On July 23, 2011, at four thirty P.M., two gunmen on motorcycles emerged on Bani Hashem Street in South Tehran, drew automatic weapons out of their leather jackets, and shot a man who was about to enter his home. They vanished after the killing, long before the arrival of the police. The victim was Darioush Rezaei Najad, a thirty-five-year-old physics professor and a major figure in Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program. He had been in charge of developing the electronic switches necessary for activating a nuclear warhead.
Rezaei Najad was not the first Iranian scientist who had recently met a violent end. Officially, Iran was developing nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and they claimed that the Bushehr reactor, an important source of energy built with Russian help, was proof of their good intentions. But in addition to the Bushehr reactor, other clandestine nuclear facilities had been discovered, all heavily guarded and virtually inaccessible. Over time, Iran had to admit the existence of some of these centers, though they denied allegations of developing weapons. But by then, Western secret services and local underground organizations had exposed several major scientists in Iran’s universities who had been tapped to build Iran’s first nuclear bomb. In Iran, what could only be identified as “unknown parties” waged a brutal war to stop the secret nuclear weapons program.
On November 29, 2010, at seven forty-five A.M., in North Tehran, a motorcycle emerged from behind the car of Dr. Majid Shahriyari, the scientific head of Iran’s nuclear project. As he passed the car, the helmeted motorcyclist attached a device to the car’s rear windshield. Seconds later, the device exploded, killing the forty-five-year-old physicist and wounding his wife. Simultaneously, in Atashi Street in South Tehran, another motorcyclist did the same to the Peugeot 206 of Dr. Fereydoun Abassi-Davani, another major nuclear scientist. The explosion wounded Abassi-Davani and his wife.
The Iranian government immediately pointed its finger at the Mossad. The roles these two scientists played in Iran’s atomic weapons project were veiled in secrecy, but Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the project, declared that the attack had made a martyr of Shahriyari and deprived his team of its “dearest flower.”
President Ahmadinejad, too, expressed his appreciation of the two victims, in an ingenious way: as soon as Abassi-Davani recovered from his wounds, Ahmadinejad appointed him Iran’s vice president.
The men who attacked the scientists were not found.
On January 12, 2010, at seven fifty A.M., Professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi came out of his home at Shariati Street, in the Gheytarihe neighborhood in North Tehran. He was on his way to his lab at the Sharif University of Technology.
When he tried to unlock his car, a huge explosion rocked the quiet neighborhood. The security forces that rushed to the scene found Mohammadi’s car shattered by the blast and his body blown to pieces. He had been killed by an explosive charge, concealed in a motorcycle that was parked by his car. The Iranian media claimed that the assassination had been carried out by Mossad agents. President Ahmadinejad declared that “the assassination reminds us of the Zionist methods.”
Fifty-year-old Professor Mohammadi was an expert in quantum physics and an adviser to the Iranian nuclear weapons program. European media reported he had been a member of the Revolutionary Guards, the pro-government parallel army. But Mohammadi’s life, like his death, was shrouded in mystery. Several of his friends maintained that he was involved only in theoretical research, never with military projects; some also claimed that he supported the dissident movements and had participated in antigovernment protests.
Yet it turned out that about half of those present at his funeral were Revolutionary Guards. His coffin was carried by Revolutionary Guard officers. Subsequent investigations ultimately confirmed that Mohammadi, indeed, had been deeply involved in advancing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
In January 2007, Dr. Ardashir Hosseinpour was allegedly killed by Mossad agents with radioactive poison. News of the assassination ran in the Sunday Times in London, citing information from the Texas-based Stratfor strategy and intelligence think tank. Iranian officials ridiculed the report, claiming that the Mossad could never carry out such an operation inside Iran, and that “Professor Hosseinpour suffocated by inhaling fumes during a fire in his home.” They also insisted that the forty-four-year-old professor was only a renowned electromagnetic expert and not involved with Iran’s nuclear endeavors in any way.
But it turned out that Hosseinpour worked at an Isfahan secret installation where raw uranium was converted into gas. This gas was then used for uranium enrichment by a series (“cascades”) of centrifuges in Natanz, a faraway, fortified underground installation. In 2006, Hosseinpour was awarded the highest Iranian prize for science and technology; two years earlier, he had been awarded his country’s highest distinction for military research.
The assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists were just one front in a much larger war. According to the Daily Telegraph in London, Dagan’s Mossad had rolled out an assault force of double agents, hit teams, saboteurs, and front companies and brought their strength to bear over years and years of covert operations against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Stratfor’s director of analysis, Reva Bhalla, was quoted as saying: “With cooperation from the United States, Israeli covert operations have focused both on eliminating key human assets involved in the nuclear program and in sabotaging the Iranian supply chain.” Israel, she claimed, had used similar tactics in Iraq in the early eighties, when the Mossad killed three Iraqi nuclear scientists, thus hampering the completion of the Osiraq atomic reactor, near Baghdad.
In its purported war against the Iranian nuclear program, Dagan’s Mossad was effectively delaying the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb for as long as possible, and thereby thwarting the worst danger to Israel’s existence since its creation: Ahmadinejad’s threats that Israel should be annihilated.
Yet these small victories cannot atone for the worst mishap in Mossad’s history—its failure to expose Iran’s secret nuclear project at its outset. For several years now Iran had been building its nuclear might—and Israel had no clue. Iran invested huge sums of money, recruited scientists, built secret bases, carried out sophisticated tests—and Israel had no idea. From the moment Khomeini’s Iran decided to become a nuclear power, it used deception, ruses, and stratagems that made fools out of the Western secret services, the Mossad included.
Iran’s shah, Reza Pahlavi, started building two nuclear reactors, both for peaceful and military purposes. The shah’s project, begun in the 1970s, didn’t cause any alarm in Israel; at the time, Israel was Iran’s close ally. In 1977, General Ezer Weizman, Israel’s defense minister, hosted General Hasan Toufanian, who was in charge of modernizing Iran’s army, in the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv—as allies, Israel supplied Iran with modern military equipment. According to the minutes of their confidential meeting, Weizman offered to supply Iran with state-of-the-art surface-to-surface missiles, while the director general of the ministry, Dr. Pinhas Zusman, impressed Toufanian by saying that the Israeli missiles could be adapted to carry nuclear warheads. But before the officials could act on their plans, the Iranian revolution transformed Israeli-Iranian relations. The revolutionary Islamic government massacred the shah’s supporters and turned against Israel. The ailing shah escaped from his country as it fell under Ayatollah Khomeini’s control and into the hands of his loyal mullahs.
Khomeini put an immediate end to the nuclear project, which he considered “anti-Islamic.” The building of the reactors was stopped and their equipment dismantled. But in the 1980s, a bloody war erupted between Iraq and Iran. Saddam Hussein used poison gas against the Iranians. The use of nonconventional weapons by their vilest enemy made the ayatollahs rethink their policy. Even before Khomeini’s death, his heir apparent, Ali Khamenei, instructed his military to develop new weapons—biological, chemical, and nuclear—to fight back against the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq had unleashed on Iran. Soon after, complacent religious leaders called from their pulpits to discard the ban on “anti-Islamic” weapons.
Fragmentary news about Iran’s efforts started spreading in the mid-eighties. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Europe was inundated by rumors about Iran’s attempts to buy nuclear bombs and warheads from unemployed officers or famished scientists in the former Soviet military establishment. The Western press described, in dramatic detail, the disappearance of Russian scientists and generals from their homes, apparently recruited by the Iranians. Reporters with fertile imaginations wrote about sealed trucks rushing eastward from Europe, bypassing border controls to reach the Middle East. Sources in Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing revealed that Iran had signed an agreement with Russia for building an atomic reactor in Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf coast, and another agreement with China, for building two smaller reactors.
Alarmed, the United States and Israel spread teams of special agents through Europe on the hunt for the Soviet bombs sold to Iran and the recruited scientists. They came up with nothing. The United States put great pressure on Russia and China to cancel their agreements with Iran. China backed off, and canceled its Iranian deal. Russia decided to go ahead but kept delaying it. The reactor took more than twenty years to build and was limited in its use by strict Russian and international controls.
But Israel and the United States should have expanded their search when the leads went cold. The heads of both the Mossad and the CIA failed to realize that the Russian and Chinese reactors were just diversions, a smoke screen for “the world’s best secret services.” Iran had surreptitiously launched a mammoth project intended to make it a nuclear power.
In the fall of 1987, a secret meeting was held in Dubai. Eight men met in a small, dusty office: three Iranians, two Pakistanis, and three European experts (two of them German) who were working for Iran.
The representatives of Iran and Pakistan signed a confidential agreement. A large sum of money was transferred to the Pakistanis, or—more precisely—to Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the head of Pakistan’s official nuclear weapons program.
A few years before, Pakistan had launched its own nuclear project, to achieve military equality with its archenemy, India. Dr. Khan badly needed the fissile substances necessary for assembling a nuclear bomb. Yet he chose not to make use of plutonium, which is harvested in the classic nuclear reactors, but to utilize enriched uranium. Mined uranium ore contains only 1 percent of uranium-235, which is vital for the production of nuclear weapons, and 99 percent uranium-238, which is useless. Dr. Khan developed a method for converting the natural uranium into gas, and feeding this gas into a line of centrifuges connected in a chain, called a cascade. With the centrifuges churning the uranium gas at a mind-boggling rate of 100,000 spins a minute, the lighter uranium-235 separates from the heavier uranium-238. By repeating that process thousands of times, the centrifuges produce an enriched uranium-235. This gas, when converted into solid matter, becomes the substance needed for a nuclear bomb.
Khan had stolen the centrifuges’ blueprints from Eurenco, a European company where he worked in the early 1970s, and then started manufacturing his own in Pakistan. Khan soon turned into a “merchant of death,” selling his methods, formulas, and centrifuges. Iran became his major client. Libya and North Korea were also clients.
The Iranians bought centrifuges elsewhere, too, and then learned how to make them locally. Huge shipments of uranium, centrifuges, electronic materials, and spare parts arrived in Iran now and then. Large facilities were built for the treatment of raw uranium, for storing the centrifuges, and for converting the gas back to solid matter; Iranian scientists traveled to Pakistan and Pakistani experts arrived in Iran—and nobody knew.
The Iranians were careful not to put all their eggs in one basket. They dispersed the nuclear project among places spread throughout their country, in military bases, disguised laboratories, and remote facilities. Some were built deep underground, and surrounded with batteries of surface-to-air missiles. One plant was erected in Isfahan, another in Arak; the most important—the centrifuge facility—was established in Natanz, and a fourth center in the holy city of Qom. At even a hint that a location might be exposed, the Iranians would move the nuclear installations elsewhere, even removing layers of earth that could have been irradiated by radioactive substances. They also skillfully misled and deceived the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Its chairman, the Egyptian Dr. Mohamed El-Baradei, behaved as if he believed every false statement of the Iranians, and published complacent reports that enabled Iran to continue with its deadly scheme.
On June 1, 1998, the American authorities saw the true extent of the Iranians’ work for the first time. A Pakistani defector appeared before FBI investigators in New York, asking for political asylum. He introduced himself as Dr. Iftikhar Khan Chaudhry and revealed the full extent of the secret cooperation between Iran and Pakistan. He exposed Dr. Khan, described meetings in which he had participated, and named Pakistani experts who had taken part in the Iranian project.
The facts and figures of Chaudhry’s testimony were checked by the FBI and found to be accurate. The FBI indeed recommended that Chaudhry be allowed to stay in the United States as a political refugee—but his amazing testimony was never given any follow-up. Perhaps out of sheer negligence, American higher-ups buried Chaudhry’s transcripts, initiated no action, and did not warn Israel. Four more years had to pass until the truth about Iran would come to light.
Suddenly, in August 2002, the Iranian dissident underground, Mujahedeen el Khalq (MEK), revealed the existence of two nuclear facilities in Arak and Natanz to the world media. In the following years, MEK kept disclosing more facts about the Iranian nuclear project, which aroused some suspicion that its information came from outside sources. The CIA was still skeptical and assumed that the Israelis and the British were trying to involve the United States in hazardous operations. Specifically, the CIA appeared to believe that the Mossad and the British MI6 were feeding MEK intelligence they had obtained, using the Iranian opposition as a hopefully credible source. According to Israeli sources, it was, in fact, a watchful Mossad officer who had discovered the mammoth centrifuge installation at Natanz, deep in the desert. That same year, 2002, the Iranian underground handed over to the CIA a laptop loaded with documents. The dissidents wouldn’t say how they had got hold of the laptop; the skeptical Americans suspected that the documents had been only recently scanned into the computer; they accused the Mossad of having slipped in some information obtained from their own sources—and then passing it to the MEK leaders for delivery to the West.
But other evidence now was piling up on the desks of the Americans and the Europeans, who finally had to open their eyes. The rumors about Dr. Khan’s lucrative and deadly trade spread all over the world. Finally, on February 4, 2004, a tearful Dr. Khan appeared on Pakistani TV and confessed that he indeed had sold know-how, expertise, and centrifuges to Libya, North Korea, and Iran, making millions in the process. The Pakistani government hastened to grant full pardon to “Dr. Death,” the father of their nuclear bomb.
Israel now became a major source of information about Iran. Meir Dagan and his Mossad provided U.S. intelligence with fresh data about the secret facility the Iranians had built at Qom; Israel allegedly was also involved in the defection of several senior officers from the Revolutionary Guards and the atomic project; the Mossad provided several countries with up-to-date facts, prompting them to seize ships carrying nuclear equipment to Iran from their ports.
But merely obtaining such intelligence would not suffice for Israel. While a fanatic Iran threatened it openly with annihilation, the rest of the world recoiled from any vigorous action. Israel was left with no choice but to launch an all-out undercover war against the Iranian nuclear program.
After sixteen years of colossal ignorance by his predecessors, Dagan decided to act.
In January 2006, a plane crashed in central Iran. All its passengers perished. Among them were senior officers in the Revolutionary Guards, including Ahmed Kazami, one of their commanders. The Iranians maintained that the crash was due to bad weather, but the Stratfor group hinted that the aircraft had been sabotaged by Western agents.
Only a month before, a military cargo plane had crashed into an apartment building in Tehran. All ninety-four passengers died. Many were also officers in the Revolutionary Guards and influential pro-regime journalists. In November 2006, another military aircraft crashed during takeoff from Tehran—and thirty-six Revolutionary Guards were killed. On national radio, the Iranian minister of defense declared, “According to material from intelligence sources, we can say that American, British, and Israeli agents are responsible for these plane crashes.”
Meanwhile, quietly, without any overt mention, Dagan had become the main strategist on Israel’s policy toward Iran. He believed that Israel perhaps might have no choice but to finally launch a full-scale, all-out attack on Iran. But such an action, Dagan thought, should only be a last resort.
The sabotage began in February 2005. The international press reported an explosion in a nuclear facility at Dialem that had been hit by a missile fired from an unidentified plane. And that same month an explosion took place close to Bushehr, in a pipeline supplying gas to the Russian-built nuclear reactor.
Another facility to be attacked was the test site Parchin, close to Tehran. There, Iranian experts were developing “the explosive lens,” the mechanism that would transform the bomb core into a critical mass and trigger the chain reaction for an atomic explosion. The Iranian underground claimed that the explosion at Parchin had caused major damage to the secret labs.
In April 2006, the Holy of Holies—the central installation in Natanz—was the scene of a festive assembly. A large crowd of scientists, technicians, and the heads of the nuclear project gathered underground, where thousands of centrifuges were churning around the clock. In a celebratory mood, they came to watch the first test of activating a new centrifuge cascade. Everyone waited for the dramatic moment when the centrifuges would be started. The chief engineer pressed the activation button—and a powerful explosion shook the huge chamber. The pipes blew up in a deafening blast, and the entire cascade shattered.
Furious, the heads of the nuclear project ordered a thorough investigation. “Unknown persons” apparently had planted faulty parts in the equipment. CBS reported that the centrifuges had been destroyed by tiny explosive charges attached to them shortly before the test. It also claimed that Israeli intelligence had assisted American agents in causing the Natanz explosion.
In January 2007, again, the centrifuges became the target of a sophisticated sabotage. The Western secret services had established Eastern European front companies that manufactured insulation material used in the ducts between the centrifuges. The Iranians couldn’t buy theirs on the open market, because of the limitations imposed on them by the UN; so they turned to bogus Eastern European companies run by Russian and Iranian exiles, who were secretly working for the Western intelligence agencies. Only after the insulation was installed did the Iranians find that it was defective and couldn’t be used.
By May 2007, President George W. Bush had signed a secret presidential order authorizing the CIA to initiate covert operations to delay Iran’s nuclear project. Soon after, a decision was made by some Western secret services to sabotage the supply chain of parts, equipment, and raw materials for the project. In August, Dagan met with U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicolas Burns to discuss his strategy toward Iran.
Mishaps, sabotage, explosions have kept occurring in installations throughout Iran during the last seven years. One mysterious hitch caused problems in the cooling system of the Bushehr reactor, which delayed its completion by two years; in May 2008, an explosion in a cosmetics plant in Arak caused significant damage to the adjacent nuclear facility; another explosion devastated a high-security compound in Isfahan, where uranium was being converted to gas.
In 2008 and in 2010, the New York Times revealed that the Tinners, a Swiss family of engineers, had helped the CIA in exposing the nuclear programs of Libya and Iran, and were paid $10 million by the agency. The CIA also helped protect them from prosecution by the Swiss authorities for illegal traffic with nuclear components. The father, Frederic Tinner, and his two sons, Urs and Marco, had sold the Iranians a faulty installation for electric supply to the Natanz facility, which destroyed fifty centrifuges. The Tinners purchased pressure pumps from the Pfeiffer Vacuum Company in Germany, had them doctored in New Mexico, and then sold them to the Iranians.
Time magazine asserted that the Mossad was involved in the hijacking of the ship Arctic Sea, which had sailed from Finland to Algeria with a Russian crew and under a Maltese flag, carrying “a cargo of wood.” On July 24, 2009, two days after setting out on her voyage, the vessel was seized by eight hijackers. Only after a month did the Russian authorities declare that a Russian commando unit had taken over the ship. The London Times and the Daily Telegraph maintained that the Mossad had sounded the alarm. Dagan’s men, they said, had informed the Russians that the ship was carrying a cargo of uranium, sold to the Iranians by a former Russian officer. But Admiral Kouts, who leads the fight against piracy in the European Union, offered Time magazine his own version. The only plausible explanation, he said, was that the ship had been hijacked by the Mossad to intercept the uranium.
But in spite of these continuous attacks, the Iranians did not remain idle. Between 2005 and 2008, in total secrecy, they built a new installation close to Qom. They planned to install three thousand centrifuges in the new underground halls. However, in mid-2009, the Iranians realized that the intelligence organizations of the United States, Britain, and Israel had full knowledge of the Qom plant. Iran reacted right away. In September 2009, Tehran surprised the world by hurriedly informing the IAEA about the existence of the Qom installation. Some sources claimed that the Iranians had caught a Western spy (possibly a British MI6 agent), who had gathered reliable information about Qom; so they disclosed its existence to diminish their embarrassment.
A month later, CIA director Leon Panetta told Time that his organization had known of Qom for three years and that Israel was involved in its detection.
The Qom discovery permitted a glimpse into the secret alliance that had been forged between three groups engaged in the battle against Iran: the CIA, MI6, and the Mossad. According to French sources, the three services were acting together, with the Mossad carrying out the operations inside Iran, and the CIA and MI6 helping the Israelis. The Mossad was responsible for several explosions in October 2010, in which eighteen Iranian technicians were killed at a plant in the Zagros Mountains that assembled Shehab missiles. With the help of its British and American allies, the Mossad had also eliminated five nuclear scientists.
This alliance had been established largely by the efforts of Meir Dagan. From the moment he became the director of Mossad, he had been pressuring his men to establish close cooperation with foreign secret services. His aides advised him against revealing the Mossad secrets to foreigners, but he brushed off their arguments. “Stop this nonsense,” he grumbled, “and go, work with them!”
Beside the British and the Americans, Dagan had another important ally who brought precious information from inside Iran: the leaders of the Iranian resistance. In unusual press conferences held outside of Iran, leaders of the Iranian National Council of Resistance revealed the name of the leading scientist in the Iranian project. His identity had so far been kept secret. Mohsen Fakhri Zadeh, forty-nine years old, was a physics professor at the Tehran University. He was said to be a mysterious, elusive man. The resistance disclosed many details about him, including his membership in the Revolutionary Guards since the age of eighteen, his address—Shahid Mahallalti Street, Tehran—his passport numbers—0009228 and 4229533—and even his home phone number—021-2448413. Fakhri Zadeh specialized in the complex process of creating a critical mass inside the atomic device to trigger the chain reaction and the nuclear explosion. His team was also working on the miniaturization of the bomb, to fit it in the warhead of the Shehab missile.
Following these revelations, Zadeh was denied entry into the United States and the EU, and his bank accounts in the West were frozen. The resistance described in detail all his functions, disclosed the names of the scientists working with him and even the location of his secret laboratories. This abundance of detail and means of transmission leads one to believe that, again, “a certain secret service” ever suspected by the West of pursuing its own agenda, painstakingly collected these facts and figures about the Iranian scientist and passed them to the Iranian resistance, which conveyed them to the West. His exposure was meant to warn him that he might be “the next in line” for assassination and inspire him to either scramble for cover or choose the better solution: to defect to the West.
General Ali Reza Asgari, a former Iranian deputy minister of defense, vanished in February 2007 while traveling to Istanbul. He had been deeply involved in the nuclear project. The Iranian services searched for him all over the world but couldn’t find him. Almost four years later, in January 2011, Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, turned to the UN secretary general and accused the Mossad of abducting him and jailing him in Israel.
But according to the Sunday Telegraph in London, Asgari had defected to the West; the Mossad had planned his defection and had taken care of his protection in Turkey. Other sources maintain that he had been later debriefed by the CIA and supplied them with valuable information about Iran’s nuclear program.
A month after Asgari’s disappearance—in March 2007—another senior Iranian officer vanished. Amir Shirazi served in the “Al Quds” unit, the elite force of the Revolutionary Guards, charged with secret operations beyond Iran’s border. An Iranian source revealed to the London Times that besides the disappearances of Asgari and Shirazi, another high-ranking officer had vanished: the Revolutionary Guards commander in the Persian Gulf, Mohammad Soltani.
In July 2009, the nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri joined the list of defectors. Amiri, who was employed at Qom, disappeared in Saudi Arabia during a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Iranians demanded that the Saudis find out what had happened to him. Amiri surfaced a few months later in the United States, was thoroughly debriefed, got $5 million, a new identity, and a new home in Arizona. CIA sources disclosed he had been an informer to Western intelligence for years and had supplied them with “original and substantive” intelligence. Amiri revealed that the Malek-Ashtar University of Technology, where he had taught, served as an academic cover for a research unit designing the warheads for the Iranian long-range missiles; Fakhri Zadeh headed that university.
After a year in America, Amiri changed his mind and decided to go back to Iran. He supposedly couldn’t cope with the stress of his new life. In a homemade video, shown on the Internet, he claimed he had been abducted by the CIA; a few hours later, he posted another video, disclaiming the first, and then produced a third video, disclaiming the second. He got in touch with the Pakistani embassy, which represented Iranian interests in the United States, and asked to be sent back to Iran. The Pakistanis helped; in July 2010, Amiri landed in Tehran. He appeared at a press conference, accused the CIA of kidnapping and mistreating him—and disappeared. Observers accused the CIA of failure, but a CIA spokesman cracked: “We got important information and the Iranians got Amiri; well, who got a better deal?”
But the Iranians were not without resources against the Mossad. In December 2004, Iran had arrested ten suspects for spying for Israel and the United States; three worked inside the nuclear installations. In 2008, the Iranians announced that they had dismantled another Mossad cell: three Iranian citizens who had been trained by the Mossad to use sophisticated communications equipment, weapons, and explosives. In November 2008, they hanged forty-three-year-old Ali Ashtari, who was found guilty of spying for Israel. In the course of his trial, he admitted meeting three Mossad agents in Europe. They were said to have given him money and electronic equipment. “The Mossad people wanted me to sell earmarked shipments of computers and electronic equipment to the Iranian intelligence services and to plant listening devices in communications instruments that I sold,” Ashtari testified.
On December 28, 2010, in the grim courtyard of Evin prison in Tehran, Iranian officers hanged another spy, Ali-Akbar Siadat, who had been found guilty of working for the Mossad and supplying it with information about Iran’s military capabilities and the missile program operated by the Revolutionary Guards. For the previous six years, Siadat had been meeting with Israeli agents in Turkey, Thailand, and the Netherlands, and receiving payments of $3,000 to $7,000 for each meeting. Iranian officials promised that more arrests and executions would follow.
But 2010 was the year of the greatest setback for the Iranian nuclear project. Was it because of the lack of high-quality spare parts for the Iranian equipment? Because of the faulty parts and metals that Mossad’s bogus companies sold to the Iranians? Because of planes crashing, laboratories set on fire, explosions in the missile and nuclear installations, defection of senior officials, deaths of top scientists, revolts and upheaval among the minorities’ groups—all those events and phenomena that Iran (correctly and incorrectly) attributed to Dagan’s people?
Or was it because of Dagan’s last “major coup,” according to the European press? In the summer of 2010, thousands of computers controlling the Iranian nuclear project were infected with the perfidious Stuxnet virus. Labeled one of the most sophisticated in the world, Stuxnet struck computers controlling the Natanz centrifuges and wreaked havoc. Its complexity left no doubt that it was the product of a large team of experts and considerable funds. One of the virus’s distinctive features was that it could be targeted to a specific system, causing no harm to others en route. Its presence in a computer was also difficult to detect. Once in the Iranian system, it could modify the speed of rotation of a centrifuge, making its product useless, without anyone being aware of it. Observers spoke of two countries as having the ability to carry out such cyberattacks: the United States and Israel.
President Ahmadinejad tried to downplay the effect Stuxnet had had, and declared that Iran had the situation well in hand. The truth, though, was that at the beginning of 2011, about half of Iran’s centrifuges were immobilized.
Dagan’s people allegedly delayed Iran’s nuclear weapons program with their incessant attacks on so many fronts over so many years: diplomatic pressure and sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council; counter-proliferation—keeping the Iranians from getting the materials needed to produce a bomb; economical warfare—prohibiting the banks in the free world from doing business with Iran; regime change, by supporting and fomenting political unrest and by fanning the ethnic divisions inside Iran, where Kurds, Azeris, Beloshis, Arabs, and Turkmen constitute 50 percent of the population; and most immediately, covert measures, black and special operations against the Iranian project.
But they couldn’t permanently stop it, no matter how good they were, nor how much cooperation they had. “Dagan is the ultimate James Bond,” a high-placed Israeli analyst said, but even James Bond couldn’t save the world in this case. At best, he could slow down the Iranians. Only an Iranian government decision or a massive attack from abroad can put an end to the Iranian dream of creating a formidable nuclear giant where the Persian Empire once stood.
And yet, when Dagan was appointed ramsad (the abbreviation for rosh hamossad—head of the Mossad), experts predicted that Iran would reach nuclear capacity in 2005; the date was later moved ahead to 2007, 2009, 2011. And when Dagan left office on January 6, 2011, he had a message for his country: Iran’s project has been delayed at least until 2015. He therefore recommended a continuation of the same actions, so effective in the last eight years, and a freeze of any military attack on Iran. Only when the dagger blade starts cutting into our flesh, he said, should we attack; that dagger blade remains four years away.
Dagan served as ramsad eight and a half years—more than most Mossad directors. He was replaced by Tamir Pardo, a veteran Mossad officer who started his operational career as a close aide to Yoni Netanyahu, the hero of the 1976 Israeli raid in Entebbe, and later distinguished himself as a daring agent, an expert in new technologies, and a creative planner of unusual operations.
When passing the torch to Pardo, Dagan spoke of the terrible solitude of the Mossad agents operating in enemy countries, when they have no one to turn to, no one to rescue them in case of need. He also candidly admitted some of his failures; the most important being lack of success in finding the place where Hamas was hiding the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, kidnapped five years ago. (Shalit was later released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian terrorists.) Yet, despite such failings, Dagan’s achievements honor him as the best ramsad so far. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked him “in the name of the Jewish people” and hugged him warmly. In an unprecedented, spontaneous reaction, the Israeli cabinet ministers stood up and applauded the sixty-five-year-old ramsad. George W. Bush saluted him in a personal letter.
But the most important tribute to Dagan came a year before, from a foreign source, the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, a newspaper known for its virulent and hostile criticism of Israel. On January 16, 2010, it published an article by the well-known writer Ashraf Abu Al-Haul. “Without Dagan,” Al-Haul wrote, “the Iranian nuclear project would have been completed years ago . . . The Iranians know who was behind the death of the nuclear scientist Masud Ali Mohammadi. Every senior Iranian leader knows that the key word is ‘Dagan.’ Only few people are familiar with the name of the director of the Israeli Mossad. He works quietly, far from the media attention. But in the last seven years he has landed painful blows on the Iranian nuclear project and stopped its advance.
“The Mossad is responsible for several daring operations in the Middle East,” Al-Haul added, and mentioned some of Dagan’s feats against Syria, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad.
“All this,” he concluded, “has turned Dagan into the Superman of the State of Israel.”
There were no supermen around the crib of the Israeli Secret Service when it was born in May 1948, just a handful of veterans of the “Shai,” who had already acquired much experience in espionage and covert operations as the intelligence service of the Haganah, the major military underground of the Jewish community in Palestine. And in their first year, these modest and devoted undercover fighters, the nascent military secret service, were shaken by violence, internal strife, cruelty, and murder in what became known as the Be’eri Affair.