Spies Against Armageddon by Dan Raviv Read Free Book Online Page A

politicians wanted America to be left guessing.
    The divisions between the Israeli security and political establishments mirrored cracks emerging in Iran. There were signs that the Iranian people were suffering from the sanctions—growing unemployment, cuts in government subsidies, soaring prices, and fuel shortages—and many were blaming their misfortune on the nuclear program.
    According to Mossad analysts, Iranian senior echelons were enmeshed in a critical debate. The main issue was the wisdom of pursuing or dropping the military nuclear path.
    Iran’s leaders wanted nuclear weapons as a tool that would ensure the survival of their regime. They looked at North Korea and saw that by having nuclear weapons, that rogue nation created a cloak of immunity for itself. World powers would not dare attack North Korea, and its dictators—Kim Jong-Il and later his son—got away with almost everything they did.
    This Iranian point of view also took note of Muammar Qaddafi’s fate. The Libyan dictator had started a nuclear program, but he never built a bomb. He then meekly dismantled his nuclear program in order to reestablish diplomatic relations with the West. Within a few years, however, American and other Western aircraft were supporting a rebellion against him; Qaddafi was overthrown, hunted down like a dog, and ignominiously killed. No bomb equaled no protection. Hard-line Iranians vowed not to make that mistake.
    There was another faction in Iran, however, which the Mossad hoped would win the argument. These were senior Iranians among the Muslim clerics, the Revolutionary Guards, and the government who contended that if Israel, America, or both were to attack, it could lead to calamity for the Islamic Republic.
    Spotting a possible Iranian rhetorical route for abandoning a nuclear arms program, Mossad analysts noted with great interest that several senior clerics—including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—issued edicts that such weapons were un-Islamic.
    The Israeli experts knew that this could simply be a lie, and also that religious leaders in Iran could decree that exceptional circumstances justified building nuclear bombs. But the analysts held on to the hope that Iranian leaders might reach a less aggressive conclusion: that instead of protecting the regime, building nuclear weapons could hasten its downfall.
    Israeli intelligence felt that it had very good and up-to-date information from the inner circle around Khamenei, who ultimately would make the decision. He was the successor to Khomeini, the mystically charismatic founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet, Khamenei was more of a modern politician, with potentially talkative courtiers all around him in the sacred city of Qom.
    The Mossad’s nuclear proliferation department believed that Iran’s scientists in 2012 would inform Khamenei—and the smug, radically loquacious President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—that they would soon be ready for a “breakout,” a headlong rush to use Iran’s enriched uranium to create a bomb. That process might take a year to accomplish, and in the process Iran would almost surely expel international atomic inspectors.
    In that sense, Israel and the United States would have some time left for a military attack to disrupt and delay the enemy’s fateful move.
    The now retired Dagan opined that Iranian leaders were “rational” and could calculate the consequences of their decisions and actions. He and current Israeli intelligence officials fervently hoped—though they could not predict the decisions of Iran’s top zealot—that Khamenei would reject the notion that nuclear bombs were the way to guarantee the regime’s survival.
    The Israeli strategy for a peaceful way out of this crisis was to push Khamenei to embrace the starker point of view: that a breakout would likely trigger a strike on Iran—perhaps a gigantic pounding by America. Instead of securing the Islamic Republic, the breakout could, ironically,