Mossad

by Michael Bar-Zohar

On November 12, 2011, a tremendous explosion destroyed a secret missile base close to Tehran, killing seventeen Revolutionary Guards and reducing dozens of missiles to a heap of charred iron. General Hassan Teh- rani Moghaddam, the "father" of the Shehab long-range missiles, and the man in charge of Iran's missile program, was killed in the explosion. But the secret target of the bombing was not Moghaddam. It was a solid-fuel rocket engine, able to carry a nuclear missile more than six thousand miles across the globe, from Iran's underground silos to the U.S. mainland.

The new missile planned by Iran's leaders was to bring America's major cities to their knees and transform Iran into a dominant world power. The November explosion delayed the project by several months.

the explosions that destroyed the Iranian base were probably set by the Israeli Secret Service, Mossad. Since its inception more than sixty years ago, Mossad has served fearlessly and secretly against the dangers threatening Israel and the West.

Waging a stubborn shadow war against Iran by sabotaging nuclear facilities, assassinating scientists, supplying plants with faulty equipment and raw materials via bogus companies, organizing desertions of high-ranking military officers and major figures in nuclear research, introducing ferocious viruses into Iran's computer systems, Mossad allegedly is fighting the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, and what that would mean for the United States and the rest of the world.

On February 12, 2008, according to the Western media, Mossad agents ambushed and killed Imad Mughniyeh, the military leader of Hezbollah, in Damascus. Mughniyeh was a sworn enemy of Israel, but he was also number one on the FBI's Most Wanted list. He had planned and executed the massacre of 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut. He had left behind a bloody trail strewn with hundreds of Americans, Israelis, French, and Argentineans.

when Mossad warned the West that the Arab Spring could turn into an Arab Winter, no one seemed to listen. Throughout 2011, the West celebrated what they believed was the dawning of a new era of democracy, freedom, and human rights in the Middle East. Hoping to obtain the approval of the Egyptians, the West pressured President Mubarak, its strongest ally in the Arab world, to step down. But the first crowds that swept Tahrir Square in Cairo burned the American flag; then they stormed the Israeli embassy, demanded the end of the peace treaty with Israel, and arrested American NGO activists. Free elections in Egypt have brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, and today, Egypt wavers on the brink of anarchy and economic catastrophe. A fundamentalist Islamic regime is taking root in Tunisia, with Libya likely to follow. Yemen is in turmoil. In Syria, President Assad is massacring his own people. The moderate nations like Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates of the Persian Gulf feel betrayed by their Western allies. And the hopes for human rights, women's rights, and democratic laws and rule that inspired these landmark revolutions have been swept away by fanatic religious parties, better organized and better connected with the masses.

Mossad appears to be the best defense against the Iranian nuclear threat, against terrorism, against whatever may evolve from the mayhem in the Middle East. Most important, Mossad is the last salvo short of open war.

In the late summer of 1971,

They watched with astonishment as a ramshackle boat suddenly emerged from the roaring waves

A few Palestinians, their clothes and keffiyehs rumpled and soaked, jumped out and waded ashore.

"Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine," came the answer. "From the Tyre refugee camp, in Lebanon."

"You know of Abu-Seif, our commander? He sent us to meet with the Popular Front commanders in Beth Lahia (a terrorist stronghold in the south of the Gaza strip). We have money and weapons, and we want to coordinate our operations."

The following morning, several armed terrorists escorted the newcomers to an isolated house inside the Jabalia refugee camp.

That evening, the man with the red keffiyeh, Captain Meir Dagan, commander of the

Israeli Defense Forces' (IDF) secret Rimon commando unit, reported to General Ariel (Arik) Sharon that Operation Chameleon had been a success. All the leaders of the Popular Front in Beth Lahia, a lethal terrorist group, had been killed.

Dagan was only twenty-six, but already a legendary fighter. He had planned the entire operation: posing as Lebanese terrorists; sailing in an old vessel from Ashdod, a port in Israel; the long night of hiding; the meeting with the terrorist leaders; and the escape route after the hit. He had even organized the fake pursuit by the Israeli torpedo boat. Dagan was the ultimate guerrilla, bold and creative, not someone who stuck to the rules of engagement. Yit...

Future Mossad chief Danny Yatom remembered Dagan as a stocky youngster with a mane of brown hair, who had applied to join the most prestigious Israeli commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, and amazed everybody with his knife-throwing skills. With his huge commando knife, he could hit dead-on any target he chose. Although he was an excellent marksman, he failed the Sa...

In the early seventies, he was sent to the Gaza strip, which had been conquered by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and had since become a hornet's nest of deadly terrorist activity. The Palestinian terrorists murdered Israelis daily in the Gaza strip and in Israel with bombs, explosives, and fi...

On January 2, 1971, when the Arroyo children, the five-year-old Avigail and the e...

blown to pieces when a terrorist threw a hand grenade into their car, General Ariel (Arik) Sharon decided he had to put an end to the bloody massacre. He recruited a few old friends from his battle-scarred youth, along with several talented younger soldiers. Dagan was one, a round-faced, short, sturdy officer who walked with a limp—he stepped on a land mine in the Six-Day War. While recuperating in the ...

Sharon's unit officially did not exist. Its mission was to destroy the terrorist organizations in Gaza using risky and unconventional methods. Dagan used to wander occupied Gaza with a cane, a Doberman, several pistols, revolvers, and submachine guns. Some claimed to have seen him disguised as an Arab, leisurely riding a donkey in the treacherous Gaza al...

Within the unit, Dagan created "Rimon," the first undercover Israeli commando unit, which operated in Arab disguise deep in enemy strongholds.

Almost every night Dagan's people donned women's or fishermen's disguises and went in search of known terrorists.

In mid-January 1971, posing as Arab terrorists in the north of the Strip, they lured Fatah members into an ambush, and in the gunfight that erupted, the Fatah terrorists were killed.

On January 29, 1971, this time in uniform, Dagan and his men traveled in two jeeps to the outskirts of the Jabalia camp (a Palestinian refugee camp). Their paths crossed with a taxi, and Dagan recognized, among its passengers, a notorious terrorist, Abu Nimer. He ordered the jeeps to stop and his soldiers surrounded the cab. Dagan approached, and at that moment Abu Nim...

shouted, but instead of scrambling for cover, he jumped on the man, pinned him, and tore the grenade from his hand. For that action...

Sharon, Dagan, and their colleagues largely annihilated terrorism in Gaza, and for years the area became quiet and peaceful. But some maintain that Sharon half-jokingly said of his loyal aide: "Meir's specialty is to separate the head of an Arab from his body."

He was born Meir Huberman in 1945 in a train car, on the outskirts of Herson, in the Ukraine, while his family was escaping from Siberia to Poland. Most of his family had perished in the Holocaust. Meir immigrated to Israel with his parents and grew up in a poor neighborhood in Lod, an old Arab town about fifteen miles south of Tel Aviv.

Many knew him as an indomitable fighter; few were aware of his secret passions: an avid reader of history books, a vegetarian, he loved classical music and...

He was a man haunted from an early age by the terrible suffering of his family and the Jews during the Holocaust. He dedicated his life to the defense of the newborn State of Israel. As he climbed the army hierarchy, the first thing he did in every new office he was assigned to was to hang on the wall a large photo of an old Jew, wrapped in his prayer shawl, kneeling in front of two SS officers, one holding a bat and the other a gun. "This old man is my grandfather," Dagan would tell visitors. "I look at the picture, and I know that we must be strong and defend ourselves so that the Holocaust never...

During the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, Dagan was among the first I...

Suez Canal in a reconnais...

In the 1982 Lebanon War, he entered Beirut at the head of his armored brigade. He soon became the commander of ...

He resurrected the principles of secrecy, camouflage, and decepti...

And after the Lebanon war ended, he did not give up his secret adventures. In 1984 he was officially reprimanded by Chief of Staff Moshe Levy for hanging out, dressed as an Arab, by the Bahamdoun terrorist headquarters.

During the Intifada (the Palestinian rebellion of 1987-1993), when he was transferred to the

West Bank as an adviser to Chief of Staff Ehud Barak, Dagan resumed his old habits and even convinced Barak to join him. The two of them donned sweat suits, found a baby-blue Mercedes with local plates, and went for a ride in the treacherous Nablus Kasbah. On their return, they scared and then astonished the Military ...

In 1995, Dagan, now a major general, left the army and joined his buddy Yossi Ben-Hanan on an eighteen-month motorcycle journey across the Asian plains. Their trip was cut sho...

in 2002, he retired to his country home in Galilee, to his books, his records, his palette, and his sculptor's chisel.

Thirty years after Gaza, a retired general, he was now getting acquainted with his family—"I suddenly woke up and my kids were grown-ups already"—when he got a phone call from his old buddy, now prime minister, Arik Sharon. "I want you at the head of Mossad," Sharon said to his fifty-seven-year-old friend. "I need a Mossad chief with a dagger between his teeth."

It was 2002 and Mossad was losing steam. Several failures in the preceding years had dealt severe blows to its prestige; the much-publicized failure to assassinate a major Hamas leader in Amman and the capture of Israeli agents in Switzerland, Cyprus, and New Zealand had seriously damaged Mossad's reputation. The last head of Mossad, Efraim Halevy, didn't live up to expectations. A former ambassador to the...

Dagan was not welcomed at Mossad. An outsider, focused mostly on operations, he didn't care very much about learned intelligence analyses or secret diplomatic exchanges. Several top Mossad officers resigned in protest, but Dagan didn't much care. He rebuilt the operational units, established close working relations with foreign secret services, and busied himself with the Iranian threat. When the second, disastrous Lebanon War erupted in 2006, he was the only Israeli leader who objected to the strategy based on massive bombardments by the air force. He believed in a land offensive, doubted the air force could win the war, and came out of the war unblemished.

Under Dagan's control, Mossad had accomplished the heretofore un-imaginable: the assassination of Hezbollah's mad killer Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, the destruction of the Syrian nuclear reactor, the liquidation of key terrorist leaders in Lebanon and Syria, and, most remarkable of all, a relentless, ruthless, and successful campaign against Iran's secret nuclear weapons program.