Now, on that July day in 2006, as the giant aircraft made its long journey to Israel, Mossad’s station chief in Washington had sent Meir Dagan the latest denials by both Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice that they intended to run in the 2008 presidential campaign. Of more immediate interest to the Mossad chief were the details of a most secret plan Dr. Rice had reluctantly helped to create with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. The plan was the underlying reason for her visit. On the surface it was to once more explore the prospects of a ceasefire. In reality it was to discover if the Israeli Air Force attacks on Hezbollah had been so successful they could serve as a blueprint for an attack on Iran. Dr. Rice had initially been nervous about launching such an assault. Did she now feel the same? Meir Dagan had become convinced—and told Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as much—that the secretary of state was not merely nervous, but had started, according to the Mossad station chief in Washington, to “agitate inside the administration” to be allowed to go to Syria to try and persuade President Bashar al-Assad to order Hezbollah to stop its onslaught. But a Mossad agent in Damascus had, shortly before the 747 aircraft touched down at Ben Gurion airport, discovered that President al-Assad refused to meet her.
A further indication of President Bush’s hard-line thinking had come from Richard Armitage, who had been deputy secretary of state in Bush’s first term. Armitage had described Hezbollah as “maybe the A-team of terrorists. Israel’s campaign on Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. If the most dominant military force in the region, the Israeli Defense Force, cannot pacify a country like Lebanon, you should think carefully about taking the template to Iran with its population of seventy million. The only effect that the Israeli bombing has achieved is to unite the Muslim world against the Israelis.”
Condoleezza Rice had come to explore again what she thought, according to one source, “could be a solution. It was to form a Sunni-Arab coalition with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt that would win the support of Britain and Europe to unite and bring pressure on the Shia mullahs in Iran.” But to achieve that, the source acknowledged, would require the removal of Hezbollah as a threat to Israel. Dr. Rice knew the hope of such plan for a coalition of what she called “like-minded Arab states” had been dented when the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saudi al-Faisal, had come to Washington early in the war and told President Bush to “intervene immediately to end this conflict.” Predictably, Bush had demurred.
All these issues formed a backdrop to Dr. Rice’s discussions in Israel. Those who attended, including Meir Dagan, listened intently to a woman who combined elegance—her weekly hairdo in her apartment in Washington’s Watergate Center cost $500—with a steely determination. “Her smile never quite reached her eyes. We remembered that when, for instance, it came to push and shove between Blair and Rice, Bush always chose her view. With Blair now a lame-duck prime minister, her mood was that he didn’t really matter anymore,” recalled one of those who attended the meetings.
While those discussions went on, so did the war. The dead and the dying, the homeless and the bereaved in northern Israel and up through southern Lebanon to the suburbs of Beirut continued to grow. And elsewhere, other developments required Meir Dagan to shift the focus of Mossad’s attention.
A Mossad undercover agent in Tehran had established that the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA), the extreme Irish terror group, was providing Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard with expertise on how to make ultra-sophisticated roadside bombs. The agent tracked the Irish bomb-makers to three factories in the Lavizān suburb in northern Tehran. Adapted to be fired from anti-tank missiles, the bombs were made from concave steel or copperplate. When fired, they traveled at two thousand meters per second and could penetrate ten centimeters of armor at a distance of one hundred meters. The missiles had already destroyed several Israeli tanks in Lebanon.
Earlier in 2006 the six-man CIRA team had traveled from Dublin to Frankfurt and onward to Damascus. From there they were brought in an Iranian military aircraft to Tehran. The bomb-makers had been recruited to provide expertise in how to make and disguise infrared triggering devices. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the success of roadside bombs had left dozens of British soldiers dead or injured. The bombs were also used to topple buildings and bring terror to the streets of Belfast and other cities in the province.
