Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Dagan revealed that Mossad had discovered Ali Shamkhani, Iran’s defense minister, was in secret discussions with Syria to move eleven Iraqi nuclear scientists from Damascus to Tehran. They had arrived in Syria shortly before the collapse of the Saddam regime, bringing with them CDs of their research on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program. In Syria the scientists had been given new identities and hidden away in a military base north of Damascus. Syria’s president, Bashir Asad, made one stipulation for the transfer to Iran: it must share its nuclear research with Syria. It could provide al-Qaeda with the basis to make a dirty bomb—yet another threat the men around the table had long feared.

Six years before, on April 21, 1999, over a hundred Israeli sailors had checked into small hotels and gasthause in the German port city of Kiel. They wore casual clothes and, when asked, told their hosts they were members of a holiday club. Each was a member of Force 700, created to give Israel a crucial third pillar of its nuclear defense to equal their country’s already powerful land- and air-strike capability.

Thirty-two years before, their predecessors had performed a similar function to smuggle seven gunboats out of Cherbourg, which had been paid for but which the French government of the day had embargoed after Israeli commandoes had destroyed thirteen Lebanese aircraft at Beirut airport—itself a reprisal for a PLO attack on an El Al 707 at Athens airport two days’ previously.

The decision to create Force 700 had come only much later, when Israel had placed an order with the Howaldswerke Deutsche Werft shipyard for three Dolphin-class submarines, among the most modern afloat, each displacing 1,720 tonnes and costing US$300 million apiece. The arrival of the sailors in Kiel on a warm spring day was surrounded with even more secrecy than Operation Noah had used to smuggle the gunboats out of France.

Critical to the Kiel operation had been keeping secret that among the thirty-five Israeli naval officers and ratings for each submarine were five specialist technicians who would be responsible for firing the nuclear weapons each submarine would carry if the order was given. These armaments would be fitted when the boats reached Haifa.

The three Dolphins left Kiel and headed for Haifa where specially prepared pens awaited them. For the next six weeks they were fitted with an adapted version of the Promis software that had been developed by Inslaw, the specialist Washington-based company. The software would allow each submarine to locate and destroy a target up to one thousand miles away. Promis was also programmed to probe defenses around a target and calculate the complex mathematics that would ensure a direct hit. After the software had been installed, each submarine was equipped with twenty-four cruise missiles. Fitted with nuclear warheads, each missile would have a destructive power greater than the Hiroshima bomb. Test firings, using dummy warheads, had been successfully carried out in the Indian Ocean.

Now, on that March day in 2005, the three Dolphins were directed to take up station on the seabed in the Persian Gulf and target Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The matter of if and when to launch a preemptive strike against Iran would require Mossad to make a clear recommendation to prime minister Ariel Sharon. As the air in the Kirya conference room grew heavy with cigarette smoke, everyone knew that, depending on what the response would be, it could destroy President Bush’s Middle East peace plan—already plagued with uncertainties—and trigger a powerful retaliation from Tehran against Israel and Jewish interests around the world. A preemptive strike against Iran could also draw fire from Syria and unleash the various terrorist groups in all-out jihad.

The head of the Research and Political Center raised other considerations. How would America, Britain, and the rest of the world react to such a strike? There were now powerful voices in the United States and Europe who would launch a verbal onslaught against Israel because an attack on Iran would create an environmental catastrophe on a par with the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986. Israel could find itself politically and economically isolated in the world.

But any attack would require a measure of coordination with American forces in the Gulf. Israeli warplanes would probably require to overfly Turkey and close to Iraqi airspace, which was under the complete control of the Pentagon. But that would present a further problem with Washington. The Arab world, and probably beyond, would see an air attack as part of a joint effort with the United States. Almost certainly it would be followed by new terrorist strikes on American soil.

Increasingly the feeling among the men in the Kirya conference room was to take all necessary precautions but not recommend a preemptive strike. In the meantime, Meir Dagan would send his already hard-pressed agents back into Kurdish Iraq, long a listening post close to Iran, and send other katsas into a country that had also become an area of mounting concern for the Mossad chief: Pakistan.

The mountain Spring flowers of the Hindu Kush would have briefly blossomed when the Mossad agent met his Pakistani informer. Both were on the front line against terrorism, bound by a common cause. Pakistan had become part of Mossad’s front line against terrorism since the arrival of al-Qaeda as the world’s major terror group. To recruit informers in the country was a priority. Jamal, the code name for the Mossad agent, had encountered Horaj on his first trip to the region in 2001. Jamal had listened carefully to Horaj as Horaj expressed fears that Pakistan would become a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism he was ready to do anything to stop. Initially, Jamal wondered if Horaj’s offer to inform for Israel had really been motivated by a desire to return respectability to his religion, which had been hijacked by the Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden, who he believed had distorted the words of the Prophet to create hatred and fear. But Mossad psychologists had studied Jamal’s background reports on Horaj and decided he could serve a useful role. Conspicuously excluded from the Washington list of states that sponsored terrorism was Pakistan. Indeed, after the September 11 attacks, the country had been regularly praised in the words of Condoleezza Rice as “our important ally in the war on terrorism.” On the speed dial of her secure desk telephone was a button that enabled the secretary of state to reach Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf. Another button was her direct link to President George Bush. Dr. Rice, a fifty-year-old former academic and Soviet specialist, was Bush’s key adviser on foreign affairs and had guided his decision to keep Pakistan on-side, choosing to ignore that since 1989 the country had supported a number of Kashmiri terror groups in their war against India. They had carried out several mass killings on the subcontinent, helped by Pakistani intelligence agents to select targets and provide advance planning, which had included the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.

Mossad had become alarmed when Pakistan had developed its nuclear capability, which Musharraf had lauded as “our equaliser, which serves as a restraining influence on India.” In Washington, Israel’s fear that Pakistan had a weapon that could threaten the Jewish state was downplayed. A large number of officers in Pakistan’s intelligence services were not only members of the country’s radical religious groups but were also strong supporters of al-Qaeda. Would that terror group one day be able to acquire the means to make at least a “dirty bomb” or even obtain a fully fledged nuclear weapon? It was a question constantly debated within Mossad and which had once more brought Jamal on a long journey through icy ravines and past mountains shrouded in cloud to keep his appointment. Waiting for him was his informer, Horaj. The payment Horaj received each time he met Jamal may also have been a contributing factor to have brought him once more to this bleak vastness close to the roof of the world.