Esther's Sling (4 page)

“With me?”

“Yes, sir. Right here in this room.”

Cohen shrugged his shoulders. “I must have misunderstood what you were saying.” He placed his cigar between his lips to inhale the smoke.

“I apologize for any lack of clarity. The second complex is six kilometers southwest of Manzariyeh Airport. It is on the northern edge of the Baqarebad military complex, built by Iran to store missiles and warheads. The tunnel complex here was originally dug out ten years ago to store important government documents. But the new plans are for a smaller version of complex one. My guess is this is intended to be the final warhead fabrication, assembly and storage facility, but it could just be a back-up to complex one. To date, we haven’t seen any construction, but the plans call for a tripling in the size of the underground chamber.”

“What is the timing for each complex to come online?” asked the defense minister, making sure his unwitting surrogate made the right points.

“Their focus is on the first complex and we estimate construction and the placement of centrifuges to be completed in about eighteen months. The second complex is clearly a low priority for them. Our best guess is that they are waiting to begin real work on it after they are finished with the first.”

“How deep is the first complex?” continued Avner.

“Well, the entrances are all at the nine hundred twenty meter contour line.” Aitan raised his left hand up in the air. His fingers were straight and his palm was face down and parallel to the table. “The floor of the main chamber is eight hundred and eighty-six meters above sea level.” He dropped the level of his hand a few inches to visualize the drop in altitude from the entrances to the level of the chamber. “The finished height of the chamber is four meters. The minimum amount of earth above the chamber is the point over the southwest corner. At that point, there is fifty-two meters of volcanic basalt. Fordow is part of a geological formation known as the Oromeieh-Dokhtar belt. It is the end result of ancient volcanic flows.” Aitan had no notes. All of the information was stored in his head. Everyone in the room knew that if Yavi Aitan read it once and committed it to memory, then the information would be locked away as if on a hard drive.

Aitan turned his face to look at Avner.
The younger man continued. “That depth is equal to one hundred fifty-five feet of earth at a minimum at the southwest corner. The maximum depth to reach the chamber is seventy-eight meters, or two hundred fifty-seven feet of basalt rock above the primary enrichment hall. If I recall correctly, the GBU-28 can penetrate, at best, only one hundred twenty feet of earth. And that assumes the bomb is dropped from at least fifty thousand feet.”

“How long?” The words were in the direct style of Benjamin Raibani. The metronome was ticking again.

“Eighteen months as …”

“No,” Raibani interjected. “Once they have Fordow operational, how long to get to ninety percent enrichment?”

Yavi Aitan pursed his lips. “That depends. Let me make a couple of assumptions.” Aitan pivoted his left forearm upward from the table on its elbow. He stuck his thumb upward. “First, assume that they enrich to twenty percent at Natanz, which I must point out they have not yet done to our knowledge.” Aitan extended his left forefinger. “Second, assume that we are right on the number of centrifuges inside Fordow and that they are all operational.” Aitan extended his middle finger. “Third, assume they are using their first generation centrifuges inside Fordow, what they call the IR-1. This last assumption is key and is in our favor. The IR-1 is not very efficient.” Aitan extended his next finger, his pinky finger now struggling to stay folded. “And finally, assume that they have a reasonably advanced implosion design that only needs twenty kilograms of ninety percent uranium.”

Raibani interjected. “How do you know the efficiency of their centrifuges?”

“Well, we have a lot of data on Natanz from both the IAEA and other sources. We know the statistics for the amount of base feedstock, the product, which has been three point five percent enriched uranium and the tail. We have even been able to get some of the tailings from Natanz to Dimona for analysis.” Aitan paused. The look in Raibani’s eyes asked the question that he didn’t need to verbalize. “Excuse me, I am hanging around with too many nuclear scientists and physicists these days. The tailings are the depleted uranium byproduct of the enrichment process.

“In a nutshell, you start with natural uranium ore which is ninety-nine point three percent uranium 238 and only seven-tenths percent uranium 235. For a weapon, you want uranium enriched to about ninety percent uranium 235. At Natanz, they use gas centrifuges which spin uranium molecules at a high speed. The heavier 238 molecules migrate to the outside of the centrifuge tubes and the lighter 235 molecules migrate toward the center of the tube. You then collect the separated molecules. The enriched 235 molecules are sent downstream and the depleted 238 molecules are sent back to repeat the process. Eventually the depleted uranium 238 is no longer needed and sent to storage in steel drums. This is the tail.
”

Aitan glanced at Zvi Avner. The defense minister very subtly rolled his finger, letting Aitan know to speed things up.
Aitan returned to the immediate question. “With those assumptions, if the Iranians start with one hundred twenty kilograms of twenty percent enriched uranium, they can produce twenty kilograms of ninety percent uranium inside Fordow in less than a month.” Yavi Aitan let that sink in for a moment. “If they can upgrade their centrifuges as they are trying hard to do – and we are trying hard to keep them from doing – the process inside Fordow would take under a week.” The room was quiet, each man’s thoughts lost in a different scenario. But each scenario had the same bad ending.

Aitan then added an exclamation point. “Keep in mind that it takes a lot more work to enrich raw uranium to twenty percent than to enrich from twenty to ninety percent. That is a simple mathematical consequence of how much uranium you are dealing with at each step in the process. I can illustrate this best by working backwards. You need about twenty kilograms of ninety percent U-235 for a warhead. To get that, you need to start with about one hundred twenty kilograms or so of twenty percent U-235. To get those one hundred twenty kilograms, you need to start with about four thousand kilograms of three point five percent U-235. And to get those four thousand kilograms, you need to start with at least twenty thousand and as much as twenty-six thousand kilograms of natural uranium, depending on th
e efficiency of your facility.”

Aitan paused briefly, allowing time for everyone to run the math through their heads. Then he continued. “Once Iran starts to enrich to twenty percent, which I expect to occur in the near future, I become very worried about their ability to break-out from there. At twenty percent, they will have done the hardest part of the enrichment process.”

Zvi Avner suppressed a smile. This was going better than he planned. “Thank you, Yavi. As usual, you have summarized the situation perfectly. We are indeed counting on the GBU-28, which I think everyone here knows has not yet been delivered to us.” Avner had returned to the script that was running through his mind. “But even if we had it in our inventory, it’s not capable of destroying Fordow. So when the Persians bring Fordow online in eighteen months or less, they are immune. We cannot destroy Fordow.”

Avner paused for effect before continuing. “We have been working with the Americans and independently to enhance the penetrating power of the GBU-28 with the use of depleted uranium and an alloy in the head of the bomb. But it appears the best that we wi
ll do is add about five meters.

“However, there is a new weapon the Americans are working on. They call it the massive ordinance penetrator, or MOP. Officially it’s the GBU-57 and it’s a beast. It weighs almost fourteen thousand kilograms and will penetrate the Fordow facility without a problem. It was first tested two years ago. But there is a hitch. We don’t have a bomber that can carry it. This …”

Cohen spoke up. “This is why the president politely refused to sell us this bomb. He said that since we don’t have the airplane that can deliver it, he couldn’t approve the sale to us.” Cohen simply shook his head as he thought about it. “The only good news is that I did get him to agree to accelerate the delivery of GBU-28s to us. God willing, we will finally receive these bombs sometime this summer.”

Avner was thinking of his next sentence when Cohen added another thought. “But I should be fair to the president. We discussed Fordow and he did agree to publicly reveal the site later this year if the next round of Geneva negotiations fail.” There was brief laughter which Cohen couldn’t ignore. “Hey, maybe we will get lucky and the president will be able to call me a putz.”

Raibani could not restrain his sarcasm this time. “And maybe Ahmadinejad will convert to Judaism.”

“Better chance of that, I think,” replied Cohen.

“So let me summarize our situation,” Zvi Avner continued. The pen in his hand slashed through the stale haze of the prime minister’s Cohiba cigar. “We have four primary targets and another two dozen secondary targets. Three of the primary targets all have underground components. We are relying on a weapon we do not yet have for the underground targets and even if we had this weapon, it will only work for sure against one of the three targets on our list. We face an integrated air defense network that will need to be suppressed in the first wave. The combination of air defense suppression and the number of targets means we will need virtually all of our F-15 and F-16 aircraft for the first sortie. Even with this, as we sit here now, we do not have a way to destroy Fordow or the Isfahan tunnels. In fact, we cannot destroy Natanz today – not until we get the GBU-28s delivered from the United States.

“By the time our air force returns to its bases in Israel, there will be rockets landing all over the country, including Tel Aviv. The people will be screaming for action against Hezbollah and Hamas. The cry will be even louder than three years ago. And even if you assume that we can go back to Persia for another sortie, this impacts our planning considerably. We have the ability to shut down the Persian air defense network in a way that leaves me confident for the first sortie, especially if we achieve tactical surprise. But the turnaround time is at best five hours. In those five hours, the Persians will regroup. They will repair anything we have done to them that they can repair and they will have units on alert that were asleep during round one. This means that when we go back, I will have to dedicate more aircraft to air defense suppression than during the first wave. With the loss of tactical surprise, I will have a much wider set of targets to deal with that have nothing to do with their nuclear program. I am saying that in the second wave we will be focused on airfields and C-two nodes that we can ignore if we are only over Persia one time. This will be the entire effort. So two times means we have to go back more times. In fact, if the plan from the start is that we are going to Persia more than once, it changes what we will do on the first sortie. The first wave will have to overwhelmingly be geared to suppression and destruction of
the defense network and C-two.

“As if that is not bad enough, I will point out the obvious if you are not already ahead of me. Every time we have to go back, we have to overfly at least two of our close Arab allies. How exactly do you think that will go over?” Avner answered his own question. “It is one thing for the Saudis to claim that they didn’t pick us up on radar as we sen
d four hundred planes over Persia, but I am quite sure that they will not be able to make that claim the second time around.”

It was Raibani who finally jumped in. “Your point is well made, Zvi. I have to say that the last issue is absolutely right. Politically, the Jordanians and Saudis won’t be able to make excuses for inaction more than once. And that assumes that the U.S. Air Force will be conveniently quiet as we fly – something that never concerned me until hearing today about the attitude of the new president.”

Avner nodded his head. He knew from experience that if he had sold Benjamin Raibani, then the prime minister was sold. And if the prime minister was sold, then the rest of the Kitchen Cabinet would be on board. “The reality is that to obtain our strategic objective we need multiple sorties,” Avner continued. “But we are clearly constrained to just one initial sortie.”

“So what are you saying?” Eli Cohen asked.

“I am saying, Mister Prime Minister, that we cannot achieve our strategic objective without the United States Air Force.”

“I can’t accept this,” said Mordechai Yaguda to the rest of the Kitchen Cabinet. Yaguda was a career politician, the scion of a famous politician from the founding of the country. At six-foot-three-inches, he was the tallest man in the room and carried himself in a manner that reflected his education at Cambridge and then Yale. The 59-year-old minister without a portfolio was a fixture in Israeli cabinets. His wife was 20 years his junior and a former model. The pair formed a power couple who spent as much time in the U.S. and Europe lobbying for Israel as they did in their home in Tel Aviv. He was the type of man everyone wanted to be friends with and he made a nice income serving on the boards of numerous public companies in the U.S. and Israel. His friends called him Mort. “Why are we limiting the first strike planning to only the IAF?” Yaguda  asked. He looked around the room, eager for support.

“What do you mean?” asked Cohen.

“Can we airlift troops into Iran? Can’t we take Fordow with troops and blow it up? Don’t we need to get creative here?”

All eyes turned to the defense minister. “Well, Mort, this is something I
have given a lot of thought to,” Avner replied. “Let me hand out the current strike summary.” Avner opened his manila folder and handed out six pieces of paper, each a copy of the summary page of the current state of planning for a strike on Iran’s nuclear program. “This assumes that we have the GBU-28. But this still doesn’t do anything with Fordow.”

Raibani now offered his opinion. “It seems to me that we have two options. We can go now before they finish Fordow or we can put soldiers on the ground in Iran to seize Fordow and destroy it. There is a large salt lake just north of the site. I’m sure we could land C-
130s there. We go in, blow it up and kill everyone we find. Then we get out. It’s Entebbe on a larger scale.”

“We have been racking our brains on this,” Avner replied. “This is very high risk. We know the Persians have thought of this.” In fact, Avner had been expecting this line of
discussion and was prepared. “Yavi, please update everyone on the state of Persian ground defenses at Fordow.”

“Sure.
” Yavi Aitan leaned forward in his chair as he gathered his thoughts. “Keep in mind that Fordow is an old military base and they have a small number of security troops based there. But that is changing rapidly. The Iranians have moved some command units and advance elements of the Mohammad Rasulollah Corps to Fordow. That is the premier Pasdarin unit, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It has the best equipment and training and is the largest of the thirty-two Pasdarin corps that are maintained. The Iranians are currently building housing and support facilities for a portion of this unit. The unit has a little over four thousand troops. We don’t yet know how much of the unit will move to Fordow, but we expect at least a full battalion. We think they will keep at least half the unit in Tehran, including its headquarters. But that is just a guess at this point. The Rasulollah Corps also has indigenous armored units, including twenty-eight T-72 tanks and fifty-eight BMP ones and twos. The bad news is that we think all of their armor will be moved to Fordow.

“Also, within three hours notice
, the Iranians can deploy a number of first-line Artesh units down from Tehran, including the 65th Airborne Special Forces Brigade. Artesh is regular army. In Qom, which is only an hour away, they have the Ali Ibn Abi Talib Corps, another premier Pasdarin unit, probably second only to the Rasulollah Corps. These units may not be on par with comparable IDF units head to head, but they are highly motivated fighters who will be defending their home turf. To underestimate any of these units would be a dangerous mistake.”

Avner jumped in to hammer home the point. “You don’t have to be a career officer to know that our troops would need to fight their way into Fordow and then fight their way back to any extraction point.” Avner was looking at Avi Gresch and Mort Yaguda. “We would have to figure out how to give our soldiers close air support. My assessment is that, assuming we have tactical surprise, we will probably be able to fight our way in and we might even successfully blow the chamber. But we will never fight our way back out. In my professional opinion, this would be a suicide mission.”

The room was quiet. Eli Cohen extinguished his cigar. This was the moment Avner had been waiting for. The defense minister cleared his throat. “There is a way to make this work,” he said. Cohen knew what was coming next. A week earlier, he and Avner had a heated discussion in private about this issue. Ben Raibani had already guessed Avner’s destination. But no one wanted to touch the topic, so Avner had free rein. “A low yield nuclear warhead could be attached to a GBU-28. We have been working on the design and I …”

“Insanity.” The voice was loud and powerful. Benjamin Raibani stood as he spoke the word. “The State of Israel would come to this? Becoming the first nation in sixty-five years to use a nuclear weapon in anger? If you think we are a pariah nation now, we will be absolutely alone.”

Cohen pondered stepping in but Raibani was saying what needed to be heard. Raibani was exactly the right man to react to Avner’s trial balloon. The Holocaust survivor – the only one in the room – continued. “I will not be party to such a decision. We will be viewed as the new Nazi state. This would galvanize the Arab world and we would lose even our hardcore Jewish support in America. We will have won the war and lost our souls in the process. And the future of Israel will be sealed.” His lips were quivering. It was the level of rage he was known for while he was a general but that had softened in the intervening years.

Raibani started to sit down, confident he had correctly punctuated his points. Half way through the motion, he abruptly stood again and looked down at Cohen to his right. “If you go forward with this, Mister Prime Minister, you will have my resignation in the morning.” He sat down in his chair.

At the far end of the table, Avi Gresch was emboldened by witnessing the side of Raibani he had never seen before. “And mine as well,” he stated, looking at Avner not Cohen.

These types of threats were not unusual in politics and Cohen was not surprised. But he wanted to stop this thought process before emotion became the only deciding force in the room. As he had done earlier, he raised his left hand and motioned, palm down, for everyone to
relax. His voice was calm. “I appreciate your views, Ben. But I am not sure I agree with your conclusions. You are free to follow your conscience and I respect that. Of course, if you choose to resign, we will need to devise an appropriate cover story.” The prime minister was calling Raibani’s bluff. He knew the man, and he knew that Benjamin Raibani had to be in this room and in the middle of this process while the State of Israel was discussing its very survival. As for Avi Gresch, Cohen didn’t care what he did and never gave him a thought.

“But before any decision is made,” Cohen continued, “what I want now is to have a rational discussion among this group of the pros and cons of this path. I will start.
Ben, you have passionately stated the downside. I cannot deny that this would galvanize the Arab street and severely hurt us with our allies. But I make the following points in favor: First, we need to strike every target on that list and destroy each one, especially Isfahan, Natanz, Arak and Fordow. Second, we have a high chance of evading Iranian air defenses on the first strike, but every return visit will put us at higher risk and we will suffer ever greater losses. And that is not to mention the political issues of overflight.” He gave a nod toward his defense minister. “Third, it appears to me that to destroy Natanz and Isfahan with its tunnel complex will require most, if not all, of our Ra’ams. So if we need to use GBU-28s elsewhere, it will be difficult. Fourth, we don’t have a weapon to destroy Fordow. Even if we can get one or two of this new bomb – what was it, the mop?” Avner nodded. “We don’t have a plane that can deliver it. Fifth, we could probably get troops into Fordow – I was thinking along the lines of a commando team infiltrated in – but I have to agree with Zvi. The odds of getting them home afterwards are very low. Sixth, when we go, we will face a massive barrage of rockets from Lebanon and from Gaza. So the army will need to be ready and it will need the IAF to support it. Seventh, the worst thing that can happen is to go and to fail to destroy their nuclear program. Eighth, using tactical nuclear weapons ensures that we will obliterate the primary targets. Ninth, we have the total support of every Arab leader other than Assad. Tenth, we will suffer losses in the retaliation. Our cities will be hit and our civilians will be killed. This will create sympathy. If we have a PR campaign ready to go, we will survive the initial onslaught of bad press.”

Benjamin Raibani was not the only one in the room to cringe in reaction to Cohen’s last point – it was simply too cold and calculating. But Raibani was the clear leader of the faction against this idea. He was now calm and ready to embrace this analytical challenge. “I can understand your point and I agree with the military issues. But when you suggest that a public relations campaign is all we need to overcome the fallout from this, then I tell you as my friend and my prime minister – with all due respect – that you are one hundred percent wrong. The moment the world hears that we have used a nuclear weapon for anything other than retaliatio
n, we will be completely alone.

“I will make a prediction, the president will, if we give him time, come around to support us. Why? Not because he will become your friend. Not because of A-I-
pac.” Raibani was referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the strongest pro-Israel lobby in America. “Not because he will become buddies with Lieberman or Dershowitz or any other Jew. But because the majority of Americans are on our side. But I tell you that the day we initiate the use of nuclear weapons, regardless of the reason, is the day the vast majority of Americans turn against us. And that is the day we lose the support of the U.S. And when we lose the U.S., Israel is doomed.”

Eli Cohen drank more water and let the wisdom of Raibani wash over him. His old friend was wise and he was persuasive. It was the reason Raibani was in the room. Cohen thought about the point Raibani could have made and didn’t. The America that will react to Israel’s first use of nuclear weapons will be led by the president he had been sitting with three days earlier.

Zvi Avner could see the tide turning in Cohen’s mind. He added his voice. “Okay, now I will review some facts. Persia’s program is massive. Once all of Natanz and Fordow is up and running, it is designed to create enough highly enriched uranium for up to ten warheads a year. They will soon have Arak online and producing plutonium. They are building ballistic missiles with greater range and greater accuracy. They are gearing up for a huge arsenal. And we all know that the Saudis will not stand by and watch this happen. They will start their own program. And we will re-start our warhead program. This is going to be a massive nuclear arms race in a part of the world that – let’s be honest here – only pauses to catch its breath between wars.

“And there will only be one sure loser in this equation. Ben, you say we are doomed when we lose American opinion. Well I say we are doomed when Persia has a nuclear arsenal
and the missiles to deliver them. For me, this is easy. Under your version of being doomed, we have to suffer the slings and arrows of nasty editorials – my apologies to Shakespeare. Under my version of being doomed, we will be nuked. I, for one, would rather deal with being a world pariah for a year or two than be the defense minister of Israel when Tel Aviv and Haifa are nuked into oblivion.

“And don’t sit here and tell me about mutually assured destruction and deterrence. Yes, we can nuke all of Persia into fused silicate, but every man in this room understands who Ahmadinejad is. Everyone has read his profile. Mossad’s conclusions are clear – and I agree with them. When that man has nuclear weapons, he will push to use them. Okay, maybe today Khamenei would stop him. But what about tomorrow? Everyone in this room should read about the Twelfth Imam believers. This guy is nuts and to sit here and let him get nuclear weapons when we can stop him is criminal.” Avner stopped. The arguments had been well made by both sides.

Once again the prime minister filled the void. “Thank you, Zvi. I think there is a lot of passion on both sides of this argument and that is how it should be. Now I need to use the rest room. Let’s take five minutes.” Prime Minister Cohen stood and walked out of the room.