The End of Terror

by Howitt, Bruce

  As they raced out to sea to rendezvous with the waiting Tekumah, the administration and communication buildings exploded. A minute later, the oil storage tanks blasted in a devastating pyrotechnical display. The firestorm of burning oil and munitions was observed from space by both Israeli and US satellites circling the earth.

  Once all three teams were back safely on board, the Israeli submarine silently submerged to a depth of fifty metres and crept out to the Straits of Hormuz and back to Israel.

  Two lesser explosions rocked the two moored warships back in the harbour, causing the destroyer to begin sinking immediately. The Yunes split apart at the waterline and sank within minutes.

  The naval commandos had silently eluded or eliminated the Iranian guards and placed explosives and wireless activated flashbang devices designed to sow mass confusion and terror in the enemy. The added destruction of the submarine and the locally constructed destroyer, the pride of the Iranian Navy, was a huge bonus and would soon be a demoralizer for the Iranian military brass.

  As the IRGC realized the base was under attack, they began quickly assembling and searching out the attackers. The wirelessly activated explosives were causing total panic and pandemonium among the Iranian forces. Eventually, after an hour of chaos, one of the Guard officers was able to get the alarm out by driving to a public telephone land line at a small retail grocery store two miles from the base. He notified the IRGC headquarters in Tehran and the Quds Force headquarters located in the former US embassy, as well as the Council of Clerics, who were all roused from their sleep by aides and junior clerics. All this telephone activity was monitored by the Israeli AWAC planes, confirming to the IDF command and 9 headquarters that the plans to take down the Iranian communication systems at Bandar Abbas had been successful.

  CHAPTER 45

  Qom and Tehran, 0500 hrs

  A hastily convened telephone conference was held between Qom and Tehran, during which it was decided, exactly as Ari and Dov had expected, that the Ayatollah and his most senior advisers and mullahs should immediately travel to Tehran. Israeli communication and IT specialists intercepted and redirected instructions for all the clerics and senior officials to assemble at the Council of Clerics headquarters. With the communication centres destroyed or compromised, the Israelis controlled all communications to and from the various Iranian military groups.

  Dov and his teams struck hard and fast during the shock and confusion surrounding the reports from Bandar Abbas. The Israeli commandos forced their way into the IRGC and Quds Force headquarters in Qom, taking the guards and those troops that were awake totally by surprise. The IRGC were considered elite troops and soon showed their skills. Although caught off guard by the intensity of the Israeli attack and penetration of their buildings, under the command of some seasoned veteran officers from the Syrian campaign, they soon recovered and fought back with fury and determination. The Israeli Special Forces were challenged for over an hour as the IRGC troops were expert fighters, well trained and coordinated. Their ability to react to sudden actions and organize among themselves via walkie-talkies instead of radios and cell phones impressed Dov. This was unexpected and Dov and his teams had to at times take defensive actions themselves. Several Sayeret were injured and evacuated to the aid station they had established for exactly that purpose.

  Eventually, the Israelis overpowered the Iranians and either killed or wounded them to the point where they were removed from the fighting. Dov and Deborah Grunwalder and their commandos then began a floor-by-floor and room-by-room clearing action. They had to disarm IRGC communications so the Iranian commanders would be unable to communicate with any of their forces.

  After the spirited firefight put up by the IRGC, the Israelis had suffered several casualties, two received serious and extensive wounds, although both would survive, and several others suffered minor wounds.

  With the IRGC forces out of the picture, Dov and Deborah retreated down to the building where the Council of Clerics offices were situated. There they removed any threats from the small contingent of Quds Force providing security for the clerics. Those guards had no appetite for aggressive defence after they had witnessed or heard what happened to their former colleagues at the headquarters.

  What surprised Dov and his teams was the complete absence of regular Iranian armed forces. He concluded that either the jamming and destruction of the communication systems was the cause or that the professional generals were smart enough to understand that the events happening all around them were designed to end the rule of the mullahs and clerics. Those soldiers were loyal to the state but disillusioned, as was the civilian population of Iran, with the stifling and corrupt rule of religious extremists and their thuggish Revolutionary Guards, Quds.

  The AWAC planes circling the skies around Iran and the Lebanon-Syrian border picked up some early attempts from the IRGC to question the sudden poor communications. They also captured recordings of frantic radio and cell phone transmissions from IRGC headquarters to Soleimani’s bunker in Syria. Because the transmissions were being blocked by the Israeli aircraft jamming all signals, Soleimani never understood what was happening. He eventually left the command bunker and returned to Beirut to spend the night with his paramour, the TV hostess and announcer who was his long-term mistress.

  At first, the clerics and mullahs believed that the soldiers gathering them together were Iranian, so great was their shock. They were not able to process what was happening. The Sayeret quickly bound the mullahs and clerics in plastic tie handcuffs and herded them out to the waiting trucks.

  “What has happened? Who are these sons of apes?” shouted one of the clerics.

  “We are infidels from Israel. We are here to end your sick, depraved rule. Now shut up.” This response was administered with the light tap of a rifle to the knee, accompanied by a smile from an Israeli commando.

  The assembled and bound mullahs and clerics were in a complete state of denial. “Where are the Islamic Guards? Why are these infidels even here?”

  Finally, after several bound prisoners were roughly pushed toward the trucks and manhandled up inside, the remainder began to quiet down when they realized there were no rescuers coming to save them.

  Once Dov was certain he had the majority of the religious leadership captured, the Israelis having loaded them into the trucks provided by, as Dov put it “our Friends in Persia,” they were driven at high speed back to Vasidieh, where an awaiting C-130 Hercules had swept in low under the radar in time to meet the trucks and their precious cargo.

  CHAPTER 46

  Natanz Nuclear Plant perimeter, 0230 hrs

  Captain Leo Moscver, who was leading the Sayeret team charged with destroying the Natanz facility, quietly assembled his men and informed them that the Israeli plan to disrupt and degrade all the Iranian communications had been successful.

  Captain Moscver was an elite among elites. Out of uniform, he was unassuming and quiet, with the air of a studious academic. He lived in the suburbs of Jerusalem with his wife, Gila, and their two young boys, Daniel and Benyamin. Gila obviously understood that her husband was in some group of special forces, but she could only guess what he was doing when he was away on a business trip, as she explained to the boys and her mother.

  Once he was on a mission, Leo was all business. His troops held him in the highest regard, since Leo never asked anything of them that he wouldn’t do himself. Within the ranks of the Sayeret, Leo was respected as one of very best. He never shied away from an action and always planned cautiously. His greatest fear in all of the eight years he had been in Sayeret was to lose one of his men. Leo believed that meticulous planning and incessant training down to the smallest detail resulted in a successful mission without men being lost. It was this careful focus that endeared him to his men and earned him the admiration of his commanders at operation headquarters in Tel Aviv.

  None of the Iranian military command centres was operable; the airfields had been removed from any action. The Isr
aeli fighter planes had destroyed the entire telecommunication infrastructure in the country, so no cell or land line phones were working.

  Before they departed from Azerbaijan on the CH-53 Yas′ur helicopter that had carried them to their insertion point, Moscver personally checked all the equipment on each of his men. He had already drilled them to run their own equipment checks but he checked each of them again anyway. It was this attention to detail that Leo believed saved lives.

  The helicopter deposited them 2.5 km from the nuclear site. They had received real-time intel from the AWACS that all Iranian communications were immobilized or scrambled. The radar stations surrounding Natanz had been rendered inactive, so the team was dropped without incident. Their biggest test now ensued. They had to advance on the breathers unseen and unheard.

  All team members were equipped with night-vision goggles and Tavor CTAR-21 Bullpup assault rifles. One soldier, Lev Solomon, also carried a Barrett M82A semiautomatic suppressed sniper rifle.

  Moscver led his team to one of the two areas their drone had identified as containing the air-breather ducts. The terrain was rough, coarse sand and hardscrabble rock — not easy to navigate at night.

  Solomon was tasked with setting up on a small promontory overlooking the rocky outcrop, which the drone had precisely identified as protecting one of the air-breathers from sight. Moscver had reviewed all the photos and live feeds from the drone he had launched an hour ago and selected this breather as the easiest to reach without discovery.

  Lev Solomon had one simple set of instructions: Eliminate any vehicle or person that approached the rest of the team as they inched their way to the breather.

  Accessing the air duct was no easy task for Moscver and his team. All the digital and HUMINT intelligence they pored over during their planning exercises had indicated that the Iranians built very sophisticated defences around all their nuclear facilities, but none more so than Natanz. This was the facility they had attempted to conceal from the IAEA when they were constructing it. It was also believed to be where Iran transferred major technology from the Fordow plant after Fordow was discovered by the British Secret Service SIS and CIA intelligence agencies.

  There was some solid anecdotal evidence that the relationship with North Korea had developed after the attack on the Syrian nuclear plant. Western intelligence services, mostly SIS and the CIA, with assistance and input from the Saudis and Jordanians, were very much convinced that there was a strong contingent of North Korean scientists and technicians, as well as some Russians, working alongside the Iranians in the centrifuge facility and the laboratories and weapons assembly area.

  Imagery obtained by American and Israeli spy satellites had identified large covered trucks leaving the plant. Those trucks had been tracked to the naval side of Bandar Abbas port, where their contents were transferred to cargo vessels that changed flags and modified their superstructure. Those vessels also turned off their identification transponders so as to avoid detection as they sailed to North Korea. While no definite proof was established, the consensus was that the cargo consisted of missiles and the electronic gear required to fire them. Kim Jong-un had been boastful of his ICBM missile technology. The Western intelligence services and others did not believe he had the know-how or funds required to develop such sophisticated and highly technical equipment.

  In the reverse, traffic captured by the intelligence services was a firm suspicion that Iranian cargo planes were bringing North Korean nuclear bomb technology back to Iran. There had been sightings of large cargo planes landing at Sari Dasht-e Naz International Airport near the Caspian Sea at night. The planes were quickly unloaded and would take off and fly to Isfahan International Airport or Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport. No hard evidence could be gathered, but the dots seemed to connect.

  Natanz was protected from air assault by a ring of surface-to-air missile sites, some of which were now the deadly Russian SA-300 and SA-400 systems. Because of its design and construction, even if bombers or cruise missiles could defeat the air defences, they would do little or no damage to the facility. Intelligence reviews by both Israel and the United States had determined that even the massive bunker-busting bombs the United States had made available would not be able to damage the installations.

  The Natanz nuclear plant was constructed ninety feet underground and consisted of approximately one million square feet of underground buildings. Two large 250-square-foot halls housed the centrifuges and the enrichment activities. Another 500,000 square feet consisted of underground support buildings for the scientists and guards. Around the perimeter was a six-meter-high concrete wall, eight feet thick, which was in turn protected by an outer wall five feet thick. The design of the facility was considered to make it impregnable to attack from air or land. Any heavy assault vehicles, such as tanks or other armoured vehicles, would have to break through the outer wall, only to be hung up against the very thick inner wall. This would leave them vulnerable to deadly anti-tank fire.

  Dov and the analysts at Rosh Pina had determined in evaluating the intelligence photos that the breathers were for reasons of security located outside the two perimeter walls. During their preparation at Rosh Pina, this had been confirmed by an IAF pilot who studied all the photo intelligence from the Keyhole US satellites and the Israeli Army satellite. One of their HUMINT agents had provided information that said there were sensors and cleverly concealed trip wires, plus antipersonnel mines haphazardly located around any direct path to the breather duct.

  As a standard, the Iranian military used antipersonnel mines originally developed by the Germans in the 1930s. This mine had a small cylindrical housing with a telescoping trigger about the size of a soda can, which when activated by the pressure of a soldier’s foot would catapult up to about waist level before detonating and unleashing a ten-foot cone of deadly ball bearings and shrapnel. Any victim within range of the mine’s explosive force was literally eviscerated and quite often cut in half. During WWII it was one of the most feared weapons deployed by the Nazis against Allied troops, who referred to it as “Bouncing Betty.”

  Being aware of all this, Moscver had his men keep a distance of thirty feet from each other. Once they were within a thousand yards of the breather location, he had the whole team slowly lie flat on their stomachs and hold position for five minutes. This was to test if any ground-based sensors had picked up their presence. He figured that if they did set off a sensor alarm, only a small patrol would come out to check. If a patrol showed up, Lev Solomon and his MA-82 would bid them goodbye.

  After five minutes, Leo had the first man crawl very slowly and gingerly forward, using the length of his body to check for the inverted tripod of a mine trigger. After they had gone about five hundred yards without detecting any mines, the lead commando, Benjamin Taber, a twenty-six-year-old father of two, suddenly froze and whispered into his communication device for everyone to also freeze in position. As he was inching forward, searching the ground in front of him and to each side with his AID goggles, he had identified the trigger of a mine less than four inches from his chin. Thankfully, the Sayeret had trained for this eventuality. Taber carefully removed his combat knife from the scabbard strapped on his left thigh and carefully began excavating around the mine. He started digging in a circle about a yard from the trigger and worked his way in until the knife made contact with the body of the mine. His whole nervous system was on high alert. Even though the night air was cold, his body was drenched in sweat. The fear of being eviscerated by the deadly Bouncing Betty and the stress of knowing that his failure now would end their whole operation weighed heavily on the young soldier.

  After he had fully excavated around it, a process that took about twenty minutes, Taber slowly lifted the mine out of the sand it was buried in. Once he had it in his hands, another team member, Zachary Nussfeld, slowly slid up to him from behind and handed him a nine-inch threaded rod and nut. Corporal Taber then inserted the small rod into a hole on the telescoping tri
gger and carefully secured it with the nut. Thus secured, the trigger and the mine were inoperable.

  Taber had served three years in the IDF infantry and then had been accepted into the Sayeryet five years ago. His grandparents and those of his wife, Mira, were survivors from Poland and Hungary, respectively. Mira’s grandparents had escaped the SS and the Arrow Cross in Budapest by obtaining papers stating they were Swiss citizens from the Swiss Consul Carl Lutz. Lutz had risked his life to save as many Jews as he could from Adolph Eichmann’s death trains and camps. At the war’s end, they recognized that staying in Budapest under the communists and Soviet rule was not safe, so they managed to find their way to Austria and eventually Italy.

  Benjamin Taber’s father, Herschel, had been born at Kibbutz Yagur, where his grandparents first settled in 1953 after fleeing Hungary and the DP Camps. Later they moved to Tel Aviv, where Herschel and his father grew a small fledgling electronics store into a burgeoning empire. Benjamin wasn’t interested in commerce; he was a dedicated soldier in the IDF. His grandparents and Ari Lazarus’s grandparents were close friends who had met when they were all staying on Yagur in Israel’s early days.

  It was while he was completing his basic tour in the infantry that Benjamin had met and married Mira.

  As he was searching for mines, his only other thoughts were of his beautiful young wife and children. Each time he went out on a mission, especially one as dangerous as this, he always knew that fate could cause something to go wrong, yet he had complete faith in Leo Moscver, his commander, and knew in his heart of hearts that as long as he followed Leo’s orders they would all be safe.

  Once the first mine was secure, Corporal Taber settled his nerves and continued his slow and careful search. Even though he and Zachary Nussfeld had trained for this eventuality, once Corporal Taber knew there was no allowance for any error, he focused on the task at hand like he had never focused before. He was sweating profusely even though the nighttime temperature was only in the midthirties Fahrenheit. The slightest misjudgment or wrong move would wreak disaster on the whole mission.