Rabinovich maintained a neutral expression, suppressing her exhilaration. If what she sensed was coming was access to Dimona, President Petrov would be delighted.
‘To be honest, the mission to the United States was not without its dangers and difficulties, but you have proven your loyalty to your new state, so we will return the compliment. I’ve spoken with the prime minister, and we are going to clear you into our nuclear research program at Dimona. How well do you know President Petrov?’
‘I’ve met him at a reception, and I’ve been a junior member of a briefing team,’ answered Rabinovich, her mind racing. How much did the Mossad know, she wondered. How much did Feldman know? To deny knowing Petrov at all was dangerous, and she opted for a more vague, and hopefully unverifiable answer. ‘So in summary, not well.’
‘Russia is aware of our nuclear capability?’
You know damn well that Russia, along with the rest of the thinking world, is aware of your nuclear capability, she thought, but she remained calm, the words of her trainers in Moscow reverberating in her ears. ‘Don’t rise to a bait.’ Aside from the critical issue of Bartók, this was clearly the final job interview. The last hurdle to Dimona.
‘To be honest, Amos, in the laboratories I’ve worked in, Israel’s nuclear capability was not given much focus. We were more concerned with our own research, but like any leader of a nuclear power, I’m sure President Petrov remains abreast of the policies of not only Israel, but the United States, Britain, France, China, India, and Pakistan, and perhaps more worryingly, North Korea.’
‘Of course,’ said Regev, as if to answer his own question. ‘Well done on the mission to recruit Bartók. We’re impressed.’
‘I’m only halfway there,’ responded Rabinovich. ‘We haven’t got the thumb drive yet.’
‘No, but I think you’ve put us ahead of the game. Once you’ve had a couple of days off, you will be picked up and taken down to Dimona where you will be fully briefed into that compartment. I’ve read your reports on your research at Sarov, but I’m sure you will have more technical detail to impart to our own scientists. In addition, I’ve scheduled you to attend the conference in Paris. I would hate Bartók to fall into the hands of your previous employers.’ And with that Regev rose to indicate the meeting was at an end.
Rabinovich had expected to drive the Yitzhak Rabin Highway, 150 kilometres into the Negev Desert, but the Mossad had provided an Israeli Defense Force Black Hawk helicopter. As they gained height out of Tel Aviv, Rabinovich gained a better appreciation of why Israel was so vulnerable. From her research she already knew it was one of the world’s smaller countries. Half the size of Switzerland, and at its narrowest, based on the 1967 borders rather than the Palestinian territories Israel now occupied, the country was only 15 kilometres wide at her waist. With a length of just 400 kilometres Israel had an area on par with New Caledonia and Fiji.
Rabinovich recalled that George W. Bush had gained the same impression. In 1998, when he was still the governor of Texas, then foreign minister Ariel Sharon had taken Bush on a helicopter tour, with the future President of the United States remarking, ‘I had no idea Israel was so small.’
Sitting at the open door of the Black Hawk, Rabinovich’s blonde hair fluttered in the rotor draft as the Israeli pilots set their course to the south. She watched the Mediterranean recede behind them, wondering what she would find at the nuclear base. The Israelis had also allocated her an apartment in the nearby town of Dimona, assuring her it was secure, but she wondered about that too.
The Sikorsky Black Hawk was touching on 140 knots, and in less than 40 minutes, the town of Dimona came into view. Rabinovich could make out the airfield to the south of Route 25 and Dimona itself. They passed to the south of the town and Rabinovich could see the palm trees lining the streets of the city. It was home to the scientists and the rest of the workforce on the nuclear base, but Rabinovich’s thoughts on her security had not been allayed when she had researched the rest of the population. Originally settled as a development town in the 1950s by Moroccan immigrants, the 33 000-strong melting pot now included immigrants from Russia and Ethiopia, African Americans known as the Hebrew Israelites and a 7000-strong contingent of Jewish Indians. Infiltration by ISIS and other groups with a grudge against Israel would, she knew, be made that much easier by the diverse nature of the desert city’s inhabitants.
Minutes later, Rabinovich could make out the dome of the reactor. The sound of the rotor blades changed to a heavier beat and the Black Hawk banked, descended and touched down on the helipad of the Shimon Peres Nuclear Centre. It had been renamed in honour of one of the great sons of Israel. The former prime minister and president, along with David Ben Gurion, had spearheaded the country’s secret development of weapons. Both Ben Gurion and Peres believed they would ensure the tiny state’s survival amongst a sea of enemies.
‘Welcome, Doctor Cohen. I’m Elie Khenin, the director. We’re very pleased to have you join us,’ the grey-haired Israeli scientist said, extending his hand as he welcomed Rabinovich on the helipad.
‘And I’m very pleased to be here, Doctor Khenin.’
‘Please, it’s Elie.’ Rabinovich gave the Israeli scientist a warm smile as she accompanied him on the short walk to the administration building.
‘Tea? Coffee?’ asked Khenin once they’d settled into the comfortable leather chairs in his office.
‘Coffee. Just black, thank you.’
Khenin nodded to his diminutive secretary. ‘I’ll have one too, thanks, Miri.’
‘So . . . I’ve read your file, Lisa. May I call you Lisa?’
‘Of course,’ Rabinovich replied, but despite the seeming relaxed welcome, her radar was working at full capacity.
‘Good, because we don’t stand on formality here. That said, it would appear you have friends in high places.’ The old scientist’s eyes twinkled mischievously. Khenin had been at the helm of the nuclear facility for nearly 15 years, and when it came to politics, he had seen it all – Likud, Labor, Kadima, the Jewish Home party – in all, over 200 political parties had been formed since Israel’s inception in 1948. Most of them were extinct, but Khenin was more than adept at steering clear of those that were left. ‘You may as well know that I was summoned to the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, and then to the Mossad where I was given a briefing on your reasons for seeking asylum in Israel and an outline of your research in Sarov.’
Rabinovich nodded. She had provided the Israelis with enough information for the outline of her scientific research to pass muster, but the core of her research and her proposed solutions she’d left at Sarov. While she busied herself gathering all the intelligence on the Israelis’ progress, she planned to lead them down the same dead ends she’d already explored.
‘You have clearly passed whatever tests they set. I will give you a tour and a briefing on what we do here, and once you sign a declaration that you will never expose that to the wider world, or anyone who is not cleared, you will be part of the Dimona compartment. Given that we intend to make the most of your presence, that will be without restriction,’ he added. ‘Miri has taken care of all the administration. As we speak, your bags are being delivered to your new apartment in Dimona, and you will also be provided with a vehicle. When you’ve had a chance to settle in, I’d like you to brief me and my senior scientists in more detail on your Sarov research. As you will come to appreciate, given the threat from Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, and in order to be able to attack more than one city simultaneously, we are working hard on the miniaturisation of our nuclear warheads. I suspect we may be having similar problems to those you’ve been working on, so it will be beneficial to compare notes.’
As she’d been trained to do, both in Russia and now in Israel, Rabinovich kept her expression neutral, but once again, her mind was racing. She had now broken into the tightest security compartment in Israel. ‘I’m not sure I have the final solutions to the yield problems associated with miniaturisation,�
�� she said, ‘but I’m more than happy to brief you on my problems to date.’
‘As I understand it,’ said Khenin, ‘you were in charge of that research at Sarov?’
‘Not nominally. The head of the Russian nuclear program is General Danilo Dragunov, but he’s a very busy man so in practice, I’ve been the de facto director.’
‘Well . . . time enough for the detail tomorrow. In the meantime,’ Khenin said, getting up and handing Rabinovich a hard hat and a white coat, ‘I’ll give you a tour of the facility. We’ll start with the reactor.’
Rabinovich walked with the director as he led the way toward the 20-metre high dome, along what was more like an avenue than a road. The sidewalk was lined with elegant palm trees and paved in brown and cream coloured tiles. The dividing strip in the middle of the road was finished with thick grass and shrubs. An oasis in the Negev.
‘This is the reactor control room,’ said Khenin indicating a dizzying array of electronic panels with a sweep of his arm. ‘We are able to power the reactor with unenriched uranium because we moderate it with heavy water,’ he added proudly.
Rabinovich nodded. A tiny fraction of ordinary water contained a different type of hydrogen – deuterium with an extra neutron and the resultant D2O was known as heavy water. She made a mental note to include Khenin’s statement in her report. It was confirmation of the conclusions already reached by Russian intelligence that the Israelis possessed one of the few heavy water reactors in the world – reactors that allowed plutonium to be extracted without shutting down the reactor itself.
‘You didn’t consider a standard reactor?’ Rabinovich asked.
‘We did, but as you’re aware, that would require enriched uranium and banks of centrifuges that we would have had to bury to protect them from attack.’
Rabinovich nodded. She was very familiar with the process. When Israel discovered Iran had buried 10 000 centrifuges under a mountain, the Mossad attacked the system with the Stuxnet virus, alternately slowing the centrifuges and then speeding them up so they fractured from their precisely engineered magnetic bearings.
‘At present our warheads are almost exclusively based on a plutonium design, but we’re keeping our options open. For the moment we’re happy with the heavy water reactor route.’
‘That’s quite an achievement,’ said Rabinovich, giving Khenin another broad smile. ‘Very impressive, particularly since heavy water isn’t that easy to come by. It’s one of the reasons I left Russia.’ Part of Rabinovich’s training had included sessions on how to lie smoothly. ‘We’ve already purchased nearly 40 tonnes of heavy water from Iran, and that’s a partnership that filled me with dread,’ she said, lowering her voice, although she knew that if you knew where to look, the purchase was already in the open arena.
‘You won’t get any argument from me on that score,’ said Khenin with a wry smile. ‘Iran is one of the few countries capable of producing heavy water, because when they built their reactor, they built a heavy water plant alongside the dome, but that’s a very expensive solution.’
Rabinovich said nothing. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. The Israelis had been amongst the foremost critics of the Iranian heavy water reactor, nestled in the western mountains near the town of Arak.
‘As you know,’ Khenin continued, ‘ordinary water has only a very small percentage of heavy water – less than 0.7 per cent – and it takes an enormous amount of electricity to produce it. When the French helped us build this plant in the fifties, we decided not to go down the heavy water production route because we knew we could import 30 tonnes from countries like France and Norway. Where Hitler failed, we’ve succeeded,’ he said.
The irony was not lost on Rabinovich. Hitler’s failure had resulted from one of the most daring commando raids in World War Two. As early as 1934, the Norwegians had started to produce heavy water as a by-product of fertiliser production at their hydroelectric plant at Vemork in the mountains to the west of Oslo. After Hitler invaded the country in 1940, a number of unsuccessful Allied operations had been launched against the plant. Despite the Germans being on alert, and the plant being further protected by mines and floodlights, a team of Norwegian commandos broke into the basement along a railway and cable tunnel and placed explosives against the heavy water electrolysis chambers. Five of the commandos escaped by skiing 400 kilometres into Sweden, successfully avoiding over 3000 German soldiers who’d been dispatched into the mountains to capture them.
‘The declared capacity of the reactor is 24 megawatts,’ said Khenin, ‘but it’s much higher than that . . . we’ve actually got it up to nearly a hundred, and that enables us to produce around 40 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium a year.’ Rabinovich followed Doctor Khenin as he led the way from the reactor building toward the building next door where he explained the process of producing the fuel rods and lithium-6.
‘I’ll brief your team in detail,’ Rabinovich said, as they walked past the complex’s power station and entered yet another building where the fuel rods were coated with aluminium, ‘but I was having great difficulty in getting anywhere near the yields the Kremlin wanted for miniature warheads.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Khenin said, a rueful tone to his voice. Rabinovich made copious mental notes as the Dimona director briefed her on exactly the same failures she had been experiencing at Sarov. In effect, Khenin was confirming that the Israelis were not in front of Russia, and she knew that President Petrov would, paradoxically, be disappointed. The detail on Dimona was very valuable, but Bartók’s thumb drive had now assumed an even greater importance.
‘Next we’ll visit the facilities we’ve constructed underground,’ said the Director, heading toward a long, windowless building on the other side of the reactor. ‘There are two floors above ground, but six more underground. We had to let the Americans in years ago,’ he added, smiling mischievously. ‘Completely fooled them. We bricked up the elevator entrances and even put in a false control room. We told them this was only for peaceful purposes. Power for agriculture, we said. Nice enough people, but very gullible.’
We’ll see who’s gullible when this is all over, thought Rabinovich. Images from Russian satellite overpasses were one thing, but no Russian agent had ever got this close.
‘We’ve tunnelled underground for two reasons,’ Khenin continued. ‘Firstly so the production facilities can’t be seen from satellite surveillance, and secondly to protect them from any ground attack. Those double doors there allow the trucks to bring in the processed fuel rods from the reactor.’ Rabinovich followed the director into the building, past the administration offices. She memorised the code as Khenin punched a series of letters and numbers into the lock. Whatever was under their feet was obviously not open to every scientist or technician in Dimona.
‘This area is known as Machon 2, and it’s here that we actually separate the plutonium from our irradiated fuel rods,’ said Khenin, nodding to a technician as he led the way into the underground bunker that contained another dizzying array of control panels.
‘Purex method?’ probed Rabinovich. It was a method used to extract both plutonium and uranium from a reactor’s spent fuel rods by dissolving the spent fuel in nitrous acid.
Khenin nodded. ‘We’ve found that to be the most effective, and if you come this way, we’ll go to level two where we have a viewing balcony for VIPs. We call this Golda’s balcony after our fourth prime minister, Golda Meir,’ he said. They reached the viewing railing and the director pointed to an open area four floors below them. ‘The trucks deliver the spent fuel rods, and from there they are lowered by crane to the plutonium separation area. Those big tanks are full of nitrous acid, and the rods are left in solution for around 30 hours. We then draw off the solution of uranium and plutonium nitrates and separate them. Each process produces about 130 grams of plutonium which finishes up as a small metal ball. Now, if you come with me, we’ll go down to the lower levels.’
Rabinovich followed Khenin down to level four where he poi
nted out the underground production facilities for lithium, deuterium and tritium. Finally, they arrived at level five and what was known innocuously as ‘the Metal Department’.
‘This is where we manufacture the warheads,’ he said. ‘Obviously, although you will have clearance, this building is very tightly controlled, even amongst our own technicians. Only about 150 of our staff are cleared into this area, and visits are restricted to the president, the prime minister, the minister for Defense and a handful of our top bureaucrats and generals.’
‘Need to know,’ observed Rabinovich.
‘Precisely. Given the likes of Snowden, it’s something our American friends could learn from us,’ he said, as they once again ascended the lift to the surface. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll sit down and you can brief us on the Russian program, but until then, Miri will show you your office and get you to sign your life away, and she’ll ensure you’re settled into your accommodation.’ The director extended his hand. ‘Welcome again. I hope we can achieve a lot together,’ he said, holding her hand for much longer than Rabinovich thought was necessary.
‘I hope you’ll be happy with us,’ said Miri, as they drove out through the guard gate and turned west onto Route 25 for the short trip across the desert to Dimona.
‘I’m sure I will be,’ said Rabinovich, staring across the low sandy hills.
‘Will you miss your family in Russia?’
Rabinovich remained on high alert. Her father had destroyed any trust she might have had in humanity decades ago, so the emphasis in her training on the spy’s time-honoured dictum of ‘trust no one’ had been somewhat superfluous. Miri might be just making pleasant conversation, but on the other hand, Miri might not be all she seemed, Rabinovich thought. She might, for all Rabinovich knew, be another agent of the Mossad.
‘No, my parents died a while ago, so I’m dedicated to my research.’
The Russian Affair Page 19
