Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan received a thank you call from Eliza Manningham-Buller. At the end she said, “We may not have caught them all, but it’s a start.” For the intelligence chief it was a good result to justify what Mossad tries to do.

In September 2006, the arrival once more of the first cooling breezes was a time to which the Jews of Israel and the Muslims of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip would look forward. A time when Jewish mothers prepared borscht, beetroot soup, and young lovers walked down the Cardo, the covered street in the Jewish quarter of Old Jerusalem and, nearby, the Muslim faithful worshipped within the cool of Haram al-Sharif, the enclosure in the Muslim quarter of Old Jerusalem, which contained the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site of the Islamic world. This, too, all went on as it had for many centuries, rituals as ancient as wearing the Tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl, and the checkered Arab headdress.

But now there were other matters to preoccupy the people of the Holy Land. In Gaza the fighting continued with guerrilla attacks by Hamas and counter assaults by Israel. The Israeli Air Force launched precision-bombing raids across the Strip. Shin Bet, the internal security force, rounded up more legally-elected members of the Hamas-dominated parliament on the grounds they belonged to an organization whose military wing was responsible for the continued kidnappings, rocket attacks, and suicide bombers.

In Israel, the fallout from the war in Lebanon continued and calls came every day for the resignation of those deemed to be responsible for the country’s failure. Early on in the conflict, Dan Halutz, after his air force had destroyed fifty-four Hezbollah rocket launchers, had announced “we have won the war.” Now, on the streets of Israeli cities, the words were publicly mocked as it gradually became clear after five weeks of fighting the last of the optimism had evaporated, and with it, the invincible reputation of the Israeli armed forces. Instead of celebrations, which had greeted other victories, the air was filled with anger over poor training of the soldiers and outdated equipment. Despite individual acts of bravery, some of the men of the IDF had been pushed to the point of mutiny. A humiliated Halutz wrote a contrite letter to all his soldiers in which he admitted “there were mistakes and these will be corrected.” But as the days of September passed, it became far from clear whether the fifty-eight-year-old fighter pilot, who had flown with distinction in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, would survive. A poll revealed that 54 percent wanted Halutz to resign.

Even though Ehud Olmert had announced he would set up a public inquiry into the conduct of the war, it did little to reduce the national anger Israelis directed at him. Sixty-three percent of the electorate polled said he should resign at once; his defense minister, Amir Peretz, fared even worse: 74 percent demanded he should leave office as soon as possible. Both politicians had been overwhelmingly dominated by Halutz and his dependence on air power, which had brought swift victory in previous conflicts. Mossad analysts, who had been monitoring public attitudes, also saw a consensus forming among IDF veterans that Halutz had failed to understand air power was only there to assist ground forces and could never win a modern-day war. It was a view Meir Dagan had put forward in those early-day meetings in the war room. He had argued, in the calm, cogent matter which had been his hallmark since taking over Mossad, that air power should have been supported by ground forces capable of driving Hezbollah back from the border area. But now the first murmurs had also surfaced in the street as to why the intelligence—always a critical factor in any past war Israel fought—had been so inept. Why had Mossad not discovered well before battle commenced the exact whereabouts of the Hezbollah rocket sites? Why had its agents not pinpointed the fallback positions of the launchers? Why had they not been able to more effectively track the movements of Hassan Nasrallah?

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, while parading through the streets of Beirut in triumph, also had suffered heavy casualties. Those who had survived watched fifty French army engineers come ashore, the vanguard of the seven thousand UN troops promised by the European Union states as peacemakers. The UN had also received offers of soldiers from several Muslim countries, some of which did not even recognize Israel. It did not augur well for the future—particularly as President Bashar al-Assad of Syria again began to make threatening announcements that time “will once more come when we have to retake the Golan Heights by force.”

But the real threat came from Iran. Not only had it been the real beneficiary of the conflict, it had united the Sunnis and the Shias in common agreement to fight the detested infidels. From having its back to the wall only three years before, when the invasion of Iraq had intimidated the ayatollahs next door, Iran had emerged as the influential power in the region’s Muslim world. It had achieved this position by shrewd opportunism and the miscalculations of its enemies. It had either ignored or played subtle politics against the threats of the UN Security Council to punish it with economic sanctions for consistently refusing to stop producing enriched uranium, a process to make the material for nuclear bombs. In that first week of September, Iran’s contempt continued to be demonstrated when it announced “a new phase” in its heavy water construction, ignoring the opposition of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear inspectorate. Mossad had already discovered the plant had been operational since mid-August. In a memo to Olmert, Meir Dagan reminded the embattled prime minister that India, Pakistan, and North Korea had all opened similar plants to convert uranium into plutonium for bombs.

Mossad analysts believed Iran’s mercurial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was counting on the disunity of the Security Council and the continued support of China and Russia to block any UN sanctions. John Bolton, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, had spoken of imposing them through a “coalition of the willing.” But would they include Jacques René Chirac and Tony Blair? Both were leaders in the twilight of their political power.

In a prophetic memo, a Mossad analyst wrote in late August: “The world must face that Iran is determined to become a nuclear military power. Inevitably that would lead to a nuclear arms race. Syria will feel emboldened to go for ‘the nuclear option.’ Saudi Arabia might well want to do the same. Egypt might also consider ‘going nuclear.’ We would then face a new and most dangerous situation.”

It was against this background that Olmert appointed his air force chief, Major General Elyezer Shkedy, to be overall commander for a new department within the IDF. It was to be called “The Iran Front.” Its task was two-fold. First, to task Mossad in obtaining “all possible intelligence from within Iran by all possible means.” In turn that information would form part of a working battle plan. On Shkedy’s appointment, his first visitor had been Meir Dagan. For several hours, Shkedy, the forty-nine-year-old son of Holocaust survivors—whose prized possession was a picture of an Israel F-15 flying over Auschwitz—spelled out his requirements. Dagan asked what was the timeframe. Shkedy replied, “the list of options is becoming shorter. But on present calculations there may be a year before we have to decide.” That decision, of course, would not be finally made in Israel. It would ultimately come from Washington, made by the Pentagon and delivered from the Oval Office by President George W. Bush. He had already told his inner cabinet—Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice—that Israel was “singing from the same hymn sheet as we are. We have no argument about Iran’s intentions. It’s going to do all it can to go nuclear.”