In the fading daylight of an October afternoon in 2005, an Israeli air force plane landed at a high security airport near Beijing. The flight had been specially arranged for Meir Dagan, the sole passenger on board. Only Prime Minister Sharon and members of the Committee of the Heads of Service knew the purpose of his long journey across Asia.
The Mossad station chief in Moscow had obtained evidence that former members of the Russian armed forces had supplied rocket technology to North Korea, enabling the pariah state to build missiles capable of striking not only Israel but all the capitals of Europe. Even more worrying was that the Pyongyang regime had secretly passed on the technology to Iran, immensely boosting its already formidable military capability. In the past month North Korea’s state-owned Chongchengang Arms Corporation, which had brokered the deal with the Russians, had sent tanker planes to Iran loaded with liquid propellant needed to drive the rockets. Each missile was designed to carry a 1.2-ton payload, more than sufficient to reduce Tel Aviv to a wasteland. One of the rockets, the Taep’o-dong 2, could reach America’s West Coast when launched in the Pacific from one of the Soviet SSN-6 submarines Moscow had sold to North Korea in 2003.
Even more disturbing was a later report from a Mossad undercover agent stationed in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The city had long been a haven for spies from all over the world, who were on the constant lookout for refugees from the north who could provide inside information or, more important, who had worked in the secret military programs of North Korea. For weeks the agent had been cultivating a defector who had worked as a production manager at Factory 395 near the town of Jaijin in the far northeast of the country. He had not only provided details of the missile guidance systems being produced but also information about the scores of other factories in the regime’s industry to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. All told, over two hundred thousand people were employed in producing nuclear materials, and chemical and biological weapons. The defector revealed that at Factory 395, its missile guidance systems were capable of delivering warheads filled with chemical and biological agents. His duties had included buying electronic equipment made in a factory outside Nagasaki. Its salesmen regularly traveled to Factory 395. Their names had been passed to Mossad’s Asia Desk and in turn to its station in Tokyo: the possibility of recruiting a salesman as an informer was an enticing one.
The defector had described the all-too-familiar story of the regime’s oppression: dawn roundups, families set to spy on each other, starvation and abuses of power by those who were favored by the regime. The slightest indiscretion was severely punished. Men had been shot after defacing one of the portraits of the country’s leader, which adorned every public place. Women had been taken by the police to their barracks and gang-raped. Some had committed suicide afterward. The names of some of those who had been brutalized and those of their torturers, along with the places where the brutality had occurred, had been recalled by the defector. At the factory he had witnessed a woman being roasted in an electric oven and a man being beaten to death with steel rods. Both had been caught trying to smuggle out food from the factory kitchen.
The Mossad agent’s report had included details of how the Taep’o-dong 2 missile had been modified by North Korean technicians so it could fire the rocket from a land-based transporter. The vehicle had been dismantled and flown to Tehran. With it had gone a warhead designed to carry a biological weapon.
The details had been sent to Washington. Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, had flown to Moscow to protest to President Vladimir Putin about the situation that had resulted from the initial sale of Russian technology to North Korea. She had met with the cold response to direct her protest to North Korea. Dr. Rice had flown to London and discussed the matter with Prime Minister Tony Blair to see what diplomatic pressure could be jointly exerted by Britain and the United States on Iran. He had favored referring Iran to the United Nations Security Council. John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, had publicly announced that he had evidence that Iran was determined to produce nuclear weapons, which could be used to intimidate the Middle East and Europe and to “possibly supply terrorists” with the missiles. His statement was largely based on the Mossad report from Seoul.
