A separate report on the table before the intelligence chiefs was from Israel’s own atomic experts. They estimated between fifteen hundred and two thousand centrifuges would create sufficient enriched uranium to manufacture one atomic bomb a year, and that could come as early as 2007, when the Natanz nuclear facility’s centrifuges would all be fully operational.
Dagan revealed that Mossad had discovered Ali Shamkhani, Iran’s defense minister, was in secret discussions with Syria to move eleven Iraqi nuclear scientists from Damascus to Tehran. They had arrived in Syria shortly before the collapse of the Saddam regime, bringing with them CDs of their research on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program. In Syria the scientists had been given new identities and hidden away in a military base north of Damascus. Syria’s president, Bashir Asad, made one stipulation for the transfer to Iran: it must share its nuclear research with Syria. It could provide al-Qaeda with the basis to make a dirty bomb—yet another threat the men around the table had long feared.
Six years before, on April 21, 1999, over a hundred Israeli sailors had checked into small hotels and
Thirty-two years before, their predecessors had performed a similar function to smuggle seven gunboats out of Cherbourg, which had been paid for but which the French government of the day had embargoed after Israeli commandoes had destroyed thirteen Lebanese aircraft at Beirut airport—itself a reprisal for a PLO attack on an El Al 707 at Athens airport two days’ previously.
The decision to create Force 700 had come only much later, when Israel had placed an order with the Howaldswerke Deutsche Werft shipyard for three Dolphin-class submarines, among the most modern afloat, each displacing 1,720 tonnes and costing US$300 million apiece. The arrival of the sailors in Kiel on a warm spring day was surrounded with even more secrecy than Operation Noah had used to smuggle the gunboats out of France.
Critical to the Kiel operation had been keeping secret that among the thirty-five Israeli naval officers and ratings for each submarine were five specialist technicians who would be responsible for firing the nuclear weapons each submarine would carry if the order was given. These armaments would be fitted when the boats reached Haifa.
The three Dolphins left Kiel and headed for Haifa where specially prepared pens awaited them. For the next six weeks they were fitted with an adapted version of the Promis software that had been developed by Inslaw, the specialist Washington-based company. The software would allow each submarine to locate and destroy a target up to one thousand miles away. Promis was also programmed to probe defenses around a target and calculate the complex mathematics that would ensure a direct hit. After the software had been installed, each submarine was equipped with twenty-four cruise missiles. Fitted with nuclear warheads, each missile would have a destructive power greater than the Hiroshima bomb. Test firings, using dummy warheads, had been successfully carried out in the Indian Ocean.
Now, on that March day in 2005, the three Dolphins were directed to take up station on the seabed in the Persian Gulf and target Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The matter of
The head of the Research and Political Center raised other considerations. How would America, Britain, and the rest of the world react to such a strike? There were now powerful voices in the United States and Europe who would launch a verbal onslaught against Israel because an attack on Iran would create an environmental catastrophe on a par with the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986. Israel could find itself politically and economically isolated in the world.
