Entebbe Airport, Uganda, July 4, 1976
In the black of night, four Israeli Hercules aircraft, undetected by Ugandan radar, surreptitiously land at Entebbe Airport. They have flown a distance of 2,500 miles from their base in Israel, carrying the Sayeret Matkal commando and several other elite army units. A week before, Arab and German terrorists hijacked an Air France airliner on its way from Tel-Aviv to Paris, and landed it in Entebbe. Protected and supported by Uganda’s dictator, General Iddi Amin, the terrorists hold ninety-five Israeli civilians hostage. Israel decides to launch a daring operation to the heart of Africa, to rescue the hostages.
Minutes after the landing, the Israeli commandos spread throughout the airport. Yoni Netanyahu, commander of Sayeret Matkal, leads his men in an assault on the terminal where the hostages are held. In the intense firefight that erupts, Yoni suddenly collapses, hit by a bullet. Another Sayeret officer, Captain Tamir Pardo, bends over his fallen commander, switches his mike on, and calls his comrades. Yoni has been hit, he says. “Muki, take over!” Yoni’s deputy, Muki Betzer, assumes command and pursues the mission. Minutes later, the battle is over. The terrorists are killed, the hostages rescued, and the heavy Hercules planes take off, on their way back to Israel.
The rescue of the hostages, so far away from home, is about to become legend. But it has exacted a price: three of the hostages have died in the firefight. As has one soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, brother of future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The entire Israeli nation mourns Yoni’s death. That night, Tamir Pardo, the Sayeret communications officer, knocks on the door of the Netanyahu family in Jerusalem; he has been sent to inform them about the circumstances of Yoni’s death. A warm relationship will sprout between Netanyahu’s family and Tamir Pardo, who was at Yoni’s side in his last moments.
Thirty-five years later, fifty-seven-year-old Tamir Pardo is appointed ramsad, replacing Meir Dagan.
Born in Tel Aviv to a Jewish family of Turkish and Serbian origin, eighteen-year-old Tamir had volunteered for the paratroopers, graduated from the officers academy, and served in the Sayeret Matkal and at Shaldag (Kingfisher) commando units. Four years after Entebbe, he joined the Mossad, took part in several unnamed operations, and was awarded the Israel Security Prize three times. In 1998 he was appointed chairman of the Mossad inquiry board that investigated Khaled Mashal’s flawed assassination attempt in Amman. Soon after, he became the head of Nevioth, the Mossad department charged with electronic collection of intelligence in foreign countries. He specialized in new technologies and creative planning. In 2002, when Dagan was appointed ramsad, Pardo became one of his two deputies, and for the next four years headed the Mossad Operations Staff; but in 2006 he spent a year with the IDF as an army general, advising the General Staff on special operations. He was said to have planned several daring missions during the Second Lebanon War. Pardo was called back to Dagan’s side in 2007. He expected to be appointed ramsad when Dagan’s tenure came to an end in 2009, but the cabinet, impressed by Dagan’s achievements, extended his service for another year. Pardo, disappointed, resigned from the Mossad and went into business with a medical services company. That did not last long. On November 29, 2010, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him the next ramsad, and he assumed his functions in January 2011.
In many ways, Pardo followed the footsteps of his predecessor. The ruthless covert war against Iran continued. In November and December 2011, several explosions rocked a military base where Shehab missiles were being tested, and a Isfahan suburb where the uranium gas, separated in the centrifuge cascades, was again converted to solid matter. Then another scientist, Dr. Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, the deputy director of the Natanz underground facility, was killed while driving his car in the streets of Tehran. The modus operandi was similar to others used in several past assassinations.
Iran accused Israel of the attacks and swore revenge. For the first time, the Iranian secret services tried to carry out several coups against Israeli targets in Asia: a bombing of a car in New Delhi wounded an Israeli diplomat’s wife; a similar attempt in Tbilisi, Georgia, failed; several explosions went off in Bangkok, Thailand, one of which wounded the perpetrator, an Iranian national. The Egyptian secret services foiled a plot by Iranian agents to blow up an Israeli ship sailing through the Suez Canal. The covert war between Israel and Iran was now coming into the open. Police investigators in New Delhi, Bangkok, and Cairo pointed a finger at Iran’s secret services. The world press described in detail the rather clumsy attempts by Iranian spooks to attack Israeli targets abroad.
Coming into the open were also new details about the Israeli operations inside Iran. Western sources claimed that the Mossad had established operational bases in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, right on the Iranian border. They served as the training grounds and dispatch for agents inside Iranian territory. The same sources claimed that many of the Mossad agents operating inside Iran were actually members of the M.E.K. opposition, Iranian Muslims who could blend into the local population better than any Israeli officer. Quite a few M.E.K. militants had been trained in secret facilities in Israel, and even rehearsed some of the operations on specially built models—like a Tehran street—where they were to ambush an Iranian nuclear scientist’s car or plant a bomb near his home.
In other cases, Iranian dissidents were approached by different means. Several CIA memos even maintained that Mossad officers carried out “False Flag” recruiting missions. The Israelis, allegedly posing as CIA agents, recruited militants of the Pakistani terrorist organization Jundallah and sent them on sabotage and assassination missions inside Iran. According to the CIA memos, the Israelis posed as American intelligence officers in order to overcome the devout Muslims’ objection to serving the Jewish state.
In the spring of 2012, worried international observers claimed that the Iranian nuclear project was close to completion and sources in the International Atomic Energy Agency even declared that Iran has produced 109 kilograms of enriched uranium, enough to assemble four atomic bombs. If Israel decided to deal a major blow to the Iranian project by launching an all-out attack against its nuclear centers, the covert war would give way to an open one.
According to the world press and quite a few talkative spokesmen, Israel was not alone in its consideration of a military option. In Jerusalem and Washington, official sources confirmed that Israel and the United States were acting together, but disagreed on a major point: when would Iran have to be stopped by all means necessary—military or other. The American services claimed that this would be the moment when the enrichment of uranium by Iran reached 80 percent, a crucial stage in the development of their nuclear capability. Uranium enriched to that level could be very quickly upgraded to 97 percent, the degree needed for the assembly of an atomic bomb.
Israel’s timetable was different, based on reports from the ground and satellite detection. The Mossad had discovered that Iran was engaged in a chaotic race against time, building a large number of underground facilities buried at a depth of eighty meters or more. They were transferring all their fissile materials and their secret labs underground. Intelligence reports obtained by the Mossad, with the help of the M.E.K. resistance organization, claimed that Iran had built a new underground facility close to Fordo. In the huge halls of the new facility the Iranians planned to install three thousand new centrifuges, far faster and more sophisticated than the equipment now in service. In that facility the Iranians could feed the centrifuges uranium enriched up to 3.5 percent and keep enriching it till it was ready for use. Israel was convinced that this doomsday cave, like many other bases and labs, had to be destroyed before the centrifuges were installed, becoming fully protected against an aerial attack. “When they reach the critical stage of enrichment,” the Israeli envoys told the Americans, “it will be too late to hit them. They will have entered an ‘immune area’ where no bombings will be able to destroy their project. The time to act is now, in the spring of 2012.”
Washington was not convinced and wanted to try a campaign of harsh sanctions. Israel did not believe the sanctions would stop Iran. At a summit meeting in Washington in early spring 2012, President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu praised the firm strategic alliance between the two nations but could not agree on a way forward against the Iranian nuclear project. The Mossad reports still indicated that Tehran was relentlessly pursuing atomic power. At the same time, Iranian leaders relentlessly threatened Israel with total annihilation. The very thought of the danger that a fanatic, nuclear Iran represented for Israel and the world reminded the Israelis of the old Talmudic adage: “If someone comes to kill you—rise up and kill him first.”
Israel felt that once again it was standing alone. And, as in 1948, the year of its creation, and in 1967, on the eve of the Six-Day War, Israel again faces the most fateful decision of its existence.