At each other's throats

摘要

If this murky tale of spies and their doings can be reduced to a single proposition it is this: Iran and Israel are locked in mortal clandestine combat and for the most part the Iranians, together with their allies in Lebanon's Hizbullah, are running circles around their flatfooted Israeli adversaries. That in itself lifts Ronen Bergman's book above the ordinary. Too many accounts of spying in the Middle East dwell on the high reputation of Israel's Mossad, a reputation which may just conceivably be out of date.rnMr Bergman is a respected investigative journalist working for Israel's biggest-selling daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. His provenance matters because there are few other ways to know whether the tales he unfolds might be true. He claims they are based on thousands of documents, mostly classified, and over 300 interviews, a third of them with people who insisted on anonymity. So a lot of Mr Bergman's revelations need to be taken on trust.