For Meir Dagan the situation was starkly clear. Iran was positioning itself to expand its influence through what could be a pincer movement by Hamas and Hezbollah—the war on two fronts the intelligence chief had long feared. Success for Tehran would mean for the first time since the seventh century its direct power would have extended to the shores of the Mediterranean. If Israel were to launch a preemptive strike—under the guise of being the regional champion of western democracy at the frontline in the fight against political Islam—it might earn the approval of the Bush administration, but it would leave Israel exposed to fierce criticism elsewhere. Meir Dagan’s advice to Olmert was that Israel should continue to “wait and see.” In the meantime, two of his predecessors, Efraim Halevy and Meir Amit, also started to sound a warning.
After four years at the helm, Efraim Halevy had departed as Mossad’s spymaster as quietly as he had arrived. Within Mossad ranks, the memory of his studious presence—his thin lips pursed before speaking, his eyes impassive behind his spectacles—had been largely forgotten. Those who did remember him on the upper floors spoke of Halevy as the man who spectacularly failed to lead the service into the new millennium and failed to make it a force to be reckoned with. In 2008 he published his memoir of those days,
In between time spent in London to launch his book and talking to Nathan, the Mossad station chief, he spoke to the author about his belief that the United States and Britain would have to “make fateful decisions” concerning their Middle East policies. “In Iran and Iraq they cannot simply gather their troops and head for home. They must adopt a firm exit strategy, one that will need a positive contribution from Israel. That will mean being sensitive to our interests and visions.” He concluded by delivering a grim warning: “We are looking down the barrel of World War Three unless the world wakes up.”
Shortly afterward, Meir Amit, now a member of Israel’s leading think-tank spoke out (to the author): “Israel must continue to take strong measures to defend itself. Terrorism is like a cancer, spreading silently and effectively. No nation can fight it alone. Saddam Hussein is yesterday’s monster. But we have a new one in Iran, whipping up the Shia revolutionary hurricane that will soon engulf Israel and, left unchecked, will engulf the world beyond our borders.”
The first breeze of that hurricane was already starting to blow across the Gaza Strip.
A reminder of the constant terrorist threat to Israel came when Swiss intelligence, working closely with a Mossad agent in the country and officers of France’s SDEC, disrupted a well-prepared plot to shoot down an El-Al passenger plane with a rocket propelled grenade as it flew in to land at Geneva airport. Documents recovered from the seven Algerians responsible showed the plot had been masterminded from Madrid. Shortly before the attack, its two al-Qaeda operators had returned to North Africa.
But cooperation did not always run so smoothly. Meir Dagan received a report from his Mossad agent in New York of a closed-door discussion between foreign ministers after intelligence predictions. These suggested that Iran was, in May 2006, “possibly only a year away from producing a nuclear device.” Tension erupted at the meeting when Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, verbally attacked the U.S. state department official, Nicholas Burns, who was the senior adviser to the meeting’s host, Condoleezza Rice. Lavrov accused Burns of “seeking to undermine our efforts to resolve the crisis with Iran.” Ministers from Britain, France, Germany, and China, all members of the United Nations Security Council, were stunned at Lavrov’s outburst in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel suite where they had gathered. The Mossad agent’s report offered a revealing insight into the back-room disagreement of high-level diplomacy.
