The man who is given most public credit for negotiating a groundbreaking deal between Israel and the UAE is the head of Mossad, Yossi Cohen. He has been talking secretly with fellow spooks in the Gulf states for years, pointing out that they shared a common enemy: Iran. But there was one encounter about 20 months ago when he let slip another agenda. “Iranian power is fragile,” he reportedly told spymasters from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, “but the real threat is from Turkey.”
That was quite something coming from the spy chief who masterminded the Israeli heist of large chunks of the Iranian nuclear archive from a warehouse in central Tehran. His point, though, was not that Iran had ceased to be an