Left-wing UK paper: Trump hired Israelis to probe Iran deal negotiators

A report published in the UK on Saturday claims that Trump aides engaged Israeli private eyes to investigate key figures involved in the Iran nuclear deal.

By: World Israel News Staff

At the close of a week that saw former Obama staffers tweeting conspiracy theories about Israeli revelations regarding Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program, a UK-based newspaper claimed that President Donald Trump’s aides had engaged Israeli private investigators to look into US negotiators involved in the 2015 nuclear deal.

The report was published by The Observer, a left-leaning weekly paper whose parent publication, The Guardian, has been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias in connection with its coverage of the Jewish state.

According to The Observer, aides for US President Donald Trump engaged an unnamed Israeli private intelligence agency to investigate Obama administration personnel involved in the negotiation of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Specifically, the report claimed that the Israeli agency was tasked with investigating Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, and Colin Kahl, Obama’s deputy assistant.

The report also claimed that Trump’s aides asked the agency to look into pro-Iran lobbyists, certain Americans of Iranian descent, and pro-deal journalists.

In the wake of the deal’s conclusion, Rhodes was profiled by The New York Times in a piece titled “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.” A key passage from that piece revealed the following:

“‘We created an echo chamber,’ [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.’

“When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. ‘In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,’ he said. ‘We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.’ He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. ‘We drove them crazy,’ [Rhodes] said of the deal’s opponents.”

‘Propaganda campaign conducted by master of fiction’

In response to these revelations, Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer commented in 2017, “Two years ago, a propaganda campaign conducted by a master of fiction manufactured moderation and filled echo chambers with nonsense,” an apparent reference to Rhodes.

“In this alternative universe, Iran’s path to the bomb has been blocked,” Dermer explained. “In the real world, Iran’s path to the bomb has been paved, because the restrictions the nuclear deal puts in place will be automatically removed in a few years, no matter how Iran behaves.”

The USAmerican president will decide by May 12 whether the US will exit the Iran deal, an agreement that critics fear has not only emboldened the largest state-sponsor of terror in the world, but has also flooded it with the resources it needs to fund extreme Islamist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah and to develop intercontinental missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Last Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a evidence that the Mossad had extracted from deep within Iranian territory, proving both the historical existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program and the current preservation of plans and records related to this program. The evidence presented by Netanyahu contradicts years of denial by Iranian leaders, in addition to statements Tehran had made about their nuclear ambitions in the run-up to the passage of the 2015 nuclear deal.