Mossad

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  But other evidence now was piling up on the desks of the Americans and the Europeans, who finally had to open their eyes. The rumors about Dr. Khan’s lucrative and deadly trade spread all over the world. Finally, on February 4, 2004, a tearful Dr. Khan appeared on Pakistani TV and confessed that he indeed had sold know-how, expertise, and centrifuges to Libya, North Korea, and Iran, making millions in the process. The Pakistani government hastened to grant full pardon to “Dr. Death,” the father of their nuclear bomb.

  Israel now became a major source of information about Iran. Meir Dagan and his Mossad provided U.S. intelligence with fresh data about the secret facility the Iranians had built at Qom; Israel allegedly was also involved in the defection of several senior officers from the Revolutionary Guards and the atomic project; the Mossad provided several countries with up-to-date facts, prompting them to seize ships carrying nuclear equipment to Iran from their ports.

  But merely obtaining such intelligence would not suffice for Israel. While a fanatic Iran threatened it openly with annihilation, the rest of the world recoiled from any vigorous action. Israel was left with no choice but to launch an all-out undercover war against the Iranian nuclear program.

  After sixteen years of colossal ignorance by his predecessors, Dagan decided to act.

  In January 2006, a plane crashed in central Iran. All its passengers perished. Among them were senior officers in the Revolutionary Guards, including Ahmed Kazami, one of their commanders. The Iranians maintained that the crash was due to bad weather, but the Stratfor group hinted that the aircraft had been sabotaged by Western agents.

  Only a month before, a military cargo plane had crashed into an apartment building in Tehran. All ninety-four passengers died. Many were also officers in the Revolutionary Guards and influential pro-regime journalists. In November 2006, another military aircraft crashed during takeoff from Tehran—and thirty-six Revolutionary Guards were killed. On national radio, the Iranian minister of defense declared, “According to material from intelligence sources, we can say that American, British, and Israeli agents are responsible for these plane crashes.”

  Meanwhile, quietly, without any overt mention, Dagan had become the main strategist on Israel’s policy toward Iran. He believed that Israel perhaps might have no choice but to finally launch a full-scale, all-out attack on Iran. But such an action, Dagan thought, should only be a last resort.

  The sabotage began in February 2005. The international press reported an explosion in a nuclear facility at Dialem that had been hit by a missile fired from an unidentified plane. And that same month an explosion took place close to Bushehr, in a pipeline supplying gas to the Russian-built nuclear reactor.

  Another facility to be attacked was the test site Parchin, close to Tehran. There, Iranian experts were developing “the explosive lens,” the mechanism that would transform the bomb core into a critical mass and trigger the chain reaction for an atomic explosion. The Iranian underground claimed that the explosion at Parchin had caused major damage to the secret labs.

  In April 2006, the Holy of Holies—the central installation in Natanz—was the scene of a festive assembly. A large crowd of scientists, technicians, and the heads of the nuclear project gathered underground, where thousands of centrifuges were churning around the clock. In a celebratory mood, they came to watch the first test of activating a new centrifuge cascade. Everyone waited for the dramatic moment when the centrifuges would be started. The chief engineer pressed the activation button—and a powerful explosion shook the huge chamber. The pipes blew up in a deafening blast, and the entire cascade shattered.

  Furious, the heads of the nuclear project ordered a thorough investigation. “Unknown persons” apparently had planted faulty parts in the equipment. CBS reported that the centrifuges had been destroyed by tiny explosive charges attached to them shortly before the test. It also claimed that Israeli intelligence had assisted American agents in causing the Natanz explosion.

  In January 2007, again, the centrifuges became the target of a sophisticated sabotage. The Western secret services had established Eastern European front companies that manufactured insulation material used in the ducts between the centrifuges. The Iranians couldn’t buy theirs on the open market, because of the limitations imposed on them by the UN; so they turned to bogus Eastern European companies run by Russian and Iranian exiles, who were secretly working for the Western intelligence agencies. Only after the insulation was installed did the Iranians find that it was defective and couldn’t be used.

  By May 2007, President George W. Bush had signed a secret presidential order authorizing the CIA to initiate covert operations to delay Iran’s nuclear project. Soon after, a decision was made by some Western secret services to sabotage the supply chain of parts, equipment, and raw materials for the project. In August, Dagan met with U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicolas Burns to discuss his strategy toward Iran.

  Mishaps, sabotage, explosions have kept occurring in installations throughout Iran during the last seven years. One mysterious hitch caused problems in the cooling system of the Bushehr reactor, which delayed its completion by two years; in May 2008, an explosion in a cosmetics plant in Arak caused significant damage to the adjacent nuclear facility; another explosion devastated a high-security compound in Isfahan, where uranium was being converted to gas.

  In 2008 and in 2010, the New York Times revealed that the Tinners, a Swiss family of engineers, had helped the CIA in exposing the nuclear programs of Libya and Iran, and were paid $10 million by the agency. The CIA also helped protect them from prosecution by the Swiss authorities for illegal traffic with nuclear components. The father, Frederic Tinner, and his two sons, Urs and Marco, had sold the Iranians a faulty installation for electric supply to the Natanz facility, which destroyed fifty centrifuges. The Tinners purchased pressure pumps from the Pfeiffer Vacuum Company in Germany, had them doctored in New Mexico, and then sold them to the Iranians.

  Time magazine asserted that the Mossad was involved in the hijacking of the ship Arctic Sea, which had sailed from Finland to Algeria with a Russian crew and under a Maltese flag, carrying “a cargo of wood.” On July 24, 2009, two days after setting out on her voyage, the vessel was seized by eight hijackers. Only after a month did the Russian authorities declare that a Russian commando unit had taken over the ship. The London Times and the Daily Telegraph maintained that the Mossad had sounded the alarm. Dagan’s men, they said, had informed the Russians that the ship was carrying a cargo of uranium, sold to the Iranians by a former Russian officer. But Admiral Kouts, who leads the fight against piracy in the European Union, offered Time magazine his own version. The only plausible explanation, he said, was that the ship had been hijacked by the Mossad to intercept the uranium.

  But in spite of these continuous attacks, the Iranians did not remain idle. Between 2005 and 2008, in total secrecy, they built a new installation close to Qom. They planned to install three thousand centrifuges in the new underground halls. However, in mid-2009, the Iranians realized that the intelligence organizations of the United States, Britain, and Israel had full knowledge of the Qom plant. Iran reacted right away. In September 2009, Tehran surprised the world by hurriedly informing the IAEA about the existence of the Qom installation. Some sources claimed that the Iranians had caught a Western spy (possibly a British MI6 agent), who had gathered reliable information about Qom; so they disclosed its existence to diminish their embarrassment.

  A month later, CIA director Leon Panetta told Time that his organization had known of Qom for three years and that Israel was involved in its detection.

  The Qom discovery permitted a glimpse into the secret alliance that had been forged between three groups engaged in the battle against Iran: the CIA, MI6, and the Mossad. According to French sources, the three services were acting together, with the Mossad carrying out the operations inside Iran, and the CIA and MI6 helping the Israelis. The Mossad was responsible for several explosions in October 2010, in which eighteen Ir
anian technicians were killed at a plant in the Zagros Mountains that assembled Shehab missiles. With the help of its British and American allies, the Mossad had also eliminated five nuclear scientists.

  This alliance had been established largely by the efforts of Meir Dagan. From the moment he became the director of Mossad, he had been pressuring his men to establish close cooperation with foreign secret services. His aides advised him against revealing the Mossad secrets to foreigners, but he brushed off their arguments. “Stop this nonsense,” he grumbled, “and go, work with them!”

  Beside the British and the Americans, Dagan had another important ally who brought precious information from inside Iran: the leaders of the Iranian resistance. In unusual press conferences held outside of Iran, leaders of the Iranian National Council of Resistance revealed the name of the leading scientist in the Iranian project. His identity had so far been kept secret. Mohsen Fakhri Zadeh, forty-nine years old, was a physics professor at the Tehran University. He was said to be a mysterious, elusive man. The resistance disclosed many details about him, including his membership in the Revolutionary Guards since the age of eighteen, his address—Shahid Mahallalti Street, Tehran—his passport numbers—0009228 and 4229533—and even his home phone number—021-2448413. Fakhri Zadeh specialized in the complex process of creating a critical mass inside the atomic device to trigger the chain reaction and the nuclear explosion. His team was also working on the miniaturization of the bomb, to fit it in the warhead of the Shehab missile.

  Following these revelations, Zadeh was denied entry into the United States and the EU, and his bank accounts in the West were frozen. The resistance described in detail all his functions, disclosed the names of the scientists working with him and even the location of his secret laboratories. This abundance of detail and means of transmission leads one to believe that, again, “a certain secret service” ever suspected by the West of pursuing its own agenda, painstakingly collected these facts and figures about the Iranian scientist and passed them to the Iranian resistance, which conveyed them to the West. His exposure was meant to warn him that he might be “the next in line” for assassination and inspire him to either scramble for cover or choose the better solution: to defect to the West.

  General Ali Reza Asgari, a former Iranian deputy minister of defense, vanished in February 2007 while traveling to Istanbul. He had been deeply involved in the nuclear project. The Iranian services searched for him all over the world but couldn’t find him. Almost four years later, in January 2011, Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, turned to the UN secretary general and accused the Mossad of abducting him and jailing him in Israel.

  But according to the Sunday Telegraph in London, Asgari had defected to the West; the Mossad had planned his defection and had taken care of his protection in Turkey. Other sources maintain that he had been later debriefed by the CIA and supplied them with valuable information about Iran’s nuclear program.

  A month after Asgari’s disappearance—in March 2007—another senior Iranian officer vanished. Amir Shirazi served in the “Al Quds” unit, the elite force of the Revolutionary Guards, charged with secret operations beyond Iran’s border. An Iranian source revealed to the London Times that besides the disappearances of Asgari and Shirazi, another high-ranking officer had vanished: the Revolutionary Guards commander in the Persian Gulf, Mohammad Soltani.

  In July 2009, the nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri joined the list of defectors. Amiri, who was employed at Qom, disappeared in Saudi Arabia during a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Iranians demanded that the Saudis find out what had happened to him. Amiri surfaced a few months later in the United States, was thoroughly debriefed, got $5 million, a new identity, and a new home in Arizona. CIA sources disclosed he had been an informer to Western intelligence for years and had supplied them with “original and substantive” intelligence. Amiri revealed that the Malek-Ashtar University of Technology, where he had taught, served as an academic cover for a research unit designing the warheads for the Iranian long-range missiles; Fakhri Zadeh headed that university.

  After a year in America, Amiri changed his mind and decided to go back to Iran. He supposedly couldn’t cope with the stress of his new life. In a homemade video, shown on the Internet, he claimed he had been abducted by the CIA; a few hours later, he posted another video, disclaiming the first, and then produced a third video, disclaiming the second. He got in touch with the Pakistani embassy, which represented Iranian interests in the United States, and asked to be sent back to Iran. The Pakistanis helped; in July 2010, Amiri landed in Tehran. He appeared at a press conference, accused the CIA of kidnapping and mistreating him—and disappeared. Observers accused the CIA of failure, but a CIA spokesman cracked: “We got important information and the Iranians got Amiri; well, who got a better deal?”

  But the Iranians were not without resources against the Mossad. In December 2004, Iran had arrested ten suspects for spying for Israel and the United States; three worked inside the nuclear installations. In 2008, the Iranians announced that they had dismantled another Mossad cell: three Iranian citizens who had been trained by the Mossad to use sophisticated communications equipment, weapons, and explosives. In November 2008, they hanged forty-three-year-old Ali Ashtari, who was found guilty of spying for Israel. In the course of his trial, he admitted meeting three Mossad agents in Europe. They were said to have given him money and electronic equipment. “The Mossad people wanted me to sell earmarked shipments of computers and electronic equipment to the Iranian intelligence services and to plant listening devices in communications instruments that I sold,” Ashtari testified.

  On December 28, 2010, in the grim courtyard of Evin prison in Tehran, Iranian officers hanged another spy, Ali-Akbar Siadat, who had been found guilty of working for the Mossad and supplying it with information about Iran’s military capabilities and the missile program operated by the Revolutionary Guards. For the previous six years, Siadat had been meeting with Israeli agents in Turkey, Thailand, and the Netherlands, and receiving payments of $3,000 to $7,000 for each meeting. Iranian officials promised that more arrests and executions would follow.

  But 2010 was the year of the greatest setback for the Iranian nuclear project. Was it because of the lack of high-quality spare parts for the Iranian equipment? Because of the faulty parts and metals that Mossad’s bogus companies sold to the Iranians? Because of planes crashing, laboratories set on fire, explosions in the missile and nuclear installations, defection of senior officials, deaths of top scientists, revolts and upheaval among the minorities’ groups—all those events and phenomena that Iran (correctly and incorrectly) attributed to Dagan’s people?

  Or was it because of Dagan’s last “major coup,” according to the European press? In the summer of 2010, thousands of computers controlling the Iranian nuclear project were infected with the perfidious Stuxnet virus. Labeled one of the most sophisticated in the world, Stuxnet struck computers controlling the Natanz centrifuges and wreaked havoc. Its complexity left no doubt that it was the product of a large team of experts and considerable funds. One of the virus’s distinctive features was that it could be targeted to a specific system, causing no harm to others en route. Its presence in a computer was also difficult to detect. Once in the Iranian system, it could modify the speed of rotation of a centrifuge, making its product useless, without anyone being aware of it. Observers spoke of two countries as having the ability to carry out such cyberattacks: the United States and Israel.

  President Ahmadinejad tried to downplay the effect Stuxnet had had, and declared that Iran had the situation well in hand. The truth, though, was that at the beginning of 2011, about half of Iran’s centrifuges were immobilized.

  Dagan’s people allegedly delayed Iran’s nuclear weapons program with their incessant attacks on so many fronts over so many years: diplomatic pressure and sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council; counter-proliferation—keeping the Iranians from getting the materials needed to produce a bomb; economical
warfare—prohibiting the banks in the free world from doing business with Iran; regime change, by supporting and fomenting political unrest and by fanning the ethnic divisions inside Iran, where Kurds, Azeris, Beloshis, Arabs, and Turkmen constitute 50 percent of the population; and most immediately, covert measures, black and special operations against the Iranian project.

  But they couldn’t permanently stop it, no matter how good they were, nor how much cooperation they had. “Dagan is the ultimate James Bond,” a high-placed Israeli analyst said, but even James Bond couldn’t save the world in this case. At best, he could slow down the Iranians. Only an Iranian government decision or a massive attack from abroad can put an end to the Iranian dream of creating a formidable nuclear giant where the Persian Empire once stood.

  And yet, when Dagan was appointed ramsad (the abbreviation for rosh hamossad—head of the Mossad), experts predicted that Iran would reach nuclear capacity in 2005; the date was later moved ahead to 2007, 2009, 2011. And when Dagan left office on January 6, 2011, he had a message for his country: Iran’s project has been delayed at least until 2015. He therefore recommended a continuation of the same actions, so effective in the last eight years, and a freeze of any military attack on Iran. Only when the dagger blade starts cutting into our flesh, he said, should we attack; that dagger blade remains four years away.

  Dagan served as ramsad eight and a half years—more than most Mossad directors. He was replaced by Tamir Pardo, a veteran Mossad officer who started his operational career as a close aide to Yoni Netanyahu, the hero of the 1976 Israeli raid in Entebbe, and later distinguished himself as a daring agent, an expert in new technologies, and a creative planner of unusual operations.

  When passing the torch to Pardo, Dagan spoke of the terrible solitude of the Mossad agents operating in enemy countries, when they have no one to turn to, no one to rescue them in case of need. He also candidly admitted some of his failures; the most important being lack of success in finding the place where Hamas was hiding the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, kidnapped five years ago. (Shalit was later released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian terrorists.) Yet, despite such failings, Dagan’s achievements honor him as the best ramsad so far. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked him “in the name of the Jewish people” and hugged him warmly. In an unprecedented, spontaneous reaction, the Israeli cabinet ministers stood up and applauded the sixty-five-year-old ramsad. George W. Bush saluted him in a personal letter.