By the following morning Mossad agents in Tel Aviv had researched the family background of Hamak Arsadian. They had the history as supplied by Solomon Rothstein, but they wanted to verify the history of both Hamak’s mother and his father. When the Mossad agent showed up at the Armenian’s small office by Zvartnots International Airport, he had the green light from Tel Aviv to formally recruit Hamak Arsadian into the service of Mossad. For the next five years Arsadian provided routine intelligence to Mossad about his travels throughout Iran. Who he met. Where he went. What he delivered. It was very routine and, after the first few months, very boring. Arsadian wondered what the point was. He could not imagine that there was any value to the mundane information he provided.
But excitement finally came. He received a real mission in March of 2007. For the first time he was actually given a shipment from his Mossad contact. It came in from Pakistan, a shipment of computer parts — chips and circuit boards — that needed to be delivered to a company called Shahid Hemat Industrial Group. The delivery warehouse was inside a military facility known as Parchin, located just to the south and east of Tehran. The delivery was routine, but Hamak was smart enough to put the pieces of the puzzle together in his mind. He wasn’t sure what the parts he delivered were for, but he was sure that he had just done something important for Israel. The rush of excitement he felt on this trip was addictive. He wanted more.
More came only six months later. For the first time his Mossad handler asked him to rendezvous with a specific person as he passed through Tabriz. The role he played was simple. He was told to be sure he stopped for fuel at the Behran Petrol Station on Road 32 just outside and to the west of Tabriz. He was to be there at one in the afternoon on the day he entered Iran from Armenia. Arsadian knew this station well. He always planned his travels so that he could stop there on the way into or out of Iran. The best part of travelling to the Islamic Republic was taking advantage of the subsidized cost of diesel fuel. Hamak never filled his tanks in Armenia.
On this trip he needed to make contact in the food store with a man named Hassan. When Hamak walked in, Hassan looked exactly as described and the two men exchanged simple and innocuous code phrases about driving conditions in the city that day. Hassan then went to the restroom and left. Hamak purchased some items and went to the restroom before going back outside to his truck. While in the restroom, which had only a single toilet, he lifted the lid on the toilet tank as he was instructed. Taped to the underside of the lid was a small package wrapped in plastic. Hamak removed the package and placed it in the small of his back, the bottom edge tucked under his waist band and the entire package underneath his shirt, further obscured by his windbreaker.
It was not until he was back on the road that Arsadian realized that, unlike the simple retelling of his travels that he had been providing the Mossad for years, he was now involved in real espionage. This was the type of activity that got men arrested and tortured in Iran. But what shocked the Armenian truck driver was the realization that thinking about what he was doing made his adrenaline surge. He was excited, not frightened or nervous. For the first time he felt like he was a warrior in the struggle against a regime that threatened Israel at every turn. He was contributing and the contribution was real and tangible. He loved it. His delivery that day was a small load in Tabriz itself. He unloaded by 3 p.m. and was at his office in Yerevan by midnight, where a Mossad-supplied and installed safe was the final repository of the real payload on this trip. Sometime the next day his Mossad handler would stop by the office and use his own key to enter, open the safe and retrieve the contents before driving the short distance to the airport for a flight out of Yerevan to Istanbul, where the package would be delivered safely to the Israeli Embassy. Arsadian never opened the package and never knew its contents, but he had just spirited the latest construction plans for the underground Fordow Enrichment site, Complex I and II, out of Iran.
To his Mossad handler and his handler’s superiors in Tel Aviv, Hamak was proving himself a real asset. He could handle the situations that made many people panic. When in 2011 Amit Margolis devised a way to get a small elite team of Israeli commandos to the Dehloran Radar Site, the men at Mossad who knew about Hamak Arsadian knew that he was the right asset for the job. For Hamak, he recognized that this new mission, when he first learned about it in early 2013, was something different, something hugely important. His payment was the tractor-trailer rig that he now piloted south down Iran Road 15. He already had title to both the tractor and the trailer in the name of his company with no liens attached. It was a nice rig, one of the nicest to be found in this region of the world. If Hamak made it home alive, the rig was his to keep, complete with its secrets.
But Hamak was a bright man who had become a news junkie as he aged. He had always been good at putting the pieces together. He guessed that this mission was the prelude to an Israeli assault on the Iranian nuclear program. He hoped he was right but knew better than to ask his handler even the most basic questions. The unstated rules were clear: Hamak was told only what he needed to know and any prying beyond that was both unprofessional and potentially dangerous to his health. When Yoni Ben Zeev was introduced to him in Yerevan several months earlier using the name Younis Mohammed, Arsadian was convinced that his suspicions about the importance of this mission were correct. The moment he laid eyes on Ben Zeev, he knew the young man in front of him was a special forces operator. Ben Zeev was straight out of central casting, a man who looked liked he could be dropped into the middle of the Himalayas with nothing but a pair of shorts on and still find his way back to civilization no worse for wear.
So the journey that brought Hamak Arsadian to this day on a rural road in Iran began when he was 15 years old. It had been a journey of discovery and self-fulfillment for the Armenian. Now he prayed that he would live to someday tell his grandchildren about his exploits. But at this moment he still had 96 miles of driving ahead of him from the turn off of Road 21 to reach Point Kabob. The easy and relatively flat driving of the prior few hours was giving way gradually to the Zagros mountain range. Soon he would be climbing up steep switchbacks, his tractor struggling in its battle against gravity, the length of his rig demanding every available inch of pavement — and more. Sporadic guardrails and crumbling road shoulders would test his mettle and his skills. As he thought about the coming drive, Hamak realized the wisdom of the load he carried that someone in the Mossad had dreamed up. The 449 remaining cartons of Charmin in his trailer weighed less than his typical load and the new MAN tractor he was driving had 175 more horsepower than his prior tractor. He was enjoying the combination. This tractor-trailer rig performed better loaded than his old one when it was empty.