The Tehran Initiative (12 page)

“We haven’t confirmed who is responsible for the attack in New York,” the director said.

David was incredulous. “Does it matter? Sir, this was a decapitation strike, designed to cut off the heads of the only three countries on the planet with the will to stop both the mullahs in Tehran and now the Twelfth Imam from building their Caliphate and annihilating Judeo-Christian civilization forever. Of course we should go after the specific terrorist cells responsible for this attack when we find them. But we don’t need to wait to hit Iran. We already know Iran has tested nuclear weapons. And the fact is, if we don’t hit the Iranians in the next few days, we may never have the chance again.”

Tom Murray was livid. “David, that’s enough,” he said, barely able to keep his voice down. “You weren’t invited into this room to lecture the director of the Central Intelligence Agency or try to goad him or the president into a war with Iran—or with anyone else, for that matter.”

“Tom, we’re already at war,” David said. “The president authorized this Agency to use all means necessary to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Now they have at least eight, after their test. Doesn’t the same national security directive not only authorize but command us—those of us in this room—to find those weapons and the people who built them and neutralize them before it is too late?”

13

Beirut, Lebanon

Jacques Miroux was Reuters’s chief Mideast correspondent.

“Your Excellency, on Thursday in Mecca, you said, ‘We seek only peace. We wish no harm against any nation,’” Miroux shouted. “But you also said Iran now has nuclear warheads, of which you have full control. Just now you spoke of the annihilation of Israel, saying it is coming and implying that it is inevitable. A moment ago you spoke of jihad as your goal. Is it your intent to threaten a thermonuclear war against the Jewish state?”

“I bring a message of peace. That is my message, and that is all. To those who want peace, I welcome you with open arms.”

“Well, at the very least, Your Excellency,” Miroux followed up, “are statements like these provoking the Israelis into what could be a massive first strike on their part?”

“Islam cannot be defeated. Period. Islam will be victorious in all the countries of the world. The teachings of the Qur’an will prevail all over the world. Even in Palestine. Especially in Palestine and the holy city of al-Quds. Why should a lion fear the mosquito, so tiny, so annoying, but so inconsequential?”

With that, the Mahdi flashed a smile and turned to wave to the masses. Then Javad guided him into a white armored SUV for the brief drive north from the airport to the Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium, where an estimated 160,000 Hezbollah members were eagerly awaiting the Twelfth Imam’s address in a facility built for a third that number, at best.

* * *

Langley, Virginia

David could feel the tension in the room spiking.

But he didn’t care. Their country had been attacked. The president was too weak to respond. The director of central intelligence was covering his behind. Someone had to speak up. Why wasn’t Murray? Why wasn’t Zalinsky?

“Director Allen, may I speak?” Eva suddenly asked.

“Of course, Eva; what is it?”

“Well, sir, I’ve known Agent Shirazi for some time now. You know full well that Jack and I worked together to design his cover story. We worked hard behind the scenes to get him hired at Munich Digital Systems along with me, working undercover. We designed and oversaw his operations in Pakistan. And Jack and I designed this mission for him in Iran and are running it together. You know that I’ve traveled into Iran with David, and you know that if it wasn’t for him, the entire operation would have been blown the first day.”

“Your point, Agent Fischer?”

“My point, sir, is that I know the extraordinary risks David is taking. Every moment of every day that he was inside Iran, he was putting his life on the line for his country, for this Agency, for each one of us. Because he believes in this stuff. His family wouldn’t be here in the US, or probably even alive, if it weren’t for this Agency, and for Jack in particular. So this is very real and very personal for him. David takes his job very seriously, and I am absolutely amazed by how well he’s doing it. My expectations were quite high from the beginning, but they’ve been blown away. And I’d submit that none of us—not a single one of us—could be doing what he’s doing. He’s gotten us inside Esfahani’s operations. He’s gotten us inside the defense minister’s office. Inside the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Inside the Supreme Leader’s office . . . and quite possibly inside the inner circle of the Twelfth Imam. He found us Dr. Najjar Malik and got him out alive. He got us Dr. Saddaji’s computer and all his backup discs—intact. And much of what we know about how serious this situation is, we know because of what David has done. It wasn’t his plan. I grant you that. It was Jack’s plan and mine. He’s made some mistakes. But so have we. David isn’t an experienced strategist yet, but in my view he’s an unbelievable tactical operator . . . and the best shot we have right now to get back inside Iran and stop this nuclear program while we still have time. But we can’t send him back in—and that’s our plan, is it not? That’s what we’re about to do, right?—well, we can’t send him inside and ask him to risk his life day after day unless he has a reasonable expectation that his country and this Agency are going to back him up every step of the way. Director, my point is this: if the president isn’t serious about having us execute his own national security directive, then you need to tell us that right now so we can readjust our goals and retask our team, and that would start with not sending David back in.”

The room was silent. Murray fumed. Zalinsky maintained a poker face. David was about to speak for himself, but the director cut him off.

“Agent Fischer, I appreciate enormously what you and your colleagues have done, including Agent Shirazi. You all have this Agency’s highest thanks, and particularly mine. I know the risks you’re all taking, and I assure you that I don’t take those lightly. What’s more, I can promise you that if I make the decision to ask any of you to put his or her life at risk, you will be fully backed by all the resources at this Agency’s disposal.”

Allen let that sink in for a moment.

“That said,” he continued, “perhaps it’s a little premature to talk about sending anyone to Iran at the moment. There are a range of questions we need to answer first. Starting with this one: was Iran’s nuclear weapons test near Hamadan successful, and if so, how are we defining
success
? The answers make a big impact on how we proceed. The president is asking specifically about this. What do we know so far?”

“Well, sir, from everything we can gather,” Murray replied, “from the magnitude of the blast as determined by the Richter scale measurements of the earthquake the blast triggered, the damage that earthquake did, and the readings from the Constant Phoenix flight over Hamadan, the guys in the analysis division are judging the test successful. They believe the warhead is likely based on the Pakistani designs sold to Iran by A. Q. Khan.”

“Weren’t they tinkering with North Korean designs as well?” the director asked.

“They were, but based on a bunch of technical readouts I won’t bore you with now, the analysis guys say the warhead they tested was the Pakistani version,” Murray explained. “Now, by
successful
, what they mean is that they believe the bomb was built properly, detonated as expected, and had a two-hundred-kiloton yield. We’re not talking about a suitcase nuke here. That’s a pretty hefty warhead. If it was detonated in the center of Tel Aviv or London or Manhattan or here in DC, it would completely obliterate every structure within a mile radius of the blast. It would destroy most civilian buildings and kill every person within about three miles. It would also set every structure on fire another mile after that, and anyone within five to ten miles—possibly more, depending on the prevailing winds and other factors at the time—would receive massive radiation doses. Many of them would die within days or weeks.”

“So pretty successful,” Allen said.

“I’m afraid so.”

“The president also wants to know if the Iranians can deliver one of these warheads by missile at the moment,” Allen said.

Zalinsky took that one. “We don’t think so, sir—not yet.”

“How confident are you in that assessment?”

“Ninety-five percent.”

“So there’s still a chance.”

“There’s a chance, sir—it’s small, but I agree it’s something we need to push on and find out for sure.”

“Director Allen, if I may?” Eva asked.

“Please.”

“The reason we’re as confident as we are on the missile issue is the material David here was able to acquire from the computer of Dr. Saddaji, the head of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

“The one who was assassinated two weeks ago.”

“Correct. And what we’ve learned from our subsequent interrogations of Saddaji’s son-in-law, Dr. Najjar Malik—”

“The scientist David smuggled out of the country.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He was Saddaji’s right-hand man?”

“Correct.”

“Okay, proceed.”

“Well, sir, while it’s true that Saddaji wasn’t running Iran’s ballistic missile program, the fact is we now have volumes of highly classified e-mail correspondence between Saddaji and the head of the missile program. When you go through it all, it becomes clear that Saddaji was being told that his colleagues were still several months—possibly even a year or more—away from perfecting the detonation of a warhead on an incoming ballistic missile.”

“A few months isn’t that much time,” Allen noted.

“That’s true, sir,” Eva agreed. “My point is only that we’re highly confident that the Iranians aren’t there yet—though you’re right, they’re not far off. What’s also troubling is that we have e-mails between Saddaji and high-ranking military officials with plans and memos discussing how to transport the warheads by truck, what kind of safeguards need to be in place, how many men would need to be part of the transportation team, whether detonation control would be in the hands of the on-the-ground commander or could be with someone more senior back in Tehran, and so forth.”

“Good. Now, the next thing the president needs to know—and this is his highest priority—is the exact location of all eight warheads at the moment.”

“Right—Jack, you want to talk about that?” Murray asked.

Zalinsky nodded and leaned forward in his seat. “Sir, we have retasked a Keyhole satellite over Hamadan,” he began. “We’re watching all movement in and around that nuclear facility and have been since the earthquake. If all the warheads were built there—and based on all the documentation we have from Dr. Saddaji’s computers, we believe that’s the case—then some, if not all, could still be there.”

The director interrupted. “I thought David had a highly placed source who told him all the warheads had been moved.”

“Yes,” Zalinsky agreed. “You’re referring to the source we’ve code-named Chameleon. He is a longtime personal friend and advisor to President Darazi and Ayatollah Hosseini. The three had lunch recently—we don’t have the exact date, but it was about three weeks ago—and Chameleon obtained direct intel that ‘large nuclear bombs’ had been dispersed to secure locations all throughout the country.”

“How reliable is the source?” the director asked.

Zalinsky looked to David.

“Very,” David said. “Chameleon is the one who said we needed to find Dr. Malik because Malik was the key to understanding exactly what Iran had.”

“And he was right.”

“He was.”

“But you guys don’t believe him when he says the weapons aren’t in Hamadan anymore. Why not?”

Zalinsky answered that. “That’s not exactly what we’re saying, sir. Chameleon could be right. We certainly believe that Darazi and Hosseini told him that the warheads were no longer in Hamadan. But we still have questions.”

“Such as?”

“Was the president being told the whole truth by Saddaji and his team? Were they planning to move the weapons but hadn’t yet? If they were really moving the warheads, were they fully assembled, or were parts being moved? It’s dangerous to move fully assembled nuclear warheads, not so much because they might go off but because someone could hijack the convoy and suddenly a fully assembled warhead is in the hands of a rogue element of the military or a terrorist group or whatever.”

“Bottom line?” Allen asked.

“The bottom line, sir, is that maybe all the weapons were scattered. Maybe they weren’t. We simply don’t know, which means Iran has eight operational two-hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads, and we don’t have any idea where they are.”

14

Beirut, Lebanon

The motorcade finally departed the airport grounds.

Jacques Miroux, following the Mahdi in a rented compact Renault, expected the entourage to head directly up Hafez El Asad Drive, where hundreds of thousands of Lebanese lined both sides of the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of their beloved Twelfth Imam as he made his way to Beirut’s largest stadium to deliver a major address. But at the last moment, to his surprise, the Mahdi’s SUV and the six other vehicles filled with heavily armed bodyguards diverted off the expected path, heading north on Al Imam El Khomeini Boulevard. A few minutes later, they turned northwest and made an unscheduled detour and stop inside the Shatila refugee camp.

It was a brilliant move, Miroux realized instantly—bold, risky, unconventional, and populist to its core. It was exactly what a typical head of state wouldn’t do. Indeed, he couldn’t think of a single world leader—especially an Arab leader—who had ever visited the twelve thousand impoverished souls crammed into the one square kilometer that was the Shatila refugee camp. The Mahdi was going to identify directly with the Palestinian cause. He was going to see and feel and touch and smell the misery of these refugees, and in so doing he was likely to win not only the hearts of the four hundred thousand or so Palestinians living in Lebanon but of the nearly four million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the nearly three million in Jordan, the million and a half living in Israel proper, the million living in Syria, and the pockets of Palestinians living in nearly every other country in the Middle East and North Africa.