Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

After four years at the helm, Efraim Halevy had departed as Mossad’s spymaster as quietly as he had arrived. Within Mossad ranks, the memory of his studious presence—his thin lips pursed before speaking, his eyes impassive behind his spectacles—had been largely forgotten. Those who did remember him on the upper floors spoke of Halevy as the man who spectacularly failed to lead the service into the new millennium and failed to make it a force to be reckoned with. In 2008 he published his memoir of those days, Man in the Shadows . It was an unsuccessful attempt to tell his side of the criticism that had dogged him throughout most of his tenure. But it also provided a platform for him to issue a warning: the further Israel is from the last attack, and for that matter, the countries of Europe and the United States, the closer it is to the next one. “Much of what lies ahead can only be achieved in a clandestine manner. In order to triumph we shall have to understand that diplomacy is the art of the possible, that intelligence is the craft of the impossible. And life is fast becoming more impossible than ever in human history,” he said (to the author).

In between time spent in London to launch his book and talking to Nathan, the Mossad station chief, he spoke to the author about his belief that the United States and Britain would have to “make fateful decisions” concerning their Middle East policies. “In Iran and Iraq they cannot simply gather their troops and head for home. They must adopt a firm exit strategy, one that will need a positive contribution from Israel. That will mean being sensitive to our interests and visions.” He concluded by delivering a grim warning: “We are looking down the barrel of World War Three unless the world wakes up.”

Shortly afterward, Meir Amit, now a member of Israel’s leading think-tank spoke out (to the author): “Israel must continue to take strong measures to defend itself. Terrorism is like a cancer, spreading silently and effectively. No nation can fight it alone. Saddam Hussein is yesterday’s monster. But we have a new one in Iran, whipping up the Shia revolutionary hurricane that will soon engulf Israel and, left unchecked, will engulf the world beyond our borders.”

The first breeze of that hurricane was already starting to blow across the Gaza Strip.

A reminder of the constant terrorist threat to Israel came when Swiss intelligence, working closely with a Mossad agent in the country and officers of France’s SDEC, disrupted a well-prepared plot to shoot down an El-Al passenger plane with a rocket propelled grenade as it flew in to land at Geneva airport. Documents recovered from the seven Algerians responsible showed the plot had been masterminded from Madrid. Shortly before the attack, its two al-Qaeda operators had returned to North Africa.

But cooperation did not always run so smoothly. Meir Dagan received a report from his Mossad agent in New York of a closed-door discussion between foreign ministers after intelligence predictions. These suggested that Iran was, in May 2006, “possibly only a year away from producing a nuclear device.” Tension erupted at the meeting when Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, verbally attacked the U.S. state department official, Nicholas Burns, who was the senior adviser to the meeting’s host, Condoleezza Rice. Lavrov accused Burns of “seeking to undermine our efforts to resolve the crisis with Iran.” Ministers from Britain, France, Germany, and China, all members of the United Nations Security Council, were stunned at Lavrov’s outburst in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel suite where they had gathered. The Mossad agent’s report offered a revealing insight into the back-room disagreement of high-level diplomacy.

It was British foreign minister Margaret Beckett’s first day in her post and she was taken aback by how bad-tempered the discussion had become. Lavrov had arrived late and was still furious about a speech U.S. Vice President Cheney had just made in Lithuania in which he had criticized Kremlin policies. Lavrov castigated Dr. Rice and her team using the kind of language, Minister Beckett was heard to say, that was more in line with Cold War rhetoric. At one point, Lavrov threatened to veto a security council resolution that Britain and France had drafted and which Washington supported. It was a new attempt to persuade Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program.

Despite efforts by John Sawers, the British Foreign Office political director, to calm matters, Lavrov continued to rage. At another point, he attacked Israel claiming its policies were “designed to drag us all into conflict.” Dr. Rice intervened by telling Lavrov he was “not being helpful.” During dinner the row rumbled on until Lavrov abruptly left. The next day over breakfast John Sawers sat down with senior delegates from China, France, the United States, and Germany to find a proposal to put before the foreign ministers at their lunch. It would give Iran a new trade deal with the West, security guarantees against any attack from Israel, and nuclear technology “which will only be used for non-aggressive purposes” on condition Iran would halt all production of weapons-grade uranium.

Over lunch—salmon and Californian Chablis, which the French delegation barely touched—Dr. Rice emphasized the proposal was “a major shift in our policy.” However, Margaret Beckett had been briefed that it was doubtful Iran would accept it. The meal broke up with the decision to put the matter on hold for further discussion—diplomatic-speak meaning that it had little chance of success. At a summit of Islamic heads of state in Indonesia a few days later, President Ahmadinejad said, “I will consider negotiating with anyone except Israel. It has no place on this earth.”

The Mossad agent monitoring the conference had more disturbing news. Russian officials attending the conference as “observers” had secretly offered to sell Iran technology that could help protect its nuclear secrets from international scrutiny. The equipment would include state-of-the-art security encryption technology developed by Atlas Elektronik, a Russian government-controlled defense company.

As May drew to a close, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) found themselves increasingly responding to Hamas rocket attacks on settlements. Encouragement for Hamas to continue its guerrilla warfare grew more vociferous from Tehran. A Mossad deep-cover agent in the Iranian capital sent the first details of a hitherto unknown nuclear underground site in northern Iran at Abe-e Ali. The report revealed that over three hundred Chinese and North Korean nuclear experts were working to produce a new centrifuge to enable the high-speed purification of uranium to achieve the 90 percent level required for weapons-grade. Ehud Olmert agreed with Meir Dagan that the evidence was of such great importance the Mossad chief and Nathan should fly to London, and then on to Washington.

For several hours over orange juice, coffee, and sandwiches the two men showed John Scarlett and other MI6 officers the evidence acquired from inside Iran. It included close-up photographs of the Abe-e Ali complex and two new workshops at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Dagan’s briefing formed a key part of a meeting of Britain’s defense chiefs after Condoleezza Rice told Prime Minister Blair that “if all else fails on the diplomatic front, we are prepared to go it alone, or with the assistance of our good friend, Israel.” An official who was at the meeting told the author, “She made it plain that going it alone meant military action.”

The meeting was held in the monolithic Ministry of Defense building in Whitehall and was chaired by General Sir Michael Walker, the chief of Britain’s defense staff. The Foreign Office team was led by William Ehrman, director general of the defense office, and David Landman, head of the nuclear proliferation department. Both had played an important role in bringing Libya out of the political wilderness. John Scarlett and Eliza Manningham-Buller were on hand to brief the meeting on Israel’s position. For the first time the Pentagon battle plans for an all-out assault on Iran were on the table. Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles would be launched from U.S. navy ships and submarines in the Gulf to target Iran’s air defense systems at the nuclear installations. The updated Tomahawks had an onboard facility that allowed them to be reprogrammed while in-flight to attack an alternative target once the initial one was destroyed. Each missile also had a “loitering” capability over a target area to provide damage assessment through its on-board TV camera. U.S. Air Force B2 stealth bombers, each equipped with eight 4,500-pound bunker-busting bombs, would fly from Diego Garcia, the isolated U.S. navy base in the Indian Ocean, the Whiteman USAF base in Missouri, and the USAF base at Fairford in Gloucestershire, England. Each meter-long bomb of hardened steel could penetrate six meters of concrete. There would be no ground-force follow-up attacks.