Harpoon

by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner

The Final Victories of an Old Soldier

  The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

  —Theodore Roosevelt1

  Meir Dagan relished his reputation as a fierce warrior who could be counted on to lead a daring mission deep behind enemy lines, dagger nestled firmly in his hands. But Dagan hated war. His subordinates and friends knew just how much he despised senseless bloodshed. His family, his closest friends, knew how much the loss of friends and comrades pained him. His barrel-chested toughness concealed a wounded heart made up of scar tissue. Much of the pain he carried with him was caused by the bloodshed he participated in during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel was caught by surprise by a simultaneous attack on two fronts by the Syrian and Egyptian armies. But whenever Dagan’s friends and family spoke about war, they inevitably spoke of Israel’s 1982 conflict in Lebanon.

  Dagan commanded the 188th Armored Brigade in the fighting, leading three battalions of Centurion tanks into southern Lebanon in the bitter combat around cities like Sidon and in refugee camps, like Ein el-Hilweh. In the war’s first days, one of his junior officers, Captain Uzi Arad, was killed in front of him. Dagan was fond of Arad; Arad’s brother had been killed in action, and Dagan had to assure Uzi’s mother that her other son would be okay as a company commander in his brigade.2 Dagan failed to fulfill his promise. But the war continued. The 188th Armored Brigade pushed north deeper into Lebanon.

  The 188th, along with infantrymen from the Golani Brigade, fought in the battle of Kfar Sil, a close-quarter bare-knuckle brawl against well-entrenched Syrian commandos who were propping up Hezbollah’s forces; the battle was described by many as the toughest of the war.3 There were cease-fires and skirmishes, and sometimes all-out hellacious fighting. At the end of July the brigade was ordered to get ready to enter Beirut. It was the first time that Israeli forces were poised to seize an Arab capital. Days later, the 188th brigade advanced on Beirut International Airport. The control tower became Dagan’s headquarters. From there, according to one of his battalion commanders, he conducted and choreographed the opera of war.4

  The battle for the airport was hard fought. At dawn on the morning of August 4, Syrian commandos unleashed a lethal barrage of antitank missiles against one of Dagan’s battalions near the main terminal. Later that day, toward afternoon, Palestinian and Syrian artillery poured a deadly and pinpointed rain of fire onto the Israeli positions. Thirteen soldiers were killed in the barrage, including Captain Tuval Gvirtzman, the commander of a company of tanks codenamed “Crusher”; he had been killed rushing to the aid of an armored personnel carrier that had suffered a direct hit and had burst into flames.5

  Gvirtzman, known by the nickname of “Tuli,” was Dagan’s favorite officer in the brigade. “Dagan loved Tuli very much,” a former officer in the brigade remembered. “He was the most beloved officer in his command.” Lieutenant Colonel Eyal Ben-Reuven was Tuli’s commanding officer and had to break the news to Dagan. Under fire, Ben-Reuven climbed up the stairs leading to the control tower toward the brigade command post. Dagan was peering through high-powered field glasses; marked-up maps were strewn about the floor amid broken glass. When Dagan heard that Tuli had been killed, he stopped what he was doing and his body slumped inward. He broke down in a loud and gut-wrenching cry that could be heard amid the gunfire.6 No one had ever seen Dagan cry before news of Tuli’s death reached him. Even though Dagan’s brigade lost twenty-five men in the conflict, and he had seen his men killed and wounded before, Tuli’s death changed Dagan forever.

  Other events during his service in Lebanon made a lasting impression as well. Upon Dagan’s return home on leave in 1985, he informed his wife, Bina, that as a result of the fierce carnage he had witnessed in the fighting he no longer felt able to eat meat. It simply disgusted him, brought up difficult memories and images, and he insisted that he and his family become vegetarians. Just like that he swore off meat forever.

  Thirty years had passed since the battle for Beirut International Airport. Israel endured numerous intifadas and suicide bombing campaigns, SCUD missiles from Iraq, and a second war in Lebanon against Hezbollah. The country also endured a ceaseless terrorist campaign of attrition in between. But the biggest threat Israel had to face now was Iran.

  Meir Dagan hated war and wanted to do whatever he could to avoid it; this was part of the genius behind Harpoon—an effort to shock and awe the bankbooks of terror and not the crowded refugee camps where the perpetrators hid shielded by women and children. This revolutionized how nations waged war on terror. There were some in Israel pounding war drums to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Israelis well understood that much of the terrorism being waged against them was being funded directly by the mullahs in Tehran, and they had no illusions what kind of threat the Islamic Republic would pose with nuclear capabilities. Dagan knew when war was necessary and when it could be avoided. In the eighth year of his tenure as Mossad director, Dagan was in a position to put actions in motion that could prevent war—even if it meant that some had to die as part of a larger and more important policy of preemptive deterrence.

  It was a little before 8:00 AM on the morning of January 12, 2010, when Dr. Masoud Alimohammadi left his modest but comfortable home in the northern Tehran suburb of Gheytarieh. He had just completed breakfast, a quick bite of flatbread and goat cheese drizzled with honey, and had finished his third cup of tea when he grabbed his car keys and headed out the door. The fifty-year-old, an Iranian quantum field theorist and elementary-particle physicist, was a revered and distinguished professor at the University of Tehran’s Department of Physics. He was also a player in Iran’s nuclear program, and he was already late to work. He didn’t notice the motorcycle with its concealed cargo, parked near his small Japanese-made sedan. Before he could unlock his car, neighbors saw a blinding flash of light followed by an ear-splitting blast that lifted him into the air. Alimohammadi was killed instantly when he was cut to pieces by the force of the powerful explosion and the shrapnel that chewed through his body. More than one thousand mourners attended Dr. Masoud Alimohammadi’s state funeral. The pall bearers were all members of the Revolutionary Guard.7

  The Iranian security services scrambled to investigate the assassination and hunt down the perpetrators. At all costs the regime needed to project the image that it was firmly in charge, that it could safeguard national security, and that the public was protected; having a senior nuclear scientist cut down in the street outside his home generated widespread fear among ordinary Iranians. The culprits needed to be found and punished immediately. The regime became obsessed with identifying the cell that carried out the hit.

  Iran’s security services ultimately made an arrest in Alimohammadi’s murder. The suspect’s name was Majid Jamali Fashi. Following a thorough and brutal interrogation, he allegedly confessed to having been a Mossad spy trained in Israel.* Fashi admitted to traveling to Tel Aviv for specialized Mossad training; he said that Israel’s intelligence service had planned and paid for the entire Alimohamaddi operation.8 He was ultimately convicted and executed—hanged in a prison courtyard.

  The close-quarter ground war against the Iranian nuclear program was now well underway.*

  Traffic was moving at a snail’s pace in the northern neighborhoods of Tehran on the morning of November 10, 2010. Traffic in the Aghdasieh district was particularly maddening. An endless number of cars maneuvered in and out of their lanes in a slow-moving crawl while the drivers, many chain-smoking, honked their horns violently in a serenade of Persian anger. The only vehicles that moved freely in this morning mess were of the two-wheeled variety. The mopeds and the motorbikes weaved in and out of the maze with few obstacles. In Tehran it was the only way to travel.

  Majid Shahriari was a passenger in a silver Peugeot 504 sedan trying to get to this university job through the frustrating mess on Artesh Boulevard. Shahriari, forty-three years old, was a quantum physicist and a major player in Iran’s nuclear
program. According to some accounts, the professor was also one of Iran’s foremost experts investigating the Stuxnet worm attack.9 Shahriari sat in the back seat with a female passenger, witnesses recalled, and both looked anxious by the morning’s heavier-than-usual gridlock. The two were driven by a middle-aged man pounding his horn in boredom and anger. Shahriari didn’t notice the motorcycle coming up behind him and then slowing down as it passed the Peugeot. Shahriari’s chauffeur didn’t see the motorcyclist’s brief dalliance along his vehicle’s side nor the small but potent explosive device that had been attached to the rear door with an adhesive strip. The motorcycle sped up as it proceeded forward and disappeared into the morning’s rush hour. Minutes later a powerful explosion punched through the Peugeot—Shahriari was killed instantly, along with the woman and the driver.

  As sirens blared and emergency service personnel rushed toward Artesh Boulevard to aid the victims, and the chaos played out on the crowded rush-hour highway, another car and passenger were being targeted in a similar incident just a few miles away to the west. A two-man motorcycle team had affixed an explosive device to the car driven by Dr. Fereydoon Abbasi as he traveled slowly through Tehran traffic. Dr. Abbasi was a senior scientist in the Ministry of Defense. According to reports, he worked side by side with Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and believed to be one of the pillars of Iran’s nuclear efforts.10 This time, though, the bomb failed to accomplish its goal. Abbasi survived.

  The State of Israel did not confirm nor deny any role in the attacks targeting Iran’s nuclear scientists. But Israel—and the Mossad—was determined to slow Tehran’s march toward nuclear weapons capability any way that it could short of all-out war or a preemptive strike—options Dagan and others inside the IDF believed would have disastrous consequences for Israel and the region. Dagan wanted to use every tool in his arsenal to delay and deter the Iranians. He urged that the same tactics—covert and devious—that Harpoon had used against the Palestinians and Hezbollah be used against the Iranian nuclear program. “Bankrupt them,” Uri L. remembered Dagan saying. “Make it impossible for them to do business. Make it unviable for them to buy the material and pay the scientists. Bankrupt the ayatollahs and force them to abandon the dream.”11 The goals and tactics of Harpoon had now become the norm throughout Israel’s intelligence services.

  Operations against the Hamas and Hezbollah gave Dagan ideas. According to one account, the Mossad director wanted to ruin the reputation of Mohamed El-Baredei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who Israel considered to be biased toward the Iranians and hostile to the Jewish state and its security concerns. A plan was considered to deposit large sums of money into El-Baredei’s bank account and then leak the word that the Iranians were paying him off in exchange for lenient reviews of their reactors.12 The operation was never executed, but it telegraphed the Mossad’s steely determination to resort to classic manipulation and dirty tricks against anyone involved in advancing Tehran’s perilous ambitions.

  The political winds had changed in the winter of 2010, though. Some wanted war. According to accounts of heated debates that occurred inside Israel’s security cabinet, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak openly called for the Israel Air Force to conduct a preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Israel had, after all, destroyed Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein’s own fledgling reactor back in June 1981, in a spectacular air force operation that brought blistering public condemnations and quiet, relieved congratulations from the international community. The Israeli raid on the Osirak reactor had obliterated Saddam’s nuclear program in its infancy, and it was never relaunched. Many were insisting that the IAF take the matter into its own hands once again. Dagan, however, vehemently opposed the notion,13 as did others, including Yuval Diskin and many generals. According to Dagan’s thinking, at best an Israeli bombing run would provide an illusory solution, perhaps destroying the facilities temporarily only to have them be rebuilt, next time in deeper, more secretive, and better fortified underground bunkers.

  The back-and-forth inside the closed-door sessions was heated and impassioned. Israel, many understood, couldn’t take out the nuclear program on its own. There was great concern that the United States wouldn’t conclude what Israel had started and finish off the Iranian facilities once and for all. “Our belief was that if they [the Israelis] went on their own, knowing their limitations, they are a very good air force but it’s small and the distances are great and the targets are dispersed and hardened,” former CIA Director Michael Hayden said. The American fear was that if Israel put events in motion, the United States would be drawn into completing the job, and that was not an option.14 President Barack Obama, elected in 2008 in part to extract the United States from Middle Eastern wars, was not an enthusiastic supporter of unilateral Israeli action that would draw American forces into the fray. And he certainly wasn’t going to undertake the task on his own.

  Israeli pilots continued to train for the mission that might or might never be sanctioned. Tactics were honed and flight paths were examined. In the end, like so many times before, Dagan’s argument proved to be persuasive. The financial effort that Dagan and Harpoon favored took on an aggressive new energy as the United States now led the effort to isolate Iran economically; this could have become a leverage tool to get Tehran to the negotiating table and agree to halt its nuclear weapons program. Dagan wanted the United States to strangle the Iranians into financial submission. The Mossad director felt that economic warfare was the only way to prevent a war that he personally viewed as destructively unwinnable. “Military action against the Iranian nuclear program,” Dagan argued, “was the final option.”15

  The job of Mossad Memuneh, or Director, was one of the most challenging and tension-filled posts inside Israel’s pressure-packed security establishment. It was the type of responsibility that could give someone with even superhuman resolve a case of high blood pressure, chronic insomnia, and an endless surge of stomach ulcers. The stress of the job—on a personal level and on a national geopolitical level—was numbing. The decisions made while sitting at the director’s chair could get agents killed in far and distant lands. The director has to look his subordinates in the eyes and convince them that the mission is worth the risk, worth their lives being in danger. The Mossad director once explained, “People on these missions don’t have aircraft waiting to rescue them if they get in trouble, they don’t have tanks and soldiers waiting to back them up, most of the times they don’t even have weapons. All they have is a piece of paper in the form of a passport, a cover story, and their ability to think sharply on their feet to stay alive.”16 And, as Mossad director, Dagan had to warn these dedicated agents that if they were caught, if an operation turned disastrous, it might be very difficult for Israel to get them out—worse, it might be downright impossible to rescue them or barter for them at all.

  The operations that had the director’s signature could end up costing more than the life of an agent or an asset. Intelligence operations could place the nation at war. The job and the decision made at the top had a direct impact on the day-to-day lives of Israel’s citizens, as well as for Jews around the world. Dagan remembered what Prime Minister Shimon Peres once said: that he read about the failures of the Mossad in the newspaper and he read about its successes in classified reports.17

  Most Mossad directors served for a term of four or five years. Exhaustion and burnout were common denominators among outgoing chiefs. As one of Dagan’s men in Harpoon put it, “There was only so much political hubris and bullshit that one man could handle.”18 Isser Harel, one of the legendary spymasters of Israel, spent ten years sitting behind the chair, at Mossad headquarters. Harel had raised the Mossad from a small and insignificant service to one of the world’s major intelligence arms, operating globally to protect Israel’s precarious security. The Mossad thwarted Arab intentions during Harel’s term, and Israel’s spies
captured Nazi Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, but Harel’s decade-long service tenure was considered extraordinarily long for a spy chief. Yitzhak Hofi, a former general who rehabilitated the Mossad following the disastrous 1973 War and had scored some major successes for the service, including the assassination of Munich Olympic massacre mastermind Ali Hassan Salameh,19 served eight years. As 2011 approached, Meir Dagan was entering his ninth year as Mossad director.

  It was time to call it a day.

  Dagan’s stint as Mossad director had been extended twice. The first time was in 2006, after Ehud Olmert’s ascension to the prime minister’s office, and then again, in 2009, following Netanyahu’s election victory. The politicians wanted Dagan by their side. It made them look decisive and maverick. The voting public felt assured by having Dagan at the helm of the Mossad. But Dagan was tired. It was an odd reality for the chief of an espionage service, but up until a few years before he assumed the post, the identities of the Mossad and Shin Bet directors were classified and referred to in the press only by the first initials of their names. The culture in Israel had progressed rapidly, and now that the names were well known, there was a demand for more transparency, oversight, and scrutiny. As such, it seemed everyone was scrambling, constantly, to cover their behinds.

  The years of work at the Mossad had caught up with Meir Dagan. The grueling pace of eighteen-hour days, covert travel, and political nonsense had taken their toll. Journalists and politicians from across the political spectrum speculated that because Netanyahu and Dagan were openly at odds over Iran, the Mossad director had been forced out. “It wasn’t true,” Bina Dagan commented on her husband’s status. “He was tired, eight years going on nine was too long. He wanted the chance to do other things.”20 He was a grandfather. He wanted to paint and earn a CEO’s salary. He had dedicated forty-eight years in service to his country. It was time to sleep in mornings after 7:00 AM and eat breakfast with his wife, maybe read stories to his grandchildren.