Throughout the 1980s the organization, having adopted the name of the “Party of God,” kidnapped more than two hundred nationals in Lebanon—mainly American or western Europeans, including Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy. It had organized the highjacking of civilian aircrafts and had more or less pioneered the idea of suicide bombings against American and French targets—killing almost 1,000 people—including 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut and 58 French paratroopers.
By the time the Iran-Iraq War was over, Tehran saw the “Party of God” as a trump card it could play in the Middle East by using it to influence the broader course of regional politics and to wage a low-intensity war against Israel. The emergence of Hassan Nasrallah led to Hezbollah controlling southern Lebanon. Financially it cost Iran very little—no more than one day’s profit from its oil revenue at €50 million a year—to maintain Hezbollah. However, Hezbollah was also funded by income from businesses set up by the movement. These included a bank, a mortgage co-operative, an insurance company, six hotels, a chain of supermarkets across south Lebanon and the Beka’a Valley, a dozen urban bus and taxi companies, and a travel agency that sends tens of thousands of pilgrims to Mecca and other Muslim holy places. Between them they provide Hezbollah with €300 million a year.
The Beka’a Valley had become its power base, centered on the historic city of Balbeck, with its own modern hospital and staffed by Syrian and Iranian doctors and nurses. It also ran clinics, a social welfare system, centers for orphans and widows, and schools—where the syllabus was identical to the one taught in Iran. It collected its own taxes with a 20 percent levy, called khoms, on all incomes. All this contributed to the image of Hezbollah being an independent state within the state of Lebanon. To emphasize its status, it had a number of “embassies”; the one in Tehran is the largest; others are situated in Yemen, Damascus, and Beirut.
Its relationship with the rest of Lebanon was complex. In May 2006, it still held 14 seats in the 128-seat national assembly, including 2 portfolios in the council of ministers. But Hezbollah also insisted it was primarily “a people-based movement fighting on behalf of the Muslim world.” To reinforce that idea, it has a powerful media department, including its satellite television channel, al-Manar (the lighthouse), which transmitted to the entire Arab world and was regarded by many viewers as better than al-Jazeera. Supporting its rolling news channel were four radio stations, two newspapers, several magazines, and a book publishing house. Its own police force worked within sharia law and Hezbollah courts sent the convicted to its own prisons in the Beka’a Valley.
Mossad estimated its militia numbered nine thousand in May 2006: the well-equipped fighters were backed by an estimated three hundred thousand reservists. It was a more powerful force than the Lebanese-Armed Forces that was supposed to have disarmed it under the United Nations Resolution 1559. That was unlikely to happen, given the majority of the army were Shi’ites and would refuse to fight their own.
Within Iran, Hezbollah’s support bridged the political divides within the ruling establishment. The country’s mullahs, whether “reformist” or “hardliner,” regarded Hezbollah as a reminder of their own revolutionary youth. In the same week that Mohammad Khatami and President Ahmadinejad had delivered their chilling words, the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, had temporarily set aside their arguments to unite in demanding that the Revolutionary Guards should be ready to fight alongside Hezbollah should Hassan Nasrallah call upon them. The deputies had also agreed to send Hamas an “emergency grant as a gift” to counter the freeze imposed by the European Union and other international donations intended for the new Palestinian government. It was Iran’s first move to marginalize Mahmoud Abbas and make Hamas the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In Lebanon, Hezbollah had begun to lean on the new pro-American coalition government led by Fouad Siniora and Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader.
For Meir Dagan the situation was starkly clear. Iran was positioning itself to expand its influence through what could be a pincer movement by Hamas and Hezbollah—the war on two fronts the intelligence chief had long feared. Success for Tehran would mean for the first time since the seventh century its direct power would have extended to the shores of the Mediterranean. If Israel were to launch a preemptive strike—under the guise of being the regional champion of western democracy at the frontline in the fight against political Islam—it might earn the approval of the Bush administration, but it would leave Israel exposed to fierce criticism elsewhere. Meir Dagan’s advice to Olmert was that Israel should continue to “wait and see.” In the meantime, two of his predecessors, Efraim Halevy and Meir Amit, also started to sound a warning.
After four years at the helm, Efraim Halevy had departed as Mossad’s spymaster as quietly as he had arrived. Within Mossad ranks, the memory of his studious presence—his thin lips pursed before speaking, his eyes impassive behind his spectacles—had been largely forgotten. Those who did remember him on the upper floors spoke of Halevy as the man who spectacularly failed to lead the service into the new millennium and failed to make it a force to be reckoned with. In 2008 he published his memoir of those days, Man in the Shadows. It was an unsuccessful attempt to tell his side of the criticism that had dogged him throughout most of his tenure. But it also provided a platform for him to issue a warning: the further Israel is from the last attack, and for that matter, the countries of Europe and the United States, the closer it is to the next one. “Much of what lies ahead can only be achieved in a clandestine manner. In order to triumph we shall have to understand that diplomacy is the art of the possible, that intelligence is the craft of the impossible. And life is fast becoming more impossible than ever in human history,” he said (to the author).
In between time spent in London to launch his book and talking to Nathan, the Mossad station chief, he spoke to the author about his belief that the United States and Britain would have to “make fateful decisions” concerning their Middle East policies. “In Iran and Iraq they cannot simply gather their troops and head for home. They must adopt a firm exit strategy, one that will need a positive contribution from Israel. That will mean being sensitive to our interests and visions.” He concluded by delivering a grim warning: “We are looking down the barrel of World War Three unless the world wakes up.”
Shortly afterward, Meir Amit, now a member of Israel’s leading think-tank spoke out (to the author): “Israel must continue to take strong measures to defend itself. Terrorism is like a cancer, spreading silently and effectively. No nation can fight it alone. Saddam Hussein is yesterday’s monster. But we have a new one in Iran, whipping up the Shia revolutionary hurricane that will soon engulf Israel and, left unchecked, will engulf the world beyond our borders.”
The first breeze of that hurricane was already starting to blow across the Gaza Strip.
A reminder of the constant terrorist threat to Israel came when Swiss intelligence, working closely with a Mossad agent in the country and officers of France’s SDEC, disrupted a well-prepared plot to shoot down an El-Al passenger plane with a rocket propelled grenade as it flew in to land at Geneva airport. Documents recovered from the seven Algerians responsible showed the plot had been masterminded from Madrid. Shortly before the attack, its two al-Qaeda operators had returned to North Africa.
But cooperation did not always run so smoothly. Meir Dagan received a report from his Mossad agent in New York of a closed-door discussion between foreign ministers after intelligence predictions. These suggested that Iran was, in May 2006, “possibly only a year away from producing a nuclear device.” Tension erupted at the meeting when Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, verbally attacked the U.S. state department official, Nicholas Burns, who was the senior adviser to the meeting’s host, Condoleezza Rice. Lavrov accused Burns of “seeking to undermine our efforts to resolve the crisis with Iran.” Ministers from Britain, France, Germany, and China, all members of the United Nations Security Council, were stunned at Lavrov’s outburst in
the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel suite where they had gathered. The Mossad agent’s report offered a revealing insight into the back-room disagreement of high-level diplomacy.
It was British foreign minister Margaret Beckett’s first day in her post and she was taken aback by how bad-tempered the discussion had become. Lavrov had arrived late and was still furious about a speech U.S. Vice President Cheney had just made in Lithuania in which he had criticized Kremlin policies. Lavrov castigated Dr. Rice and her team using the kind of language, Minister Beckett was heard to say, that was more in line with Cold War rhetoric. At one point, Lavrov threatened to veto a security council resolution that Britain and France had drafted and which Washington supported. It was a new attempt to persuade Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program.
Despite efforts by John Sawers, the British Foreign Office political director, to calm matters, Lavrov continued to rage. At another point, he attacked Israel claiming its policies were “designed to drag us all into conflict.” Dr. Rice intervened by telling Lavrov he was “not being helpful.” During dinner the row rumbled on until Lavrov abruptly left. The next day over breakfast John Sawers sat down with senior delegates from China, France, the United States, and Germany to find a proposal to put before the foreign ministers at their lunch. It would give Iran a new trade deal with the West, security guarantees against any attack from Israel, and nuclear technology “which will only be used for non-aggressive purposes” on condition Iran would halt all production of weapons-grade uranium.
Over lunch—salmon and Californian Chablis, which the French delegation barely touched—Dr. Rice emphasized the proposal was “a major shift in our policy.” However, Margaret Beckett had been briefed that it was doubtful Iran would accept it. The meal broke up with the decision to put the matter on hold for further discussion—diplomatic-speak meaning that it had little chance of success. At a summit of Islamic heads of state in Indonesia a few days later, President Ahmadinejad said, “I will consider negotiating with anyone except Israel. It has no place on this earth.”
The Mossad agent monitoring the conference had more disturbing news. Russian officials attending the conference as “observers” had secretly offered to sell Iran technology that could help protect its nuclear secrets from international scrutiny. The equipment would include state-of-the-art security encryption technology developed by Atlas Elektronik, a Russian government-controlled defense company.
As May drew to a close, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) found themselves increasingly responding to Hamas rocket attacks on settlements. Encouragement for Hamas to continue its guerrilla warfare grew more vociferous from Tehran. A Mossad deep-cover agent in the Iranian capital sent the first details of a hitherto unknown nuclear underground site in northern Iran at Abe-e Ali. The report revealed that over three hundred Chinese and North Korean nuclear experts were working to produce a new centrifuge to enable the high-speed purification of uranium to achieve the 90 percent level required for weapons-grade. Ehud Olmert agreed with Meir Dagan that the evidence was of such great importance the Mossad chief and Nathan should fly to London, and then on to Washington.
For several hours over orange juice, coffee, and sandwiches the two men showed John Scarlett and other MI6 officers the evidence acquired from inside Iran. It included close-up photographs of the Abe-e Ali complex and two new workshops at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Dagan’s briefing formed a key part of a meeting of Britain’s defense chiefs after Condoleezza Rice told Prime Minister Blair that “if all else fails on the diplomatic front, we are prepared to go it alone, or with the assistance of our good friend, Israel.” An official who was at the meeting told the author, “She made it plain that going it alone meant military action.”
The meeting was held in the monolithic Ministry of Defense building in Whitehall and was chaired by General Sir Michael Walker, the chief of Britain’s defense staff. The Foreign Office team was led by William Ehrman, director general of the defense office, and David Landman, head of the nuclear proliferation department. Both had played an important role in bringing Libya out of the political wilderness. John Scarlett and Eliza Manningham-Buller were on hand to brief the meeting on Israel’s position. For the first time the Pentagon battle plans for an all-out assault on Iran were on the table. Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles would be launched from U.S. navy ships and submarines in the Gulf to target Iran’s air defense systems at the nuclear installations. The updated Tomahawks had an onboard facility that allowed them to be reprogrammed while in-flight to attack an alternative target once the initial one was destroyed. Each missile also had a “loitering” capability over a target area to provide damage assessment through its on-board TV camera. U.S. Air Force B2 stealth bombers, each equipped with eight 4,500-pound bunker-busting bombs, would fly from Diego Garcia, the isolated U.S. navy base in the Indian Ocean, the Whiteman USAF base in Missouri, and the USAF base at Fairford in Gloucestershire, England. Each meter-long bomb of hardened steel could penetrate six meters of concrete. There would be no ground-force follow-up attacks.
The meeting attendees then went on to discuss the risks associated with such an attack. The details were subsequently obtained by the author and are published here for the first time. The meeting attendees were told that an American-led attack could trigger “devastating reprisals” against the 8,500 British troops based in Iraq and the 4,000 British soldiers who had arrived in Afghanistan. Ehrman reminded them that both countries had strong religious and political ties to Iran. Walker predicted the attack might be preceded by Washington reorganizing its plan to withdraw a substantial number of troops from Iraq. It would also certainly lead to confrontation with China and Russia—whose support would lead to Iran cutting off its oil supplies to the West. Scarlett cited Meir Dagan’s view that the offensive on Iran would see a dramatic increase in suicide bomber attacks against Israel. The intelligence chief added that MI6 intelligence could provide no guarantee that an aerial assault on Iran would destroy the eight identified targets the Pentagon designated. These targets were:
• Saghand, a mining operation set to begin later this year, yielding fifty-to-sixty tons of uranium annually.
• Ardkan, where ore is purified to produce uranium ore concentrate known as yellowcake.
• Gehine, a mining and milling facility.
• Isfahan, where yellowcake is cleansed of impurities and converted to uranium hexafluoride gas.
• Natanz, an enrichment site, which can be used to produce weapons-grade uranium.
• Tehran, a research reactor and radioactive waste storage facility.
• Bushehr, a Russian-built light water reactor.
• Arak, a heavy water research reactor.
• Anarak, a nuclear waste storage site.
No date had yet been fixed for an air attack, but if Iran continued its bellicose attitude and ignored demands made by the UN, the Bush administration could launch military action in 2007, but possibly not later than the run-up to Bush’s final year in office in 2008. The present mission plans were two-phased. Cruise missiles would destroy defenses around the targets, then B2 stealth bombers would strike their plants with bunker-busting bombs. The Pentagon estimated the total mission time in the target areas at probably eight hours. Submarines would simultaneously launch rockets.
The meeting studied the latest intelligence on Iran’s current ballistic missile capability: a total of eighty-five S-300 air defense missiles. Provided by China, they would be effective against U.S. fighter-bombers, less so against the multi-defense systems of the Tactical Tomahawks. There were also forty X-55 cruise missiles, each with an estimated range of over one thousand miles. They were based close to the border with Turkmenistan. Less than thirty Shabtai-3 rockets provided by China and based in sites in southern Iran bringing them well within range of Israel. The Shahab-4 rocket was currently being developed near Natanz, south of Tehran. Present intelligence estimates said it would not come on line until 2008. Each would have a range of eight thousand mi
les—able to strike against anywhere in Europe and the United States. The present missiles could be adapted to fire from Iran’s twenty-five missile crafts and its three frigates. None, however, could be launched from Iran’s air force of two hundred aging aircraft: Tomcats, MIG-29 Fulcum, and Phantoms. Iran’s five hundred thousand army of regulars and conscripts were poorly led and trained. Most of their equipment comes from the former Soviet Union.
The meeting then turned to a lengthy discussion of who, apart from the Blair government and Israel, would support a U.S. attack. The conclusion was that diplomatic support within the European Union would probably only come from Poland.
What the meeting did not know, and which would only emerge in August 2006 (through Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist), was that President Bush and Vice President Cheney had proposed using nuclear weapons to destroy the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. The plan had been fiercely opposed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Peter Pace. He and other Pentagon commanders, at an equally secret meeting warned Bush and Cheney of what they saw as “the serious economic, political, and military consequences. A military strike on Natanz would vent fatal radiation for three hundred kilometers.” This would include Tehran and its multi-million population. The Pentagon chiefs argued for dropping the “largest possible bunker bombs available in a multi-drop attack which would generate sufficient force to accomplish what a nuclear warhead would achieve, but without provoking an outcry over what would be the first use of a nuclear weapon in conflict since Nagasaki.”
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 72
