Plans had been finalized. Fifty Alsatian dogs would spearhead the attack on Natanz, the nuclear bomb-making complex ninety miles northeast of Tehran. The animals would be fitted with body belts of armor-piercing explosives able to penetrate the entrance to underground laboratories where Mossad’s deep-cover agents had established thousands of centrifuges—the crucial device essential to produce weapons-grade uranium—were working around the clock. The dogs had been trained at an exact replica of the Natanz site constructed in the Negev Desert. Their handlers were part of the elite
While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continued to threaten Israel would be “wiped from the map,” Meir Dagan chaired a “crisis meeting” in the Kirya in early January to study the latest satellite pictures from Israel’s own spy in the sky. The images showed the completed construction of a large new underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Accompanying the images were new reports from Mossad deep-penetration agents in Iran and other Arab capitals. The meeting had been asked to assess the fallout from a preemptive strike against Iran. It was accepted that a wave of terrorism would follow. Hezbollah would launch rockets from Lebanon. Arab nations would publicly condemn. But Mossad chief Dagan said his intelligence predicted that Arab nations, while publicly condemning, would be “relieved that Iran’s fangs had been drawn.” The meeting was told that two more Chinese air force transport aircraft landed at a military airfield near Natanz and unloaded crates of the state-of-the-art centrifuge known as P-2. It is designed to interconnect 164 centrifuges to form a “cascade.” Gas is spun at high speed in a cascade to weaponize uranium 235 to the same capability as the Hiroshima bomb. Both China and North Korea in the past have provided Iran with nuclear-weapons technology. Pakistan’s maverick scientist, A. Q. Khan, the “father of the Islamic bomb,” later sold designs and nuclear components to Iran and other rogue states.
Mossad chief Dagan told the defense chiefs at the Kirya meeting: “Our latest intelligence shows that scientists at Natanz have begun to produce weaponized uranium. That means our original estimate that Iran would go nuclear in five years has been cut in half. We are at three minutes to midnight.” In May 2006, Dagan cut the estimate to possibly a year—one minute from midnight. Against this background the Mossad specialists continued their analysis of a man who had emerged from the shadows of Iranian politics to become a major threat to world peace. Increasingly Ahmadinejad appeared to believe he had a sense of divine mission. He had told his people he felt “the hand of God” continued to guide him after he had first threatened Israel. In December 2005, when an aircraft crashed in Tehran, killing 108 people, the president had thanked the dead “for they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow.” He daily expressed his devotion to the Mahdi, the Messiah-like figure of Shia Islam, who would return to lead the Muslim world to freedom. All streams of Islam believe in a divine savior whose return would be preceded by cosmic chaos and widespread war. The vision is similar to the Christian version of Apocalypse. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed the Mahdi would return in his own lifetime and that he had been given the task of creating chaos to hasten his arrival. He had opened the New Year with another virulent threat to destroy Israel and had exulted at the renewed fears across the world his words had generated. Was that why he had even welcomed a conflict with Israel and the United States—because he saw it as the launchpad for the Mahdi to appear? These were the questions the specialists studied but could as yet find no conclusive answers for.
As the meeting in the Kirya conference room came to an end, Meir Dagan reminded the others around the table of some of the last words Ariel Sharon had spoken before he had been rushed to hospital with a stroke: “Israel cannot, and will not, allow a nuclear-equipped Iran.” Then the Mossad chief had left the room to update himself on the medical drama that had cast a great shadow over Israel’s hopes for the New Year.
