The answers were not reassuring. The signs were that the doctrinal, cultural, and political differences between the Sunni Hamas and the Shia Hezbollah were being buried in the common cause to destroy Israel. Bashar al-Assad, who has a powerful resemblance to his father—the same high forehead and piercing eyes—had begun to try and steer Syria clear of the theocratic militancy of Iran his father had supported, but in the complex religious map of the region, the al-Assads are members of a minority Shia sect in a predominantly Sunni majority Syria. But increasingly the new power of the Iraqi Shia—65 percent of the population—had allowed Iran to profit enormously from their dominant role in that chaotic country. A Mossad report revealed: “Iraq’s Shia leaders regularly visit Tehran to settle issues such as border security and developing joint energy projects. Iranian businessmen are investing heavily in Iraq’s overwhelmingly Shia southern regions and Iran’s highly skilled intelligence operatives are embedded in Iraq’s nascent security forces and within the Shia militias who rule the streets of Basra.”
Even more worrying for Israel, Mossad undercover agents reported the growing presence of those spies in the Hezbollah strongholds in the Beka’a Valley. It was there that the organization was believed to have stockpiled its growing supply of missiles and rockets supplied by Iran. One Mossad report put the figure at 18,000. This number included the Katyusha rockets made in Russia, which have a range of fifteen kilometers. More powerful were the Iranian-built Fajr-3 missiles, almost six meters long, which have a range of almost forty kilometers. Most powerful of all were Iran’s version of a Scud missile, the Shabtai-1. They could reach any Israeli city. When Iraqi Scuds rained down on Haifa and Tel Aviv during the Desert Storm conflict in 1991 (see chapter 16, “Spies in the Sand”), hundreds of buildings were destroyed and scores of civilians injured. One of Mossad’s
Meir Dagan was a good example that much intelligence is anti-historical because it uses stratagems to frustrate the truth as well as unearth it. Facts are often directed toward some distant, unwritten goal, and it is the highest purpose of any intelligence to leave complicity hidden and ambiguous. At the Mossad training school, the Sources and Methods class reminds students that they cannot simply adhere to the historian’s discipline; that a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque, but he must control it so absolutely to work only with the material on hand and refrain from supplementing deficiencies with additions of his own. But the class instructor explained that in intelligence work the deficiencies are precisely what is expected to be supplied. “Action cannot wait for certainty. Motive deception will be at the center of their endeavors. They will create situations to draw fact out of the darkness. The art of informed conjecture will be part of their skills, but always to be used within the range of probability. Their writ will confine them to the realm of surmise,” one of the instructors told the author.
Those finely-honed skills had served Meir Dagan well. Now they went into overdrive after Mohammad Khatami, a senior member of the Iranian leadership, in the second week of May described Hezbollah as “the sun of Islam who will soon shine even brighter.” A few days later President Ahmadinejad ended another of his anti-Semitic harangues to a Tehran crowd with the promise: “We shall very soon witness the elimination of the Zionist state of shame.” Was this merely more rabble-rousing rhetoric? Or was it finally the precursor of what Dagan had long predicted: an attack on Israel on two fronts—Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah coming out of the olive and banana groves of south Lebanon and the Beka’a Valley? And would that be the moment Iran would mobilize its Revolutionary Guards and would al-Qaeda seize the opportunity to marshal its untold numbers of jihadists throughout the Muslim world. To try and find answers Meir Dagan had sent encoded priority signals to Mossad stations across the Middle East to report signs of mobilization. Then he refreshed himself on Hezbollah and its previous methods.
