Foreign diplomats at an event in Tehran this week mingled with little sense of urgency, waving away as posturing the US move to pull some non-essential personnel from the Middle East.
Iran and the US were due to hold crunch nuclear talks in Oman on Sunday, and Washington was making a show, was the consensus not just among the diplomats, but at the top of western companies in the region.
Less than 30 hours later, Israel had struck, launching air strikes that hit Iran’s primary nuclear sites and military facilities, and killed its top four commanders.
It was not the US evacuation that appears to have been a ruse, it is now apparent, but the notion that the Trump administration was preparing for more talks — a device to lure Tehran into a false sense of security, softening it up for Israel’s latest lethal attack.
The subterfuge seems to have worked. One Arab diplomat and one senior western diplomat told the Financial Times that they believed the US personnel drawdowns had been a ploy for leverage in the talks.
Their premise — shared for months by Iranian politicians, businessmen and foreign diplomats — was that as long as nuclear talks that President Donald Trump so frequently hailed were continuing, the US would pull its ally Israel back from any attack.
Many of these people thought it would not be until July or August, at the earliest, that the talks would run their course. There were even suggestions in Washington that Trump’s relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu had frayed, and that the US was losing patience with the Israeli prime minister.
Now, as Israel’s attack brings a new eruption of conflict in a war-weary Middle East, the US finds itself engaged in another regional conflict — the kind of warfare the Trump vowed to keep his country out of.
On Friday, as Iran retaliated by firing a barrage of missiles at Israel, US officials told the FT that the US was helping its long-standing ally shoot down the rockets.
How involved was the US all along?
Washington “knew this was coming, and they helped maintain this fiction that there would be a meeting” on Sunday between Iran’s foreign affairs minister Abbas Araghchi and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, said Aaron David Miller, a former US state department negotiator in the Middle East now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“So to that degree, they co-operated with the Israelis in the ruse, and it clearly worked.”
Even as Israel was attacking Iran, the US was not prepared to openly acknowledge that. Secretary of state Marco Rubio stressed that it had been a “unilateral” action taken by Israel, and that the US was “not involved”.
Missing from his statement was the typical US emphasis on its “ironclad” support for its ally.
Hours later, both Netanyahu and Trump were acknowledging that the US had been kept abreast of the plans.
“Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up. It was, ‘we know what’s going on’,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal on Friday. He had spoken to Netanyahu on Thursday, he said. Later, the president praised the strikes as “excellent” in an interview with ABC News.
It marked a big change in tone from his comments to US media on Thursday, where he told reporters that at attack by Israel “might blow” up the talks. “Might help it, actually,” he added. “But it also could blow it.”
That might also have been part of the deception.
Miller suggested Israel’s decapitation strategy — its lethal attacks against the top brass of Iran’s military leadership — was among the reasons the elaborate ruse was maintained.
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“No Israeli prime minister would have dared to have done this had he got a resounding ‘no’ from Trump.”
Emile Hokayem, director of regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said it was “only fair to wonder whether the Americans were part of a sophisticated campaign of deception all along”.
Trump likes decisive military force, Hokayem said, so he may claim credit for Israel’s attack.
“But it is just as likely that Netanyahu enrolled him in his own plan.”
Some people have speculated Trump may have deliberated on it during a trip last weekend to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.
A person familiar with the situation said Israel’s final preparations for the strikes came on Monday and that the Trump administration had been informed of the plan and raised no objection.
“The US was in the know all along,” the person said.
In a televised address on Friday, Netanyahu said that Israel told the US about the impending attacks “through many meetings”.
“American support — or at least America not opposing — is something we very much want,” he said.
On his Truth Social platform, Trump also hinted that he knew what Israel would do next. “There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end.”
Even as the president pushed publicly for a diplomatic solution, “it’s likely Israel came to Trump . . . and said Iran is taking steps to shorten breakout and towards weaponisation”, said Dan Shapiro, former deputy assistant secretary of defence for the Middle East and former US ambassador to Israel.
“To which Trump gave the classic ‘yellow light’ — not a ‘hell no’, but not an endorsement either,” he added.
Phil Gordon, who was national security adviser to former vice-president Kamala Harris, said that while the US clearly got on board with Israel’s plan in the end, “I don’t think it’s the case that for weeks or months . . . [Trump] was just pretending to go along to lull the Iranians into complacency”.
Other Middle East foreign policy experts said the ruse theory would have been too complex for a leader less interested in operational specifics.
“He’s not a detailed guy,” said Elliott Abrams, the US special representative for Iran and Venezuela during the first Trump administration. This was a situation where “you don’t want to know in advance exactly when and what”.
The Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, had also kept the US in the dark about other operations, he noted.
And if the conflict between Israel and Iran turns into a larger conflict, the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu could fray once again.
While the two now appear closer than they were just a few days ago, analysts warned this may not last.
Suzanne Maloney, a former state department adviser now at the Brookings Institution think-tank, said the relationship could fray again if the US was dragged into a wider war, “something that President Trump has campaigned against throughout his own political career”.
Gordon said of Trump: “We’ve seen him go hot and cold on people over time.”
Trump was also much more comfortable with uncertainty than other world leaders, and more willing to take geopolitical events as they come, said Jon Alterman, a former state department official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank.
Trump’s “secret weapon” was that while other leaders seek certainty, he was “willing to deal with ambiguity, with uncertainty, with risk”.
Additional reporting by Raya Jalabi in Beirut, Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Andrew England in London