Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  When quarterly reports were issued at IAEA meetings, Vienna was turned into a scene from the Orson Welles 1948 movie, The Third Man. The “U.N. City” neighborhood on the Danube River was teeming with Mossad, CIA, and spies of other nations—typically traveling with signals intelligence (sigint) technicians. They tried to recruit members of the Iranian delegation and listened in on their conversations. This was a somewhat rare opportunity to approach Iranian government employees outside their country’s very restrictive borders. Some of them were senior scientists and managers in Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

  ElBaradei, who genuinely feared that his agency was being manipulated by Western interests, was stubborn. He refused to succumb to their pressure or to rush to point an accusing finger at Iran. Among his international staff were around 20 Iranians, and the Israeli assumption was that the U.N. agency was penetrated by Iran’s spies and those of other countries. The IAEA was a body full of holes.

  The Mossad put together a thick dossier on ElBaradei, alleging a cozy relationship with Iran, and gave it to Omar Suleiman, who was President Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence chief. Mubarak was no fan of Iran’s, and Suleiman was very cooperative with Israel on various projects. Still, there was no sign of ElBaradei being reigned in by his home government.

  Mossad operatives considered several ideas for embarrassing the IAEA director, in the hope that he would have to resign. One such plan was to penetrate his bank account and deposit money there that he would not be able to explain. The psychological warfare department then would spread rumors to journalists that ElBaradei was receiving bribes from Iranian agents. In the end, that did not occur. In fact, his prestige only rose when he and the IAEA together were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

  ElBaradei did become tougher on Iran, just around that time, when solid information provided by Western intelligence agencies left very little to the imagination. Now it was clear that Iran was deceiving inspectors. While enriching more uranium than would be needed to produce medical isotopes or generate electricity—the officially declared purposes—the Iranians were also trying to achieve the final stage of a nuclear program: weaponization. That would mean putting together all the components, including fissile material in precisely sized metal spheres, and detonators with high-speed switches.

  They were also working on complex calculations of how to detonate a nuclear bomb, and what would be the optimum altitude from which to drop it.

  This became clear—to Western officials, undeniably true—when a laptop computer that contained an incriminating, three-minute Persian-language video found its way to the IAEA. The computer had apparently belonged to an Iranian, who had loaded it with mathematical musings, photos of laboratories and workshops, and details of a mock-up of a warhead on a missile. There was one highly memorable feature: Whenever the video was viewed, it played the music from the Oscar-winning movie Chariots of Fire.

  The Mossad had procured this smoking gun in 2004 and shared it with other Western intelligence agencies, which passed it to the international inspectors. There were some suspicions that the Mossad might have fabricated the Chariots of Fire files, but the CIA considered them genuine.

  Equipped with that and other evidence, Western nations managed to persuade other members of the IAEA to pass a resolution in September 2005 that accused the Iranians of “non-compliance.” The official verdict now was that Iran failed to be transparent and refused to obey calls for a halt in uranium enrichment.

  The agency then moved its confrontation with Iran to a higher level by referring the non-compliance report to the United Nations Security Council in February 2006. Strong reservations were expressed by China, which bought 15 percent of its oil from Iran, and by Russia, which had strong trade relations and was building an electricity-generating nuclear plant in the Iranian city of Bushehr. But, in December 2006, U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iran.

  In the years that followed, more rounds of sanctions were approved. They targeted Iranian military officers, Revolutionary Guard leaders, scientific experts, and corporations associated with the country’s nuclear and missile programs. Their travel was banned and bank accounts outside Iran frozen. The world was forbidden to trade with these individuals and companies.

  Israeli and American intelligence agencies evaluated the restrictions, however, and determined that they were too soft. The assessment was that only stronger, crippling sanctions might have some effect on Iran’s leadership.

  It seemed that the kind of steps required would include a ban on buying Iranian crude oil and its byproducts. China and Russia refused to lend a hand to that effort. Sanctions thus were not hobbling the determination of Iran’s leaders to keep up their nuclear work.

  The Mossad realized that more drastic measures were needed. Dagan’s battle plan called next for sabotage. That took various shapes. As early as 2003, the Mossad and the CIA exchanged ideas for damaging utility services and lines feeding Iran’s nuclear facilities. Plans were drawn up to place bombs along the electricity grid leading to the uranium-enrichment site at Natanz.

  Dagan—keen to tighten intelligence ties with the United States in light of the trauma America had suffered on September 11, 2001—encouraged more joint planning and, eventually, joint operations on the Middle East’s clandestine fields of battle.

  Another CIA suggestion was to send a physicist, a Russian who had moved to the United States, to Iran to offer his knowledge to the Iranian nuclear program. The caper was ridiculously mishandled when the CIA altered a set of nuclear warhead plans that the physicist was carrying, but neglected to tell him. The Iranians would have received damaging disinformation. Unfortunately for this scheme, the ex-Russian noticed errors and told the Iranians that something was flawed. He simply did not know that the CIA wanted him to keep his mouth shut and pass along the materials.

  Despite imperfect penetrations at first, the entire concept of “poisoning” both information and equipment was attractive; and the Mossad, the CIA, and the British kept doing it. These agencies set up front companies that established contact with Iranian purchasing networks. In order to build up trust, they sold Iran some genuine components. But at a later stage, they planted—among the good parts, such as metal tubes and high-speed switches—many bad parts that damaged Iran’s program.

  The results of this international sabotage began to show. Iran found itself having trouble keeping control of the equipment that it had bought from overseas.

  The peak of these damage operations was a brilliantly innovative computer worm that would become known as Stuxnet. Though its origin was never officially announced, Stuxnet was a joint project by the CIA, the Mossad, and Aman’s technological unit. The malicious software was specifically designed to disrupt a German-made computerized control system that ran the centrifuges in Natanz.

  The project required studying, by reverse engineering, precisely how the control panel and computers worked and what effect they had on the centrifuges. For that purpose, Germany’s BND—very friendly to Israel, in part hoping to erase Holocaust memories—arranged the cooperation of Siemens, the German corporation that had sold the system to Iran. The directors of Siemens may have felt pangs of conscience, or were simply reacting to public pressure, as newspapers pointed out that it was Iran’s largest trading partner in Germany.

  For a better understanding of Iran’s enrichment process, old centrifuges—which Israel had obtained many years before—were set up in one of the buildings at Dimona, Israel’s not-so-secret nuclear facility in the southern Negev desert. They were nearly identical to the centrifuges that were enriching uranium in Natanz.

  The Israelis closely watched what the computer worm could do to an industrial process. The tests, partially conducted also at a U.S. government lab in Idaho, took two years.

  Virtual weapons of destruction such as Stuxnet can be e-mailed to the target computer network, or they can be installed in person by plugging in a flash drive. Whether hidden in an electronic message or plugged in b
y an agent for the Mossad, the virus did get into the Natanz facility’s control system sometime in 2009. Stuxnet was in the system for more than a year before it was detected by Iranian cyber-warfare experts. By then, it was giving the centrifuges confusing instructions, which disrupted their precise synchronization. They were no longer spinning in concert, and as the equipment sped up and slowed repeatedly, the rotors that did the spinning were severely damaged.

  The true beauty of this computer worm was that the operators of the system had no idea that anything was going wrong. Everything at first seemed normal, and when they noticed the problem it was too late. Nearly 1,000 centrifuges—about one-fifth of those operating at Natanz—were knocked out of commission.

  Iranian intelligence and computer experts were shocked. The nuclear program was slowing down, barely advancing, and falling way behind schedule. Stuxnet, more than anything else, made the Iranians realize they were under attack in a shadow war, with hardly any capability to respond.

  In late 2011, they announced two more cyber-attacks. One virus, which computer analysts called Duqu, showed signs of being created by the same high-level, sophisticated hackers who authored Stuxnet: U.S. and Israeli intelligence.

  If that were not enough, like the Ten Plagues that befell ancient Egypt, the Iranians were hit by yet another blow—this time, a lethal one. Between 2007 and 2011, five top Iranian scientists were assassinated by a variety of methods. One supposedly was felled by carbon monoxide from a heater in his home. Four others were killed by bombs.

  Three of the four bombings were accomplished by powerful magnets that held a uniquely shaped charge—a small but powerful bomb that directed all its lethal energy in one direction—when stuck onto a car door. The explosives were placed by fast-moving attackers riding on motorcycles, and motorcycles were practically a trademark of the Mossad’s assassination unit.

  There was a sixth attempt, using the magnetic method of sticking a bomb on a car door, but almost miraculously that target survived. Fereydoon Abbas-Divani, perhaps because of instincts developed as a Revolutionary Guard, sensed the danger and jumped out of his car. The Iranian regime, to show its defiance—after publicly blaming “the Zionists and America” for the string of attacks—promoted Abbas-Divani to be head of the Iran Atomic Energy Organization.

  The common thread was that all the targets were key figures in Iran’s nuclear program, at least some of them in the weaponization area. They also were lecturers or researchers in the science departments of top Iranian universities.

  All the assassinations took place in the morning, when the targets were on their way to work. The attackers riding motorcycles showed cool-headed steadiness of the highest order. Clearly, these killings were the work of professionals, who had precise information about the home addresses and daily routines of the targeted scientists.

  In the midst of all those killings, there was another incident—different, but very large. A massive explosion destroyed much of a missile-testing base near Tehran in December 2011. Dozens of people were killed, including a Revolutionary Guards general in charge of developing long-range missiles that could hit Israel and beyond. Major General Hassan Moghadam was also responsible for liaison with Syria and Hezbollah, and decided what missiles would be shipped by Iran to militants in Lebanon.

  As with the assassinations of the scientists, there was no claim of responsibility for the death of the general and the others at the missile development facility. Iran denied that this blast was the result of sabotage, but that contention was probably out of reluctance to admit that a major military base had been infiltrated.

  As for wishful thinking on the other side, some anti-ayatollah Iranian exiles claimed that their freedom-seeking brethren inside the country were carrying out these acts of violence. The exiles, frustrated by the endurance of the Islamic regime, wanted to believe that political dissidents had formed an active underground group that could strike the nuclear and missile programs with both courage and accuracy.

  The truth, although Israel intended never to confirm it, was that these attacks were the handiwork of the Mossad’s long arm. As difficult as the missions were, Israeli intelligence already had a long history of sabotage and targeted bloodshed. The name of the game, as the Book of Proverbs and the agency’s motto suggested, was to disrupt the plans of enemy countries.

  It was noteworthy, too, that the United States flatly denied any involvement. American officials even went so far as to publicly criticize the unknown killers for spoiling diplomatic hopes, because the chances of negotiations with Iran became slimmer after every attack. The Americans, in private, said that they were chiding Israel.

  As for other suspects, while German intelligence was concerned about Iran, this era’s set of spies in Berlin thankfully exhibited no taste for murder. And Britain’s MI6 got out of the assassination business after the negotiated, if fragile, end of the conflict in Northern Ireland in 1998.

  Several journalists suggested that the Mossad was only acting as an assassination contractor in Iran. They guessed that killers were recruited by the Israelis from such Iranian opposition groups as Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK) or a Sunni Muslim group, Jundallah (Soldiers of God), also known as the People’s Resistance Movement of Iran—in that country’s Baluchistan province.

  It is true that Dagan had drawn up a battle plan that included the use of disaffected minority groups. In a State Department cable from 2007 obtained and released by Wikileaks, the Mossad chief was quoted as telling a senior American official that disaffection among Baluchi, Azeri, and Kurdish minorities could be exploited by the United States and Israel. Dagan also suggested supporting student pro-democracy activists, if only to cause unrest inside Iran.

  The official message also said that Dagan felt sure that the U.S. and Israel could “change the ruling regime in Iran and its attitude toward backing terror regimes,” and that “we could also get them to delay their nuclear project.”

  According to the cable, Dagan said, “The economy is hurting, and this is provoking a real crisis among Iran’s leaders.” The minority groups that the Mossad and CIA could support or exploit are “raising their heads and are tempted to resort to violence.”

  High unemployment among Iran’s young males could be—from a Mossad perspective—extremely useful in recruiting allies, agents who could be trained, or even mercenary or rebel armies.

  In the years that followed, clues emerged, indicating that activists in MEK, Jundallah, and a few other dissident groups in Iran served as sources of information for Israel. In addition, when the Mossad wished to plant a tip about Iran in the international media, it frequently fed stories to MEK or another rebel group, which then trumpeted the news. That, in a way, was “laundering” information in order to protect sources and methods of collection.

  The Mossad also enjoyed fairly safe passage in and out of Iran by going through nations where the security services were cooperative—including the Kurdish autonomous zone of northern Iraq. Israeli spies had developed excellent relationships with senior Kurds in several countries for decades, traceable back to the minority group appreciating Israel’s help against Arabs who kept oppressing them. In the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  But for such a sensitive, dangerous, and daring mission as a series of assassinations in Iran’s capital, the Mossad would not depend on hired-gun mercenaries. They would be considered far less trustworthy, and there was hardly any chance that the Mossad would reveal to non-Israelis some of its assassination unit’s best methods.

  These, in fact, were “blue and white” operations—Israeli intelligence’s term for a fully Israeli project, referring to the colors of its nation’s flag. From the little that was made public, it was obvious that they were nearly perfect in their execution: daring, innovative, and right out of the office of the Ramsad’s playbook.

  The Mossad was showing—more than any other Western intelligence organization—its willingness to take drastic measures and risk the lives of its b
est operatives. In turn, those men and a very few women were displaying their readiness to sacrifice. Clearly, if caught, they would be hanged in a public square in Iran. Israeli spies had come to such tortured ends in the past, sometimes after maintaining double lives in enemy countries for years.

  Naturally, no one in Tel Aviv was talking about any operational details of how Israelis entered and left Iran—or where they stayed while inside the Islamic Republic.

  There were many possibilities. Obviously, Israeli operatives traveled using the passports of other countries, including both bogus and genuine documents. That fact had been inadvertently revealed several times, over many years. In addition, the Mossad continuously maintained safe houses in Iran, dating back to the pre-1979 years under the Shah. That was an investment in the future, typical for Israeli intelligence.

  The Mossad also had a human treasury: Tens of thousands of ex-Iranians now lived in Israel. Iranian Jews had fled, especially just after the 1979 revolution, and many of their children also were well acquainted with the Persian language and customs. Individuals who were brave enough—and then selected and trained by the Mossad—could move back to Iran and secretly serve Israel.

  Israeli operatives inside Iran were available for all kinds of espionage and even, if and when the time came, for pinpointing targets for air strikes. The Mossad knew, after all, that the entire Iranian weapons program would not be demolished by assassinations of nuclear scientists and military officers. Those individuals would be replaced.

  Yet, any delay at all represented an achievement. Israeli strategic thinking—exercised in Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere—held that temporary disruptions to an enemy’s dangerous projects were sufficient cause for taking significant risks.

  This was even truer when it came to killing Iranian specialists, who worked on unique tasks that required years of study. These men were not available in abundant supply, despite Iran’s relatively large and advanced technological infrastructure.