The International Fugitive: Secrets Of Clandestine Travel Overseas

The International Fugitive: Secrets Of Clandestine Travel by Kenn Abaygo

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Some claimed to have seen him disguised as an Arab, leisurely riding a donkey in the treacherous Gaza alleys. His infirmity didn't coolhis determination to carry out the most dangerous operations. His views were simple. There are enemies, bad Arabs who want to kUlus, so we have to kill them first. Within the unit, Dagan created "Rimon," the first undercover Israeli commando unit, which operated in Arab disguise deep in enenty strongholds. In order to move freely in Arab crowds and reach their targets undetected, they had to operate in disguise.

They quickly became known as "Arik's hit team" and rumors had it that they often killed captured terrorists in cold blood. Sometimes, it was said, they escorted a terrorist to a dark alley, and told him "Y u've got two minutes to escape"; when he tried, they shot himdead. Sometimes they would leave behind a daggerora gun, and when the terrorist reached for it, he would be killed on the spot. Joumalists wrote that, every morning, Dagan would go out to the fields, use one hand for peeing and the other for shooting at an empty Coke can. Dagan dismissed such reports.

Almost every night Dagan 's people donned women's or fishermen's disguises and went in search of known terrorists. In mid-January , posing as Arab terrorists in the north of the Strip, they lured Fatah members into an ambush, and in the gunfight that erupted, the Fatah terrorists were killed. On January 29, , this time in uniform, Dagan and his men traveled in two jeeps to the outskirts of the JabaUa camp a Palestinian refugee camp. Their paths crossed with a taxi, and Dagan recognized, among its passengers, a notorious terrorist, Abu Nimer He ordered the jeeps to stop and his soldiers surrounded the cab.

Dagan approached, and at that moment Abu Nimer stepped out, brandishing a hand grenade.

Staring at Dagan, he pulled its pin. For that action he was awarded the Medal of Courage. It's been claimed that after tossing away the grenade, Dagan killed Abu Nimer with his bare hands. It was not the Wild West, where everybody was trigger-happy. We never harmed women and children. We attacked people who were violent murderers. We hit them and deterred others. To protect civilians, the state needs sometimes to do things that are contrary to democratic behavior.

It is true that in units like ours the outer limits can become blurred.

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That's why you must be sure that your people are of the best quality. The dirtiest actions should be carried out by the most honest men. D emocratic or not — Sharon, Dagan, and their colleagues largely annihilated terrorism in Gaza, and for years the area became quiet and peaceful. But some maintain that Sharon half-jokingly said of his loyal aide: He was bom MeirHuberman in in a train car, on the outskirts of Herson, in the Ukraine, while his fainily was escaping from Siberia to Poland. Most of his family had perished in the Holocaust.

Meir immigrated to Israel with his parents and grew up in a poor neighborhood in Lod, an old Arab tovm about fifteen miles south of TelAviv. Many knew him as an indomitable fighter; few were aware of his secret passions: He was a man haunted froman early age by the terrible suffering of his family and the Jews during the Holocaust. He dedicated his life to the defense of the newbom State of Israel.

As he climbed the army hierarchy, the first thing he did in every new office he was assigned to was to hang on the wall a large photo of an old Jew, wrapped in his prayer shawl, kneeling in front of two SS officers, one holding a bat and the other a gun. In the Lebanon War, he entered Beirut at the head of his armored brigade. He soon became the commander of the South Lebanon security zone, and there the adventurous guerrilla fighter reemerged from the starched colonel's uniform He resurrected the principles of secrecy, camouflage, and deception of his Gaza days.

His soldiers came up with a new name for their secretive chief. They called him "King of Shadows. In he was officially reprimanded by Chief of Staff Moshe Levy for hanging out, dressed as an Arab, by the Bahamdoun terrorist headquarters. During the Intifada the Palestinian rebellion of , when he was transferred to the West Bank as an adviser to Chief of Staff Ehud Barak, Dagan resumed his old habits and even convinced Barak to join him The two ofthemdonned sweat suits, as befit true Palestinians, found ababy-blue Mercedes with local plates, and went for a ride in the treacherous Nablus Kasbah.

On their retum, they scared and then astonished the Mihtary Headquarters sentries, once the latter recognized who was sitting in the front seat. In , Dagan, nowa major general, left the army and joined his buddy YossiBen-Hanan on an eighteen-month motorcycle journey across theAsian plains. Back in Israel, Dagan spent some time at the head of the antiterrorist authority, made a halfhearted attempt to join the business world, and helped Sharon in his Likud electoral campaign. Then, in , he retired to his country home in Galilee, to his books, his records, his palette, and his sculptor's chisel Thirty years after Gaza, a retired general, he was now getting acquainted with his family — "I suddenly woke up and my kids were grovm-ups already" — when he got a phone call fromhis old buddy, now prime minister, Arik Sharon.

The last head of the Mossad, EfraimHalevy, didn't live up to expectations. A former ambassador to the European Union in Brussels, he was a good diplomat and a good analyst, but not a leader and not a fighter. Sharon wanted to have at the head of the Mossad a bold, creative leader who would be a formidable weapon against Islamic terrorismand the franian reactor. Dagan was not welcomed at the Mossad. An outsider, focused mostly on operations, he didn't care very much about learned intelligence analyses or secret diplomatic exchanges.

Several top Mossad oflBcers resigned in protest, but Dagan didn't much care. He rebuilt the operational units, established close working relations vidth foreign secret services, and busied himself with the Iranian threat. When the second, disastrous Lebanon War erupted in , he was the only Israeli leader who objected to the strategy based on massive bombardments by the air force.

He believed in a land offensive, doubted the air force could win the war, and came out of the war unblemished. Still, he was much criticized by the press for his tough attitude toward his subordinates. Frustrated Mossad officers, who were retired, ran to the media with their gripes, and Dagan was under constant fire. And then, one day, the headlines changed.

Flattering articles loaded with superlatives filled the daily papers, lauding "the man who restored honor to the Mossad. They vanished after the killing, long before the arrival of the police. The victim was Darioush Rezaei Najad, a thirty-five-year-old physics professor and a major figure in Iran's secret nuclear weapons program. He had been in charge of developing the electronic switches necessary for activating a nuclear warhead.

Rezaei Najad was not the first Iranian scientist who had recently met a violent end. Officially, Iran was developing nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and they claimed that the Bus hehr reactor, an important source of energy built with Russian help, was proof of their good intentions. But in addition to the Bus hehr reactor, other clandestine nuclear facilities had been discovered, all heavily guarded and virtually inaccessible.

Overtime, Iran had to admit the existence of some of these centers, though they denied allegations of developing weapons. But by then, Westem secret services and local underground organizations had e? In Iran, what could only be identified as "unknown parties" waged a brutal war to stop the secret nuclear weapons program On November 29, , at seven forty-five a. As he passed the car, the helmeted motorcyclist attached a device to the car's rear windshield. Seconds later, the device cjqDloded, killing the forty -five-year-old physicist and wounding his wife.

Fereydoun Abas si-Da vani, another major nuclear scientist. The explosion wounded Abas si-Da vani and his wife. The Iranian govemment immediately pointed its finger at the Mossad. The roles these two scientists played in Iran's atomic weapons project were veiled in secrecy, but Ah Akbar Salehi, the head of the project, declared that the attack had made a martyr of Shahriyari and deprived his team of its "dearest flower" President Ahmadinejad, too, expressed his appreciation of the two victims, in an ingenious way: The men who attacked the scientists were not found.

On January 12, , at seven fifty a. He was on his way to his lab at the Sharif University of Technology. When he tried to unlock his car, a huge ejqjlosion rocked the quiet neighborhood. The security forces that rushed to the scene found Mohammadi's car shattered by the blast and his body blown to pieces.

He had been killed by an explosive charge, concealed in a motorcycle that was parked by his car The Iranian media claimed that the assassination had been carried out by Mossad agents. President Ahmadinejad declared that "the assassination reminds us of the Zionist methods. But Mohammadi's life, like his death, was shrouded in mystery. Several of his friends maintained that he was involved only in theoretical research, never with military projects; some also claimed that he supported the dissident movements and had participated in antigovemment protests.

Yet it tumed out that about half of those present at his fianeral were Revolutionary Guards. His coffin was carried by Revolutionary Guard officers. Subsequent investigations ultimately confirmed that Mohammadi, indeed, had been deeply involved in advancing Iran's nuclear ambitions.

In January , Dr. ArdashirHosseinpourwas allegedly killed by Mossad agents with radioactive poison. News of the assassination ran in the Sunday Times in London, citing information from the Texas-based Stratfor strategy and intelligence think tank, franian officials ridiculed the report, claiming that the Mossad could never carry out such an operation inside Iran, and that "Professor Hosseinpour suffocated by inhaling fiimes during a fire in his home. But it tumed out that Hosseinpour worked at an Isfahan secret installation where rawuraniumwas converted into gas.

This gas was then used for uranium enrichment by a series "cascades" of centrifuges in Natanz, a faraway, fortified underground installation. In , Hosseinpour was awarded the highest franian prize for science and technology; two years earlier, he had been awarded his country's highest distinction for military research.

The assassinations of franian nuclear scientists were just one front in a much larger war According to the Daily Telegraph in London, Dagan's Mossad had rolled out an assault force of double agents, hit teams, saboteurs, and front companies and brought their strength to bear over years and years of covert operations against fran's nuclear weapons program Stratfor's director of analysis, Reva BhaUa, was quoted as saying: In its purported war against the franian nuclear program, Dagan's Mossad was effectively delaying the development of an franian nuclear bomb for as long as possible, and thereby thwarting the worst danger to Israel's existence since its creation: Ahmadinejad 's threats that Israel should be annihilated.

Yet these small victories cannot atone for the worst mishap in Mossad's history — its failure to expose fran's secret nuclear project at its outset.

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For several years now Iran had been building its nuclear might — and Israel had no clue, fran invested huge sums of money, recruited scientists, built secret bases, carried out sophisticated tests — and Israel had no idea. Fromthe moment Khomeini's Iran decided to become a nuclear power, it used deception, ruses, and stratagems that made fools out of the Westem secret services, the Mossad included. Iran's shah, Reza Pahlavi, started building two nuclear reactors, both forpeacefiil and military purposes.

The shah's project, begun in the s, didn't cause any alarm in Israel; at the time, Israel was Iran's close ally. According to the minutes of their confidential meeting, Weizman offered to supply Iran with state-of-the-art surface-to-surface missiles, while the director general of the ministry. Pinhas Zusman, impressed Toufanian by saying that the Israeli missiles could be adapted to carry nuclear warheads. But before the officials could act on theirplans, the Iranian revolution transformed Israeli-Iranian relations.

The revolutionary Islamic government massacred the shah's supporters and tumed against Israel. The ailing shah escaped iromhis country as it fell under Ayato Hah Khomeini's control and into the hands of his loyal mullahs. Khomeini put an immediate end to the nuclear project, which he considered "anti-Islamic. But in the s, a bloody war erupted between Iraq and Iran. SaddamHussein used poison gas against the Iranians. The use of nonconventional weapons by their vilest enemy made the ayato Uahs rethink their policy. Even before Khomeini's death, his heir apparent, Ali Khamenei, instructed his military to develop new weapons — biological, chemical, and nuclear — to fight back against the weapons ofmass destruction that Iraq had unleashed on Iran.

Soon after, complacent reUgious leaders called from their pulpits to discard the ban on "anti-Islamic" weapons. Fragmentary news about Iran's efforts started spreading in the mid-eighties. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in , Europe was inundated by rumors about Iran's attempts to buy nuclear bombs and warheads fromunemployed officers or famished scientists in the former Soviet military estabMshment. The Western press described, in dramatic detail, the disappearance of Russian scientists and generals fromtheir homes, apparently recruited by the Iranians.

Reporters with fertile imaginations wrote about sealed trucks rushing eastward fix mEurope, bypassing border controls to reach the Middle East. Sources in Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing revealed that Iran had signed an agreement with Russia for building an atomic reactor in Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf coast, and another agreement with China, for building two smaller reactors. Alarmed, the United States and Israel spread teams of special agents through Europe on the hunt for the Soviet bombs sold to Iran and the recruited scientists.

They came up with nothing. The United States put great pressure on Russia and Qiina to cancel their agreements with fran. China backed off, and canceled its franian deal. Russia decided to go ahead but kept delaying it. The reactor took more than twenty years to build and was limited in its use by strict Russian and intemational controls.

But Israel and the United States should have expanded their search when the leads went cold. The heads of both the Mossad and the CIA failed to realize that the Russian and Chinese reactors were just diversions, a smoke screen for "the world's best secret services. In the fall of , a secret meeting was held in Dubai. Eight men met in a small, dusty office: The representatives of fran and Pakistan signed a confidential agreement. A large sumofmoney was transferred to the Pakistanis, or — more precisely — to Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the head of Pakistan's official nuclear weapons program A few years before, Pakistan had launched its own nuclear project, to achieve military equality with its archenemy, India.

Khan badly needed the fissile substances necessary for assembling a nuclearbomb. Yet he chose not to make use of plutonium, which is harvested in the classic nuclear reactors, but to utilize enriched uranium Mined uranium ore contains only 1 percent of uranium, which is vital for the production of nuclear weapons, and 99 percent uranium, which is useless.

Khan developed a method for converting the natural uranium into gas, and feeding this gas into a line of centrifuges connected in a chain, called a cascade. With the centrifuges chuming the uranium gas at a mind-boggling rate of , spins a mmute, the lighter uranium separates from the heavier uranium By repeating that process thousands oftimes, the centrifuges produce an enriched uranium This gas, when converted into solid matter, becomes the substance needed for a nuclear bomb.

Khan had stolen the centrifuges' blueprints fromEurenco, a European company where he worked in the early s, and then started manufacturing his own in Pakistan.

Khan soon tumed into a "merchant of death," selling his methods, formulas, and centrifuges, fran became his major client. Libya and North Korea were also clients. The Iranians bought centrifuges elsewhere, too, and then teamed how to make them locally. Huge shipments of uranium, centrifuges, electronic materials, and spare parts arrived in Iran now and then. Large facilities were built for the treatment of raw uranium, for storing the centrifuges, and for converting the gas back to solid matter; Iranian scientists traveled to Pakistan and Pakistani experts arrived in fran — and nobody knew.

The franians were carefiilnot to put all their eggs in one basket. They dispersed the nuclear project among places spread throughout their country, in mifrtary bases, disguised laboratories, and remote facilities. At even a hint that a location night be ejq osed, the franians would move the nuclear installations elsewhere, even removing layers of earth that could have been irradiated by radioactive substances. They also skillfully misled and deceived the inspectors of the Intemational Atomic Energy Agency, fts chairman, the Egyptian Dr Mohamed El-Baradei, behaved as if he believed every false statement of the Iranians, and published conplacent reports that enabled fran to continue with its deadly scheme.

On June 1, , the American authorities saw the true extent of the Iranians' work for the first time. He ejq osed Dr. Khan, described meetings in which he had participated, and named Pakistani ejq erts who had taken part in the franian project. The facts and figures of Chaudhry's testimony were checked by the FBI and found to be accurate. The FBI indeed recommended that Chaudhry be allowed to stay in the United States as a political refugee — but his amazing testimony was never given any foUow-up. Perhaps out of sheer negligence, American higher-ups buried Chaudhry's transcripts, initiated no action, and did not warn Israel.

International Fugitive: Secrets of Clandestine Travel Overseas by Kenn Abaygo

Four more years had to pass until the truth about fran would come to light. Suddenly, in August , the franian dissident underground, Mujahedeen elKhalq MEK , revealed the existence of two nuclear facilities in Arak and Natanz to the world media, fri the foUovraig years, MEK kept disclosing more facts about the Iranian nuclear project, which aroused some suspicion that its information came from outside sources. The CIA was still skeptical and assumed that the Israelis and the British were trying to involve the United States in hazardous operations. Specifically, the QA appeared to believe that the Mossad and the British MI6 were feeding MEK intelfrgence they had obtained, using the Iranian opposition as ahopefixlly credible source.

According to Israeli sources, it was, in fact, a watchful Mossad officer who had discovered the mammoth centrifuge installation at Natanz, deep in the desert. That same year, , the Iranian underground handed over to the CIA a laptop loaded with documents. The dissidents wouldn't say howthey had got hold ofthe laptop; the skeptical Americans suspected that the documents had been only recently scanned into the computer; they accused the Mossad of having shpped in some information obtained from their own sources — and then passing it to the MEK leaders for delivery to the West.

But other evidence now was piling up on the desks of the Americans and the Europeans, who finally had to open their eyes. The rumors about Dr Khan's lucrative and deadly trade spread all over the world. Finally, on February 4, , a tearful Dr. North Korea, and Iran, making millions in the process. The Pakistani govemment hastened to grant full pardon to "Dr Death," the father of their nuclear bomb. Israel now became a major source of information about Iran.

Meir Dagan and his Mossad provided U. But merely obtaining such intelligence would not suffice for Israel While a fanatic Iran threatened it openly with annihilation, the rest ofthe world recoiled fromany vigorous action. Israel was left with no choice but to launch an all-out undercover war against the franian nuclear program After sixteen years of colossal ignorance by his predecessors, Dagan decided to act. In January , a plane crashed in central fran. All its passengers perished. Among them were senior officers in the Revolutionary Guards, including Ahmed Kazami, one of their commanders.

The franians maintained that the crash was due to bad weather, but the Stratfor group hinted that the aircraft had been sabotaged by Western agents. Only a month before, a military cargo plane had crashed into an apartment building in Tehran. All ninety-four passengers died. Many were also officers in the Revolutionary Guards and influential pro-regime journalists. In November , another military aircraft crashed during takeoff from Tehran — and thirty-sixRevolutionary Guards were killed. On national radio, the franian minister of defense declared, "According to material from intelligence sources, we can say that American, British, and Israeli agents are responsible for these plane crashes.

He believed that Israelperhaps might have no choice but to finally launch a ftill-scale, all-out attack on Iran. But such an action, Dagan thought, should only be a last resort. The sabotage began in February The intemational press reported an explosion in a nuclear facility at Dialemthat had been hit by a missile fired from an unidentified plane. And that same month an ejplosion tookplace close to Bushehr, in a pipeline supplying gas to the Russian-built nuclear reactor Another facility to be attacked was the test site Parchin, close to Tehran.

A large crowd of scientists, technicians, and the heads ofthe nuclear project gathered underground, where thousands of centrifuges were churning around the clock. In a celebratory mood, they came to watch the first test of activating a new centriftige cascade. Everyone waited for the dramatic moment when the centrifuges would be started. The chief engineer pressed the activation button — and a powerful ejplosion shook the huge chamber. The pipes blew up in a deafening blast, and the entire cascade shattered. Furious, the heads ofthe nuclear project ordered a thorough investigation. CBS reported that the centrifuges had been destroyed by tiny explosive charges attached to them shortly before the test.

It also claimed that Israeli intelligence had assisted American agents in causing the Natanz ejqalos ion. In January , again, the centrifuges became the target of a sophisticated sabotage. The Westem secret services had established Eastern European front conpanies that manufactured insulation material used in the ducts between the centrifuges. The Iranians couldn't buy theirs on the open market, because ofthe limitations imposed on themby the UN; so they turned to bogus Eastem European companies run by Russian and Iranian exiles, who were secretly working for the Westem intelhgence agencies.

Only after the insulation was installed did the franians find that it was defective and couldn't be used. By May , President George W. Bush had signed a secret presidential order authorizing the CIA to initiate covert operations to delay Iran's nuclear project.

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Soon after, a decision was made by some Westem secret services to sabotage the supply chain of parts, equipment, and raw materials forthe project. In August, Dagan met with U. Undersecretary of State Nicolas Bums to discuss his strategy toward fran. Mishaps, sabotage, ejqjlosions have kept occurring in installations throughout Iran during the last seven years.

The CIA also helped protect themfromprosecution by the Swiss authorities for illegal traffic with nuclear components. The father, Frederic Tinner, and his two sons, Urs and Marco, had sold the Iranians a faulty installation for electric supply to the Natanz facility, which destroyed fifty centriftiges. Time magazine asserted that the Mossad was involved in the hijacking of the ship Arctic Sea, which had sailed fromFinland to Algeria with a Russian crew and under a Maltese flag, carrying "a cargo of wood.

Only aftera month did the Russian authorities declare that a Russian commando unit had taken over the ship. The London Times and the Daily Telegraph maintained that the Mossad had sounded the alarm Dagan's men, they said, had informed the Russians that the ship was carrying a cargo of uranium, sold to the Iranians by a former Russian officer But Admiral Kouts, who leads the fight against piracy in the European Union, offered Time magazine his own version. Between and , in total secrecy, they built a new installation close to Qom They planned to install three thousand centriftiges in the new underground halls.

However, in mid, the Iranians realized that the intelligence organizations ofthe United States, Britain, and Israel had full knowledge ofthe Qomplant. Iran reacted right away. Some sources claimed that the franians had caught a Westem spy possibly a British MI6 agent , who had gathered reliable information about Qom; so they disclosed its existence to diminish their embarrassment.

A month later, CIA director Leon Panetta told Time that his organization had known of Qom for three years and that Israel was involved in its detection. The Qomdiscovery permitted a glimpse into the secret alliance that had been forged between three groups engaged in the battle against Iran: According to French sources, the three services were acting together, with the Mossad carrying out the operations inside Iran, and the CIA and MI6 helping the Israelis. The Mossad was responsible for several explosions in October , in which eighteen Iranian technicians were killed at a plant in the Zagros Mountains that assembled Shehab missiles.

With the help of its British and American allies, the Mossad had also eliminated five nuclear scientists. This alliance had been established largely by the efforts of Meir Dagan. From the moment he became the director of Mossad, he had been pressuring his men to establish close cooperation with foreign secret services.

His aides advised him against revealing the Mossad secrets to foreigners, but he brushed off their arguments. In unusual press conferences held outside of Iran, leaders of the Iranian National Council of Resistance revealed the name of the leading scientist in the Iranian project. His identity had so far been kept secret. Mohsen Fakhri Zadeh, forty-nine years old, was a physics professor at the Tehran University. He was said to be a mysterious, elusive man. Fakhri Zadeh specialized in the complexprocess of creating a critical mass inside the atomic device to trigger the chain reaction and the nuclear e55 losion.

His team was also working on the miniaturization of the bomb, to fit it in the warhead of the Shehab missile. Following these revelations, Zadeh was denied entry into the United States and the EU, and his bank accounts in the West were frozen. The resistance described in detail all his fimctions, disclosed the names of the scientists working with him and even the location of his secret laboratories.

This abundance of detail and means of transmission leads one to believe that, again, "a certain secret service" ever suspected by the West of pursuing its own agenda, painstakingly collected these facts and figures about the Iranian scientist and passed them to the Iranian resistance, which conveyed them to the West. General AU Reza Asgari, a former Iranian deputy minister of defense, vanished in February while traveling to Istanbul He had been deeply involved in the nuclear project. The Iranian services searched for him all over the world but couldn't find him.

Almost fouryears later, in January , Iran's foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, tumed to the UN secretary general and accused the Mossad of abducting him and jailing himin Israel. But according to the Sunday Telegraph in Lxtndon, Asgari had defected to the West; the Mossad had planned his defection and had taken care of his protection in Turkey. Other sources maintain that he had been later debriefed by the CIA and supplied them with valuable information about Iran's nuclear program. A month after Asgari's disappearance — in March — another senior Iranian officer vanished.

Amir Shirazi served in the "Al Quds" unit, the elite force of the Revolutionary Guards, charged with secret operations beyond Iran's border. An Iranian source revealed to the London Times that besides the disappearances of Asgari and Shirazi, another high-ranking officer had vanished: In July , the nuclear scientist ShahramAmiri joined the list of defectors. Amiri, who was employed at Qom, disappeared in Saudi Arabia during a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Iranians demanded that the Saudis find out what had happened to him.

CIA sources disclosed he had been an informer to Westem intelligence for years and had suppHed them with "original and substantive" intelligence. Amiri revealed that the Malek-Ashtar University of Technology, where he had taught, served as an academic cover for a research unit designing the warheads for the Iranian long-range missiles; Fakhri Zadeh headed that university.

After a year in America, Amiri changed his mind and decided to go back to Iran. He supposedly couldn't cope with the stress ofhis new life. In a homemade video, shown on the Intemet, he claimed he had been abducted by the CIA; a few hours later, he posted another video, disclaiming the first, and then produced a third video, disclaiming the second. He got in touch with the Pakistani embassy, which represented Iranian interests in the United States, and asked to be sent backto Iran. The Pakistanis helped; in July , Amiri landed in Tehran. He appeared at a press conference, accused the CIA of kidnapping and mistreating him — and disappeared.

In December , Iran had arrested ten suspects for spying for Israel and the United States; three worked inside the nuclear installations. In , the Iranians announced that they had dismantled another Mossad cell: In November , they hanged forty- three-year-old Ali Ashtari, who was found guilty of spying for Israel In the course ofhis trial, he admitted meeting three Mossad agents in Europe. They were said to have given himmoney and electronic equipment. On Decenijer 28, , in the grim courtyard of Evin prison in Tehran, Iranian officers hanged another spy, Ali-Akbar Siadat, who had been found guUty of working for the Mossad and supplying it with information about Iran's military capabilities and the missile program operated by the Revolutionary Guards.

Iranian officials promised that more arrests and executions would follow. But was the year of the greatest setback for the Iranian nuclear project. Was it because of the lack of high-quality spare parts for the Iranian equipment? Because of the faulty parts and metals that Mossad's bogus companies sold to the Iranians? Because ofplanes crashing, laboratories set on fire, ejq losions in the missile and nuclear installations, defection of senior officials, deaths of top scientists, revolts and upheaval among the minorities ' groups — all those events and phenomena that Iran correctly and incorrectly attributed to Dagan 's people?

Or was it because of Dagan 's last "major coup," according to the European press? In the summerof , thousands of computers controlling the Iranian nuclear project were infected with the perfidious Stuxnet virus. Labeled one of the most sophisticated in the world, Stuxnet struck computers controlling the Natanz centrifuges and wreaked havoc. One of the virus's distinctive features was that it could be targeted to a specific system, causing no harm to others en route. Its presence in a corifiuterwas also difficult to detect. Once in the Iranian system, it could modify the speed of rotation of a centrifuge, making its product useless, without anyone being aware of it.

Observers spoke of two countries as having the ability to carry out such cyberattacks: The truth, though, was that at the beginning of , about half of Iran's centrifuges were immobilized. Dagan's people allegedly delayed Iran's nuclear weapons program with their incessant attacks on so many fonts over so many years: But they couldn't permanently stop it, no matter how good they were, nor how much cooperation they had. At best, he could slow down the Iranians. Only an Iranian government decision or a massive attack from abroad can put an end to the Iranian dreamof creating a formidable nuclear giant where the Persian Empire once stood.

And yet, when Dagan was appointed ramsad the abbreviation for rosh hamossad — head of the Mossad , experts predicted that Iran would reach nuclear capacity in ; the date was later moved ahead to , , And when Dagan left office on January 6, , he had a message for his country: Only when the dagger blade starts cutting into our flesh, he said, should we attack; that dagger blade remains four years away. Dagan served as ramsad eight and a half years — more than most Mossad directors.

He was replaced by Tamir Pardo, a veteran Mossad oflBcer who started his operational career as a close aide to Yoni Netanyahu, the hero of the Israeli raid in Ritebbe, and later distinguished himself as a daring agent, an expert in new technologies, and a creative planner of unusual operations.

When passing the torch to Pardo, Dagan spoke of the terrible solitude of the Mossad agents operating in enemy countries, when they have no one to turn to, no one to rescue themin case of need. He also candidly admitted some of his failures; the most important being lack of success in finding the place where Hamas was hiding the Israeli soldier Qlad ShaUt, kidnapped five years ago.

ShaUt was later released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian terrorists. Yet, despite such failings, Dagan's achievements honor him as the best ramsad so far Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked him "in the name of the Jewish people" and hugged him warmly. In an unprecedented, spontaneous reaction, the Israeli cabinet ministers stood up and applauded the sixty-five-year-old ramsad.

Bush saluted him in a personal letter But the most important tribute to Dagan came a year before, from a foreign source, the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, a newspaper known for its virulent and hostile criticismof Israel. Every senior franian leader knows that the key word is 'Dagan. He works quietly, far from the media attention.

But in the last seven years he has landed painful blows on the franian nuclear project and stopped its advance. And in their first year, these modest and devoted undercover fighters, the nascent military secret service, were shaken by violence, intemal strife, cruelty, and murder in what became known as the Be'eri Affair. His bushy eyebrows shielded dark, cavernous eye sockets, and a sardonic smUe often hovered over his thin lips. Bom in Poland, he was reputed to be an ascetic, a modest man of flawless integrity; but his rivals claimed he was a dangerous and fierce megalomaniac. A longtime member of the Haganah, Big Is ser was the director of a private construction company in Haifa.

He was a loner, silent and unsociable, and lived with his wife and son in a small, windswept house in the coastal village of Bat Galim Shortly before the creation of Israel, Be'eri had been appointed head of the Shai by the commanders of the Haganah. When independence was declared, on May 14, , Israel was attacked fromaU sides by its neighbors, and Be'eri became the head ofthe newbom military secret service.

Be'eri was active in the left wing of the Labor movement and had excellent political connections. His friends and colleagues praised his devotion to the defense of Israel The Independence War would go on until April Yet, soon after Be'eri became head of the secret service, strange, blood-curdling events — seemingly unrelated — started to happen. A couple of hikers on Mount Carmel made a grisly discovery. In a deep guUy at the foot of the mountain they found a half-burned body riddled with bullets. It was identified as a well-known Arab informant ofthe service.

Ah Kassem His assassins had shot him, and then tried to bum his body. Great Britain had been the ruling power in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel; the Haganah carried an underground struggle against its restrictions on the Jewish community. British intelligence had frequently tried to plant their spies inside the Jewish leadership. But Abba Hushi, a pillar of the Jewish community and the charismatic leader of Haifa's workers — a traitor? At first, Israel's leaders who were in the know indignantly dismissed Be'eri's accusation.

But Be'eri had found two confidential telegrams sent by British intelligence fromHaifa's post office in May He laid themon Ben-Gurion's desk — irrefutable evidence of Hushi's treachery. At the same time, Be'eri ordered the arrest of a fiiend of Hushi's, Jules Amster Be'eri had Amster brought to a salt deposit in AtUt, outside Haifa, had himbeaten and tortured for seventy-sbcdays, and pressured him to admit that Hushi was a despicable traitor Amster refiased to yield, and was finally released, a broken man. His teeth were gone, his legs were covered with wounds and scars, and he was haunted foryears by fear On June 30, , while shopping at a Tel Aviv market, army captain Meir Tubiansky was arrested and brought to Beth Giz, a recently occupied Arab village.

It was suspected by military intelligence that Tubiansky, while in Jerusalem, had disclosed top-secret information to a British national, who, in his turn, had passed it to the Arab Legion, Jordan's army. The Jordanian artillery, acting on that information, had heavily shelled several strategic targets throughout Jerusalem. In a summary court-martial that lasted less than an hour, Tubiansky was accused of being a spy forthe Arabs, found guilty, and sentenced to death. A hastily assembled firing squad executed him in front of a group of stunned Israeh soldiers.

Tubiansky would be the only person ever ejsecuted in Israel, beside Adolf Eichmann. Inquiries into the deaths and torture led investigators to the perpetrator: He filmed Abba Hushi. According to several investigators. Big Is ser had a personal score to settle with Hushi. He might have succeeded if the main forger in the employ of the service, besieged by guilt, hadn't confessed to his superiors that he had falsified the telegrams implicating Abba Hushi, under Be'eri's direct orders.

And Be'eri had also been the one who had ordered the hasty arrest and the execution of Captain Tubiansky. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion acted immediately. Be'eri was tried in a military court, then in a civil one, stripped of his rank, dishonorably discharged from the IDF, and found guilty in the deaths of AU Kassem and Meir Tubiansky.

Israel's leaders were flabbergasted. Be'eri's methods seemed taken straight from the infamous KGB; his sinisterpersonaUty, his orders to forge, torture, and murder were a stain on the moral and humane principles on which Israel had been founded. The Be'eri affair left a gruesome scar on the secret service and had a profound impact on its evolution. If, in wartime, the civil leaders had recoiled from condemning Be'eri, Israel's secret service might have assumed a totally different character It might well have become a KGB-like organization for whom filming, forgery, torture, and murder were routine practices.

Instead, in the fiiture, Be'eri's methods would be forbidden. The secret service placed limits on its own power and based its fiature operations on legal and moral principles that would guarantee the rights of individuals. With the removal of Be'eri, another man stepped onto the center stage of Israel's shadow world, Be'eri's polar opposite: R euven Shiloah, forty, soft-spoken, secretive, was a man of ntystery.

He had come froma rich culture, possessed a sharp, analytical mind, an in-depth knowledge of the Arab Middle East, its tribal traditions, ruling clans, fleeting alliances, and blood feuds. One of his admirers called him "the queen in Ben- Gurion's chess game" while he served as political adviser to David Ben-Gurion. Some compared him to the wily Cardinal Richelieu of France; others saw him as a subtle manipulator, a master puppeteer, a man who knew how to puU strings behind the scenes.

Shiloah had been active, all his life, in secret missions and undercover work. The suave, urbane son of a rabbi, Shiloah had been bom in Old Jerasalem Always formally dressed, the trim, balding young man had set out on a mission to Baghdad, long before the creation of Israel He had spent three years in fraq, posing as a joumahst and a teacher and studying that country's politics. He helped create two such special Jewish commando units: He also convinced the British to parachute Jewish volunteers fromPalestine into occupied Europe, to organize local Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

On the eve of Israel's Independence War, he traveled to the neighboring Arab capitals in secret and brought back a priceless trophy: Shiloah's compulsive need to act under a thick cloak of secrecy became a source of myriad legends. His friends used to joke that once he haUed a taxL "Where to? Shiloah answered; "It's a state secret. It was one of several quasi-independent intelligence groups created before the birth of Israel. But on December 13, , Ben-Gurion issued an order to establish "an institute in Hebrew, mossad to coordinate state intelligence agencies," to be headed by Reuven Shiloah.

Yet it tooktwo more years of delays and disputes before the Mossad could be created. One intelligence unit, called the political department, whose members had been gathering intelligence abroad, enjoying generous ejqsense accounts and a glamorous lifestyle, revolted and refused to continue spying for Israel when they heard of the plan to disband their unit and incorporate it into the Mossad. Only after they were reprimanded — and most of themfired — could Shiloah create the Mossad.

Its title would eventually be changed to the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, and its motto chosen fromProverbs Shiloah was determined to confer upon it an exceptional feature. The Mossad would not only be the long arm of Israel, but also the long arm of the entire Jewish people. At a meeting of his first recruits, the ramsad declared: Young militant Jews were surreptitiously brought to Israel and trained by the army and Mossad, weapons were smuggled into unstable or enemy countries and hidden, local Jews were organized into defense units to create forces able to defend the Jewish community fromattacks by a mob or by irregular armed groups — at least until help came fromgovemment forces or international organizations.

In the fifties, the Mossad brought to Israel tens of thousands of inperiled Jews from the Arab countries in the Middle East and Morocco; and years later, in the eighties, it was again the Mossad that organized the rescue of Jews trapped in Khomeini's Iran and carried out the mass exodus of Ethiopia's Jews to Israel. But during its first undercover operation in Iraq, disaster struck. In the large Baghdad department store OrosdiBak, on Rashid Street, a young man named Assad was manning a necktie counter.

A Palestinian refugee, he had left his home in Acre after the Israeli army had captured that city. Shortly before leaving Israel, he had done a favor for his cousin who had fallen iU, by taking his place as a waiter in a cafe near the military governor's compound. For a week, Assad had walked the corridors of the military governor's building, carrying an omate brass tray and serving tiny cups of strong Turkish coffee to Israeli army officers.

May 22, , he was observing the customers walking through the store, when he noticed a familiar face. It can't be, he thought at first; it's impossible! Assad urgently alerted the police. Right here in Baghdad! The fraqi detectives brutally interrogated Moshe about the man who had been identified as Israeli. Moshe stuck to his story: In the dark cellars of police headquarters, the interrogators strung up Moshe by his feet and then by his hands, beat him, and threatened to kill him.

But their seedy prisoner seemed to knownothing. After a week of torture, the Iraqis decided that NissimMoshe was a nobody and released him. The other prisoner kept repeating he was Iranian, named Ismail SaUiun, and he showed his captors his Iranian passport; but they continued torturing him. He didn't look Iranian, and he didn't speak a word of Persian. Finally, they set up a confrontation between him and Assad, the Palestinian who had identified him.

He broke down and confessed: The detectives dragged him to his apartment, broke the fiimiture, probed the walls, and then discovered a cache of documents — a voluminous file taped to the bottom of a drawer in his desk. And the nightmare began. Not only for Taggar, but for the entire Baghdad Jevidsh community. Several clandestine Jewish and Israeli organizations operated in Baghdad, including an illegal emigration unit, a self-defense group, and a few Zionist and youth movements.

Some had been created even before the birth of the State of Israel. Around Baghdad, in several caches, weapons and documents were stocked, some within the central Mas 'uda Shemtov synagogue. The recent additions to these groups were a few espionage networks, hastily established prior to the creation of the Mossad; compartmentalization was almost nonexistent, and the fall of one could easily bring down all the others. The fraqi Jews sat on a powder keg: Every member of the secret Jewish networks knew that the Iraqis would show no mercy, and his life would hang on a thread.

For that reason, Yehuda Taggar had been sent there to detach the espionage network from all the others. A former officer in the Palmach elite forces, Taggar was twenty-seven and sported a rebel forelock and a ready smUe. This was his first mission abroad, and prior to his capture he had done his best to isolate the network he led from the other groups, but some of his own men nonetheless still took part in other secret activities; another Israeli with a genuine British passport, Peter Yaniv Rodney the Hindu , ran a separate network but remained in contact with Taggar Taggar's communications to Tel Aviv passed through the top commander of all the groups operating in Baghdad: His cover name was Zaki Haviv, but he was really Mordechai Ben-Porat, an fraqi-bom Israeli, a former officer during Israel's Independence War He had been loath to go back to Baghdad and was on the verge of getting married to a girl he had met in the army, but finally yielded to the pressure of the intelligence community and undertookthis perilous mission.

In the days following Taggar's arrest, the entire secret organization crumbled. Iraqi special police units arrested scores of Jews. Some broke down under interrogation and led their captors to their hideouts. The fraqis discovered documents that linked certain Jews to espionage. Under the flagstones of the Shemtov synagogue, the police uncovered a huge cache of weapons, built up over the years, starting after a bloody pogromin in which Jews had been slaughtered, 2, wounded, and hundreds of women raped.

The number of weapons found amazed the fraqis: During the ferocious fraqi interrogation, a name popped up more and more frequently: Zaki Haviv, the mysterious top man of the underground.

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But who was he? Finally, a smart young detective made the connection: Zaki Haviv had to be none other than NissimMoshe, the self-effacing fellow who had been arrested with Taggar and then released. A manhunt of epic proportions was conducted throughout Baghdad, but Zaki Haviv had vanished. Actually, he was in the one place the police hadn't dreamt of searching. A couple of days after his release fix mthe initial arrest with Taggar, Ben-Porat was awakened by a loud pounding on his door. Ben-Porat thought that was his end. The house had no back exit, and there was no one in Baghdad who could save him now.

And he knew, for a man in his position, there could be only one verdict in the Iraqi courts ; the gallows. He resigned himself and unlocked the door Two police officers were outside. He had forgotten all about the accident in which he had been involved some months earlier. He had ignored the court summons, and now was going to face Iraqi justice. The trial was swift, barely an hour The judge sentenced him to two weeks in jail. And so, while an army of Iraqi agents were on full alert, searching for him, Zaki Haviv was paying his debt to society in a Baghdad jail.

Prior to his release two weeks later, he was being taken to headquarters to be fingerprinted and photographed. He knew that if that were to happen, he was doomed. They would then be able to identify him as Zaki Haviv, and this time it would not be a two-week sentence. He walked with his two guards along Baghdad's streets to the headquarters, at some distance. En route they passed through the crowded Shurja souk, an exotic market crammed with tiny dark shops, merchants screammg the praise of their wares, and narrow, crooked alleys.

At what he hoped was the right moment, Ben-Porat pushed his guards aside, dove into the crowd, and vanished. The cops didn't even try to chase him. After all, he was due to be released in less than an hour, so why bother? But when they reported the incident, allhell broke loose. They had let Zaki Haviv, the most wanted man in Iraq, go! The opposition press found out and attacked the government's ineptitude with screaming headlines. While he hid at a friend's house, the daring plan was put into action.

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At that time, a mammoth airlift was underway, bringing the entire Jewish community fromlraq to Israel, via Cyprus. About , Jews were fleeing fraq, with big planes taking off almost every night. On the night of June 12, Ben-Porat put on his best clothes and hailed a cab. His friends had drenched him with arrack — the local liquor — and, reeking of alcohol, he collapsed on the backseat of the taxi and feigned sleep. The driver helped his drunken fare out and into a back street near Baghdad airport, and left. Once alone, Ben-Porat hurried to the airport fence — he knew exactly where it had been cut — and slipped inside.

On the tarmac, a plane had just finished loading its emigrants and was taxiing on the runway. Suddenly the pilot aimed his lights at the control tower, momentarily blinding the air controllers. The plane gathered speed, its rear door slid back, ten feet aboveground, and a dangling rope appeared.

Coming out of the dark, Ben-Porat darted toward the plane, grabbed the rope, and was hauled into the aircraft, which immediately took off. Neither ground crews nor passengers noticed this escape, which seemed taken straight from an action movie. As the plane passed over the city, its lights flashed on and off three times. Their fiiend was safe and on his way. A few hours later, Haviv, indeed, was in Tel Aviv. He married his sweetheart, and in the years that followed tumed to politics, became a member of parliament, a cabinet minister, and today is a venerated leader of the Iraqi Jews in Israel.

Those left behind were not so fortunate. Scores of Jews were arrested, beaten, and tortured. Taggar and twenty-one others were tried for subversion. Shortly before his trial was to start, Taggar was awakened in the middle of the night, his cell frill of policemen. We know all about you already, you're an Israeli officer, you're a spy — we don't need anything more.

At three thirty in the moming, the officers took Taggar to the execution chamber He walked between them, stunned. Only weeks ago he had been visiting his family in Jerusalem, then on his way here he had enjoyed the pleasures of Paris and Rome. And now he was going to dangle from the end of a rope. The fraqis made him sign several forms — bureaucracy at work, even at such a time — then the hangman took away his rings and watch. Taggar demanded that his body be sent to Israel. The hangman made him stand over a trapdoor and tied sandbags to his feet. He was forced to tum his back to the hangman, who placed the noose on his neck and grabbed the handle controlling the trapdoor Taggar rejected the black hood that they tried to puU over his head.

The hangman now looked at his commanding officer, standing with several others in front of the man who was going to die. Taggar thought of his family, of his native Jerusalem, of the life he could have had. Will my neck be broken? And then, all of a sudden, the officers left. If you follow the advice in this book you will likely end up dead or in custody, tread lightly Mark Mirabello rated it really liked it Apr 21, Craig rated it really liked it Oct 26, Marls rated it liked it Mar 17, Kayla marked it as to-read Jan 17, Jay Manning marked it as to-read Feb 23, Zsolt marked it as to-read Feb 26, Lakshya Raj marked it as to-read Nov 26, Aadil marked it as to-read Dec 15, Jasper added it Jan 18, Tony Boyles added it May 28, Dan marked it as to-read Jun 26, Robert marked it as to-read Aug 17, Jimmy marked it as to-read Dec 19, Jess Zerr marked it as to-read Feb 07, John Aceto marked it as to-read Sep 21, Shahid Ameen added it Sep 28, Meryki marked it as to-read Sep 18, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

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• Wonderful Ways to Be a Stepparent
• The Weasel: A Double Life in the Mob
• Fuentes del yo: La construcción de la identidad moderna (Spanish Edition)
• Where to Pee on a Pirate Ship (For ages 10 and up)
• Above and Beyond
• Les 100 mots de la Provence: « Que sais-je ? » n° 3882 (French Edition)