Mossad

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  In 1995, Dagan, now a major general, left the army and joined his buddy Yossi Ben-Hanan on an eighteen-month motorcycle journey across the Asian plains. Their trip was cut short by the news of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Back in Israel, Dagan spent some time at the head of the antiterrorist authority, made a halfhearted attempt to join the business world, and helped Sharon in his Likud electoral campaign. Then, in 2002, he retired to his country home in Galilee, to his books, his records, his palette, and his sculptor’s chisel.

  Thirty years after Gaza, a retired general, he was now getting acquainted with his family—“I suddenly woke up and my kids were grown-ups already”—when he got a phone call from his old buddy, now prime minister, Arik Sharon. “I want you at the head of the Mossad,” Sharon said to his fifty-seven-year-old friend. “I need a Mossad chief with a dagger between his teeth.”

  It was 2002 and the Mossad was losing steam. Several failures in the preceding years had dealt severe blows to its prestige; the much-publicized failure to assassinate a major Hamas leader in Amman and the capture of Israeli agents in Switzerland, Cyprus, and New Zealand had seriously damaged the Mossad’s reputation. The last head of the Mossad, Efraim Halevy, didn’t live up to expectations. A former ambassador to the European Union in Brussels, he was a good diplomat and a good analyst, but not a leader and not a fighter. Sharon wanted to have at the head of the Mossad a bold, creative leader who would be a formidable weapon against Islamic terrorism and the Iranian reactor.

  Dagan was not welcomed at the Mossad. An outsider, focused mostly on operations, he didn’t care very much about learned intelligence analyses or secret diplomatic exchanges. Several top Mossad officers resigned in protest, but Dagan didn’t much care. He rebuilt the operational units, established close working relations with foreign secret services, and busied himself with the Iranian threat. When the second, disastrous Lebanon War erupted in 2006, he was the only Israeli leader who objected to the strategy based on massive bombardments by the air force. He believed in a land offensive, doubted the air force could win the war, and came out of the war unblemished.

  Still, he was much criticized by the press for his tough attitude toward his subordinates. Frustrated Mossad officers, who were retired, ran to the media with their gripes, and Dagan was under constant fire. “Dagan Who?” scribbled one popular columnist.

  And then, one day, the headlines changed. Flattering articles loaded with superlatives filled the daily papers, lauding “the man who restored honor to the Mossad.”

  Under Dagan’s control, the Mossad had accomplished the heretofore unimaginable: the assassination of Hezbollah’s mad killer Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, the destruction of the Syrian nuclear reactor, the liquidation of key terrorist leaders in Lebanon and Syria, and, most remarkable of all, a relentless, ruthless, and successful campaign against Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.

  Chapter Two

  Funerals in Tehran

  On July 23, 2011, at four thirty P.M., two gunmen on motorcycles emerged on Bani Hashem Street in South Tehran, drew automatic weapons out of their leather jackets, and shot a man who was about to enter his home. They vanished after the killing, long before the arrival of the police. The victim was Darioush Rezaei Najad, a thirty-five-year-old physics professor and a major figure in Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program. He had been in charge of developing the electronic switches necessary for activating a nuclear warhead.

  Rezaei Najad was not the first Iranian scientist who had recently met a violent end. Officially, Iran was developing nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and they claimed that the Bushehr reactor, an important source of energy built with Russian help, was proof of their good intentions. But in addition to the Bushehr reactor, other clandestine nuclear facilities had been discovered, all heavily guarded and virtually inaccessible. Over time, Iran had to admit the existence of some of these centers, though they denied allegations of developing weapons. But by then, Western secret services and local underground organizations had exposed several major scientists in Iran’s universities who had been tapped to build Iran’s first nuclear bomb. In Iran, what could only be identified as “unknown parties” waged a brutal war to stop the secret nuclear weapons program.

  On November 29, 2010, at seven forty-five A.M., in North Tehran, a motorcycle emerged from behind the car of Dr. Majid Shahriyari, the scientific head of Iran’s nuclear project. As he passed the car, the helmeted motorcyclist attached a device to the car’s rear windshield. Seconds later, the device exploded, killing the forty-five-year-old physicist and wounding his wife. Simultaneously, in Atashi Street in South Tehran, another motorcyclist did the same to the Peugeot 206 of Dr. Fereydoun Abassi-Davani, another major nuclear scientist. The explosion wounded Abassi-Davani and his wife.

  The Iranian government immediately pointed its finger at the Mossad. The roles these two scientists played in Iran’s atomic weapons project were veiled in secrecy, but Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the project, declared that the attack had made a martyr of Shahriyari and deprived his team of its “dearest flower.”

  President Ahmadinejad, too, expressed his appreciation of the two victims, in an ingenious way: as soon as Abassi-Davani recovered from his wounds, Ahmadinejad appointed him Iran’s vice president.

  The men who attacked the scientists were not found.

  On January 12, 2010, at seven fifty A.M., Professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi came out of his home at Shariati Street, in the Gheytarihe neighborhood in North Tehran. He was on his way to his lab at the Sharif University of Technology.

  When he tried to unlock his car, a huge explosion rocked the quiet neighborhood. The security forces that rushed to the scene found Mohammadi’s car shattered by the blast and his body blown to pieces. He had been killed by an explosive charge, concealed in a motorcycle that was parked by his car. The Iranian media claimed that the assassination had been carried out by Mossad agents. President Ahmadinejad declared that “the assassination reminds us of the Zionist methods.”

  Fifty-year-old Professor Mohammadi was an expert in quantum physics and an adviser to the Iranian nuclear weapons program. European media reported he had been a member of the Revolutionary Guards, the pro-government parallel army. But Mohammadi’s life, like his death, was shrouded in mystery. Several of his friends maintained that he was involved only in theoretical research, never with military projects; some also claimed that he supported the dissident movements and had participated in antigovernment protests.

  Yet it turned out that about half of those present at his funeral were Revolutionary Guards. His coffin was carried by Revolutionary Guard officers. Subsequent investigations ultimately confirmed that Mohammadi, indeed, had been deeply involved in advancing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

  In January 2007, Dr. Ardashir Hosseinpour was allegedly killed by Mossad agents with radioactive poison. News of the assassination ran in the Sunday Times in London, citing information from the Texas-based Stratfor strategy and intelligence think tank. Iranian officials ridiculed the report, claiming that the Mossad could never carry out such an operation inside Iran, and that “Professor Hosseinpour suffocated by inhaling fumes during a fire in his home.” They also insisted that the forty-four-year-old professor was only a renowned electromagnetic expert and not involved with Iran’s nuclear endeavors in any way.

  But it turned out that Hosseinpour worked at an Isfahan secret installation where raw uranium was converted into gas. This gas was then used for uranium enrichment by a series (“cascades”) of centrifuges in Natanz, a faraway, fortified underground installation. In 2006, Hosseinpour was awarded the highest Iranian prize for science and technology; two years earlier, he had been awarded his country’s highest distinction for military research.

  The assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists were just one front in a much larger war. According to the Daily Telegraph in London, Dagan’s Mossad had rolled out an assault force of double agents, hit teams, saboteurs, and front companies and brought their s
trength to bear over years and years of covert operations against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

  Stratfor’s director of analysis, Reva Bhalla, was quoted as saying: “With cooperation from the United States, Israeli covert operations have focused both on eliminating key human assets involved in the nuclear program and in sabotaging the Iranian supply chain.” Israel, she claimed, had used similar tactics in Iraq in the early eighties, when the Mossad killed three Iraqi nuclear scientists, thus hampering the completion of the Osiraq atomic reactor, near Baghdad.

  In its purported war against the Iranian nuclear program, Dagan’s Mossad was effectively delaying the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb for as long as possible, and thereby thwarting the worst danger to Israel’s existence since its creation: Ahmadinejad’s threats that Israel should be annihilated.

  Yet these small victories cannot atone for the worst mishap in Mossad’s history—its failure to expose Iran’s secret nuclear project at its outset. For several years now Iran had been building its nuclear might—and Israel had no clue. Iran invested huge sums of money, recruited scientists, built secret bases, carried out sophisticated tests—and Israel had no idea. From the moment Khomeini’s Iran decided to become a nuclear power, it used deception, ruses, and stratagems that made fools out of the Western secret services, the Mossad included.

  Iran’s shah, Reza Pahlavi, started building two nuclear reactors, both for peaceful and military purposes. The shah’s project, begun in the 1970s, didn’t cause any alarm in Israel; at the time, Israel was Iran’s close ally. In 1977, General Ezer Weizman, Israel’s defense minister, hosted General Hasan Toufanian, who was in charge of modernizing Iran’s army, in the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv—as allies, Israel supplied Iran with modern military equipment. According to the minutes of their confidential meeting, Weizman offered to supply Iran with state-of-the-art surface-to-surface missiles, while the director general of the ministry, Dr. Pinhas Zusman, impressed Toufanian by saying that the Israeli missiles could be adapted to carry nuclear warheads. But before the officials could act on their plans, the Iranian revolution transformed Israeli-Iranian relations. The revolutionary Islamic government massacred the shah’s supporters and turned against Israel. The ailing shah escaped from his country as it fell under Ayatollah Khomeini’s control and into the hands of his loyal mullahs.

  Khomeini put an immediate end to the nuclear project, which he considered “anti-Islamic.” The building of the reactors was stopped and their equipment dismantled. But in the 1980s, a bloody war erupted between Iraq and Iran. Saddam Hussein used poison gas against the Iranians. The use of nonconventional weapons by their vilest enemy made the ayatollahs rethink their policy. Even before Khomeini’s death, his heir apparent, Ali Khamenei, instructed his military to develop new weapons—biological, chemical, and nuclear—to fight back against the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq had unleashed on Iran. Soon after, complacent religious leaders called from their pulpits to discard the ban on “anti-Islamic” weapons.

  Fragmentary news about Iran’s efforts started spreading in the mid-eighties. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Europe was inundated by rumors about Iran’s attempts to buy nuclear bombs and warheads from unemployed officers or famished scientists in the former Soviet military establishment. The Western press described, in dramatic detail, the disappearance of Russian scientists and generals from their homes, apparently recruited by the Iranians. Reporters with fertile imaginations wrote about sealed trucks rushing eastward from Europe, bypassing border controls to reach the Middle East. Sources in Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing revealed that Iran had signed an agreement with Russia for building an atomic reactor in Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf coast, and another agreement with China, for building two smaller reactors.

  Alarmed, the United States and Israel spread teams of special agents through Europe on the hunt for the Soviet bombs sold to Iran and the recruited scientists. They came up with nothing. The United States put great pressure on Russia and China to cancel their agreements with Iran. China backed off, and canceled its Iranian deal. Russia decided to go ahead but kept delaying it. The reactor took more than twenty years to build and was limited in its use by strict Russian and international controls.

  But Israel and the United States should have expanded their search when the leads went cold. The heads of both the Mossad and the CIA failed to realize that the Russian and Chinese reactors were just diversions, a smoke screen for “the world’s best secret services.” Iran had surreptitiously launched a mammoth project intended to make it a nuclear power.

  In the fall of 1987, a secret meeting was held in Dubai. Eight men met in a small, dusty office: three Iranians, two Pakistanis, and three European experts (two of them German) who were working for Iran.

  The representatives of Iran and Pakistan signed a confidential agreement. A large sum of money was transferred to the Pakistanis, or—more precisely—to Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the head of Pakistan’s official nuclear weapons program.

  A few years before, Pakistan had launched its own nuclear project, to achieve military equality with its archenemy, India. Dr. Khan badly needed the fissile substances necessary for assembling a nuclear bomb. Yet he chose not to make use of plutonium, which is harvested in the classic nuclear reactors, but to utilize enriched uranium. Mined uranium ore contains only 1 percent of uranium-235, which is vital for the production of nuclear weapons, and 99 percent uranium-238, which is useless. Dr. Khan developed a method for converting the natural uranium into gas, and feeding this gas into a line of centrifuges connected in a chain, called a cascade. With the centrifuges churning the uranium gas at a mind-boggling rate of 100,000 spins a minute, the lighter uranium-235 separates from the heavier uranium-238. By repeating that process thousands of times, the centrifuges produce an enriched uranium-235. This gas, when converted into solid matter, becomes the substance needed for a nuclear bomb.

  Khan had stolen the centrifuges’ blueprints from Eurenco, a European company where he worked in the early 1970s, and then started manufacturing his own in Pakistan. Khan soon turned into a “merchant of death,” selling his methods, formulas, and centrifuges. Iran became his major client. Libya and North Korea were also clients.

  The Iranians bought centrifuges elsewhere, too, and then learned how to make them locally. Huge shipments of uranium, centrifuges, electronic materials, and spare parts arrived in Iran now and then. Large facilities were built for the treatment of raw uranium, for storing the centrifuges, and for converting the gas back to solid matter; Iranian scientists traveled to Pakistan and Pakistani experts arrived in Iran—and nobody knew.

  The Iranians were careful not to put all their eggs in one basket. They dispersed the nuclear project among places spread throughout their country, in military bases, disguised laboratories, and remote facilities. Some were built deep underground, and surrounded with batteries of surface-to-air missiles. One plant was erected in Isfahan, another in Arak; the most important—the centrifuge facility—was established in Natanz, and a fourth center in the holy city of Qom. At even a hint that a location might be exposed, the Iranians would move the nuclear installations elsewhere, even removing layers of earth that could have been irradiated by radioactive substances. They also skillfully misled and deceived the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Its chairman, the Egyptian Dr. Mohamed El-Baradei, behaved as if he believed every false statement of the Iranians, and published complacent reports that enabled Iran to continue with its deadly scheme.

  On June 1, 1998, the American authorities saw the true extent of the Iranians’ work for the first time. A Pakistani defector appeared before FBI investigators in New York, asking for political asylum. He introduced himself as Dr. Iftikhar Khan Chaudhry and revealed the full extent of the secret cooperation between Iran and Pakistan. He exposed Dr. Khan, described meetings in which he had participated, and named Pakistani experts who had taken part in the Iranian project.

  The facts and figur
es of Chaudhry’s testimony were checked by the FBI and found to be accurate. The FBI indeed recommended that Chaudhry be allowed to stay in the United States as a political refugee—but his amazing testimony was never given any follow-up. Perhaps out of sheer negligence, American higher-ups buried Chaudhry’s transcripts, initiated no action, and did not warn Israel. Four more years had to pass until the truth about Iran would come to light.

  Suddenly, in August 2002, the Iranian dissident underground, Mujahedeen el Khalq (MEK), revealed the existence of two nuclear facilities in Arak and Natanz to the world media. In the following years, MEK kept disclosing more facts about the Iranian nuclear project, which aroused some suspicion that its information came from outside sources. The CIA was still skeptical and assumed that the Israelis and the British were trying to involve the United States in hazardous operations. Specifically, the CIA appeared to believe that the Mossad and the British MI6 were feeding MEK intelligence they had obtained, using the Iranian opposition as a hopefully credible source. According to Israeli sources, it was, in fact, a watchful Mossad officer who had discovered the mammoth centrifuge installation at Natanz, deep in the desert. That same year, 2002, the Iranian underground handed over to the CIA a laptop loaded with documents. The dissidents wouldn’t say how they had got hold of the laptop; the skeptical Americans suspected that the documents had been only recently scanned into the computer; they accused the Mossad of having slipped in some information obtained from their own sources—and then passing it to the MEK leaders for delivery to the West.