Esther's Sling (3 page)

Benjamin Raibani spoke first. “Actually I think that is exactly right. That’s what I had in mind.”

Avi Gresch, Minister of Foreign Affairs, sat the farthest away from Cohen. He was not a military man, but was a politician
with a keen sense of public relations. His response reflected his expertise. “I like it. It makes sense. It will make sense to the rest of the world.”

Eli Cohen didn’t respect a man without a strong military background. He brushed off the advice despite the fact that it was supportive. “Who else? Yavi?” Unlike his feelings for Gresch, Cohen had tremendous respect for Yavi Aitan, the up and coming sta
r of the Israeli Defense Force.

“It makes sense as a political statement,” responded the minister of intelligence and atomic affairs. “We can claim victory if all we do is destroy Natanz and
Isfahan. Of course, what it will take to achieve that goal in reality is, in my opinion, something well beyond just destroying those two targets. But we will have to come back to that.”

Cohen leaned back in his chair. Once again, the commentary of Yavi Aitan had earned the respect of his boss. “Yes, I think you are right. If no one else objects, then Zvi, you
have your strategic objective.”

Avner had the green light to proceed. “I will plan for that strategic outcome and let you handle the political aspects,”
the defense minister said. He paused to review his thoughts. “Everybody here understands the make-up of the IAF.” The most professional of the three branches of the Israeli Defense Force, the Israeli Air Force reflected both the tactical history of Israel’s wars and the practical realities of Israeli defense budgets. Israel had to defend its existence against a hostile neighboring population of over 145 million Arabs on an annual budget smaller than what the United States spends annually just to care for and support its veterans.

“We have built a potent force designed for fighter superiority and strike missions that are geographically very close to Israel,” Avner continued. “Our Air Force excels at fast sortie turn-around. We are ready to confront Hezbollah or the Syrian Army or the Egyptians.” Avner waved his pen-loaded hand in the air as he ticked off Israel’s adversaries. He knew when he watched the video of Prime Minister Cohen and the U.S. president meeting the press in the White House – and saw the animosity between these two men who should be allies – that this meeting would be about how Israel could destroy the Iranian nuclear program without direct U.S. military support. He had been practicing his speech.

“But none of this represents the tactical challenge posed by Persia. Our targets in Persia average sixteen hundred kilometers distance, each way. We have so far identified over twenty-five targets that must be successfully hit in order to destroy their nuclear program. Of these, most are targets that the IAF can destroy in one sortie. But two of them, Natanz and Fordow, are underground and hardened. These two targets are especially challenging as they both require bunker busting bombs. Plus we expect Persia to increase their tunnel construction as they have done in Isfahan, so time does not help us.

“Layer on top of the size and complexity of the target list, we must assume that the moment we strike, we will face a barrage of missiles from Hezbollah. We estimate their total missile arsenal at close to forty thousand. That compares to about fifteen thousand missiles in their arsenal at the start of the second Lebanon war, during which they fired about
forty- two hundred missiles into Israel. If …”

“Wait now.” Benjamin Raibani interrupted. His age, experience and proven wisdom made him the most respected man in the room. His words carried weight that was second only to Cohen’s. “That forty thousand number is misleading. Almost all of those
are combat missiles or katyushas. How many are real threats?”

“I was going to get to that.” The defense minister was not happy. He had been on the pace he had practiced and did not want interruptions. He paused deliberately to express his displeasure. “May I continue?”

“Yes. Of course,” replied Raibani.

“Of those, Hezbollah has, by our best intelligence” – Avner  looked at a sheet of paper he pulled out of his folder – “two hundred and forty missiles with a range greater than fifty kilometers. That consists of one hundred twenty
Fajr-5 missiles with a range of seventy-five kilometers, ten Scud Ds with guidance and a seven hundred kilometer range and, unfortunately, one hundred and ten M-600 missiles. These are Syrian built, use programmed inertial guidance and have a range of just over three hundred kilometers.”

“A hundred ten?” Cohen was perplexed and angry as he rhetorically expressed his feelings. “When did this happen? Hell, how did this happen?”

This was the type of discussion Avner feared. “We have only recently identified one hundred of these missiles delivered into the control of Hezbollah by Syria. However, they are stored inside Syria for the time being. We are thinking through options, including a strike similar to the Zelzal operation.” Avner was referring to an Israeli commando operation inside Lebanon during 2007 that destroyed an underground storage facility in the Bekaa Valley that had housed 54 Iranian built Zelzal-2 missiles. “This gift from Syria was done to replace those Zelzal missiles. The bad news is that the M-600, which is a Syrian copy of Persia’s Fateh-110, is a step up in range and accuracy.”

“Gift?,”
replied Eli Cohen. “That son-of-a-bitch Assad wouldn’t give Hezbollah a single bullet unless he was paid by the Iranians. I’ve read his Mossad file. He has to pay his wife’s MasterCard bill.” Everyone in the room except Avner laughed.

“Please Mister Prime Minister,” implored Zvi Avner. “I have a lot to cover.” Cohen waved his cigar in the air, ceding the floor to his colleague. “Thank you.” Avner took a breath. “Regardless of the number of long-range missiles, we should assume that Hezbollah will respond when called upon by Persia. They will fire hundreds of missiles daily and the target list this time will include Tel Aviv and maybe even Dimona. I will not go into the state of development of our missile defense systems other than to say we are very happy with the progress of Iron Dome and Arrow 2. But the point is that we will have to launch a ground offensive into Lebanon to stop this barrage when it comes. And we will need to have our strike aircraft available – all of them.”

“Aren’t they burying everything in Lebanon now?” The question this time came from Yavi Aitan. It was rhetorical. At 42, Aitan was the youngest man in the room and the cerebral whiz kid who earned a PhD in mathematics from MIT when he was only 24. From there he was recruited into Unit 8200, Israel’s version of America’s National Security Agency. Unit 8200 was growing rapidly and the intelligence and analytical insight of Yavi Aitan immediately stood out even among the outsized brainpower of the organization. Aitan had advanced quickly. On his 32nd birthday, Aitan was transferred from the operational side of Unit 8200 into the managerial side of its parent, the Directorate of Military Intelligence, known as Aman.

Aitan continued to advance rapidly and was promoted to the rank of general in the aftermath of the second Lebanon war, when it was revealed that his correct written assessment of the presence of Iranian anti-ship missiles in Lebanon had been intentionally
buried by senior Aman and Israel Defense Force staff officers. When a C-802 missile struck the INS Hanit on July 14, 2006, killing four crew members and nearly sinking the frigate, the strength of Aitan’s analysis was revealed and became legendary within the Israeli intelligence community. He was like the Wall Street analyst who predicts the next stock market crash, enduring ridicule until proven right. In the housecleaning that followed the poorest showing ever by the IDF, Aitan had been elevated to prominence. Eli Cohen immediately became a fan of the penetrating mental capabilities of General Aitan and had only him in mind when time came to name a new minister of intelligence and atomic affairs.

“Yes. Hezbollah is turning Lebanon into a big bunker network,” Avner responded. “It was bad three years ago. It is getting worse all the time now.”

“So we will need to significantly upgrade our bunker buster munitions in both quality and quantity.” Aitan had beaten the defense minister to his point.

“Yes, I will get to that. Now, let me state the obvious about our tactical situation.” Avner felt like he was going to punch the next person who interrupted him, an action that would not be entirely out of character. “The planning for a Persian strike has to assume that we have one full-out sortie to achieve our strategic goal because as soon as those aircraft return to Israel, we will
need them in Lebanon and Gaza. I have to assume that Hamas will join in with everything they have. In addition, I cannot be prudent without at least planning for the possibility that Syria, at the behest of Persia, will attack – even if it is just an attempt to retake the Golan Heights.”

Aitan was compelled to respond. “Based on our sources, Basher Assad is very unlikely to take overt military action.”

Avner was expecting this comment. “That may be the case and we all hope that it will be the case. But I do not have the luxury of making that assumption. The point is that if Syrian units start to move while we are simultaneously dealing with Hezbollah and Hamas, the air force will be fully engaged with virtually zero reserve. It will be the same situation as the Six Day War. From the perspective of the IAF, we are all-in once we strike Persia. This has been our working assumption and our planning to date. We would be intimately involved in the first strike, especially suppressing Persian air defense. Then the Americans would drop the heavy hardware, leaving us free to deal with our neighbors.”

Eli Cohen blew a cloud of cigar smoke toward the center of the table. “You made your point Zvi. What are you driving at?”

This was the question Avner was waiting for. “Look, just because the Americans are out of the equation doesn’t change anything for us. We have the exact same tactical considerations. We have one sortie for the IAF over Persia and then they have to be available right here to deal with the fallout.

“Here are the practical challenges. First, we have two primary targets now and a third emerging rapidly. Isfahan we can destroy with conventional bombing – although the Iranians have added a tunnel complex at Isfahan that is a secondary target. Natanz is underground and hardened. Now we have this site north of Qom under construction and I am assuming that we will have to deal with it too. The weapon we are relying on to penetrate and destroy these targets is the American GBU-28, which is seven and a half meters long and weighs over two thousand kilograms. We only have one airplane that can deliver it: the F-15I Ra’am. We can modify them to carry two bombs each, but we lose the central external fuel tank in the process. We have twenty-five Ra’ams, so we can deliver fifty of these bombs in the first sortie assuming one hundred percent mission availability.”

Yavi Aitan jumped in. “We have the plans for Fordow in some detail.” He was using the name for the site north of Qom that would soon become widely known. He was not aware of it, but he was about to help Avner make the point he was really vectoring toward. “They are building two underground complexes that are twenty-two and a half kilometers apart. The main complex has an underground chamber that is a rectangle one hundred fifty-seven by ninety-six meters. It is designed with a primary and secondary enrichment hall and what we think is a fabrication room to convert highly enriched uranium from the cascades into uranium dioxide powder and then into uranium tetraflouride, or green salt.

“
This room could include machinery to convert green salt into metallic form,” Aitan continued, “but if they go that route, it will be a tight fit. They would have to bring in kilns to melt the green salt and fuse it with magnesium. To accomplish that they will need to add a lot of ventilation that is not reflected in their plans. Also, there is a smaller room that could have several possible uses, including storage of depleted uranium hexafluoride, or storage of highly enriched uranium dioxide or green salt, or even warhead storage. Plus they have a separate processing hall which is being built above ground but will probably be buried in the future. This hall will receive shipments of uranium hexafluoride that is enriched up to twenty percent. The hall will have an autoclave to heat granular hexafluoride into gaseous form and feed it through piping directly into the centrifuge cascades in the main chamber.

“Interestingly, the plans show that the secondary enrichment hall, which is designed for less than three thousand centrifuges, will be separated from the rest of the rooms by a thick wall. My guess is that the secondary hall is for inspection purposes if they have to let in the IAEA.” Aitan referred to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the organization that oversees publicly declared nuclear programs o
n behalf of the United Nations.

“Why do you say that?” asked Raibani.

“Because the main complex has six entrances into the mountain which funnel into three openings into the chamber,” Aitan replied. “All three openings are into the secondary enrichment hall area. The main chamber is separated by a wall that has a couple of openings that look like they will be hidden. So call it an educated guess. Does that answer your question?”

Raibani nodded.

“The primary enrichment hall is designed for 8,856 centrifuges.”

“What about this second complex you mentioned?” asked the prime minister. “How long have we known about this?”

“Well, we learned about the second complex when we obtained the engineering plans in September 2007. I have discussed the second complex before,” Aitan answered.