Spies Against Armageddon (53 page)

This debate unexpectedly settled itself, with a slap in the face to the two quarrelling sides. On Christmas Eve 2003, the world woke up to a public announcement: Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya was giving up its weapons of mass destruction, which included a nascent nuclear program and a large arsenal of chemical weapons.

The announcement took Israeli intelligence completely by surprise, and its directors did not like surprises. The Mossad claimed that it was Aman’s fault, for dropping Libya from the list of “objectives” for information-gathering because of tight budgets. The result was that in recent years, very few Israeli intelligence operations were mounted inside or against Libya.

The Mossad felt embarrassed by the fact that the CIA and British MI6—two of its closest counterparts—had been negotiating with Qaddafi for weeks to clinch the deal. Those intelligence communities did not share the information with the Mossad.

What really grabbed the Israeli agencies in the Libya story was the revelation that Colonel Qaddafi’s nuclear program had been born out of the efforts and expertise of the Pakistani merchant of atomic knowhow, A.Q. Khan. He had signed an agreement with Qaddafi to deliver a turn-key project. Drawings, the centrifuges, scientists experienced at enriching uranium, and engineers who could assemble the bomb could all be provided by Khan.

Dagan and his chief intelligence officer wondered to themselves: Since they missed the whole Libyan deal, what else had they missed? The research department was ordered in 2004 to go back into its archives and examine every piece of humint and sigint information it had accumulated, in the past decade, about Khan’s activities as a nuclear traveling salesman. Intelligence agencies often gather more data than they can read and analyze, and individual intercepts and data points are not always immediately pieced together into a coherent mosaic.

The Mossad realized that—in addition to Libya—Khan had traveled to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria. Further evaluation concluded that the Saudis and Egyptians, being in the American camp, would be less likely to have the gall to launch a nuclear program.

Syria could be a different case. It was anti-America, making overtures to Iran, and supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon more than ever. The then-new Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, was inexperienced and might miscalculate in his ambitions to outdo his late father Hafez.

The more Mossad researchers dug, the more they found. For the first time, Israeli analysts were seeing hints of nuclear work in Syria. They noticed that the Assad regime, at the start of the 21st century, had clandestine contacts with North Korea that were difficult to explain. The subject was, almost surely, not the already-known cooperation in the field of Scud missiles. There was something else going on: secret, high-level, and troubling.

Dagan had his agency zoom in on Syria, by all measures available. The Mossad first turned to the CIA and other friendly liaison links to ask whether they were aware of Syria’s having nuclear contacts with North Korea. Western intelligence agencies all knew about missile sales and cooperation between Damascus and Pyongyang. Yet, neither the Americans nor the French (the latter having relatively good coverage of Syria due to their colonial past) knew a thing about nuclear links.

Israeli intelligence realized that it would have to rely upon itself. That was a commonly held view in Israel on many topics, even when international cooperation seemed to be available. “It’s part of their ethos,” commented Dennis Ross, a longtime Middle East advisor to American presidents, “not to contract out their security.”

Within the Israeli intelligence community, through most of 2007, there was an urgent sense of being faced with a new mystery in Syria. This was, therefore, no time to re-open old Mossad-Aman wounds about who missed Libya’s weapons program. The divisions were healed.

Military intelligence had Unit 8200 improve its eavesdropping on Syrian communications and signals. Israeli satellites, first launched in 1988, were reoriented so that their orbits would put them over Syria more often. The Mossad’s agent-running Tsomet department was instructed to do all it could to penetrate Syria’s leadership and to uncover the mysterious, unresolved contacts with North Korea.

This substantial extra work for Israeli intelligence required additional budgetary resources. Dagan turned to Prime Minister Olmert to ask for more money and found, in Olmert, an ally. “Whatever you need,” was the message, “you’ll get it.”

Israel’s air force now was able to afford a lot more high-altitude reconnaissance flights. Intelligence analysts were working much longer hours, poring over photos taken by Israeli satellites.

Some of the information was from sigint sources—intercepted communications. But that was far from easy. It seemed that only a very few Syrians knew what was going on. Israeli intelligence tried to listen in on all their conversations, including those of President Assad and his close advisor and coordinator of covert projects, Brigadier General Muhammad Suleiman.

The combined espionage effort was narrowing onto several places and projects deemed highly suspicious. The first breakthrough came in the form of a building, seen in reconnaissance photos: 130 feet by 130 feet, and about 70 feet tall, within a military complex in an obscure desert in northeastern Syria, not far from the Euphrates River.

The Syrians tried to block aerial views of whatever was being built by putting a large roof over the scene. That meant that something was being constructed, something worth concealing, but Israeli agencies could not tell what was inside.

The next, crucial step would involve risking the lives of Israelis: sending operatives into Syria to get close, to see what the Syrians were building. For a variety of operational reasons, a decision was made to send combatants of the Mossad’s Kidon unit—who excelled at sensitive, dangerous surveillance and not only assassinations—in addition to an army special forces unit.

They sampled the soil, water, and vegetation around the site, but did not find any traces of radioactive materials. Yet, other evidence they carried back to Israel did lead to the pieces of the puzzle falling into place.

The mystery began to be solved. It truly was a nuclear project.

The teams returned there on several reconnaissance missions and obtained, every time, additional information. It became clear that North Korean experts were helping Syria build a nuclear facility. Unknown was whether it was a collection of centrifuges, which would take a long time to enrich uranium for bombs. Or was it a nuclear reactor, which could, alarmingly, provide plutonium for bombs more quickly?

Whatever it was, how close to completion was the project? The answer would be significant. Israeli leaders might feel they had to bomb the building urgently, or they might decide they had time to wait and see.

In March 2007, irrefutably incriminating evidence arrived. These were photos taken inside the mysterious building. Who took the photos is the most closely guarded secret of the operation. It could have been Mossad combatants who managed to penetrate the facility. The Israelis also might have recruited a Syrian, or even a North Korean, to take snapshots inside and provide them to the Mossad. The most likely scenario: Israelis extracted the photographs from a laptop computer or a memory drive carelessly carried abroad by a Syrian official.

There was now strong pictorial evidence that Syria was building a graphite reactor of the Yongbyon type, used by North Korea to make its own nuclear bombs. Israel understood that the Communist pariah state, always desperate for hard currency, did it for the money.

Even more important and troubling was the assessment by the Mossad’s non-conventional weapons department that the reactor could be ready to “go hot” within a few months, and then it would take a little over a year to produce enough plutonium for a nuclear bomb.

One more piece of evidence was troubling. Large pipes and a pumping station, for cooling the reactor with Euphrates River water, seemed to be complete—ready for use.

An additional item of data contributed to Israel’s decision-making process. The Mossad concluded that Iran had no role whatsoever in the construction of the reactor. Despite a growing friendship between Syria and Iran, the Iranians were not privy to the secret. An alliance between nations, however close, still can be constrained by a large degree of compartmentalization.

That was the information that Dagan and his chief intelligence officer were bringing to their briefing for Olmert in Tel Aviv—the meeting that concluded with a consensus that the building would have to be flattened.

That was, of course, much easier said than done.

The burden of decision-making was now slowly shifting from the intelligence community to the IDF and, above all, to a political process led by Olmert and his cabinet.

Faced with a huge decision, any Israeli prime minister, early on, tests the waters of the Potomac to hear what the American administration has to say on the subject. Almost all major choices were made by Israel after consulting with or telling the United States—although the Israelis rarely stood still for a long period to field questions and get bogged down in soul-searching and indecision.

They saw George W. Bush’s administration as the most friendly to Israel since the Reagan era. But being entangled in two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Americans might react in unexpected ways.

It was traditional to send the director of the Mossad to Washington to test those waters. Olmert dispatched Dagan, who showed the CIA and the Pentagon a dossier and asked: Do you Americans know about this?

They did not.

Olmert, paying his own visit to Washington in June 2007, addressed President Bush face to face: “George, I am asking you to bomb the compound.”

Bush decided, however, that bombing Syria without obvious provocation would cause “severe blowback.” He suggested that Western countries should instead expose the Syrian reactor project, by providing photographic evidence to the world’s media, to force the Damascus government to dismantle it.

Olmert’s reply to the president, in July, was: “Your strategy is very disturbing to me.”

The prime minister concluded that, if action were needed, Israel would have to do it alone. Olmert found himself suddenly in the same position as was the late Menachem Begin in 1981. Olmert had to decide whether he would follow in the footsteps of his predecessor and enforce the Begin Doctrine—that no enemy of Israel would be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

Consulting with very few advisors, Olmert reached his own decision that he would follow the Begin line. It was almost instinctive, based on strategic analysis and a sense of Jewish history, that Israel needed to maintain a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Still, many questions needed to be resolved.

The preferred option would be sabotage: to send a very limited number of Israelis to destroy the facility. That was removed from the table, when IDF special forces and the Mossad said they could not reliably get there with all the explosives and other materials they would need.

The discussion itself recalled 1981, when the option of sending a large contingent of soldiers was ruled out: too visible, too risky, and the probability of success unknown.

Attention turned, as it did then, to an aerial attack. Analysts in Israel’s air force started applying their specialty—using the mathematics of operational research—and calculated how many planes would be needed, what load to carry, what routes to fly, and what air-defense hazards they might encounter.

The political decision-making process, in the meantime, got into full gear. The first question was one of timing. The Mossad’s non-conventional weapons department determined the window of opportunity to be a matter of just a few months, running only to the end of autumn of 2007. At that point, the reactor would become operational.

The very few Israelis privy to the secret were shaken by that. They feared that if the reactor were bombed after going hot, radiation would spread. That would cause the worst possible pollution in the Euphrates River, which flows from Turkey, via Syria, to Iraq, and provides the livelihood for millions of people.

If such contamination were to happen, Israel would be blamed for a colossal ecological disaster. International reactions might be reminiscent of old anti-Semitic accusations that Jews poisoned wells. The Muslim world would be up in arms.

Olmert slightly expanded the number of people who were involved in these discussions. Over a matter of weeks, he hosted five serious meetings of his inner cabinet—14 people in all—with every minister encouraged to express his or her genuine views.

The ministers were helped to come to a conclusive decision by the knowledge that the Israeli intelligence community and the military, this time, spoke with one voice. That was a huge difference from the deliberations leading to the Osirak attack 26 years earlier. All the intelligence agency chiefs, their deputies, and their top analysts now favored demolishing Syria’s reactor project—including Dagan, the Aman chief General Amos Yadlin, who was one of the pilots who struck Iraq in 1981, and the IDF chief of staff, Lt.-General Gabi Ashkenazi.

A strong consensus seemed to be emerging. Ministers supported Olmert’s position that—in the spirit of Begin—Syria would have to be stopped from getting nuclear weapons. But there was one very prominent exception.

To the astonishment of his colleagues, Defense Minister Ehud Barak kept voicing strong objections. He did not say that he was, in principle, opposed to bombing Syria; but he suggested that Israel still had time, that there was no need to rush.

Barak even tried to prevent other generals from expressing their views in cabinet meetings, saying that he would be the sole defense or military voice. Olmert overruled him on that claim.

A rift between the two Ehuds was growing. Olmert tried to figure out Barak’s true motives. He reached the conclusion that these were selfish political interests, and that Barak was prepared to sacrifice national interests for his own good.

Looming over the debate were tensions left by the Lebanon war in the summer of 2006, when Israel battled Hezbollah and many Israelis criticized the political and military decisionmakers’ deficiencies. An investigatory committee was due to release its report in January 2008. Olmert, Dagan, and Ashkenazi could not avoid the conclusion that Barak was waiting for that release—probably hoping that Olmert would be forced to resign and Barak could be prime minister again, or he could be defense minister in a cabinet that would give him more influence.