“Yes, I assumed you would react this way.” Eli Cohen took a sip of water. “As you would assume, we have been planning for this on a contingency basis for some time. Last year our planning had to change a key assumption. We began planning for an operation alone without any active assistance from the United States.”
Amit was surprised, he had assumed that Israel had always been planning for an operation without direct American involvement, at least as a contingency. Prime Minister Cohen continued. “Our problem is that we are, quite frankly, stuck in a rut. The Yahalom Group, the team charged with coming up with the plan, has existed for almost a year. It consists of half a dozen senior staff officers. One is from the navy, two are ground force officers and the remaining three are air force officers. All of them are colonels or generals. All of them are career officers. And all of them think conventionally.”
This still did not answer Amit’s question and his face showed it. Director Ami Levy jumped in. “You see, Amit, they keep going in circles and coming to the same conclusion. It is the conventional military conclusion…”
“And that is that this can’t be done without the Americans,” Margolis interjected.
“Exactly,” replied Cohen. “These men are stuck in conventional dogma. We need someone to inject fresh thinking into this group.”
“But I am not a military man.”
“Again, exactly. Any military professional who joins that group will come to the same conclusions. It is the nature of the profession. I… no, we… no, Israel needs someone just like you to shake up this team. You have imagination and a deeply analytical mind. You need to get these men thinking outside the box.”
“Easy. Use nuclear weapons.”
Eli Cohen started laughing. It was genuine. “Have you been listening in on our cabinet meetings? No, no Amit. That contingency plan is easy enough. The point of your involvement is to come up with a non-nuclear plan that works. The Yahalom Group has one mandate: deliver a plan that destroys the Iranian program without the use of nuclear weapons and that everyone will look at and say ‘yes, that will work.’ Can you do this?”
“Sir, I have already committed. I will join this planning group as you desire. I just want to be sure that this is the right decision for you and Israel. None of these men will even respect me.”
“Amit, that last comment is nonsense,” Cohen responded. “You are how old? Thirty-five?”
“I turn thirty-five this year.”
“Look around you. The prime minister and the two senior members of Mossad are sitting here begging you to undertake this assignment. Do you think this is from lack of respect? Quite the opposite. Look, let me tell you this story. I have known Ami and Shlomo for a very long time. These two men are the best judges of character I know. What it takes to gain their respect is really more than I can contemplate. I came to them two weeks ago to suggest a man for this assignment. Anyone from Mossad or Shabak or Aman or even the private sector. They came back with your name. The only thing I knew about you was your blood lines. But what they described was a man every bit the equal of his father. He would be very proud of you.
“As a last test, I wanted to see how you did in Russia handling the S-300 issue. Believe me, when you came back with the suggestion on the drones, I knew that Ami and Shlomo were absolutely right. You are the man for this. The man to bring a new perspective and shake these guys up. Time is running out, Amit. This is not a country club assignment. We need a working plan and we need it yesterday.”
The room was quiet. The power of any prime minister or president is massive by virtue of the position. But Eli Cohen had the charisma and passion to cause men — and an entire nation — to march to the gates of hell. Margolis had gone from skeptical to excited. “Okay. When do I start?”
“I know you are tired, but I want to introduce you to the group right now. They are across the street in the Matkal Tower.”
“I’m ready.”
10 — Myrtus
Eli Cohen entered the conference room late. He had just finished an interview with CBS News that was intended to air on 60 Minutes within the next month or two. He was in a good mood. Not because the questions were easy — they were, in fact, openly hostile to the prime minister’s belligerent attitude towards Iran — but because Eli Cohen felt he had proved his points with indisputable logic. Never mind if the 60 Minutes correspondent believed otherwise, it was the way Eli Cohen always felt. The prime minister was in such a good mood that he already had a cigar fired up and underway as he walked in.
“Gentlemen, please be seated,” he began. The date was Tuesday, March 9, 2010. “We have a focused agenda today.” The Kitchen Cabinet was formally in session in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Cohen sat in his chair at the head of the conference table. Ben Raibani stood up and walked to the wall to turn on the air filtration system — this role having been long established for him. “We are here to review the latest Esther planning,” Cohen continued. “Esther” was the working codename for the various plans being formulated by the Yahalom Group. “I regret to inform everyone that Mort is still in the United States and can’t join us today.” Cohen had asked Mort Yaguda and his wife to spend the month of March in Washington making the rounds among the politically powerful and influential. It was what Yaguda did best and Cohen needed his skills to be fully employed. Israel was pushing hard to counter what the prime minister saw as the dangerous policies of appeasement being followed by the President of the United States.
Cohen continued. “First I want to update everyone with a critical change since we last met on this topic in December. As everyone here no doubt recalls, that was a lengthy and frustrating meeting. It was, in fact, essentially a repeat of the meetings we had in May and August. Since we have been spinning our wheels, I made the decision to add a new member to Yahalom Group. In early January, we added a young Mossad officer to the group. He is not a military man, but he is a very strong analytical thinker who is very creative.” Cohen paused a moment to see if any questions were coming. Nothing. “The purpose of this meeting is to update everyone here on the state of Esther and to review any key issues affecting the Iranian situation. I believe that Yavi has some important updates, so I will turn it over to him.”
Yavi Aitan looked older than in the prior May, much older. He was on the frontlines of the covert struggle to slow the Iranian nuclear program. The stress of the role he played was showing, and the impact was very clear. His hair, which was jet black at the May meeting, was already showing a salt and pepper look on the sides of his head. His eyes were bloodshot and dark rings now formed a forbidding foundation under them. But his habits were the same. He pulled his seat up and leaned forward against the table. “Thank you, Prime Minister. We have a number of items to review. The first thing I would like to cover is the latest intel we have on Myrtus. As you know, we were successful in injecting the worm into the centrifuge control systems at Natanz. The software worked the way it was designed. The bad news is that the damage so far has been less than we expected. So we did not destroy all of the IR-1 centrifuges in place in Natanz. We did, however, destroy over two thousand centrifuges based on our current best estimate. We…”
“How accurate is that estimate?” asked Minister of Defense Zvi Avner.
“I have a high degree of confidence. The sources for this are multiple and include humint.” Human intelligence meant spies inside the Iranian nuclear program. Having responded, Aitan continued where he left off. “We have had Operation Lead Vault in action for almost a year now and we have committed a lot of resources to this in cooperation with allied intelligence agencies. Lead Vault is the ongoing program to deprive Iran of raw materials they need to build more centrifuges. We have particularly targeted their ability to make or import maraging steel, which is used for the bellows in both the IR-1 and their newer designs.”