Israeli envoy says U.S. and Israel planned Iran war in lockstep

Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Leiter said Washington and Jerusalem had been “in lockstep from the beginning in the planning, in the implementation, and we're going to end this thing together as well,” a sweeping claim that turns the U.S. role in the Iran war into a question of direct accountability. On CBS’s Face the Nation, Leiter said the two governments had been collaborating “for months,” with “daily conversations” even before the June 2025 operations Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer, and that he and the administration were assessing the war’s progress together.

That timeline matters because it suggests far more than loose diplomatic backing. Leiter told CBS that Israel had reached a level of collaboration with the U.S. military it had “never seen before,” while also saying Israel believed Iran’s military-security apparatus was under strain, with internal arguments over a successor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He said Israel’s plan was to secure Iran’s enriched uranium, though he declined to say how.

The public record shows a war that had already crossed multiple thresholds. Al Jazeera’s timeline says Israel launched major strikes on June 13, 2025, the United States hit Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan on June 22, Iran fired missiles toward Al Udeid airbase in Qatar on June 23, and a U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect on June 24. Al Jazeera said Iran reported at least 610 dead, while Israel said 28 people were killed on its side. The conflict reignited on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran again while U.S.-Iran nuclear talks were still underway.

The political record around those operations is less clean than Leiter’s “lockstep” framing. Reuters reported that President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held more than two and a half hours of closed-door talks at the White House on February 11, 2026, but reached no “definitive” agreement on Iran, even as Trump said negotiations with Tehran would continue. The Times of Israel reported that a New York Times account described Netanyahu presenting Trump with a regime-change plan at that meeting, with CIA Director John Ratcliffe calling it “farcical,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling it “bullshit,” and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine warning it would sharply deplete U.S. interceptor stockpiles.

CBS said Leiter’s March 8 interview aired as U.S. and Israeli forces were stepping up their bombing campaign. That makes his account more than a diplomatic flourish. It is a test of what “lockstep” meant in practice: shared targeting, shared intelligence, shared planning, and a war whose political costs would not stop at Israel’s border.