Gideon's Spies полностью

Born in a village in the shadow of the Alborz, the fourth of seven children, he was a year old when his father, Ahmed, had moved the family to Tehran to work as a blacksmith. The specialists had pondered how much the poverty that had plagued his formative years had influenced his future career and shaped his radical views. The youth who had ranked 130th in the nation’s university entrance exam, sat by three thousand students, had become a committed campus activist during the reign of the shah and had gone underground from the regime’s dreaded Savak security service. After the shah was deposed Ahmadinejad had welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini as the country’s new ruler.

The wiry, gaunt-faced, heavily bearded youth with piercing coal black eyes became a familiar figure at Tehran’s University of Science and Technology (IUST) recruiting for his student organization, the Office for Strengthening. It became world famous when it held hostage American diplomats in their Tehran Embassy in 1979 for 444 days. Ahmadinejad displayed unusual political skills in exploiting the situation to humiliate the United States. In 2006, Ahmadinejad became the focus of intense speculation when a photograph was published that claimed to identify him as the ringleader of the hostage takers and that he had personally ill-treated their captives. The CIA established there was no truth in the allegation. Long before then, he’d obtained a doctorate in engineering, joined the Revolutionary Guards, and saw action in the Iran-Iraq War. In quick succession he became vice governor of the remote province Maku and then governor of the more important Ardabil Province. The mayor’s office in Tehran was his next goal, and he was elected in 2003 with a 12 percent turnout. He canceled many reforms introduced by his predecessor, emphasized the need for religious piety, and courted popularity by setting up soup kitchens for the city’s poor. It was the platform for his campaign to become president, offering “jobs for all and oil money on your tables.” The incumbent president, seventy-year-old Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was swept from power. The world watched and hoped that the forty-nine-year-old Ahmadinejad would continue the dialogue with the West over its fears that Iran’s quest for nuclear power was really a cover for producing nuclear weapons. Rafsanjani had indicated he was prepared to give the guarantees Washington and London sought and which Israel insisted on. But the first hint that the new president would not be so malleable came when he told a Tehran rally in October 2005 that he would “develop the most powerful of forces to give us everlasting power and peace—nuclear power.”

Since then every word Ahmadinejad had spoken, every diplomatic move he had made, every escalating threat against Israel he had delivered in the harsh tones of his mountain village dialect had been carefully studied by the Mossad specialists. His biography provided a useful means for them to explore what drove Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Part of it certainly was shrewd realpolitik, designed to win approval at home and to spread fear abroad. He understood the power of Iran’s oil resources on the global market and its rising price. He also saw America had been weakened by the insurgency in Iraq. He was equally as much an Islamic fanatic as Osama bin Laden and had latched on to the appeal for Muslim fundamentalists of demanding the elimination of Israel and being a Holocaust denier. In all this Ahmadinejad was not an original thinker; many of his ideas came from radical Islamic scholars who had long advocated jihad against Israel and the West. Ahmadinejad continued to use the Koran to reach out to pious Muslims yet maintained his appeal to Iran’s militant youth. To them he emphasized the religious authority for all he said, none more so than invoking a lethal “Prophet’s Tradition” against all Jews and their motherland.

Increasingly the specialists saw an issue of major concern was whether Ahmadinejad would realize his idea of Armageddon across the Middle East—and possibly soon. On that New Year’s Day they knew whether Israel would be forced to launch a preemptive attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities would depend on their analysis.