Two weeks ago, CIA director William Burns – who has rather a lot on his plate just now – had a quiet word in the Israeli prime minister’s ear about Chinese investment in the Jewish state.

It was the latest and most urgent of America’s attempts to prevent Israel from slipping further towards the Beijing dragon’s maw, an issue which has increasingly threatened to drive a wedge between the two allies.

It’s no secret that in recent years, Uncle Sam has found himself asleep at the wheel while China has been pushing ahead in the global race. Four decades of pursuing a policy of friendship towards Beijing had simply opened the door to exploitation. With political, economic, academic and cultural spheres united under a nationalist agenda, China has been quietly rolling out a strategy for dominance. Now there is concern in Washington that Beijing has been targeting Jerusalem, seeking to narrow America’s Middle East footprint, undermine its alliances and aggravate its domestic politics.

In the last two decades, there have been more than 460 Chinese investments and mergers and acquisitions in Israel, totalling tens of billions of dollars. Today, there are up to 45 new deals annually. It will come as no surprise that these deals focus on infrastructure and technology – two key areas of security sensitivity…

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One of the West’s great foreign policy failures of 2021 was the Iran nuclear negotiations, which remained bitterly unresolved as the clock passed midnight.

Having spoken to a number of diplomatic sources on different sides in recent weeks, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the process has been woefully inept.

Not only has there been a dramatic failure to extract any concessions from Tehran – even a meaningful freeze on progress towards the bomb has remained elusive – but western negotiators have become enveloped themselves in an Asterix-style dust cloud of infighting, competing agendas and tension.

All of this, of course, is a gift to the Iranians, who have entered 2022 in a commanding position…

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Mossad recruited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to carry out a covert operation which blew up one of the regime’s most secure nuclear facilities earlier this year, the JC can reveal.

Up to 10 scientists were approached by Israeli agents and agreed to destroy the underground A1000 centrifuge hall at Natanz in April, though they believed that they were working for international dissident groups.

Some of the explosives they used were dropped into the compound by a drone and quietly collected by the scientists, while others were smuggled into the high security facility hidden in boxes of food on a catering lorry. The ensuing destruction caused chaos in the highest echelons of the Iranian leadership. It demolished 90 per cent of the centrifuges at the nuclear plant, delaying progress towards a bomb and putting the key complex out of action for up to nine months.

The new details are among astonishing secrets of three connected Mossad operations that took place over an 11-month period of sabotage in Iran. The first two, in July 2020 and April 2021, targeted the complex in Natanz using explosives, while he third, in June this year, took the form of a quadcopter assault on the Iran Centrifuge Technology Company (TESA), in the city of Karaj, 30 miles northwest of Tehran. The full details are published for the first time by the JC today.

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The Iranian nuclear scientist who was shot dead near Tehran in November was killed by a one-ton automated gun that was smuggled into the country piece-by-piece by the Mossad, the JC can reveal.

The 20-plus spy team, which comprised both Israeli and Iranian nationals, carried out the high-tech hit after eight months of painstaking surveillance, intelligence sources disclosed.

The Tehran regime has secretly assessed that it will take six years before a replacement for top scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is fully operational.

Meanwhile, Israeli analysts have concluded that his death has extended the period of time it would take Iran to achieve a bomb from about three-and-a-half months to two years — with senior intelligence figures privately putting it as high as five years.

The disclosures come as the JC gives the fullest account yet of the assassination that made headlines around the world and significantly degraded Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

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The fate of Adolf Eichmann’s four sons – some of whom were active Nazis who targeted Jews in Argentina – is disclosed by Jake Wallis Simons for the first time.

The story of how the architect of the Holocaust was kidnapped by Mossad in Argentina in 1960 before being executed in Israel has been dramatised by Netflix in a new film called ‘Operation Finale’.

Eichmann had four sons. The three eldest Klaus, Horst and Dieter, remained loyal to him even after his death, while the youngest,  Ricardo, rejected him.

Now MailOnline can reveal that Klaus and Horst are dead, while Ricardo, who was five when his father was kidnapped, is living in Germany.

We tracked down the remaining brother, Eichmann’s third son Dieter, now 76, to a flat in Buenos Aires, just a few miles from the spot where his father was abducted before being hanged.

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