‘Tehran’ is the latest Israeli thriller, emphasis on thrills

This summer, as much of the world remained hunkered down at home amid the coronavirus pandemic, news of a series of mysterious explosions trickled out of Iran. The blasts, which took place at military or strategic locations across the Islamic Republic, including Iran’s Natanz nuclear complex, were attributed by many foreign policy experts to covert Israeli operatives participating in the continuing shadow war between Israel and Iran.

For Moshe Zonder, the creator of the new Israeli drama “Tehran,” which aired to immense popularity in Israel this summer just as those centrifuges were detonating, it was the kind of publicity money can’t buy.

“It was a bombing, and then an episode in our show, and then another bombing, and it kept going like this,” Zonder said in a telephone interview from Tel Aviv. “Everyone reacted and said, ‘Oh, Tamar Rabinyan is working!’”

“Tehran” follows Tamar Rabinyan, an Iranian-born, Israeli-raised spy sent back into Iran on her first deep-cover mission to help coordinate an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear programme. Apple TV+ picked up the series in June, partnering with Cineflix Rights and the Israeli network Kan 11, and began streaming it around the world on Sept. 25. New episodes premiere each Friday.

Filmed in Athens in Farsi, English and Hebrew, “Tehran” stars emerging Israeli actor Niv Sultan, as Tamar, along with “Homeland” alums Shaun Toub and Navid Negahban, both Iranian American.

It is the latest spy drama to come out of Israel, which despite being a country of only 8.5 million, is the one of world’s most prolific exporters of television to the United States, including adapted shows like “Hatufim” (“Prisoners of War”), the basis for the Showtime hit “Homeland,” and original series like Netflix’s “Fauda.” (Zonder was the head writer for “Fauda.”) Apple TV+ alone has two more Israeli-sourced nail-biters on deck: “Echo 3,” adapted by Mark Boal (“Hurt Locker”) from the combat drama “Bishvila Giborim Afim” (“When Heroes Fly”) which itself is available on Netflix; and “Suspicion,” an adaptation of “Kfulim” (“False Flag”), an award-winning thriller that is streaming on Hulu.

But “Tehran” is in many ways a departure from these programmes, which feature ensemble casts anchored by seasoned, psychically tortured male characters. Tamar, on her first military mission, carries no emotional wounds; her primary affliction is her sheer ambition. She is vulnerable, soft, and her femininity informs every action she takes in Iran. (Sultan, 28, enrolled in months of immersive Farsi classes to learn the language for the role.)

“This world of espionage thrillers is usually so manly,” Zonder said. Choosing a female protagonist, and a young one at that, forced him and his co-writer, Omri Shenhar, as two men writing together, to reconsider the options available to Israeli spies in times of crisis.

“When she got into trouble and she had conflicts, she needed to decide and act on what she could do as a woman in order to stay alive,” he said. “It was just as much as an adventure for us, sitting together and writing her, making her decisions.”

For seasoned Israeli security operatives, many of those decisions felt highly improbable — another way “Tehran” differs from the popular Israeli series that have come before it. Israeli military dramas are typically constrained by shoestring budgets compared with those of American productions and defined by a gritty realism. Press and social media reactions in Israel to shows like “Fauda,” “Prisoners of War” and “Our Boys,” HBO’s 2019 series about the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens and one Palestinian teen that together triggered the 2014 Gaza conflict, suggest that watching them functions as a kind of group therapy.

“Tehran,” on the other hand, is slick, wildly entertaining and packed with fantastical plot twists. Tamar becomes embroiled in a love affair with a student activist. She reconnects with her long-lost Iranian family. There are double agents, extortion and multiple international kidnappings. All in only eight episodes.

Lest any viewers think the script spills real secrets about Israel’s covert operations in Iran, Israeli intelligence officials say the show is entertaining, but highly unrealistic.

“Obviously the series was made with an audience of ordinary people in mind, and it’s a success,” said Shabtai Shavit, who served as director general of the Mossad, the Israeli spy agency, from 1989-1996. “But if it was watched by an audience from within the intelligence community, it would be as an exercise to watch a show in order to define what’s wrong with a situation.”

The premise of Tamar’s mission — slip into Iran in order to hack into its anti-aircraft system long enough to enable an Israeli attack — is itself problematic, Shavit said, because technology has long existed that would allow Tamar to do her work without ever leaving the security of her desk in Israel. But more critically, Tamar broke several cardinal rules of engagement, including recruiting local Iranians into her spy work — a move that would have been strictly forbidden — and entangling her Jewish Iranian relatives in her plot, at great risk to their lives and hers.

“As a matter of principle, we never involve Jewish people in target countries in our operations, and the reason is self-explanatory,” Shavit said. “The minute they involved the Jewish relatives there, they put them in danger. It’s simply not done.”

But while some of the big points of “Tehran” are a stretch, the small ones were handled with care. Zonder, who worked as an investigative journalist before making the transition to screenwriting, spent two years working with specialists on Iran from the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities, as well as with senior case managers from the Mossad who dealt with Iran and Iranian Jews who had immigrated to Israel.

As he did with “Fauda,” Zonder takes the cultural details seriously in “Tehran”: the hierarchy within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard; the fashion choices of Iranian dissident student subculture; the social strata signified by rhinoplasty; the societal standing of the country’s 25,000 remaining Jews.

The cast was equally committed to the details. “I had to not only learn the language, but really immerse myself in Iranian culture,” Sultan wrote in an email.

The goal was to fill out the show’s characters and world in a way that kept the Islamic Republic of “Tehran” from coming across as a faceless enemy.

“The most interesting aspect of the whole series is that it complicates life in Iran,” said Dr. Haggai Ram, a professor of Middle East studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel who specializes in Iranian culture and history. “It shows that Iranians are not just a bunch of fanatics, or just passive victims of an oppressive regime. It shows Iranian society in its complexity.”

Many Iranian Jews, watching in Israel, found the experience to be steeped in nostalgia. Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Middle East commentator who has been living in Israel since he was 14, said the transformation of Athens into Tehran was quite convincing.

“The attention to detail was phenomenal,” he said. “They even replicated the charity boxes you find on the street for needy families. It was also very good at reproducing the atmosphere of fear in Iran, in terms of the demonstrations.”

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that there are least 135,000 Jews of Iranian descent living in Israel today, many of whom came as small children during the Iranian Revolution. Zonder said that many had reached out to him since “Tehran” aired in Israel to tell him that the show had given them a clearer understanding of the dual loyalties their own parents continued to struggle with.

It’s those bits of humanity that Zonder was most eager to get right. “We picked what we wanted and needed from the research for our story,” he said. “It’s not a documentary.”

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