeptical that the non-military route would work, and that we were deeply worried about the implications of not taking military action if it failed. I discussed our thinking — and, in general terms, our plans — in my meetings with Panetta. He already had a pretty good idea of the broad contours of what we were contemplating, since US radar systems and electronic intercepts had been recording the volume and nature of air force exercises we’d been conducting over recent months. Leon and I had by now got to know each other well, having first met when he was in charge of the CIA at the start of the Obama administration. In one of our early meetings at CIA headquarters in Langley, there had been a small bunch of grapes on his desk and I plucked a few in my mouth with obvious enjoyment. Now, at the Pentagon, he had a big bowlful ready whenever we met. The fact that he opposed an Israeli military operation made him no less of a pleasure to deal with. He was unfailingly calm and even tempered. He had an encyclopedic grasp of issues of defense, intelligence, budgets and policy. He was always rock-solid in America’s commitments to Israel. It’s worth 422 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028270