Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  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.

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bsp; 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.

  Sharon—later followed as prime minister by Ehud Olmert and more robustly by Benjamin Netanyahu—repeatedly declared that Iran was not only Israel’s problem, but an international one. Dagan absorbed that credo and, in the very private battle he was waging, tried to muster as much support as possible from other nations’ security services.

  The Mossad director did have a problem, however, persuading the intelligence agencies of other nations that Iran was racing to create nuclear weapons. That was a tough mission. Military analysts at Aman had cried wolf, several times, in their annual National Intelligence Estimate. In the mid-1990s, the Estimate predicted that Iran would have nuclear weapons by the dawn of the new millennium. That date was postponed to 2003, and later modified to 2005.

  The Israeli case—that Iran’s nuclear program was a huge and urgent matter—was severely dented by another Estimate, the NIE that America’s intelligence community delivered to President George W. Bush in 2007. It said, with high confidence, that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, perhaps in a somewhat frightened reaction to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that year.

  So why should the world believe that the Israeli analysis was more accurate? Governments everywhere were skeptical of everything that touched on Middle East secrets. American and British espionage agencies were burned by declaring with certainty in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction—and thus faulty intelligence was one of the building blocks of the costly, unpopular war in Iraq.

  Dagan laboriously deepened the Mossad’s liaison relationships with numerous intelligence agencies in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. He wanted first to persuade them that the Iranian danger was real, and he laid out the latest evidence with detailed data. Unlike in the past, with Israel’s reputation for being very stingy with information—wanting to get a lot, without giving much at all—Dagan was showing a broad array of facts that added up to an Iranian nuclear program far bigger than anything Tehran could claim was required for peaceful purposes.

  The Mossad chief frequently flew to meet counterparts in countries that had intelligence relationships with Israel, urging them to accept that causing problems for Iran’s nuclear program was something that they all should want to do and could do. Dagan hit it off especially well with the four directors of the Central Intelligence Agency who were his American partners during his eight years: George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and Leon Panetta.

  To strengthen the approach of compiling—and then acting upon—the most current intelligence available, the Mossad teamed up with Aman’s technology unit and the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. They compiled a list of all the components that Iran would need to build a nuclear bomb.

  The IAEC was able to utilize experience gained by acquiring everything that Israel’s nuclear program—a secret project that officials refused ever to speak about—had required. They came up with 25,000 items, from tiny screws to missile engine parts: an amazingly wide range including specialized metals, carbon fiber, valves, wiring, fast computers, control panels, and so much more.

  Iranian purchasing networks, operating on five continents in a systematic effort guided by the masters of the nuclear program, were trying to get their hands on everything the program needed. As a first action move, Dagan urged his counterpart agencies to find legal ways in all their respective countries to stop the shipments to Iran. He had an easy time with the CIA, MI6, the German BND, the French DGSE, and a few others who understood the danger and had been monitoring Iran’s nuclear project.

  Soon, even the relatively small secret services of countries such as Poland joined this informal coalition of intelligence agencies. Joint steps included halting and seizing cargos. Based on tips from the Mossad, the CIA, and MI6, dozens of Iranian purchasing networks were exposed. Iran-bound shipments from such
nations as Tanzania, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan were confiscated by European and other state authorities.

  The Mossad strengthened its liaison relationships with intelligence agencies in former Communist countries in Eastern Europe, as they had contacts in Middle Eastern countries that were different—and often more useful—than Western agencies had. When a businessman or other traveler from the ex-Soviet bloc was in Iran, the authorities seemed to be less suspicious than they were when Westerners arrived. Israel was able to share in some of the intelligence gleaned by the visitors, who included undercover spies.

  Friendly liaisons were illustrated when Dagan received awards from several countries, including an honorary citizenship bestowed upon him by formerly Communist Poland. The gesture was poignant, in light of his family’s tragic history on Polish soil, and also saluted joint operations with the Mossad in the present.

  Iran started feeling the pinch, because of disruptions to its supply chain, but the nuclear program was not deterred.

  The international effort had to be stepped up. Hoping to benefit from having the United Nations as a central base for the pressure, Israel and cooperative foreign agencies needed more evidence to prove Iran’s true intentions. That was achieved by the coordinated intelligence efforts of the Mossad, CIA, MI6, and BND. They continually provided sensitive information to the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency.

  It was the mandate of the IAEA, based in Vienna, to monitor Iran’s program. The agency bought satellite imagery from private companies, and it sent inspectors to several Iranian facilities where U.N. cameras were then installed.

  Though the field work of the inspectors was quite good, they were stopped from telling the full truth. International bureaucrats led by the IAEA Director-General, former Egyptian diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei, drafted the reports and watered them down so that the conclusions were soggy rather than strong. Israeli officials felt that he was far too eager to broker a deal that would allow the Iranians to keep enriching uranium.