CHAPTER EIGHT: FUTURE HEADLINE

KREMLIN JOINS “AXIS OF EVIL,” FORMS MILITARY ALLIANCE WITH IRAN

On May 4, 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney delivered a speech at a conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, that infuriated the Kremlin.

He warned that while America wants to see Russia truly emerge as a healthy and vibrant democracy and a trusted partner in the global economy, under Vladimir Putin’s leadership, the country was in the process of reversing the gains of the last decade.

“In many areas of civil society—from religion and the news media, to advocacy groups and political parties—the [Russian] government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of her people,” Cheney said. He also warned that “no legitimate interest is served when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail, either by supply manipulation or attempts to monopolize transportation. And no one can justify actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor, or interfere with democratic movements.”

Russia’s leaders have a choice to make, Cheney explained. They can choose the path of freedom and democracy or the path of tyranny and aggression. He noted that the future of peace and security in the twenty-first century will be profoundly affected by the decisions Moscow makes in the coming years, and he insisted that Western leaders are optimistic.

“None of us believes that Russia is fated to become an enemy,” he said.153

It was a thoughtful, well-reasoned, and much-needed speech, and I was glad the White House chose to send such a strong message to President Putin and his top advisors. But that last line troubled me, for when one looks at Russia through not only the political and economic lenses but also through the third lens of Scripture, one sees that Russia is, in fact, destined to become an enemy of the West, and particularly of Israel, in part because of its alliance with Iran.

Let me explain.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

A careful study of Ezekiel 38 makes it clear that a Russian leader will one day mount an attack against Israel. What’s more, we learn that Russia’s czar will not attack Israel alone. Rather, he will build a military coalition—much as the United States did when it sought to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. Here Ezekiel provides us extraordinarily precise intelligence. Though he wrote more than 2,500 years ago, the Hebrew prophet was able to tell us what to watch for. In fact, he gave us a detailed list of countries that will join Russia’s anti-Israel coalition in the last days.

The first specific country he named as part of the Russian alliance was Persia (Ezekiel 38:5). Until March 21, 1935, Persia was the official name of the country we now call Iran. But never in the last 2,500 years have Russia and Iran had a military alliance. This caused many a skeptic to think, See, the Bible has no idea what it’s talking about. The Russians have always hated the Iranians. The Iranians have always hated the Russians. There’s no way they are ever going to form an alliance against Israel or anybody else. This just proves the Bible is full of errors.

Such a conclusion may have seemed reasonable to many until recently. The Russians, after all, briefly occupied portions of northern Iran several times: in the nineteenth century, in 1912, during World War I, and from 1941 to 1946. But Moscow has never had an alliance with Iran. To the contrary, repeated occupations by the Soviets drove Iran into a military alliance of sorts with the U.S. for several decades.

After the Red Army left Iran in 1946, Tehran established close relations with the United States as Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi (commonly known as “the Shah”) accepted large amounts of American military aid and arms to build a counterweight to Soviet ambitions to take over Iran’s oil fields and the rest of the Middle East.

In 1979, the U.S. lost Iran during the Islamic revolution as the Shah was overthrown and forced into exile and American embassy personnel were taken hostage for 444 days. But as serious a blow as this was to U.S. interests, the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini hardly created the opening Moscow would have hoped for—or the one the Bible predicted. The fervently religious Khomeini had no intention of creating any semblance of an alliance with the atheists to the north. What’s more, after the Soviets invaded neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979, Khomeini feared the Kremlin was coming to take over Iran next.

It was Saddam Hussein, ironically, who forced Khomeini to begin forming ties to the Communists. By the late 1980s, Iran was suffering economically and militarily from year after year of a brutal and seemingly never-ending Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988). Tehran needed help from one of the superpowers, and they certainly were not going to turn to Washington. So Khomeini and the mullahs turned to Moscow instead, figuring that if Mikhail Gorbachev was pulling troops out of Afghanistan, he was not about to send them into Iran.

A MILITARY ALLIANCE EMERGING

Today, even the biggest skeptic of Ezekiel’s intelligence would have to admit that a military alliance between Russia and Iran is emerging for the first time in history.

Economic and political ties between Russia and Iran began to develop steadily in the 1990s. Military ties grew even more rapidly. Tehran was desperate to rebuild its forces after its long war with Iraq. Moscow was desperate for hard cash after the collapse of the Soviet Union and for a beachhead into the oil-rich Middle East.

It was a match made in hell.

The Clinton administration became concerned enough that in 1995 it pressured the Russians to sign an agreement whereby Moscow would stop selling arms to Iran and would promise to complete the delivery of all weapons systems previously sold to Tehran by the end of 1999. But the deal signed by Vice President Al Gore and Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin may go down as one of the least effective accords ever. Russian arms sales to Iran between 1992 and 2000 topped $4 billion.154

When Vladimir Putin took office as president, he quickly abandoned the 1995 agreement with the Americans. In December 2000, he sent Russian defense minister Igor Sergeyev to Iran to meet with Iranian defense minister Ali Shamkhani to begin discussing a dramatic new military relationship between the two countries. In March 2001, Putin welcomed Iranian president Mohammed Khatami to Moscow. Khatami was the first Iranian leader to visit the Russian capital in the twenty-seven years since the Shah’s visit.¹⁵⁵ The visit made big headlines around the world and raised serious concerns in Washington and Jerusalem.

During his three-day visit, Khatami toured Russian nuclear facilities, missile factories, and Russia’s space command. Putin and Khatami and their advisors also accelerated negotiations for a ten-year, multibillion-dollar arms deal between their two countries, despite U.S. warnings to the Kremlin not to assist the radical Islamic regime.¹⁵⁶

Over time, the nature of the relationship hammered out between the two countries has become even clearer, as evidenced by world media headlines:

RUSSIA PLANS 5 MORE NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS IN IRAN

Washington Post, July 27, 2002

NEW RAILWAY TO LINK RUSSIA AND IRAN VIA AZERBAIJAN

Agence France-Presse, May 22, 2004

RUSSIA FAVORS IRAN ROUTE FOR CRUDE EXPORTS

Tehran Times, June 14, 2004

PUTIN: IRAN DOESN’T PLAN TO BUILD ATOMIC ARMS

Aljazeera, February 18, 2005

PUTIN DEFENDS ARMS SALES TO SYRIA, IRAN

Associated Press, April 28, 2005

IRAN REGARDS RUSSIA AS POSSIBLE PARTNER TO BUILD 20 NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS

MosNews.com, September 7, 2005

KREMLIN READY TO DEFEND IRAN

MosNews.com, September 13, 2005

RUSSIA AGREES TO $1 BILLION ARMS DEAL WITH IRAN

Associated Press, December 2, 2005

IRAN’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS

What makes all this so troubling, of course, is that the Kremlin is selling these conventional arms and providing such nuclear fuel, technology, and assistance to the most dangerous radical Islamic terrorist regime on the face of the planet, a country President Bush specifically cited as a member of the Axis of Evil.

Putin has tried repeatedly to assure world leaders that Iran does not intend to build nuclear weapons. After a February 2005 meeting in the Kremlin with Hassan Rowhani, Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Putin insisted that “the latest steps on Iran’s behalf persuade us that Iran has no intention of building an atomic weapon. Consequently, we will continue to cooperate with Iran in all fields, including nuclear energy.”157 Two months later, during a news conference in Jerusalem on his historic trip to Israel—the first ever for a Russian leader—Putin explained that “we are working with Iran in order to develop the atom for peaceful ends and we are against any program seeking to endow Iran with an atomic weapon.”158

Yet the intentions of Iran to obtain nuclear weapons go back many years. During a January 1987 speech to Iran’s nuclear scientific community in Tehran, Iran’s then-president Ali Khamenei (who later became Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, after the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini) made a direct link between Iran’s nuclear program and Iran’s national security and stressed the urgency of going nuclear as rapidly as possible.

“Regarding atomic energy, we need it now,” Khamenei said. “Our nation has always been threatened from outside. The least we can do to face this danger is let our enemies know that we can defend ourselves. Therefore, every step you take here is in defense of your country and your evolution. With this in mind, you should work hard and at great speed.”¹⁵⁹

In an October 6, 1988, address to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani made the country’s nuclear intentions even more clear. “We should fully equip ourselves both in the offensive and defensive use of chemical, bacteriological, and radiological weapons. From now on, you should make use of the opportunity and perform this task.”¹⁶⁰ In 1989, Rafsanjani was elected president of Iran, where he served until 1997.

Lest there be any doubt, Rafsanjani was even more provocative in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. On December 14, 2001, the Iran Press Service ran a story entitled “Rafsanjani Says Muslims Should Use Nuclear Weapon against Israel.”¹⁶¹

According to the story, Rafsanjani asserted that a nuclear attack would “annihilate Israel,” while costing Iran “damages only.” He said, “If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” The article pointed out that “not only [was] Mr. Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s speech the strongest against Israel, but also the first time that a prominent leader of the Islamic Republic openly suggest[ed] the use of a nuclear weapon against the Jewish State.”

To fulfill such a mission, Rafsanjani again ran for president in 2005. He was defeated by the even more hard-line and anti-Semitic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—who vowed to accelerate Iran’s nuclear program—on the very day The Ezekiel Option was released.

The timing of Ahmadinejad’s victory and the book’s release was eerie enough, but eerier still were the similarities between the novel and what was happening in Iran in real life.

On page 333 of Option’s hardcover edition, my fictional Iranian leader calls for the annihilation of Israel, saying, “The world must understand—the Zionists must be humbled. Death to Israel. . . . This cancerous Jewish tumor is the most dangerous threat on the face of the earth. But the Night of the Jews is almost over. Allah, we beseech thee, annihilate them with your wrath.” On page 358, a fictional Islamic scholar who supports Iran in its battle against Israel warns that “Allah is not on the side of the Jews. He will not be mocked by claims that he is. The world will know who the One True God really is when Israel is wiped off the face of the map forever.”

In the fall of 2005, fiction once again became reality:

AHMADINEJAD: WIPE ISRAEL OFF MAP

Aljazeera.net, October 26, 2005

WIPE ISRAEL “OFF THE MAP” SAYS IRANIAN

New York Times, October 27, 2005

ISRAEL SHOULD BE WIPED OFF MAP, SAYS IRAN’S PRESIDENT

The (U.K.) Guardian, October 27, 2005

Ahmadinejad, speaking at the “World without Zionism” conference in Tehran, not only told his fellow Islamic radicals that “Israel must be wiped off the map” because Israel is trying “satanically and deceitfully to gain control” of all of Palestine. He also warned that “anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury” and any Islamic leader “who recognizes the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world.” And he threatened the United States as well. “Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism? . . . [Y]ou had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved.”162

The remarks triggered widespread international condemnation, but Ahmadinejad did not back off. On December 9, he gave a speech in Mecca to the Organization of the Islamic Conference in which he called Israel a “tumor,” questioned whether the Holocaust had ever really happened, and suggested that if Europeans were so concerned about the fate of the Jews, they should move Israel to Europe.¹⁶³

“THE POINT OF NO RETURN”

Ahmadinejad’s incendiary rhetoric against Israel and the U.S. should not be mistaken for empty threats, any more than Saddam Hussein’s threats to invade Kuwait were empty in the years leading up to August 2, 1990. Rather, Ahmadinejad’s words suggest a countdown to a new and terrible war in the Middle East.

In late 2005, during a trip to Israel, I met with one of the top Iran experts in the Mossad, Israel’s primary foreign-intelligence agency (the Israeli version of the CIA). “Please listen to what this regime is telling us, and please believe them,” the agent, an operative who himself spent years undercover inside Iran, told me. “The regime in Iran first and foremost is against the U.S., not Israel. Israel is just a tool to get to the U.S. Israel is the Little Satan. You are the Great Satan.

“Remember,” the Mossad agent continued, “the Iranians invented the chess board. They are playing three or four moves ahead of us. . . . We should remember Hitler and other Fascist regimes throughout history. They always signaled their ultimate intentions ahead of time. . . . A top advisor to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently said, ‘A clash between Islam and the West is inevitable, and we must be prepared.’ We ignore such warning at our peril. We must be prepared, too.”¹⁶⁴

The Iranian leadership has certainly been preparing for a clash between Islam and the West as they feverishly try to build, buy, or steal nuclear weapons, as well as the missiles to deliver such weapons to their intended targets. In July of 1998, the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States—headed by Donald Rumsfeld—issued a sobering report in which its members (top U.S. military and intelligence officials) unanimously concluded that “the only issue as to whether or not Iran may soon have or already has a nuclear weapon is the amount of fissile material available to it. Because of significant gaps in our knowledge, the U.S. is unlikely to know whether Iran possesses nuclear weapons until after the fact.”165

The commission found that Iran—whose missiles can already reach Tel Aviv, Paris, and London—could build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the U.S. “within five years of a decision to proceed,” though again the members stressed that officials in Washington might not know when such a decision was made. They pointed out that “a 10,000 km-range Iranian missile could hold the U.S. at risk in an arc extending northeast of a line from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to St. Paul, Minnesota.”

Even more disturbing, the commission warned that countries such as Iran were seeking ways to launch Scud missiles off the back of a tramp steamer or other commercial container ship, putting Iranian nuclear, chemical, biological, or simply conventional warheads within range of major American, European, or Israeli cities with effectively no warning whatsoever.

And that was in 1998. Today the threat to the American homeland from an Iranian ship-launched missile has increased dramatically. “Some 75 percent of the total U.S. population of 290 million people and 75 percent of its military bases are within 200 miles of the coast,” reported a United Press International story in 2005. “The number of potential launch platforms is immense, with 130,000 registered merchant ships in 195 countries. . . . Thousands of SCUDs and other inexpensive short-range ballistic missiles have been dispersed, sold worldwide with some in countries where terrorist groups operate openly. Iran test-launched a tactical ballistic missile from a ship last year and the threat has become much worse with the rapid proliferation of cruise missiles. China has already supplied many to Iran.”166

Since the publication of the Rumsfeld commission’s report, we have learned much more, including the fact that for nearly two decades, Iran had successfully hidden expensive and sophisticated nuclear research facilities from U.S., Israeli, and other Western intelligence agencies. Only when a group of Iranian dissidents known as the National Council of Resistance held a press conference on August 14, 2002, revealing the existence and location of such facilities did the world have any idea just how aggressively Tehran was pursuing nuclear weapons.

In their Natanz facility, it turns out, the Iranians were planning to enrich uranium to weapons-grade standards. In their Ara-k facility, the Iranians were planning to extract plutonium for military purposes.

“We knew back in 2000–2001 that Iran had secret nuclear sites, and we were actually trying to find out where they were,” said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But when he finally found out, he admitted he was stunned by the magnitude of Iran’s efforts. “Within a few days [of finishing the Natanz and Ara-k facilities], they could make enough [nuclear fuel] for a bomb. Not just one bomb. The two massive underground facilities—each the size of a football field—are designed to hold 50,000 or more centrifuges. That could produce uranium for 25 to 50 nuclear bombs a year.”¹⁶⁷

Kenneth Pollack, a high-ranking U.S. National Security Council official who was in charge of Iran and Persian Gulf affairs during the 1990s, admitted, “Despite the promises the Clinton administration had heard from Khatami’s informal interlocutors that the reformists [in the Iranian government] understood the United States’ concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and would work to accommodate us, Iran’s nuclear program had never slowed down. In fact, it had made tremendous progress.”¹⁶⁸

During the writing of this book, I spoke to at least a half dozen senior Israeli military and intelligence officials who, on the condition of anonymity, told me that Iran either is at or is rapidly approaching what they call the “point of no return.” This is the point at which Iran will have all the technical know-how, trained scientists, bomb-making blueprints, enriched uranium, and other critical components to build a nuclear device.

Once the mullahs have all the chefs and ingredients they need to cook up their thermonuclear poison, these sources say that perfecting an actual bomb could happen very quickly. Some estimate Iran could have the “Islamic Bomb” called for by Rafsanjani as early as 2007. Others say sometime between 2008 and 2011 is more likely. But the truth is no one knows for sure, and that is what is so dangerous.

What we do know for sure is that Russia is helping speed the process, not slow it down. “I am sometimes asked if Iran wants to create such [nuclear] weapons or is thinking about the possibility, and I always reply that it does and is,” says Viktor Mikhailov, director of the Institute of Strategic Stability of Russia’s Ministry of Atomic Energy and widely considered one of the fathers of the Iranian nuclear industry. “It is impossible to retain national independence and sovereignty now without nuclear weapons. . . . I think that the nuclear sector of the Iranian economy is maintained at a very high research and technical level. . . . Iran will create—can create—its nuclear bomb in five to ten years. It will not be as sophisticated as the nuclear weapons of Russia or the U.S., but it will do. The Americans are afraid of this . . . because nuclear death can come not from the air but in many other ways. They fear a single nuclear explosion in their territory.”169

Over 1,000 Iranian nuclear scientists have been trained in Russia or by senior Russian scientists. Russia has vowed to finish building Iran’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr (perhaps by 2007), despite intense international pressure to stop helping Iran go nuclear. Russia is also negotiating with Iran to build as many as twenty more nuclear power plants, despite the fact that Iran is sitting on an ocean of oil and natural gas and hardly suffering from a lack of energy supplies. Russian diplomats have repeatedly stalled efforts by the U.S. and the European Union (EU) to place sanctions on Iran for its illegal nuclear activities. And Vladimir Putin has put his personal stamp of approval on Russian nuclear assistance to Iran, despite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vow to annihilate the Jewish state.

The question is why.

WHAT RUSSIA WANTS

“Russia has two interests in Iran,” Dr. Dore Gold told me when I saw him in Tel Aviv in the fall of 2005. “First, they want to resurrect the supposed glory of the Soviet Union. And second, they want to make money.”

I first met Gold, the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, during the summer of 2000 when Ehud Barak was trying to give away the store to Yasser Arafat. Gold, one of the first Israeli diplomats to ever meet personally with Arafat, had taken me inside Arafat’s thinking and helped me understand who he was and what he wanted. He was enormously helpful to me as I was doing research for The Last Days, and I later helped him promote the release of his New York Times best seller Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism.

But Gold was not only an expert on Arafat and the Saudis. He had also been closely monitoring Russian activities and ambitions in the Middle East for years and served as a senior advisor to Israeli prime minister Sharon.

“The Russians want an empire, and to get one they need to establish ‘special relationships’ with Arab and Islamic regimes in the Middle East whom they can use as their agents of influence,” he told me one morning over coffee. “From 1948 to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviets were the main backers of the Arab threat to Israel. But they were never able to secure Iran as an ally until now. . . . Iran is pivotal in Russian thinking. It is a major regional power in its own right, and it is a gateway into the rest of the Middle East.”

What’s more, he noted, Moscow figures that a strong relationship with Iran lessens the likelihood that the mullahs will aggressively support the rebels in Chechnya or any other effort to foment a coup in the Russian capital.170

Gold, an American who emigrated to Israel, went on to argue that while Russia’s economy is much stronger today than it was in the early 1990s, that is largely due to the oil-and-gas industry. The military-industrial complex, on the other hand—the engine that for years provided millions of jobs for Russian workers—has been dramatically downsized since the end of the Cold War. Thus, Russia needs to sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms to countries like Iran or their military production facilities will have to scale down even more or shut down entirely. Unemployment would surge, as would poverty, thus increasing the possibility of domestic instability of the kind the Kremlin fears most.171

Dr. Yuri Shtern shares a similar assessment as Dore Gold but adds some color commentary from a unique vantage point. Born in Moscow in 1949, Shtern graduated from Moscow University with a PhD in economics. He agitated—as Natan Sharansky did—for Soviet Jewish rights until he was finally allowed to emigrate to Israel in 1981. There he managed a Jewish settlement in Judea and worked for a time for the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce, trying to drum up business between Israel and the former USSR after years of pushing for boycotts of Soviet products due to Soviet persecution of Jews. In 1996 he was elected to serve as a member of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) and is now the number-two official in Yisrael Beitenu, one of Israel’s fastest-growing political parties.

Shtern and I first met in February 2004 at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, where he was part of a seven-person Israeli delegation. We met again at the Dan Panorama Hotel in Tel Aviv the following year, and I asked him why the country of his birth was arming his worst enemies.

“Russia—after Israel—is the second strangest place in the world,” Shtern told me one night after dinner. “It has a history of Christianity and education but also a deep tradition of tyranny. The danger now is that Russia may lurch back to tyranny.”

Part of the reason is that “Russia is in great danger of Islamicization,” and “it’s unbelievable how many Russian officials are being bought by Islamists” from Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East. That, Shtern said, is a big reason why Russia is helping Iran go nuclear. Russian workers need the jobs. Russian companies need the cash. Russian politicians are getting paid off. And he warned that more trouble lies ahead. While the world’s attention has been focused on the troubles in Iraq for the last several years, Shtern insists that “the future of the world is being shaped by Russia.”172

A few months before these meetings with Gold and Shtern, I sat down with Natan Sharansky at the Madison Hotel in Washington, DC, to talk to him about Putin, Iran, and the growing nuclear threat. At the time, he was still a member of Prime Minister Sharon’s cabinet, serving as Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs. I was writing a story for World magazine about President Bush’s summit with President Putin in the Slovak capital of Bratislava.

I started by asking him about the big picture. “A growing number of observers in the West are concerned that Vladimir Putin is becoming a new Russian dictator. They point to the Kremlin’s takeover of television stations, jailing of political opponents, and ending democratic elections for the governors of Russia’s provinces. As someone who grew up in Russia and spent nine years in a KGB Gulag as a dissident, what is your sense about the future of democracy in Russia?”¹⁷³

“We hear two types of statements these days,” Sharansky told me. “The first is that Russia went back to the past because Russians like their old totalitarian regimes, and that is proof that Russians can’t be democrats or don’t want democracy. This is nonsense. The other sentiment is that the Russian government is engaged in some serious retreats from democracy and the world should be concerned. That is absolutely true. Look, for a thousand years Russia never was a democracy. But I believe the Russian people want freedom and democracy. There have been tremendous changes there in the past ten or fifteen years. Millions of people are not enslaved in Gulags. Millions are not working for the KGB. Millions do not live in fear that one mistaken word and they’ll be thrown in prison. This is real, historic progress. That said, there have been some serious retreats. But look, twelve years after the French revolution there was Napoleon. There are ups and downs in the development of democracy in any country. Now Putin is restricting many areas of Russian life. The free world should not be hesitant to raise these issues and encourage the Russian government to expand freedom, not restrict it.”

I asked him why he thought Russia was selling nuclear technology to Iran when Iran was widely recognized as a terrorist state and, in President Bush’s famous phrase, part of the Axis of Evil.

“Well, you know that I was involved for a long time in the negotiations to persuade the Russians to stop selling these technologies to Iran,” Sharansky explained, noting his meetings with Putin and “many other meetings with Russian leaders over the years” on this issue. “And it is important to point out that it wasn’t the Russian government that was directly selling the technologies. It was various Russian companies, and the Kremlin wasn’t fighting it enough. . . . Putin told me personally—and he happened to be absolutely right about this—that the day will come when it is clear that it is Western sales of technologies to Iran which will be just as critical to helping Iran develop weapons of mass destruction, maybe more so, not just Russian technologies. And sure enough, a year ago when the scope of Iranian activities were discovered, everyone could see that the technologies that flowed through Pakistan, England, and Holland have created a big danger that within one or two more years Iran will develop nuclear weapons.”

“Nevertheless, does your government believe this emerging Russian-Iranian alliance is a direct threat to Israel’s national security?” I asked.

“The free world is blind to taking effective measures to stopping this impending disaster,” he replied. “Now it must be clear that the free world cannot afford to permit the regime of the Ayatollahs to have nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. The Iranians have made themselves perfectly clear. They intend to destroy Israel and the other ‘Satans’ in this world.”

“What should be done to stop Iran from acquiring the bomb?” I wondered.

“As I point out in my book [The Case for Democracy], Iran is a unique example of a country where in one generation a society of true believers in radical Islam has become a society of double-thinkers,” said Sharansky. “That is, in their hearts and minds they are disgusted with their government and disillusioned with radical Islam, even though with their lips they must avoid being critical because they fear government reprisals. There are many Iranians eager to change their government. With some encouragement from the free world I think we can help the people of Iran to bring democratic change. I was glad to see President Bush speak directly to the Iranian people in his State of the Union address. But it is not enough. The United States and Europe—the entire free world—must do much more to encourage the forces of freedom and reform within Iran, before it is too late.”

“What if it is already too late?” I asked. “Can you picture a scenario in which Israel is forced to take military action against Iran?”

“If it is too late and democratic change will not happen in Iran, and so much time was wasted, and the free world was too cautious to support the dissidents in Iran, then there is a very real danger that Iran will get nuclear weapons. And the free world will have no choice but to act. But I don’t want to discuss specific scenarios. Let us hope it does not go that far.”

Actually, it may have already gone that far.

WORST-CASE SCENARIOS

In February 2006, I asked Steve Forbes if he would arrange an interview for me with Caspar Weinberger, who served as U.S. defense secretary from 1981 to 1987 and was now publisher of Forbes and a foreign-affairs columnist for the world’s foremost business magazine. Steve graciously agreed and set up a time for me to call Weinberger at his home in Connecticut. It turned out to be just weeks before Weinberger passed away.

As one of the key architects of Ronald Reagan’s strategy to bring down the Evil Empire, a man who literally had his finger on the button during some of the tensest years of the American showdown with the Soviet military, few knew the Russians better than “Cap” Weinberger.174 Moreover, few had as much experience at the highest levels of the U.S. government going head-to-head against the mullahs in Iran. Weinberger, after all, had access to all U.S. intelligence about the ayatollah and the revolutionary regime in Tehran. He was there when the U.S. hostages were freed by Iran in 1981. He was there when the Reagan administration built ties to Iraq as a counterweight to Iranian aggression. He was even targeted by a grossly unfair prosecutor in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages affair that engulfed the second term of the Reagan administration, though he was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, who rightly called him a “true patriot” who gave “extraordinary service to our country.”

Weinberger, who was eighty-eight when he died, could not have been more generous with his time or more insightful with his answers. When we spoke, his memory was still sharp and his analysis still bore the distinct evidence of his decades of experience on the front lines. I asked him about a wide range of issues related to Russia and Iran, particularly if he thought Iran would go nuclear over the next few years. His answer floored me.

“I think they probably already have gone nuclear,” he told me. “I think they have probably equipped themselves to construct some types of nuclear weapons and . . . I think they could probably do quite a lot of damage right now.”175

That, Weinberger believed, was very likely why Ahmadinejad was being so provocative toward Israel—because he already possessed nuclear weapons and was preparing for a direct military confrontation.

It was a chilling theory. “If Iran has already gone nuclear,” I asked, “then why have the Russians been helping Iran build nuclear plants and providing nuclear training and technology to a country most of the world agrees is so dangerous?”

“The answer is your first clause—it’s the Russians,” Weinberger replied. “It’s the way they operate. . . . The Soviets [during the Cold War] were trying to increase their influence in the whole Mideast. They were using one of the traditional routes to the oil fields, coming through Afghanistan, and trying to seal not only their bases but their supply routes. We were taking actions and preparing ourselves to prevent that domination from succeeding. . . . [But] they have never accepted the idea that they were destined to be a second- or third-class power. They want to get their superpower status back, and that’s a lot of what Putin is doing now. . . . They [Putin and his advisors] have not really accepted the idea of democracy or a transparent form of government in which the people are able to run things. . . . They are not going to accept the fact that they were utterly and completely defeated.”

“That said, how dangerous is Vladimir Putin?” I asked.

“I think he has a suitable background for why people are worried,” Weinberger said. “He was a Soviet spy. His whole background and training was in the interest of the old Soviet policies, and I don’t think he’s changed very much. I don’t think you get far and advance as rapidly as he did unless you’re doing pretty well what you’re wanted to do [by the KGB leadership].”

Weinberger’s concerns didn’t stop with the current leader of Russia. He raised other worst-case scenarios, including someone more dangerous than Putin emerging in Moscow through election, assassination, or coup.176

In his 1996 book The Next War, Weinberger and coauthor Peter Schweizer envisioned a Russian ultranationalist seizing power in a coup in 2006 and then threatening the world with a nuclear war. I asked if he still thought this was a possibility.

“It is a possibility,” Weinberger told me, noting that while recent revolutions in ex-Soviet republics such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan have been pro-Western and pro-democracy in nature, they have only heightened fears among Russian nationalists and ultranationalists that Russia could be next if the Kremlin doesn’t crack down on dissent and rule with a heavy hand. “[Our scenario] was presented not just as a possibility but as a suitable scenario for war college and advanced strategic thinking and studying, and I think it’s still a possibility. I think you have in Russia an angry loser [and] I think it’s wrong and immature for anybody to believe that Russia has joined the Western camp. . . . We would be dangerously naive if we thought that winning the Cold War was all we had to do.”

WHAT AHMADINEJAD WANTS

The problem is that the Kremlin is playing with fire.

As I mentioned in the introduction, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has told friends he believes the end of the world is only a few years away. He has also said that he believes the way to hasten the arrival of the Islamic messiah is to unleash an apocalyptic holy war against Christians and Jews. Thus, he has vowed to annihilate the U.S. and Israel and is feverishly preparing his military to accomplish just that.177

The best way to understand Ahmadinejad’s brand of Shiite eschatology (end-times theology) is to listen to Iranians describe it themselves.

Amir Taheri is a European-based columnist who used to serve as the executive editor of Kayhan, Iran’s largest daily newspaper. In an April 2006 essay entitled “The Frightening Truth of Why Iran Wants a Bomb,” Taheri wrote that just before announcing to the world that Iran had “gatecrashed ‘the nuclear club,’” President Ahmadinejad “disappeared for several hours” to have a secret meeting with the Islamic messiah, a figure known as the Twelfth Imam or Mahdi. Taheri wrote, “According to Shia lore, the Imam is a messianic figure who, although in hiding, remains the true Sovereign of the World.”

The article described Ahmadinejad’s claim to be one of a select group of men specifically chosen by the Twelfth Imam to be his representatives and helpers in the world prior to his return. Ahmadinejad “boasts that the Imam gave him the presidency for a single task: provoking a ‘clash of civilizations’ in which the Muslim world, led by Iran, takes on the ‘infidel’ West, led by the United States, and defeats it.”

The article continued:

From childhood, Shia boys are told to cultivate two qualities. The first is entezar, the capacity patiently to wait for the Imam to return. The second is taajil, the actions needed to hasten the return. For the Imam’s return will coincide with an apocalyptic battle between the forces of evil and righteousness, with evil ultimately routed.¹⁷⁸

Hossein Bastani is an Iranian journalist living in exile. He has written numerous accounts of Shiite leaders in Iran claiming to have witnessed physical sightings of the Twelfth Imam and saying that he will reveal himself to the world soon. “But despite these sightings,” Bastani noted in one column, “it is the President [Ahmadinejad] himself who presents the strongest claims of being in touch with and thus supported by the twelfth Imam.” He added that in 2005, “at a meeting with the Foreign Ministers of Islamic countries and in response to a question that Iran displayed signs of a crisis, President Ahmadinejad said that these were the signs of the return of the twelfth Imam, who will definitely return in two years.”179

Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini is a professor at the Religious Learning Center in Qom, Iran, and one of his country’s most respected Shiite scholars. In his book Al-Imam al-Mahdi: The Just Leader of Humanity, Amini described the signs of the coming of the Mahdi in great detail. Chief among them: a massive earthquake and the launching of a global war to kill and/or subjugate Jews, Christians, and other “infidels.”

In one passage Amini quoted the prophet Mohammed (though not from the Koran), who is believed to have said, “Listen to the good news about the Mahdi! He will rise at the time when people will be faced with severe conflict and the earth will be hit by a violent quake. He will fill the earth with justice and equity as it is filled with injustice and tyranny. He will fill the hearts of his followers with devotion and will spread justice everywhere.”¹⁸⁰

Other key passages:

When the world has become psychologically ready to accept the government of God and when general conditions have become favorable to the idea of the rulership of the truth, God will permit the Mahdi to launch his final revolution. . . . A few selected individuals . . . will be the first ones to respond to his call, and will be drawn to him like iron to a magnet in that first hour of his appearance. . . .

On seeing the fulfillment of many of the signs promised in the traditions, a large number of unbelievers will turn towards Islam. Those who persist in their disbelief and wickedness shall be killed by the soldiers of the Mahdi. The only victorious government in the entire world will be that of Islam and people will devotedly endeavor to protect it. Islam will be the religion of everyone, and will enter all the nations of the world. . . .

The Mahdi will offer the religion of Islam to the Jews and the Christians; if they accept it they will be spared, otherwise they will be killed. . . .

It seems unlikely that this catastrophe can be avoided. . . . Warfare and bloodshed [are] inevitable.181

The coming of the Twelfth Imam is never mentioned in the Koran. Rather it stems from supposed sayings of Mohammed and his followers soon after the Koran was complete. Thus, not all Muslims share the brand of theology I have just outlined, nor do all Shiites.¹⁸² But Ahmadinejad and his close aides and advisors leave no doubt that they are driven by the belief that the Islamic messiah will appear in the next two or three years and that by launching a war to annihilate Israel, in particular, they can hasten that day.