Early in July 2010, realizing that the Dubai affair had blocked his run to become head of the Mossad, Caesarea chief Holiday quit.
Meanwhile, Meir Dagan adopted a business-as-usual attitude. In general, Dagan definitely believed that “in certain cases the Mossad’s director has to hand over the keys if he’s got a mishap that harms the state, because that would ease the pressure on the country.” But from Dagan’s point of view, nothing had happened—no foul-up, no mistakes. “We hit an important target, he’s dead, and all the troops got home,” he summed up after the operation.
Only in 2013, in an interview for this book, would Dagan admit, for the first time, that “I was wrong in sending the team in with those passports. It was my decision and only my decision. I bear the full responsibility for what happened.”
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AS THE DUBAI FIASCO unfolded, Netanyahu “felt a sense of déjà vu,” one of his close aides said, as if 1997 was happening all over again. Back then, the Mossad had assured him it could go into a “soft target” country, Jordan, and cleanly eliminate Khaled Mashal. That ended in humiliation and capitulation. There was no telling how long the fallout from Dubai would last. He had to restrain the Mossad, he decided, and green-light fewer dangerous missions.
In addition, Dagan had to be reined in.
The two men had never gotten along. Indeed, Netanyahu’s relations with all of the intelligence community chiefs were problematic. “Netanyahu doesn’t rely on anyone, and so he made covert diplomatic moves without informing the heads of the community,” said Netanyahu’s national security adviser, Uzi Arad. “From one moment to the next, I watched the rift of distrust opening up between him and them.”
Dagan, for his part, thought the prime minister was too hesitant to approve operations, and yet also fearful of being seen as hesitant—a bundle of neuroses unfit for keeping a nation secure.
But Dagan remained at the Mossad. The campaign against Iran, multipronged and interconnected and complicated, was still in play. In fact, after the successful hit on Masoud Alimohammadi, earlier in January, Dagan asked Netanyahu for approval to intensify the campaign and to continue killing the remaining thirteen scientists of the weapons group. Netanyahu, apprehensive about another imbroglio, was in no hurry. It wasn’t until October that he gave the green light for another hit. On November 29, 2010, two motorcyclists blew up the cars of two senior figures in the Iranian nuclear project by attaching limpet mines to them and speeding away. Dr. Majid Shahriari was killed by the blast in his Peugeot 206; Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani and his wife, who was also in the car, managed to escape his Peugeot 206 before it exploded just outside Shahid Beheshti University.
By this point, however, it had become evident that the targeted killing campaign, along with the economic sanctions and the computer sabotage, had slowed but not stopped the Iranian nuclear program. The program “reached a point far beyond what I had hoped for,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said. He and Netanyahu both concluded that Iran was nearing the moment when the project’s installations would be indestructible, and they agreed that Israel should act to destroy the facilities before that happened. They ordered the IDF and the intelligence arms to prepare for Operation Deep Waters: an all-out air attack, supported by commando forces, in the heart of Iran. Some $2 billion was spent on preparations for the attack and for the anticipated ensuing war against the Radical Front.
Dagan, among others, thought the plan was insane. He saw it as a cynical move by two politicians who wanted to exploit the widespread public support that the attack would provide them in the next elections, not a levelheaded decision based on national interest. “Bibi learned a technique, the essence of which was to convey messages in a short time. He reached a remarkable level of mastery and control on this. But he is also the worst manager that I know. He has a certain trait, similar to Ehud Barak: Each of them imagines that he is the world’s greatest genius. Netanyahu is the only prime minister [in the country’s history] who reached the situation where the entire defense establishment failed to accept his position.”
“I’ve known a lot of prime ministers,” Dagan said. “Not one of them was a saint, believe me, but they all had one thing in common: When they reached the point where the personal interest came up against the national interest, it was the national interest that always won. There was absolutely no question. Only about these two I cannot say it—Bibi and Ehud.”
The enmity between Dagan and Netanyahu reached a boiling point in September 2010. Dagan claimed that Netanyahu had taken advantage of a meeting, purportedly about Hamas, with him, the head of the Shin Bet, and the chief of staff, in order to illegally order preparations for an attack: “As we were leaving the room, he says, ‘Just one moment, Director of the Mossad and Chief of Staff. I have decided to place the IDF and you at O plus 30.”
“O plus 30” was short for “thirty days from an operation,” which meant that Netanyahu was calling a full-scale attack on Iran an “operation,” rather than the more appropriate term, an “act of war.” Wars needed a vote in the cabinet, but prime ministers could simply order an operation.
Dagan was stunned by the recklessness: “The use of [military] violence would have intolerable consequences. The working assumption that it is possible to fully halt the Iranian nuclear project by means of a military offensive is incorrect….If Israel were to attack, [Iranian Supreme Leader] Khamenei would thank Allah: It would unite the Iranian people behind the project and enable Khamenei to say that he must get himself an atom bomb to defend Iran against Israeli aggression.”
Even the mere act of putting the Israeli forces on attack alert could lead to an inexorable slide into war, Dagan argued, because the Syrians and the Iranians would see the mobilization and could take preemptive action.
Barak had a different version of that dispute—he said that he and the prime minister were only examining the feasibility of an attack—but that hardly mattered. The breakdown in relations between Dagan and Netanyahu was irreparable. Dagan had run the Mossad for eight years, longer than anyone else in history except Isser Harel. He had re-created it in his image, had revived a moribund and timid agency and restored it to the historical glory it had enjoyed for decades. He’d penetrated Israel’s adversaries more deeply than anyone believed possible, had eliminated targets who’d evaded death or capture for decades, had stalled for years an existential threat to the Jewish state.
None of that mattered. Dubai was an embarrassment, or maybe just an excuse. In September 2010, Netanyahu told Dagan his appointment would not be renewed.
Or maybe Dagan quit. “I decided by myself that it’s enough,” he said. “I want to do other things. And also, the truth is that I was sick of him.”
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TAMIR PARDO, WHO SUCCEEDED Dagan as director, had to rehabilitate a large part of the operations teams and procedures, which were wrecked in the aftermath of the Dubai hit. He appointed N., a man who had been instrumental in planning the hit on Mughniyeh, to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the damage, and later made him his deputy. The reconstruction of the operational units did not stop the agency’s activities, though, especially not those aimed at the Iranian nuclear project. After a few months in the job, Pardo went back to the targeted killing policy his predecessor had laid down.
In July 2011, a motorcyclist followed Darioush Rezaeinejad, a doctor of nuclear physics and a senior researcher for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, until he reached a point close to the Imam Ali Camp, one of the most fortified bases of the Revolutionary Guard, which contains an experimental uranium enrichment area. The biker drew a pistol and shot Rezaeinejad dead.
In November 2011, a huge explosion occurred in another Revolutionary Guard base, thirty miles west of Tehran. The cloud of smoke was visible from the city, windows rattled, and satellite photos showed that almost the entire base had been obliterated. General Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, head of the Revolutionary Guar
d’s missile development division, was killed in the blast, as were sixteen of his personnel.
Despite the demise of al-Mabhouh, arms shipments continued to flow into Gaza from Iran via Sudan. The Mossad maintained surveillance, and the Israeli Air Force kept up attacks on the convoys. The biggest success came after the Mossad discovered that three hundred tons of advanced weaponry and explosives, which were disguised as civilian goods and stored at a military compound in the south of Khartoum, were awaiting shipment to Gaza. The arms cache included short- and medium-range rockets and advanced antiaircraft and antitank missiles and was defined by Israel as something that would “upset the equilibrium.” If it were to reach Gaza, said one of the AMAN officers who briefed Prime Minister Netanyahu, “we would recommend attacking Hamas even without prior provocation, to prevent them from deploying it.”
But the arms never went anywhere. At 4 A.M. on October 24, 2012, IAF F-15 fighters attacked the site and destroyed the weapons, as well as the Hamas and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel who were there at the time. The skies over Khartoum were illuminated by the explosions. Roofs were blown off and windows shattered by the blast. The residents of Khartoum suffered because of their government’s decision to allow the country to be part of the terrorist weapons-smuggling pipeline. After this incident, the Sudanese authorities told the IRCG that they would no longer permit it.
Like his predecessors, Pardo refrained from risking Israeli operatives in killings undertaken in target countries, particularly in places as dangerous as Tehran. All the hits on Iranian soil were, in fact, implemented by members of that country’s underground opposition movements and/or members of the Kurdish, Baluchi, and Azerbaijani ethnic minorities who were hostile to the regime.
These targeted killings were effective. Information reaching the Mossad indicated that they brought about “white defection”—meaning that the Iranian scientists were so frightened that many requested to be transferred to civilian projects. “There’s a limit to an organization’s ability to coerce a scientist to work on a project when he does not want to,” Dagan said.
In order to intensify the fears of the scientists, the Mossad looked for targets that were not necessarily very high up in the nuclear program, but whose elimination would cause as much apprehension as possible among the greatest numbers of their colleagues at the same level. On January 12, 2012, Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, a chemical engineer at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, left his home and headed for a laboratory in downtown Tehran. A few months earlier, a photograph of him accompanying Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on a tour of nuclear installations had appeared in media across the globe. Once again, a motorcyclist drove up to his car and attached a limpet mine that killed him on the spot. His wife, who was sitting next to him, was not hurt, but she saw everything and told his colleagues, horrified at what had happened.
Assassinating scientists, whatever they are working on, is an illegal act under American law, and the United States never knew, and did not want to know, about these actions. The Israelis never told the Americans their plans, “not even with a wink and a smile,” said the CIA’s Michael Hayden. That said, Hayden had no doubt about which measure undertaken to stop the Iranian nuclear project was most effective: “It was that somebody was killing their scientists.”
At the first session of the National Security Council with the new president, Barack Obama, in 2009, Obama asked the CIA director how much fissile material Iran had stockpiled at Natanz.
Hayden replied, “Mr. President, I actually know the answer to that question, and I’m going to give it to you in a minute. But can I give you another way of looking at this? It doesn’t matter.
“There isn’t an electron or a neutron at Natanz that’s ever going to show up in a nuclear weapon. What they’re building at Natanz is knowledge. What they’re building at Natanz is confidence, and then they will take that knowledge and that confidence and they’ll go somewhere else and enrich uranium. That knowledge, Mr. President, is stored in the brains of the scientists.”
Hayden made it abundantly clear that “this program has no American relationship whatsoever. It is illegal, and we [the CIA] never would have recommended it or advocated such a thing. However, my broad intelligence judgment is that the death of those human beings had a great impact on their nuclear program.”
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THE AYATOLLAHS’ REGIME IN Tehran had wanted an atomic bomb to make Iran a regional power and to ensure their continued grip on the country. Instead, Israeli and American actions, particularly Israel’s targeted killing operations and the virus infections of Operation Olympic Games, had slowed the program’s progress considerably. In addition, international sanctions had flung Iran into a grave economic crisis that threatened to bring down the regime entirely.
These sanctions, particularly the ones imposed by the Obama administration (including the detachment of Iran from the international money transfer system, SWIFT), were so harsh that in August 2012, the head of Spear, E.L., estimated that if he could persuade the United States to take just a few more economic measures, the Iranian economy would be bankrupt by the end of the year. “And that situation would bring the masses out into the streets again and would likely lead to toppling the regime,” he said.
Nevertheless, this did not stop Benjamin Netanyahu from making preparations for an open military assault on Iran. It’s not entirely clear whether he ever really intended to execute the plan: His defense minister, Ehud Barak, maintained that, “if it depended on me, Israel would have attacked,” but there are others who believe that Netanyahu—who had the last word—only wanted to make Obama believe that he intended to attack, in order to force Obama’s hand, to steer him to the conclusion that America would inevitably get embroiled in the war anyway, so it would be better for the United States to carry out the attack itself, first, in order to be able to control the timing.
The Obama administration feared that an Israeli attack would send the price of oil soaring and that chaos would ensue in the Middle East, harming the president’s chances of reelection in November 2012. The administration also estimated that Israel was likely to attack soon and worriedly watched Israel’s every move—even regular army brigade maneuvers became a source of apprehension that an Israeli attack on Iran was imminent. In January, Senator Dianne Feinstein met with Mossad director Pardo in her Senate office, demanding that he explain the reason for movements by Israel’s 35th Brigade, as captured by a U.S. satellite. Pardo didn’t know anything about the routine drill, but he later warned Netanyahu that continued pressure on the United States would lead to a dramatic measure, and likely not the one that Netanyahu hoped for. Pardo himself believed that another two years of economic and political pressure would probably make Iran surrender under favorable conditions and give up its nuclear project entirely.
But Netanyahu refused to listen to him, ordering Pardo to continue with the assassinations, and the IDF to continue its preparations for an attack.
In December, the Mossad was ready to eliminate another scientist, but just before it went ahead, Obama, fearing Israeli action, agreed to an Iranian proposal to hold secret negotiations in Muscat, the capital of Oman. “The Americans never told us about those talks, but they did everything to make sure we would learn about them,” said a Mossad intelligence officer who discovered the Muscat meetings. She recommended to Pardo that he immediately drop the assassination plan. “We must not do this when a political process is under way,” she said. Pardo agreed with her and asked Netanyahu for permission to cease the entire assassination campaign as long as the talks were ongoing.
It is reasonable to assume that if the talks had begun two years later, Iran would have come to them in a considerably weaker state, but even the deal that was eventually struck was an Iranian capitulation to a number of demands that the ayatollahs had been rejecting for years. Iran agreed to dismantle the nuclear project almost entirely and to be subject
to strict limits and supervision for many years into the future.
For Dagan, the agreement marked a double triumph: His five-front strategy against Iran had achieved many of its objectives. At the same time, Netanyahu had grasped that launching an attack while negotiations with Iran were under way would be an intolerable slap in the Americans’ faces. He postponed the attack again and again, and when the final agreement was signed, he canceled it altogether, at least for the near future.
But Dagan was not satisfied. He was bitter and frustrated over the manner in which Netanyahu had shown him the way out, and he did not intend to take it lying down. In January 2011, on the last day of his tenure, he invited a group of journalists to Mossad headquarters and, in an unprecedented move—and to the journalists’ astonishment—lashed out fiercely at the prime minister and the minister of defense. After his address, the chief military censor, a woman with the rank of brigadier general, stood up and announced that everything Dagan had said about Israeli plans to attack Iran was in the top-secret category and could not be published in the media.
When he saw that the military censor had barred the publication of his remarks, Dagan simply repeated them at a conference at Tel Aviv University in June, before hundreds of participants, knowing that someone of his stature would not be prosecuted.
Dagan’s criticism of Netanyahu was trenchant and personal, but it also sprang from a profound change in attitude that Dagan underwent in his later years as director of the Mossad, a change that was of far greater importance than his ferocious fight with the prime minister over the Iranian nuclear project.
Dagan, along with Sharon and most of their colleagues in Israel’s defense establishment and intelligence community, believed for many years that force could solve everything, that the right way to confront the Israeli-Arab dispute was by “separating the Arab from his head.” But this was a delusion, and a dangerously common one at that.
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