Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  Olmert was suddenly reminded why his job was one of the most difficult on the planet. New challenges arose with little or no warning, and they demanded decisiveness. This was far beyond his previous jobs as a lawyer, politician, and mayor of Jerusalem.

  He had become prime minister only in January of the previous year, when Ariel Sharon suddenly had to be replaced as prime minister. A severe stroke in January 2006 silenced and paralyzed one of the strongest and most loquacious of Israeli leaders, and Sharon would apparently live out his days in a vegetative state.

  Hearing about Syria’s secret project, Olmert turned grimly serious.

  “What are we going to do about it?” he reflexively asked.

  Within minutes, it was clear that the question was rhetorical. The two Mossad men and the prime minister all knew that Israel would have to demolish the Syrian reactor.

  Dagan was installed as Mossad chief for just such a day. Prime Minister Sharon—who appointed him in September 2002—instructed the retired general to enhance the spy agency’s work to make it more relevant to burning national-security issues.

  Sharon believed the Mossad had just gone through five years, under Efraim Halevy, with very little of relevance being accomplished. Perhaps that was too harsh a judgment, since under Halevy’s directorship the Mossad continued to recruit agents, run them, and collect information. The ground was well prepared for what Dagan would do later. Yet, Halevy’s image was cemented as a cautious and cerebral intelligence officer who—unlike Dagan—avoided risks.

  Dagan was born Meir Huberman in 1945 in Novosibirsk, in the Soviet Union, to Polish Holocaust survivors who had fled eastward and found shelter there. They later migrated to Israel and settled in Bat Yam, a poor town south of Tel Aviv. His grandparents had been murdered by the Nazis, and he would indeed keep a photo of one of his grandfathers, kneeling before arrogant German soldiers just before his death, on display all through his career.

  The Hubermans were part of a large community of newcomers, denigrated by long-time Bat Yam residents as “the refugees.” Young Meir recalled how one of his teachers told the class that Jews who survived the Holocaust must have done something wrong and probably were collaborators with Nazis.

  This made a strong impression on the boy. It would help shape his determination to show that he deserved to be respected—not tainted by prejudice about survivors from the Diaspora. He wanted full acceptance as an Israeli. In the 1960s, there was nothing more Israeli for a young man than to become a fighter in an élite unit.

  He got his wish, and as a special forces soldier he was wounded twice in combat and received medals. By 1970 he was a captain and found himself in the Gaza Strip, occupied by Israel three years earlier in the Six-Day War. He served there under General Ariel Sharon, a connection that would turn into a long-lasting friendship built on mutual admiration.

  Dagan led an innovative and violent team, called Sayeret Rimon, that hunted for Palestinian terrorists. He and his troops staged ambushes and made a habit of popping out of the ground without warning to kill militants. Arab news media, before long, were spreading rumors about an Israeli named Dagan who cut off Palestinians’ heads—sometimes while they were still alive.

  Years later, Sharon would launch a different version of that rumor, by saying that Dagan’s specialty was “separating Arabs’ heads from their bodies.” Other Israeli politicians wondered why Sharon thought that was an amusing or acceptable thing to say.

  Dagan’s image as a tough guy helped him rise through the ranks of the military. In the 1980s he served in Lebanon and again focused on chasing Palestinian and Hezbollah terrorists. He was occasionally involved with Aman’s Unit 504, which had a record of dirty operations, including extrajudicial killings.

  However limited those operations might have been, they were magnified in the retelling. Within the IDF, Dagan also gained a more positive reputation as a cunning planner of daring operations. He reached the rank of general and served as the commander of operations for the general staff, and in 1995 he retired from the military. He was 50 years old.

  While serving in uniform, he had not bothered to quash the rumors of being a man of violence. Fear could be a useful weapon against the enemy—and a way to build his self-image. Yet, after retiring from the Mossad, Dagan would reject all such descriptions, saying, “I have never been a killer, and I don’t like to kill.”

  But he confirmed that his unit had killed dozens of terrorists, specifically when “anyone armed refused to surrender.” Dagan did add proudly that for every one who was killed, “dozens were taken prisoner.”

  He retired to his house in a quiet, beautiful part of northern Israel to have more time for his hobbies, including painting. His canvasses often portrayed rural Middle Easterners, both Jews and Arabs, in bucolic scenes. Dagan also traveled the world, including an adventure across Central Asia with two long-time friends, who both were also retired generals.

  Dagan was called back into government service in 1996 to lead a small counter-terrorism bureau in the prime minister’s office, first under Shimon Peres. Later, under Benjamin Netanyahu, Dagan decided he did not like the self-promoting politician nicknamed “Bibi.”

  Heading a small unit with limited resources, kind of a fifth wheel outside the main intelligence agencies, Dagan did not have much to do in that job. But he did learn the importance of economic factors: Follow the money, when examining terrorist groups. He and his unit initiated a more systematic approach for tracing terrorists through financial sites and not just gun sights.

  Under his leadership, the Central Bank of Israel, the tax authorities, and other financial institutions joined forces to accomplish that goal. He would take that tool with him to the Mossad, making it an important part of the counter-terrorism unit there.

  His time at the prime minister’s office also taught him the importance of international coordination in tracking financial transfers, and cooperation with the United States was especially important. That sowed the seeds of an overall improvement in security cooperation with the American government, particularly with the CIA. Dagan was thus developing from being a tough soldier with dirt under his fingernails, into a refined man of the world.

  When Sharon became prime minister in 2001, he naturally thought of Dagan as the perfect man to head the Mossad. Four of the previous nine directors had been army generals, like Dagan, and his was the kind of no-nonsense leadership that seemed necessary at a time of multi-faceted dangers.

  Israel was challenged by the second Palestinian intifada, which had swept Sharon into office. He also saw a need to re-order the country’s priorities so it could act against non-Palestinian threats, such as Iran and Hezbollah.

  When Halevy—who had restored calm within the Mossad, after the Meshaal murder snafu in Jordan—retired from his extended interim role, Dagan got the job.

  His arrival at the Ramsad or agency director’s office, on the third floor of the headquarters at Glilot, was a hard landing. As an outsider, Dagan was not welcomed by the old-timers. Hardly anyone within the Mossad liked his image as someone tough, even cruel, as though he ruled by fear.

  The old guard spread jokes about Dagan, like his supposedly beginning their weekly meeting by asking: “So, who are we going to assassinate today?”

  Dagan hoped to re-shape the organization in his own image. He felt the resistance within the Mossad and decided to move fiercely to quash it—reminiscent of Sharon’s nickname, “the Bulldozer.” He replaced his deputy, then brought in a new one again and again.

  When he found that one of these deputies was leaking information to a journalist, Dagan went to the prime minister, and asked Olmert to order Shin Bet—in charge of domestic investigations—to probe the Mossad deputy. Dagan was certain who the leaker was, but he wanted to go through the motions.

  Shin Bet’s findings arrived quickly and did not surprise Dagan. His deputy had been wiretapped and photographed while meeting with a journalist. Dagan gave him a choice: either write a letter
of resignation immediately, or be subject to a criminal investigation that could lead to his indictment for breaching state secrets. Of course, the man quit.

  The Mossad does not have a press officer, and Mossad people are not authorized to talk to the media. Yet, in many instances, current agency employees find a way to circumvent that restriction. They relay information to former Mossad staffers, who in turn pass it on to reporters. Most of the information that changes hands in this way is office gossip. The Israeli media have very little knowledge of the missions and serious work of the Mossad, so TV, radio, newspapers, and websites settle for the crumbs of information that are available.

  Several in the agency’s top management resigned, in what was becoming a bitter atmosphere under Dagan. He proved, however, the validity of Charles de Gaulle’s aphorism that graveyards are filled with people who thought they were indispensable.

  Dagan replaced the old guard with younger men and women, who proved more enthusiastic, more flexible, and more prepared to follow his direction. Yet, after his retirement years later, he would admit that he could have handled the situation better: perhaps by dealing with each person in a direct, one-on-one manner, and not as a collective.

  Two years into his term, Dagan had firmly established his authority and could re-define Mossad priorities and missions.

  Trying to shift the direction of the agency, with its approximately 3,000 staff members, was like turning a big ship. Dagan realized that it was going in the wrong direction.

  At first, under the spell of the 9/11 tragedy in the United States, he made the Mossad’s top mission the monitoring of—and battle against—what Israeli intelligence called “global jihad,” meaning al-Qaeda and other loosely affiliated Islamist cells all around the world.

  There was, indeed, some basis for setting that as the priority. Aman’s 8200 electronic surveillance teams, Mossad’s humint capabilities, and liaisons with international counterparts uncovered several plots by Muslim zealots to bomb Israeli embassies in Singapore and the Philippines, to target Israeli and Jewish facilities in Tunisia and Turkey, and to shoot down an Israeli airliner leaving Mombasa, Kenya.

  In addition, exchanging information about al-Qaeda—and about Islamist networks inspired by Osama bin Laden in dozens of countries—gave the Mossad and its friends in the CIA a lot to talk about.

  Quite soon, however, Dagan and analysts in the Mossad’s research department realized that networks inspired by al-Qaeda were not seriously interested in battling Israel and the Jews. Their main priority was and has been causing bloody trouble to America and pro-Western Arab regimes.

  Dagan had to consider re-ordering priorities again. In light of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, plus the rhetoric of its leaders who declared Israel an illegitimate state to be wiped off the map—it seemed wise to place the Islamic Republic at the very top of the priority list. Intelligence collection and analysis aimed at Iran would be more than doubled.

  A second priority, just behind on the list, would be Iran’s terrorist proxies, who carried out the Islamic Republic’s dirty work by periodically pricking Israel: Hezbollah and Hamas.

  To establish these priorities, however, Dagan had to overcome one major obstacle: the military analysts at Aman. That agency was, by law, in charge of Israel’s NIE—the National Intelligence Estimate—and did not like the Mossad to encroach onto its turf by trying to set new national priorities.

  Aman still believed in the classic approach: that prime importance went to monitoring the military capabilities of Israel’s nearest neighbors.

  Dagan dismissed Aman’s contention, by offering his own checklist of the neighbors. In an acrimonious debate, he argued that Egypt could not pose a threat to Israel. Certainly Syria, with its outmoded and rusty military, could not. And Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, after America’s spring 2003 invasion, had been removed from the military equation. Israelis, in government and out, were justifiably relieved when Saddam was captured, tried by an Iraqi court, and hanged.

  This debate unexpectedly settled itself, with a slap in the face to the two quarrelling sides. On Christmas Eve 2003, the world woke up to a public announcement: Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya was giving up its weapons of mass destruction, which included a nascent nuclear program and a large arsenal of chemical weapons.

  The announcement took Israeli intelligence completely by surprise, and its directors did not like surprises. The Mossad claimed that it was Aman’s fault, for dropping Libya from the list of “objectives” for information-gathering because of tight budgets. The result was that in recent years, very few Israeli intelligence operations were mounted inside or against Libya.

  The Mossad felt embarrassed by the fact that the CIA and British MI6—two of its closest counterparts—had been negotiating with Qaddafi for weeks to clinch the deal. Those intelligence communities did not share the information with the Mossad.

  What really grabbed the Israeli agencies in the Libya story was the revelation that Colonel Qaddafi’s nuclear program had been born out of the efforts and expertise of the Pakistani merchant of atomic knowhow, A.Q. Khan. He had signed an agreement with Qaddafi to deliver a turn-key project. Drawings, the centrifuges, scientists experienced at enriching uranium, and engineers who could assemble the bomb could all be provided by Khan.

  Dagan and his chief intelligence officer wondered to themselves: Since they missed the whole Libyan deal, what else had they missed? The research department was ordered in 2004 to go back into its archives and examine every piece of humint and sigint information it had accumulated, in the past decade, about Khan’s activities as a nuclear traveling salesman. Intelligence agencies often gather more data than they can read and analyze, and individual intercepts and data points are not always immediately pieced together into a coherent mosaic.

  The Mossad realized that—in addition to Libya—Khan had traveled to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria. Further evaluation concluded that the Saudis and Egyptians, being in the American camp, would be less likely to have the gall to launch a nuclear program.

  Syria could be a different case. It was anti-America, making overtures to Iran, and supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon more than ever. The then-new Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, was inexperienced and might miscalculate in his ambitions to outdo his late father Hafez.

  The more Mossad researchers dug, the more they found. For the first time, Israeli analysts were seeing hints of nuclear work in Syria. They noticed that the Assad regime, at the start of the 21st century, had clandestine contacts with North Korea that were difficult to explain. The subject was, almost surely, not the already-known cooperation in the field of Scud missiles. There was something else going on: secret, high-level, and troubling.

  Dagan had his agency zoom in on Syria, by all measures available. The Mossad first turned to the CIA and other friendly liaison links to ask whether they were aware of Syria’s having nuclear contacts with North Korea. Western intelligence agencies all knew about missile sales and cooperation between Damascus and Pyongyang. Yet, neither the Americans nor the French (the latter having relatively good coverage of Syria due to their colonial past) knew a thing about nuclear links.

  Israeli intelligence realized that it would have to rely upon itself. That was a commonly held view in Israel on many topics, even when international cooperation seemed to be available. “It’s part of their ethos,” commented Dennis Ross, a longtime Middle East advisor to American presidents, “not to contract out their security.”

  Within the Israeli intelligence community, through most of 2007, there was an urgent sense of being faced with a new mystery in Syria. This was, therefore, no time to re-open old Mossad-Aman wounds about who missed Libya’s weapons program. The divisions were healed.

  Military intelligence had Unit 8200 improve its eavesdropping on Syrian communications and signals. Israeli satellites, first launched in 1988, were reoriented so that their orbits would put them over Syria more often. The Mossad’s agent-running Tsomet department was instr
ucted to do all it could to penetrate Syria’s leadership and to uncover the mysterious, unresolved contacts with North Korea.

  This substantial extra work for Israeli intelligence required additional budgetary resources. Dagan turned to Prime Minister Olmert to ask for more money and found, in Olmert, an ally. “Whatever you need,” was the message, “you’ll get it.”

  Israel’s air force now was able to afford a lot more high-altitude reconnaissance flights. Intelligence analysts were working much longer hours, poring over photos taken by Israeli satellites.

  Some of the information was from sigint sources—intercepted communications. But that was far from easy. It seemed that only a very few Syrians knew what was going on. Israeli intelligence tried to listen in on all their conversations, including those of President Assad and his close advisor and coordinator of covert projects, Brigadier General Muhammad Suleiman.

  The combined espionage effort was narrowing onto several places and projects deemed highly suspicious. The first breakthrough came in the form of a building, seen in reconnaissance photos: 130 feet by 130 feet, and about 70 feet tall, within a military complex in an obscure desert in northeastern Syria, not far from the Euphrates River.

  The Syrians tried to block aerial views of whatever was being built by putting a large roof over the scene. That meant that something was being constructed, something worth concealing, but Israeli agencies could not tell what was inside.

  The next, crucial step would involve risking the lives of Israelis: sending operatives into Syria to get close, to see what the Syrians were building. For a variety of operational reasons, a decision was made to send combatants of the Mossad’s Kidon unit—who excelled at sensitive, dangerous surveillance and not only assassinations—in addition to an army special forces unit.

  They sampled the soil, water, and vegetation around the site, but did not find any traces of radioactive materials. Yet, other evidence they carried back to Israel did lead to the pieces of the puzzle falling into place.