Spies Against Armageddon (2 page)

Chapter One

Stopping Iran

Authorized visitors and employees arriving on the third floor of Mossad headquarters—inside a highly secure campus at a major highway intersection north of Tel Aviv—see four Hebrew letters on the wall that spell
Ramsad
. In the intelligence world, full of abbreviations and acronyms, this one means
Rosh ha-Mossad
—Head of the Mossad.

The office of Meir Dagan, who held that powerful job from 2002 through 2010, revealed several clues about his thinking and how his personality was shaped. Mementoes of his military service, to be sure, dotted the walls, but unique was a photograph dating from the dark days of World War II.

On one wall was a black-and-white photo of a miserable scene: a Jewish man on his knees, wrapped in a striped
tallit
(prayer shawl), arms raised in surrender or prayer, surrounded by jeering Nazi soldiers.

Dagan would tell visitors that the Jew was his maternal grandfather, Ber Ehrlich Sloshny. He would say that his grandpa was shot a few minutes after the photo was taken, as the Germans wiped out all the thousands of Jews in the shtetl of Lokov in Ukraine.

Though not ordinarily thought of as a sentimental fellow, Dagan took along this photograph throughout his career. It hung on the walls wherever he served as a military officer. He also displayed it in his office as Ramsad.

There, it carried extra meaning: a reminder of the existential threats facing Israel throughout its history, inside a government agency tasked with countering such threats. Dagan felt that he had the special burden of ensuring the continued existence of the Jewish state.

There could be no heavier load on his shoulders than the primary one he had during eight years leading the Mossad: how to prevent Israel’s virulent enemies in the Islamic Republic of Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Dagan, when asked, seemed eager to tell how he obtained the photo of his grandfather. He explained that his father returned to Lokov from Russia after the war to look for surviving relatives. He learned that no one had made it through the Holocaust, yet he was approached by a Gentile neighbor. The man told of the Germans forcing him to bury the bodies of murdered Jews, and because he had a camera with him they boastfully ordered him to take pictures. Now, after the war, he gave the photo to Dagan’s father, who ultimately brought it with him to Israel.

For Dagan, the photo carried more than the simplistic meaning Israeli political leaders often intend when they declare that Jews must “never again” be wiped out and need the power to defend themselves.

For him, the photo also conveyed a moral lesson. When Dagan looked at it, he was amazed how people could easily turn into persecutors and beasts. He realized that it could happen to almost anyone.

Certainly, as the Mossad chief with a wide variety of means at his control, that transformation could have happened to him. The Ramsad could have misled himself into thinking he was almost like God. He held vast power in his hands. He could seal the fate of practically anyone.

When Dagan weighed which powers to use, how and when, confronting Iran presented huge challenges and occasional dilemmas. Around two years into his term, in 2004, when Dagan concluded definitively that the ayatollahs’ regime would be his number-one priority, there was a need to strategize how best to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions preceded the rise of the Shi’ite clerics and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Those ambitions began in the mid-1950s, during Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign and his tacit appointment by the United States as the “policeman” of the region.

As Iran’s monarch, the Shah was certainly the darling of the U.S. nuclear power industry. He was a fantastic customer, busily buying American-made power plants. They were meant to produce electricity, but the monarch did not hide his hope that one day he would use the technology for military purposes: to build bombs and extend his hegemonic influence.

In those pre-1979 days, Israel also wanted a piece of the lucrative Iranian pie. The Shah and his regime were close allies of the Jewish state since the 1950s. Israel was fighting the Arabs; and Iran, though majority Muslim, did not see itself as part of the Arab peoples and had friction with them. The Shah’s aspirations clashed with those of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Saudi Arabia’s royal rulers. Getting together with Israel was a marriage of convenience.

Israeli intelligence trained Savak, the Shah’s brutal secret police and espionage service. As part of the compensation, the Shah allowed the Mossad to operate on his soil as a base for recruiting agents in Iraq and other countries. Iran even provided documentation to enhance the Israelis’ cover stories.

Israeli arms manufacturers did a thriving business with Iran. The Shah sold oil to Israel and financed joint weapons ventures, including an improved version of the Jericho ground-to-ground missile, made by Israel based on a design that France apparently shared willingly in the early 1960s.

The joint missile project, codenamed Flower, was supposed to provide a means of delivery for Israel’s nuclear weapons. And the Shah, with his nuclear aspirations, was thinking just the same thing for
his
future arsenal.

Then came Shimon Peres, the defense official—and future prime minister and president of Israel—who was one of the creators of his own nation’s secret nuclear program. Peres offered the Shah nuclear technology and the use of Israel Atomic Energy Commission experts.

Israel, decades later, would have felt deep embarrassment and regret had the Shah said yes. The Israelis would have been helping their future arch-enemy go nuclear. The Shah said no. He did not need the Israelis’ help. He already had American, French, German, and Canadian companies queuing up for big contracts with him.

After overthrowing the Shah in 1979, the new Shi’ite rulers did not have time or resources to devote to a nuclear program. They were tied down by a decade-long war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That terrible conflict, which left over a million dead on both sides, prompted them to think again. The Iraqis were using chemical weapons and poison gas against Iranians along the front, while striking Iran’s cities with long-range Scud missiles.

Ayatollah Khomeini noticed that the world was silent in the face of these war crimes, and the intense and brooding cleric was livid to discover that the United States was supporting Iraq. Iran’s supreme spiritual leader had been opposed to non-conventional weapons, on the religious grounds that innocents are typically the victims of mass destruction. But after the war, Khomeini changed his mind, concluding that Iran needed to match its enemies—if only as a deterrent.

In the early 1990s, after Khomeini’s death, Iran renewed its atomic bomb-building program. It had some help from Russia and China, but above all from Pakistan’s notorious nuclear traveling salesman, Abdul Qader Khan.

The Iranians confined themselves to buying drawings and instruction sheets for the construction of “cascades” of centrifuges, to be used for enriching uranium. Enrichment centers would have to be built, but Iran felt quite able to do it—unlike the Libyans, who around 1992 bought a ready-to-use project entirely from A.Q. Khan.

Amazingly, at that point, Israeli intelligence and the defense ministry did not perceive Iran as a threat. They even allowed Israeli companies and middlemen to sell security and military gear to the ayatollahs.

The deals were secret, however, in part to hide them from the United States. The Americans would have vigorously opposed such deals, because of the humiliation of their 52 diplomats being held as hostages in Tehran from late 1979 to early 1981.

The most worrisome, far-reaching set of transactions involved Nahum Manbar. The Israeli businessman traveled to Poland in the late 1980s and started selling Polish weapons to Iran, which was desperate to replenish its arms supply after the punishing war with Iraq. Establishing solid contacts in the Iranian defense ministry, Manbar supplied raw materials from China and Hungary that Iran used to make chemical weapons.

Britain’s MI6 spy agency noticed his activities, some conducted on British soil, but could not believe that an Israeli would be working so closely with the Iranians. British intelligence analysts naturally concluded that Manbar was a Mossad operative who was out to penetrate Iran’s chemical and defense secrets. He was not.

In fact, the Mossad and the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service—Israel’s equivalent of the FBI—were just realizing that Iran should not be helped with its military ambitions. Tolerating arms transactions made no sense. In part because of concerns expressed by the United States, Manbar was put under surveillance. Israeli spies watched for any physical or telephonic contacts with Iranian government agents.

During one surveillance mission in 1993 in Vienna, Austria, two Mossad men who were riding a motorcycle late one cold night took a wrong turn. Their motorcycle crashed into a car, and both spies were killed. Public reports simply said that two Israeli tourists died. The Mossad conducted an investigation to make sure that the car driver had not been an enemy agent.

Though there was no reason to blame Manbar for the deaths, the incident strengthened the Mossad’s determination to punish the Israeli chemical arms merchant.

He was arrested in 1997 and put on trial in Israel, with a gag order and military censorship preventing any mention of the case by the country’s usually hyperactive press. The muzzling was a fairly routine way of handling a case involving espionage agencies and sensitive foreign affairs. Manbar was sentenced to 16 years in prison for doing business with an enemy nation.

Dagan’s placement of Iran at the top of his priority list was fully in the spirit of what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sought when he appointed his old friend and fellow former army general in 2002. Dagan was tasked with turning the Mossad into a lean, muscular, and focused organization with a clear sense of its primary missions.

Dagan believed that his agency had become unimaginative and sometimes even lazy. His goal, metaphorically speaking, was to restore a Mossad “with a dagger between its teeth.” At various, well-chosen times, the dagger would be expertly hurled at Iran.

Both the Mossad and the military intelligence agency, Aman, had concluded that Iran’s nuclear program was advancing on two tracks. One was civilian, to generate electricity and for research to help medical and agricultural needs. At the same time, Iranian scientists were clandestinely advancing along a military track, often using the civilian work as cover to develop an ability to make nuclear bombs. Just as some equipment was clearly “dual use,” many of the experts were, too. University lecturers and researchers were also part of the bomb program.

Sharon instructed Dagan to be the top-level “project manager”—a term of art in organizing intelligence work. The Mossad chief would personally coordinate a wide range of Israeli efforts to challenge Iran: politically, economically, psychologically, and almost entirely covertly.

The most benign steps entailed diplomatic pressure on Iran. The ayatollahs and their government would receive messages through third countries that told them to stop the military side of their nuclear program, coupled with threats of stern action if they did not stop.

The next stage centered on persuading Iran’s main trading partners to impose sanctions aimed at damaging the Iranian economy. These were mostly European countries, which had to be persuaded that Iran’s weapons and missile programs could even threaten them. The hope was that Iranian leaders would decide that it was not worth it to pursue nuclear weapons, because sanctions on certain goods, financial transactions, and travel would make their people suffer. Israeli intelligence’s assessment was that while Iran might look like a strict religious dictatorship, the government was actually quite aware of a need for public support.

The Mossad—and Dagan himself—devoted a lot of energy to learning everything possible about Iran’s domestic public opinion and pressures within Iranian society. While half of Iran’s population was Persian, the country was a multiethnic tapestry with Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis, and Turkmen. The minorities were all oppressed, to one degree or another, and could be seen as weak links in the Iranian chain.

Such tensions could be exploited by psychological warfare, to stir up discontent inside Iran. Identifying deeply unhappy citizens also provided a pool of potential paid informants for the Mossad.

Covert action could take many forms: recruiting high-quality agents in Iran’s leadership and inside the nuclear program, sabotaging nuclear facilities, and assassinating key figures in the program. The overall philosophy of this comprehensive action plan—in Dagan’s analysis, voiced by him and others in the Mossad—was “to define and use tools to change the mind of a country.”

Top-level Iranians would have to be persuaded, by actions and not just words, that pursuing nuclear weapons would backfire. They would have to be convinced that it would make their regime less likely to survive, not more. In the mentality of the Mossad, pressure and persuasion—by no means always gentle—would be a far better strategy than a massive air raid on nuclear facilities.

Israel had no direct communication with Iran’s leaders, but several European and Asian governments could pass messages back and forth. And, from time to time, the United States and its allies had talks with Iran about its nuclear program.

Positive results, if any, were practically invisible. Disgusted by a lack of progress and a surfeit of deception, the Western nations in 2011 and 2012 significantly tightened economic sanctions aimed at key individuals and organizations inside Iran.

Israel’s political leaders, while encouraging the Mossad to pursue methods well short of all-out war, often made bellicose statements for public consumption. They found that by hinting that they might have to send their air force to strike at Iranian facilities, the rest of the world sat up and took urgent notice of Iran’s nuclear work. As early as 2002, when he installed Dagan at the Mossad, Sharon’s hope was that other countries would take the lead in applying pressure on Iran. They had a lot more economic clout, and the Americans, in particular, had more powerful military capabilities.