Now that Hassan Rouhani has been elected president of Iran, it’s worth examining some surprising aspects of his politics and personal history. The bottom line seems to be this: that Rouhani uses the word “reformist” to describe himself, and he smiles as he promises to change the public face of Iranian policy — but, in fact, he has been very close with Iran’s hardline Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

One set of clues is found in a powerful essay not officially permitted to be read or cited in Iran.  It’s called “Mourning for Children: The Sins of Fathers,” and it’s become the talk of the town among Tehran’s political, business, and academic circles.  It was published in November 2011 by Ali Reza Nourizadeh, an influential exiled Iranian political commentator.  Nourizadeh has said that Rouhani has a history of pretending that he’s a moderate, when he’s actually a Khamenei loyalist.

Rouhani – man of the hour for the world’s media

The essay reveals what is likely Hassan Rouhani’s most guarded and dark secret: the suicide of his son, and the angry note the son left behind. When Rouhani, an ambitious politician within the Islamic Republic of Iran’s political structure, was studying at age 44 for a post-graduate degree (MPhil) at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland, his elder son killed himself.

Rouhani went on with his studies and his life, improving his English and completing a PhD in 1999 in Glasgow, but some of his friends admit that he never fully recovered from his tragic loss.

Nourizadeh’s essay about the suicide — published in an Arabic newspaper in London, where he resides, and broadcast on European-based Radio Farda — includes the text of the note left by Rouhani’s son: a Persian version of “J’accuse,” aimed at the Islamic Republic’s ruling elite and his own father.

“I hate your government, your lies, your corruption, your religion, your double acts and your hypocrisy,” the son is said to have written. “I am ashamed to live in such an environment where I’m forced to lie to my friends each day, telling them that my father isn’t part of all of this. Telling them my father loves this nation, whereas I believe this to be not true. It makes me sick seeing you, my father, kissing the hand of Khamenei.”

The father was, without doubt, among the important disciples of Iran’s first supreme ayatollah, Ruholla Khomeini, who led the Islamic revolution of 1979. Hassan Rouhani could be seen sitting next to Khomeini during prayers in Paris, where the ayatollah held court before his triumphal flight to Tehran after the Shah’s departure.

Rouhani went on to serve Khomeini and his successor, Khamenei, in various capacities.  He was a deputy speaker of parliament (the Majlis) and member of the board of IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting).

After completing his thesis in the United Kingdom in 1999 on “the flexibility of Sharia (Islamic law) with reference to the Iranian experience,” he was appointed Secretary General of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and served also as the national security advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei.

The highlight of his 16-year term was his handling of the nuclear negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the big powers known as P5+1 (the United States, Russia, UK, China, France, and Germany). For his sophisticated approach he was nicknamed “the Diplomat-Sheikh” by the Iranian, Arabic and Western media.

Rouhani is the only clergyman ever to serve on Iran’s nuclear team. He was trusted by the highest authorities, and he knows a lot.

His behavior in the negotiations seemed to be carefully stage-managed: smiling and expressing readiness for minor concessions, but displaying an iron-clad determination to continue with Iran’s nuclear project.

Rouhani did convince his superiors to effect a temporary suspension of uranium enrichment, a pause which which lasted 10 months. This was apparently to avoid U.N.  Security Council action on Iran’s nuclear program, and American analysts feel certain that Ayatollah Khamenei feared — just after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 — that Iran might be similarly invaded if it did not stop its nuclear work.

After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005, Rouhani resigned; but he continued to be involved in public life. He ran a center for strategic studies and edited a foreign policy journal.

Just last year, Iranian newspapers started writing about his memoirs: a 1,000-page oral history. The book, titled National Security and Nuclear Diplomacy, contains his reflections as the official in charge of Iran’s nuclear case. It gives an account of how decisions were made in Iran’s political system, as well as the role of top-level institutions in the nuclear issue. Rouhani also included relevant documents in discussing all stages of negotiations with the European countries.

National Security and Nuclear Diplomacy, which has been recently reprinted but only in Farsi (Persian), is a must-read for every intelligence analyst and state official who wishes to know how Iran’s nuclear policies will be adjusted and re-explained.

In summary, it is now highly likely that Iran will change its tone – it will be softer and pleasant – but the music will remain the same. Iran will continue to advance and master the nuclear technology, but scientists and decision-makers there will probably stop short of assembling their first bomb.

This change — and the unforeseen nature of Rouhani’s victory — represent a political earthquake.  A bombshell in domestic and international politics.

Here is a Tweet sent out by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sunday evening:

PM Netanyahu: The international community must not be tempted to relax the pressure on #Iran to stop its nuclear program.  http://dld.bz/cEBK6 

Goodbye, Ahmadinejad

Yet it certainly looks like Iranians have elected a reformist. Rouhani was clearly — among the six officially approved candidates — the one least liked by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And Rouhani promised change.

Although Israeli intelligence devotes huge energy and resources to monitoring Iran — Iran’s secret nuclear project, its military, its politics, and its society — the Israeli espionage agencies did not see Rouhani’s victory on the horizon.  

They certainly did not expect that Rouhani could win an outright majority in the first round of voting, with no runoff required.

Mossad (the foreign espionage and operations agency, which our sources say has continued to run assets in and out of Iran) and Aman(the military intelligence agency that considers the capabilities and intentions of Israel’s regional enemies) both assumed that Khamenei would stop at nothing to install one of his reliable loyalists as Ahmadinejad’s successor.  The Supreme Leader had many disagreements with Ahmadinejad, partly over the talkative president’s bombastic style and inflated ego, and Khamenei was expected to avoid further headaches. If necessary, it was thought, he would rig the election — just as hard-liners were believed to have done in 2009.

Hello, Hassan Rouhani

A landslide for a candidate who told voters he would work for peace and security?  The only candidate who mentioned the sanctions that are adding to the suffering of many Iranians?  A Muslim cleric, but one who spoke in favor of press freedoms and negotiating with the West?

Experts don’t understand Iran: This win by Rouhani was wholly unexpected, and it shows that trusted and prestigious Western experts don’t understand Iran — and the complex undercurrents of an ancient culture that’s struggling with a blend of modernity and religious extremism.

Remember Rouhani’s nuclear restraint: In 2003, as an official in “reformist” President Mohammad Khatami’s administration,  it was Rouhani who directed the decision to freeze uranium enrichment.

(Israeli and U.S. officials firmly believe that Iran’s Supreme Leader feared that the U.S. might attack Iran at that time, just after the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Israel’s defense minister said this week that Iran’s uranium enrichment re-started in 2005 and is getting close to the amounts of enriched uranium needed to “break out” and build nuclear bombs.)

Might Rouhani freeze or reverse Iran’s nuclear work again, as part of a deal with the West to cancel sanctions? Would the Supreme Leader and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) let him do that? They may block any and all “reformist” ideas voiced by Rouhani.

Iran already has the materials, hardware, software, and knowledge necessary to build its first nuclear bomb — though not yet the ability to put one in a warhead atop a missile.

Rouhani’s election win signals a growing possiblity that Iran will decide to slow down its nuclear project.  That would be part of a policy of engaging with the United States (as everyone assumes that President Barack Obama would dearly like to avoid waging war against Iran).

So here is another unexpected result: that Israel will be further isolated in its severe concern over Iran’s nuclear capabilities (and continued support for Syria’s regime, for Hezbollah, and for terrorism around the world).  The gap between Israel and America, on these issues, may well be further widened.

In Washington on Friday, the Israeli defense minister Moshe (Boogie) Yaalon — a former director of the Aman agency — was asked about an interview, last year, in which he pointed out that Israel’s “red line” toward Iran was different from Obama’s “red line.”  Has that changed?

Yaalon: “In the past twelve months, we have clarified the differences between our red lines.” That was merely a hint of disagreement, and below that tip of the iceberg there’s plenty more.

[Note: Yossi Melman is co-author of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran, which gives a lot more intelligence-based information on and analysis of Iran's nuclear program and the country's politics.   For more about the book: http://amzn.to/13Ru4Ou .]

K.T.’s analytical series on FoxNews.com, called DefCon 3, taped an episode in Jerusalem. Yossi Melman, co-author of Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, joined her on the program — with a detailed analysis of what Iran has accomplished so far, and the chance that Israeli leaders may choose to take military action to stop Iran’s nuclear progress.

Click here to watch the video:  http://video.foxnews.com/v/2474823111001/defcon-3-live-from-jerusalem/?playlist_id=931078471001#

After Israel’s government was asked to provide a response, on a subject where “no comment” is usually all we get, a senior officer who worked for a long time in the field of communications intercepts did have something to say.

“America is our strategic ally, so it so clear that we neither spy on the USA nor against its citizens,” said a Brigadier-General who is a former commander of Unit 8200 of Israel’s military intelligence agency Aman.  He asked not to be named. Unit 8200 is being mentioned in some media reports,  in a form of innuendo,  as a likely accomplice of the NSA in its counter-terrorism surveillance programs.

The Australian edition of Business Insider has this headline:

DID YOU KNOW?: Two Secretive Israeli Companies Reportedly Bugged the US Telecommunications Grid for the NSA

A few comments are in order, when almost every day there are new leaks about the surveillance programs run by the United States government since 9/11.  Israel has been doing a lot of the same things, but with a minimum of complaint within Israel.

Years ago, and even since the founding of Israel in 1948, most of its citizens have weighed the conflict between security requirements and how to protect civil rights. They have clearly opted for security, above all.

Obama Administration officials say that with the vast amount of information collected by the highly secretive National Security Agency (NSA), only a tiny fraction is ever looked at — and only when there is believed to be a connection with foreign terrorist groups.

In Israel, the police have the authority to demand details of telephone calls for any criminal investigation. If a crime has been committed, police will obtain logs of cellphone calls in the immediate geographic area — just before and after the crime. That sort of high-tech investigating has helped solve crimes.

The domestic security agency Shin Bet (the initials of Sheruti ha-Bitachon, which means Security Services) has even broader authority — and capabilities — to intercept calls and e-mails within Israel. Shin Bet is roughly equivalent to America’s FBI and Britain’s MI5, and the Israelis have been on strongly on the look-out for communications involving foreign spies and terrorists — long before America woke up to the global peril on 9/11.

It can fairly be said that the surveillance powers of Israeli government and police agencies are far wider than those of U.S. officials, who insist that they obey laws barring them from spying on American citizens.

As for published claims that two high-tech companies that were founded in Israel — Narus Systems and Varint — helped the NSA run its controversial communications intercepts, suggestions that Israelis are physically present at NSA facilities and working with the American interceptors and analysts seem to be little more than speculation.

Yes, it would be no surprise if equipment used by the NSA — at its headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland, and at many unacknowledged facilities around the world — is designed or made in Israel. (Our book includes information on high-tech accomplishments by Unit 8200 of Israel’s Aman agency, and veterans of Unit 8200 often become leaders in the internet and communications industries.)

Yet it would be unfair to suggest that Israelis are carrying out the intercepts, collection, and analysis of information. The Americans at the NSA are quite capable of doing it all on their own.

In reluctantly discussing the counter-terrorism programs that have been revealed, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, insists that information about U.S. citizens is ignored. Clapper adds that leaks to the news media on this subject have damaged America’s ability to keep an eye and ear on terrorist groups.

It is not surprising to see reports that the Department of Justice has launched an investigation into who is leaking all these secrets about surveillance programs. The leak seems more like a gusher.

Part of a Leak, Apparently from the NSA, Published June 8 by The Guardian

There are strong indications now that the United States and Israel are focused on similar dangers. The latest leak — describing an NSA tool (“Boundless Informant”) for keeping track of the internet and phone-call information intercepted all around the world — includes a list of countries that are targeted: Iran above all others. Israel has also had its focus on Iran, hoping to stop its nuclear program, for a decade.

NSA documents suggest that intercepts are fully approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and overseen by the Department of Justice — in the name of investigating terrorism and/or the spread of nuclear weapons.

The Iranian claim said the Arab nation in question has become obviously dependent on Israel. (One can guess that Iran is hinting at Jordan or Qatar, but naturally an observer might wonder who’s now the target of Iran’s official, delusional hypothesizing.)

Iran’s report said the sabotage group — with 12 members supposedly now arrested — intended to stir up ethnic unrest in parts of Iran, specifically in the run-up to the Iranian election in less than two weeks.

Yossi Melman (co-author of Spies Against Armageddon) comments from Tel Aviv that the Iranian claim is “almost certainly rubbish.”

It’s true that Israeli intelligence analysts closely watch Iranian politics — as well as military moves, economic trends, and above all the nuclear program. But Israel and the world have no realistic reason to hope that the June 14 presidential election in Iran will change that country’s secret push toward becoming a nuclear-armed power.

An election cartoon from Iran’s news agency

None of the presidential candidates would represent a major shift in Iranian expansionist ambitions, in part because a guardian council controlled by the Supreme Leader — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — held veto power over the list of candidates for the presidency.

Melman adds:   ”Israel almost surely would not risk operations and waste resources on such a stupid mission – to sabotage Election Day. The Mossad has more urgent missions to execute in Iran. This report is obviously a propaganda ploy by the regime to boost its morale before the election and to mobilize Iranian voters to rally around the regime.”

Jonathan Schanzer, a scholar at the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, seems quite appropriately to be ridiculing the Iranian claim — on his Twitter feed @JSchanzer:

Iran says it stops a UK-Israel plot. If only France joined in, it would’ve been like a Suez War reunion. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4387370,00.html …

Iran announced last month that it hanged two spies: one supposedly working for the Mossad, and the other for the CIA. These claims are often made after dissidents — or, frankly, individuals who fell into official disfavor — are arrested and quickly tried and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Israel has been alarmed for over a decade, now, by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s march toward nuclear capability — and our book chronicles the historic shift of priorities by Israeli intelligence: devoting less attention to Palestinian politics so as to be focused with laser-beam attention on Iran.

The latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency has several troubling aspects, including Iran’s rapid progress on a few paths that could lead to nuclear weapons.

Julian Borger of Britain’s The Guardian notes, however, that Iran has apparently continued to take great care to stay below the “red line” set by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech at the U.N. in New York last September.

Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, is monitoring all this very carefully, and Netanyahu is surely interested in every detail that can be plucked out of Iran.

Yet his new coalition government is distracted by many subjects — and notably has failed to reach agreement on its posture toward a possible “two-state solution” with the Palestinians, even as America’s Secretary of State John Kerry arrives in Jerusalem and Ramallah for another attempt at mediating a return to negotiations.

Even though Barack Obama, on his first trip to Israel as President in March, said he respects Israel’s right to make its own decisions on how best to defend itself, it is crystal clear that the United States still wants Israel to act with restraint: to give negotiations and sanctions more time to be effective.

American analysts feel the IAEA’s latest report still points to the likelihood that it would take Iran one year at a minimum — and perhaps two years — before it could produce a deliverable nuclear weapon.

It is the first hour of this clickable audio item: http://www.jimbotalk.net/programhighlights?date=20130522

And here is a five-minute interview summarizing the main points for Bohannon’s “America In the Morning” aired on Thursday (May 23rd).

Please click here to listen for the 5-minute interview: Raviv on Jim Bohannon 23 May 2013

Raviv and Bohannon discuss the Obama Administration’s revelation that its drone strikes killed four U.S. citizens, Secretary of State John Kerry’s renewed attempt to mediate between Israelis and Palestinians, new indications that Syria’s regime may be winning the civil war, and the IAEA report on Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear work.

Meir Dagan, who ended eight years as head of Israel’s secretive foreign intelligence agency at the end of 2010, was speaking (April 29) on Israeli television’s Channel 2 in an interview by Ilana Dayan on her “Uvda” (Fact) show.

Dagan, the former spymaster who last year had a medical emergency but then successful surgery in the former Soviet Union, is again actively speaking out — with the intention of restraining Prime Minister Netanyahu from ordering Israel’s military to attack Iran.

Last year, Dagan told the CBS News broadcast “60 Minutes” that the likely retaliation that would follow such an attack by Israel would ruin daily life in the Jewish state.  In short, Dagan does not believe it would be worth it to attack Iran.

Now he has told Dayan on her TV show (in Hebrew) that there was a situation — when he was still the Mossad director — in which the political leaders of the country favored a military conflict, while those who would have to execute such orders were firmly against.

Meir Dagan on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” 2012

Dagan was undoubtedly referring to the opposition expressed to Prime Minister Netanyahu and his then-defense minister, Ehud Barak, by Dagan, the top military officer (Chief of the General Staff) Gabi Ashkenazi, and the head of domestic security (the agency known as Shin Bet), Yuval Diskin.

As Yossi Melman reported over 4 months ago:

“Netanyahu turned to the chief of staff, General Ashkenazi, and told him to ‘set the systems for P-plus,’ a term meaning to swiftly increase the preparedness of the military in case of a war with Iran. The measures to be taken in such a situation could include moving military units, strengthening intelligence capabilities and preparing the home front for a war. …

“The truth is that Netanyahu and Barak did not order the military to plan a direct, all-out attack on Iran. Their true intention was to trigger a chain of events which would create tension and provoke Iran, and eventually could have led to a war that might drag in the United States.

“At that meeting and on other occasions, General Ashkenazi warned Netanyahu and Barak that such an order could ‘create uncontrollable facts on the ground’ which could ignite an undesired regional war. ‘If you open and press an accordion, the instrument starts playing music’ was the picturesque description from the chief of staff, who retired more than a year ago.”

Now, on Israeli TV,  Meir Dagan has gone public with his account of how his country’s top political leaders — meaning Netanyahu and Barak — wanted to ready the “military and the entire systems, and then you may have a situation where you are on alert — and the other side sees it — and everybody is ready and preparing for war.  A war which maybe nobody wants.”

While hinting that he saw the danger of an unwanted war at that time, Dagan has not publicly said what he advocates.  It seems obvious that he would like robust covert action — including sabotage coordinated with the United States — to continue.

Dagan did repeat this week that he pledged, while leading the Mossad, that Iran would not create or acquire a nuclear weapons during his time as head of the spy agency.  And Iran has not developed nuclear bombs. Dagan says publicly that Iran cannot make a nuclear weapon before 2014, meaning that there still is time to slow down the Iranians — or for American military action to destroy Iranian facilities far more thoroughly than could Israel.

Amos Yadlin, at an AIPAC policy conference

Yadlin, who was one of the pilots who bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in Baghdad in 1981, is now the director of a think tank affiliaited with Tel Aviv University, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).

He was quoted worldwide this week as saying that this summer, Iran will have surpassed the level indicated by Netanyahu as an intolerable line — perhaps even a casus belli for Israel.

Much has changed, of course, since September. Netanyahu has been reelected and has a different coalition of ministers who seem less willing than their predecessors to consider war against Iran.  Barack Obama has also been reelected, and then he made his first visit to Israel as President — pledging that the United States will not permit Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

A new American defense secretary has been installed — a former senator, Chuck Hagel, who seemed in the past a bit skeptical about putting Israel’s security near the top of U.S. military priorities. This week, however, he had a productive and busy working visit to Israel — and could not be accused of being anything but a militant and firm friend of Israel.

Out of all this — and more, including disagreements on whether Syria’s army definitely used chemical weapons against rebels in the long and tragic civil war — comes a clarified analysis by Amos Yadlin.

General Yadlin, who commanded the largest agency in Israel’s intelligence community, made a point of telling Kol Israel radio: “I am a person who calms things and doesn’t inflame them.”  Yet he confirmed that he criticized Netanyahu’s decision to set a public “red line,” because Iran can keep its quantity of uranium enriched to a 20% or higher level just below the line declared by the prime minister.  ”But the Iranians can continue to enrich, in large quantities, at lower enrichment levels — in a very wide program with a very large number of centrifuges,” Yadlin added.  (Quotations are somewhat paraphrased from his statements in Hebrew on the radio.)

He said that this could open the way to “a bad deal to be negotiated by the major nations with Iran,” permitting lower-level uranium enrichment.  So far, he noted, Iran has been careful to stay “formally” below the line set by Netanyahu.

Yet Yadlin suggested that Israel does not have to feel compelled to attack Iran, even if that country does surpass the “red line” this summer.  ”There are many things that can be done before an attack,” the retired general said — hinting at covert action inside Iran.  ”Last year I said that we have to give diplomacy and sanctions more chance, and there are the various things that happen to the Iranian reactors and nobody takes credit for them.”

He said he continues to believe that in the second half of this year or at the start of 2014, “every one of the three leaders — of Iran, Israel, and the USA — will have to make a tough decision.”  Yadlin has suggested that Iran will have the capability, if decided by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to break out quickly toward building nuclear bombs.

“There are different timetables between the United States and Israel,” said Yadlin, “due to different capabilities.”  Israel is determined to prevent Iran from getting near the break-out to bomb construction, whereas the United States might not turn to military action until Iran is actually putting together a bomb — “and that could be years,” said Yadlin.

“I assume President Obama and the Prime Minister discussed this during the President’s visit, and just because a ‘red line’ is crossed doesn’t force an attack [by Israel or the U.S.].”

The radio host asked whether Hagel’s announcement that the U.S. will sell mid-air refueling planes, Osprey tilt-rotor helicopters, and advanced radar to Israel is intended as a message to “just sit quietly, because you have plenty of weapons.”

Yadlin replied: “The public doesn’t understand just what happened.  Hagel announced approval to sell weapons, but then that may or may not fit into the plans of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces].  And it’s not clear when the weapons would be received.  That’s typically 3 years.  So it’s not relevant to the discussion [over bombing Iran this year or next year].”

Noting that the IDF chief of staff, General Benny Gantz, said this week that Israel could attack Iran on its own and be effective, Yadlin commented: “He’s right.  Israel can do it.  And I believe there wouldn’t be a world war, and the Middle East wouldn’t burn.  But Iran would react.  It wouldn’t be like Iraq [which did not respond in 1981].  Yet Iran’s capabilities are not quite as publicly presented.  So an attack [by Israel] is not automatic, and the Iranian response would not necessarily be what other people think.”

If you’re assuming there will be a regional war, out of this nuclear issue,  Yadlin advises: “I say calm down.”

Al-Monitor, an independent website specializing in Middle East news, has Laura Rozen tweeting from the Kazakh capital — with perhaps a hint of hope: a U.S. source saying there was a “whole new level of engagement” and “very intense talks on substance,” but the sides remain “far apart.”

Netanyahu at the UN in New York, September 2012

In a report by Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Western diplomats were said to be “puzzled” that Iran did not fully respond to an offer that might have moved some way toward Iran’s demand that its right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes be recognized.

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, although busy (as expected) with domestic issues and his new coalition cabinet, can be expected to find the time — most likely at the Sunday cabinet meeting — to issue a form of “I told you so.” He has repeatedly expressed his doubts that negotiations and sanctions will persuade Iran to halt its work aimed (in the view of Israel and most Western governments) at building nuclear bombs.

While welcoming President Barack Obama’s declaration that the United States won’t allow Iran to create or obtain a nuclear weapon, Netanyahu and Obama still disagree on what is and isn’t acceptable.

As is said in the Middle East, they disagree on what is the Red Line.  The U.S. and Israel obviously will need a lot of behind-the-scenes discussions if they are to establish a united stand.

In the meantime, covert actions — including unprecedented joint operations by American and Israeli espionage agencies — aimed at slowing Iran’s nuclear work are believed to be continuing.