Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Increasingly the specialists saw an issue of major concern was whether Ahmadinejad would realize his idea of Armageddon across the Middle East—and possibly soon. On that New Year’s Day they knew whether Israel would be forced to launch a preemptive attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities would depend on their analysis.

Plans had been finalized. Fifty Alsatian dogs would spearhead the attack on Natanz, the nuclear bomb-making complex ninety miles northeast of Tehran. The animals would be fitted with body belts of armor-piercing explosives able to penetrate the entrance to underground laboratories where Mossad’s deep-cover agents had established thousands of centrifuges—the crucial device essential to produce weapons-grade uranium—were working around the clock. The dogs had been trained at an exact replica of the Natanz site constructed in the Negev Desert. Their handlers were part of the elite Oketz unit. The body belts would be detonated by remote control by their handlers. They had practiced mounting low-level helicopter attacks on the dummy site. Providing covering fire for any attack would be the Sholdag force modeled on the SAS. They would be supported by Israel’s Air Force 69 Squadron, based at the Herzerim air base in the Negev. Over the New Year its pilots continued training for the long-haul flight to Iran and back without refueling. Each £60 million plane was equipped with the latest weaponry, including the “over the horizon” Promis software that could pinpoint a target forty miles away. The Dolphin submarines remained hidden in the depths of the Gulf of Oman. Their twenty missiles each would support the air attack.

While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continued to threaten Israel would be “wiped from the map,” Meir Dagan chaired a “crisis meeting” in the Kirya in early January to study the latest satellite pictures from Israel’s own spy in the sky. The images showed the completed construction of a large new underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Accompanying the images were new reports from Mossad deep-penetration agents in Iran and other Arab capitals. The meeting had been asked to assess the fallout from a preemptive strike against Iran. It was accepted that a wave of terrorism would follow. Hezbollah would launch rockets from Lebanon. Arab nations would publicly condemn. But Mossad chief Dagan said his intelligence predicted that Arab nations, while publicly condemning, would be “relieved that Iran’s fangs had been drawn.” The meeting was told that two more Chinese air force transport aircraft landed at a military airfield near Natanz and unloaded crates of the state-of-the-art centrifuge known as P-2. It is designed to interconnect 164 centrifuges to form a “cascade.” Gas is spun at high speed in a cascade to weaponize uranium 235 to the same capability as the Hiroshima bomb. Both China and North Korea in the past have provided Iran with nuclear-weapons technology. Pakistan’s maverick scientist, A. Q. Khan, the “father of the Islamic bomb,” later sold designs and nuclear components to Iran and other rogue states.

Mossad chief Dagan told the defense chiefs at the Kirya meeting: “Our latest intelligence shows that scientists at Natanz have begun to produce weaponized uranium. That means our original estimate that Iran would go nuclear in five years has been cut in half. We are at three minutes to midnight.” In May 2006, Dagan cut the estimate to possibly a year—one minute from midnight. Against this background the Mossad specialists continued their analysis of a man who had emerged from the shadows of Iranian politics to become a major threat to world peace. Increasingly Ahmadinejad appeared to believe he had a sense of divine mission. He had told his people he felt “the hand of God” continued to guide him after he had first threatened Israel. In December 2005, when an aircraft crashed in Tehran, killing 108 people, the president had thanked the dead “for they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow.” He daily expressed his devotion to the Mahdi, the Messiah-like figure of Shia Islam, who would return to lead the Muslim world to freedom. All streams of Islam believe in a divine savior whose return would be preceded by cosmic chaos and widespread war. The vision is similar to the Christian version of Apocalypse. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed the Mahdi would return in his own lifetime and that he had been given the task of creating chaos to hasten his arrival. He had opened the New Year with another virulent threat to destroy Israel and had exulted at the renewed fears across the world his words had generated. Was that why he had even welcomed a conflict with Israel and the United States—because he saw it as the launchpad for the Mahdi to appear? These were the questions the specialists studied but could as yet find no conclusive answers for.

As the meeting in the Kirya conference room came to an end, Meir Dagan reminded the others around the table of some of the last words Ariel Sharon had spoken before he had been rushed to hospital with a stroke: “Israel cannot, and will not, allow a nuclear-equipped Iran.” Then the Mossad chief had left the room to update himself on the medical drama that had cast a great shadow over Israel’s hopes for the New Year.

On January 4, with the setting sun low over the Judean Hills, Meir Dagan drove into the Negev Desert past the first of the guard posts which protected the perimeter of Ariel Sharon’s most prized personal possessions, his Sycamore ranch. Blending into the barren landscape, the building reflected its owner, strong and seemingly indestructible. On the seat beside Dagan was his briefcase containing the latest reports of Shaul Mofas, the soft-spoken minister of defense, and the abrasive General Dan Halutz, the chief of staff of the armed forces. Between them they had approved ten prime targets for any preemptive strike against Iran. Mofas had written: “Iran is now the greatest challenge facing us.” The decision to launch an attack would be taken by the Committee of the Heads of Services. Dagan would provide the latest intelligence. There would be consultations with Benyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, a former prime minister who had resigned from the Likud Party only to take over as its leader when Ariel Sharon had quit in December to form his own party, Kadima (Forward). His move had broken the mold of Israel’s two-party system, Likud and Labor, to establish a powerful new force. A number of key Likud politicians had joined him, among them Shimon Peres, another former prime minister. While Israelis struggled to absorb the upheaval, Sharon suffered a ministroke, but in days he was back at his desk and, at the age of seventy-seven, was still working a twelve-hour day. It would be his final decision to attack Iran.

As Dagan drove toward the ranch, he knew the next time he would see the prime minister after this meeting would be following recovery from an operation to repair a small hole in his heart, which had been discovered when he was being treated for his stroke. Alongside the plans for a strike on Iran was Mossad’s assessment of Hamas ending its “truce” of attacks on Israel. It came at a time when Sharon was still considering whether to allow Palestinians in East Jerusalem to vote in elections due later in the month; all the signs were that Hamas would make a good showing. But Dagan knew there were also personal troubles Sharon had to cope with. His son, Omri, had been forced to resign from the Knesset over a finance scandal that had led to criminal charges against him. The previous night’s television news carried a report that the net was closing on a police investigation into $3 million secretly donated by an Austrian tycoon to help the prime minister repay expenses from his last election.

Dagan reached the ranch, built on the ruins of a Palestinian village and covering two thousand acres. As usual Sharon was waiting for his intelligence chief before sitting down to eat a meal prepared by his daughter-in-law, Inbal. The relationship between the two men had always been close, united by their common background of having fought in Lebanon. Then, Sharon had been as trim as Dagan had remained, but the prime minister, at 280 pounds, was now massively overweight for his five-foot-seven-inch height. To discuss the plan for the Iran attack, they sat in the ranch’s spacious lounge. Afterward they had sipped coffee while Sharon reminisced; his eyes, restless and hard when he was younger, had now taken on an old man’s softness, but his memory was as sharp as ever. He recalled in detail how he had captured a fortified zone in the Sinai by dropping paratroopers from helicopters, a tactic still studied in military academies in the U.S. and Britain. And how in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Mossad had been caught off guard, he had virtually single-handedly turned certain defeat into a brilliant victory. Dagan, as usual, listened intently as Sharon went on to explain how he had helped form the Likud Party after Labor had refused to accept him—and how he now intended to make Kadima live up to its name. He had spoken of his dislike for Netanyahu for his fierce opposition to the evacuation of the Jewish settlements. As the evening wore on, old friends dropped in to wish Sharon well for the next day’s surgery. He told one, Reuven Adler, that he was worried about the general anaesthetic. Adler had joked, “What’s the matter, Arik, you have turned into a coward all of a sudden?” When it came time for Dagan to leave, he noticed that Sharon looked more tired and pensive.