The entire campaign (known in Israel as the Second Lebanon War) was a humiliating defeat that achieved almost none of its aims. The most powerful military force in the Middle East had been beaten twice in six years by the same guerrilla army. “It was something like the North Vietnamese Army after the Tet Offensive,” Dagan said. “Although the offensive failed and they took some heavy blows, they won the war.”
After the ceasefire was signed, Nasrallah became the most popular leader in the Arab world, the only one in many years to have faced Israel in a military confrontation and won.
Israel tried to compensate for its failure on the battlefield with attempts on the lives of Hezbollah leaders, primarily Nasrallah. “If we had succeeded in killing Nasrallah, it would have changed the picture,” said Halutz. “We tried, but without success.” Three times, specific intelligence information was obtained regarding Nasrallah’s whereabouts. Once, a building was bombed shortly after he left it. Twice, the bombs actually hit his location but failed to penetrate the thick layers of reinforced concrete above the underground bunkers where he was hiding. “It’s incredible what they built down there,” said Halutz. “You hit one spot and all of a sudden you see the smoke coming out of some hole at the end of the street, and you realize that there’s some tunnel down there that you never knew about.”
Other efforts to take out high-ranking Hezbollah officials ended the same way. On July 20, Israel tried to zero in on Laqqis by pinpointing his cellphone. An F-16 fired a missile into the apartment in Beirut where the phone was located, but it turned out that Laqqis had left it there and gone out. His son was killed. “We did not approach this business [the assassinations] as prepared as we should have been,” Halutz admitted.
—
IN JUNE 2007, A year after killing four IDF soldiers and touching off another war, Hamas forces—angry that Abu Mazen’s Fatah members still controlled Palestinian Authority institutions despite the Hamas election victory—massacred a large number of Fatah officials in Gaza and seized the Strip by force, effectively setting up an independent Hamas state.
The situation could not have been worse for Israel. From the north and south, it was surrounded by states and organizations with military power and enormous budgets, controlled by the Radical Front, while Israel itself was bruised and hesitant after the capture of its soldiers and the defeat in the 2006 war.
A month after the takeover in Gaza, the Radical Front’s senior commanders held a secret summit in Damascus to discuss future joint activity against the enemy.
The atmosphere was festive. The front had succeeded in relaunching a campaign of suicide bombings within the State of Israel; an array of tens of thousands of rockets and missiles in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip had the entire territory of Israel covered; Hezbollah had defeated Israel’s attempt to destroy it the previous summer; Hamas had won the elections in the Palestinian Authority and built its own state in Gaza; Iran and Syria, each on its own, were making significant progress toward completing production of a nuclear weapon. The situation, they all agreed, was the best the “resistance” axis could have hoped for.
Israeli officials watched the conference from a distance. And planned. Dagan knew this war would have to be fought in the shadows, replete with risks and without limits.
IBRAHIM OTHMAN SAT DOWN next to a pretty stranger at the bar of a Vienna hotel. He was a middle-aged man, balding and droopy-eyed, but the woman next to him seemed interested, at least in having a conversation. She spoke French—Othman spoke French!—and loved Paris and dogs. Othman bought her a drink and told her about the poodles he raised at his home in Damascus.
Othman was the director of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. The woman was a Mossad operative. The Israelis weren’t exactly sure what kinds of secrets Othman held, but they knew he would be in Vienna in January 2007, and it was comparatively easy to run an operation there. They did not consider the operation to be an especially important one—it was being run concurrently with several that were deemed more significant.
Nevertheless, while the female agent indulged Othman’s stories of poodles at the bar, a team of Rainbow operatives searched his room. A preliminary inspection didn’t produce anything of value, and they began trying, without success, to open a heavy, locked case that Othman had left in the room. To do so without leaving any trace required a special effort, and in the meantime a surveillance detail had noticed that Othman was showing signs of weariness and would soon be going back to his room.
“I am going in. Give me the timing,” whispered the commander, abandoning his lookout position and entering the room to take charge. Othman signed the check. “You have about four minutes,” radioed one of the lookouts. The Syrian thanked his new friend, and the two arranged to speak in the morning and perhaps meet up. Othman began walking to the elevator. “Two minutes,” radioed the lookout. “Get out of there.”
In the room, the Rainbow team had just opened the bag and begun copying the pictures inside it as quickly as possible, without paying attention to what they were. Othman was inside the elevator. “One minute to contact,” said the tense voice on the radio. By now everything had been shot, and the bag repacked and locked. “The elevator’s there. Get out now!”
Othman was now in the hallway, only thirty seconds away, almost within sight of his room. One member of the team was preparing to execute a diversionary trick, by acting drunk and spilling a glass of whisky on him. But with seconds to spare, the rest of the team exited the room and walked rapidly down the corridor in the opposite direction. “We’re out. All’s okay. Disengage,” came the calm and confident voice of the commander.
The material the Mossad team copied there that day was not immediately deciphered. It took some two weeks after the break-in at Othman’s room in Vienna until someone looked at it.
That was when they first saw the pictures of the reactor.
Syria was trying to build a bomb. It was, in fact, making dramatic progress toward building a bomb, yet it had managed to keep the entire enterprise a complete secret. And this was one situation that could not be resolved by rubbing out a few key people. Drastic action of a different kind was called for.
Strangely enough, Bashar al-Assad had enormous respect for Israeli intelligence, which was why he worked so hard to deceive it. He was convinced that every message in Syria transmitted by electromagnetic means—telephone, cellphone, fax, text, email—was being intercepted by Israeli intelligence. “He truly believed that every time Mustafa called Mohammed, Moishele was listening in,” an officer from Unit 8200 said. “And that was not necessarily a drastic mistake.”
To minimize the risk, Assad instructed General Muhammad Suleiman—his liaison to the Radical Front—to set up a shadow army, one separate and independent from the rest of the Syrian defense establishment. Even the highest-ranking officials and officers, including the military chief of staff and the minister of defense, were kept ignorant. Suleiman ordered that all important communications be passed only on paper, in envelopes sealed with wax, by a network of motorcycle couriers. This retreat from the electronic age worked. Suleiman’s organization remained totally invisible to Israeli intelligence for years.
Suleiman’s biggest secret was hidden away in the arid district of Deir al-Zor, inside a deep canyon a few miles from the banks of the Euphrates in northeastern Syria. Since 2001, he’d been overseeing the construction of a building to house a nuclear reactor that Syria had purchased from North Korea, with Iranian funding. The reactor would enable the Syrians to produce plutonium for an atomic bomb, which, Assad believed, would give him strategic parity with Israel.
Suleiman had spared no effort to conceal the site—but Othman was one of the few people Suleiman trusted. He knew about the reactor, and he’d left files concerning it in his bag. And now the Israelis knew, too.
—
WHEN THE MOSSAD GOT its hands on the material in January 2007, Mossad
director Dagan was in the midst of becoming the chief defense and strategy adviser to Ehud Olmert. When Olmert decided to go to war against Hezbollah in July 2006, Dagan fiercely opposed chief of staff Dan Halutz’s plan to defeat the Shiite militia through air attacks, and he told the cabinet, “I know Lebanon, and I know Hezbollah, and without boots on the ground, on a large scale, it won’t work.” The more time went by and Dagan’s concerns were validated, the more attentive Olmert became to his opinions.
Dagan was someone who could see into the souls of others, and he was a talented PR man as well. He shared the juiciest tidbits of operations with Olmert, who was captivated by Dagan and his world of espionage and special ops. After losing his faith in the IDF and extensive all-out military campaigns, he gave more and more power to his spymaster to wage his war of shadows against the Radical Front. “I believed in Meir,” said Olmert. “He needed my support in order to approve the crazy ideas that his agency came up with.”
The discovery of the reactor was yet another feather in Dagan’s cap—especially since no other intelligence agency, including those in the United States, had been able to find it—but mostly it was a cause for serious concern. The news that the country’s top enemy was at an advanced stage in a nuclear weapons program, about which they knew absolutely nothing, swept through the length and breadth of the Israeli intelligence community instantaneously. “Meir came to me with this material [the pictures taken from Othman’s room],” recalled Ehud Olmert, “and it was like an earthquake. I realized that from now on, everything would be different.”
Shortly afterward, Olmert dispatched Dagan to brief U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and CIA chief Michael Hayden.
By this time, as he rode the elevator up to the seventh floor of CIA headquarters, at Langley, he was already a familiar and welcome guest. Dagan got along famously with Hayden: “He was to the point, an intelligence officer in every bone of his body, and he listened to what I proposed.” In turn, Hayden believed that Dagan was “straightforward, plainspoken, bluntly honest, unpretentious, sincere, and very knowledgeable.”
The two men established the closest levels of trust in history between the intelligence agencies of the two countries, initiating an era of deep cooperation. Hayden described the relationship between the agencies as complementary: “We’re big, we’re rich, technologically sophisticated, and we’re global,” while the Israelis are “small, focused, culturally and linguistically smart, and relevant to the targets,” by which he meant jihadist terrorism and attempts by Middle Eastern countries to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Each time Dagan visited the CIA, he brought with him sensitive information and suggestions, some of them quite imaginative, for joint operations. But at that April meeting, not even the experienced Hayden anticipated the bombshell. “Dagan sat down, opened his briefcase, and took out color copies of the pictures of the reactor at Deir al-Zor.”
For a long while, Dagan went over the material with Hayden, asking whether his experts saw eye to eye with the Israelis’ analysis. Dagan was also well aware that, despite the Mossad’s capabilities in Syria, his agency had almost no information about what was happening on the other end of the nuclear deal. So he asked Hayden to take the intel he had brought “and plug it into the CIA’s broader knowledge of North Korea.”
The next morning, Hayden went to the White House to meet with President George W. Bush. While he and the other participants were sitting and waiting for the president to arrive, Hayden leaned over to Vice President Dick Cheney, who had long opined that the Syrians were trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons, and whispered, “You were right, Mr. Vice President.”
Bush ended the meeting with two clear-cut but practically contradictory orders: “Number one: Be sure. Number two: This can’t leak.” Hayden went back to Langley wondering how to confirm the Israeli information without spreading the word around. “To be sure, you want to get more people involved, but that increases the risks of spilling the secret.”
While trying to balance these two directives, the CIA and other U.S. agencies started “an intensive, months-long effort to confirm and corroborate the information Israel provided us on the reactor and to gather more details from our own sources and methods.” The conclusions of the joint Pentagon-CIA-NSA team came in June, and they were just as worrying as the Israelis’. “Our intelligence experts are confident,” the team wrote, “that the facility is in fact a nuclear reactor of the same type North Korea built indigenously at its Yongbyon nuclear facility….We have good reason to believe this reactor was not intended for peaceful purposes.”
The United States had committed to Israel’s security, and Olmert wanted that commitment honored—he wanted U.S. forces to destroy the reactor. Timing was an issue as well. Experts at Israel’s nuclear facility in Dimona said that according to what they saw in the pictures, the Syrian plant was very close to completion. They estimated that it would be hot within half a year, and that if they waited until then to bomb it, it would cause radioactive pollution and an environmental disaster.
Operationally, it was a relatively simple mission for the U.S. Air Force. A squadron of B-2 stealth bombers could have destroyed the installation without any special problems. But CIA Middle East experts reckoned that an American bombing mission in the region would be fraught with danger.
“My analysts are very conservative,” Hayden said to Dagan, in what he called “one of the most candid conversations I ever had with him.” The Assad family, Hayden said, reminded him of the Corleone family in The Godfather. But when Sonny was rubbed out, the don had the gifted Michael to replace him. When Basel Assad was killed in an accident, “Hafez had to settle for Fredo/Bashar,” who was known in the CIA as a “serial miscalculator.”
“Assad could not stand another embarrassment after the [2005] withdrawal from Lebanon,” Hayden said. “Out of weakness, he would have to show his strength and retaliate with war.”
Dagan had the exact opposite opinion: “You had to look at it from Assad’s point of view,” he said. “On the one hand, he had always wanted to reach strategic equality with Israel and, therefore, to get his hands on nuclear weapons. On the other hand, Bashar al-Assad always preferred not to confront us directly. Furthermore, if he went to war after the bombing, this would expose the existence of the nuclear installation—that he had built an atomic facility in violation of his signature on the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty], which even the Russians, his allies, don’t know about, and for sure would not be happy to know of. If we were to attack covertly and keep it totally under wraps, without publicizing it and embarrassing him, Assad would not do anything.”
The final decision was made in a meeting with the president that, due to the high degree of secrecy, was held not in the West Wing of the White House but in the Yellow Oval Room of the residential wing, so that the meeting would not even be listed on the public presidential appointments register.
Only Vice President Cheney was in favor of an American attack, claiming that the United States should do it to send a strong message not only to Syria and North Korea but also to Iran.
Secretary of State Rice acknowledged that the reactor in Syria was “an existential threat” to Israel, but she did not think that the United States should get involved. Hayden made it clear that the reactor was in an advanced stage of construction, but Syria was still a long way away from getting a nuclear bomb.
Already bogged down in two wars in Muslim countries, Bush concluded, “What Mike [Hayden] just told me is this is not an imminent danger, and therefore, we will not do this.”
Israel could rely only on itself.
—
NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN SYRIAN hands would undoubtedly be an existential threat to Israel. But AMAN analysts agreed with Hayden and warned Olmert that attacking Syria without direct prior provocation could lead to a strong military reaction by Assad. Dagan, on the other hand, recommended
bombing the site immediately, before the reactor was activated. “The State of Israel cannot tolerate a country with which it is at war having nuclear weapons,” he said.
Dagan had made a significant wager. If he was wrong, open warfare with Syria probably still would have ended in an Israeli victory, but it would cost thousands of lives. Yet despite the enormous risks, thanks to his charisma, self-confidence, and past successes, Dagan’s opinion carried the day.
At 3 A.M. on the morning of Thursday, September 6, scores of fighter planes took off from the Ramat David air force base, in northern Israel, fifteen miles southeast of Haifa. They wheeled westward, in the direction of the Mediterranean, and then southward. It was part of a routine base evacuation drill, familiar to the Arab intelligence services that monitored the Israeli Air Force. Nothing special. But this time, the planners of the exercise were out to deliberately confuse those men watching the proceedings on radar screens in Damascus.
Somewhere over the sea, a formation of seven F-15I fighters broke away from the others and headed in the opposite direction—northward. The crews knew the exact location of the targets they had to destroy, and the exact nature of those targets. The importance of their mission had been divulged to them by their commander just before takeoff. They flew very low, along the Mediterranean coast and then over Turkey, before entering Syrian airspace. At a range of thirty miles, they launched twenty-two missiles at the three sites within the nuclear complex.
The Syrians were taken completely by surprise. Their air defense systems detected nothing until the missiles were already fired, leaving no time for the sites to be evacuated. A few antiaircraft missiles were dispatched, but only after the planes were long gone.
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