It was against this background that Olmert appointed his air force chief, Major General Elyezer Shkedy, to be overall commander for a new department within the IDF. It was to be called “The Iran Front.” Its task was two-fold. First, to task Mossad in obtaining “all possible intelligence from within Iran by all possible means.” In turn that information would form part of a working battle plan. On Shkedy’s appointment, his first visitor had been Meir Dagan. For several hours, Shkedy, the forty-nine-year-old son of Holocaust survivors—whose prized possession was a picture of an Israel F-15 flying over Auschwitz—spelled out his requirements. Dagan asked what was the timeframe. Shkedy replied, “the list of options is becoming shorter. But on present calculations there may be a year before we have to decide.” That decision, of course, would not be finally made in Israel. It would ultimately come from Washington, made by the Pentagon and delivered from the Oval Office by President George W. Bush. He had already told his inner cabinet—Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice—that Israel was “singing from the same hymn sheet as we are. We have no argument about Iran’s intentions. It’s going to do all it can to go nuclear.”
In the meantime in Tehran, Mohammed-Reza Bahonar, the deputy speaker of Iran’s parliament and a staunch ultra-conservative supporter of President Ahmadinejad, warned that Iran would pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “if our patience finally runs out with the international community, our country may have to produce nuclear weapons as a defense measure.”
In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan told his own senior staff that “once more the clock is moving closer to midnight.”
In London another clock had stopped, at least for the moment: the long-awaited report into the death of Princess Diana nine years before had gone into limbo. The Royal Coroner, Dr. Michael Burgess, who knew the contents of the report by Lord Stevens, had astonishingly resigned, deciding he was “too busy” to preside over the most significant and high-profile case of his or any coroner’s life. In a letter to interested parties, including Prince Charles and Mohamed al-Fayed, the mild-mannered Burgess had written about “my heavy and constant workload.” As the ninth anniversary of Dodi al-Fayed and the Princess’s death were marked by the annual surge of visitors to the midnight car crash location in Paris, the questions continued to be asked and the speculation was rampant. Had Dr. Burgess refused to continue because there was pressure upon him to declare the crash had been nothing more than a tragic accident? Or had he resigned because he would not discount that murder had been committed—and that powerful figures in the intelligence world and in Britain’s Royal Family had exerted their combined influence to dismiss any suspicion of foul play? More certain is that if there was finally to be an inquest it would require months of searching for a replacement for the sixty-year-old Burgess. By August 2006, it had appeared that Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, had been unable to find one. Lord Stevens, who had headed the inquiry into the two deaths, knew that any new coroner would have to read a massive dossier to familiarize himself with its myriad contents numbering ten thousand pages. That would take many months. The experienced Stevens knew that the moment any fresh legal figure examined the results of his team’s two-and-a-half-year investigation he would be “bound to want supplementary inquiries to be made.” That would, one of his handpicked detectives told the author, “add another year or even more to our work.” Privately Lord Stevens has told friends that the inquiry “could go on for years.”
In September 2006, a date for when the inquest might take place was put at the earliest 2007, possibly 2008. Even then, asked the conspiracy theorists, would
