Kharg Island measures three by five miles and is only twenty miles off the coast of Iran. The island is the main oil tanker fueling spot for Iranian crude oil exports. Its strategic importance to Iran is in great disproportion to the size of the island and it was the scene of fighting during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. As a result, the island had long been militarized, with an airfield, a garrison, a Hawk missile SAM site and its own Tall King early warning radar.
Inside a dimly lit and humid bunker on the island, two technicians watched radar screens that synthesized the information gathered by the Russian built radar onto phosphorescent screens. Across from the radar technicians, a single man did double duty. He was the communications officer in charge of relaying any important information to Tehran, and he also operated some electronic eavesdropping equipment placed on the island. Among the equipment was a radar receiving unit that picked up and analyzed the large volume of radar emissions aimed at Iran and traveling across the waters of the Persian Gulf. One of the man’s jobs was to report to Tehran when the Saudi early warning radars were turned on and when they weren’t. He had been on the job for several years and knew the signatures of all of the key permanently emplaced American and Saudi radar units in the line of sight of the island.
His electronic equipment had lost contact with the radar signal originating from King Khalid Military City about fifteen minutes earlier and he had quickly reported it. Now his equipment told him the radar was turned back on and operating normally. The unit at King Khalid was particularly important to the senior officers in Tehran since they had long assumed that the Saudis would turn the unit off if the Israeli Air Force was passing overhead on the way to Iran. A message was quickly sent to Tehran reporting that both the King Khalid and Dhahran radar sites were back online.
48 — Assault on Dehloran
The daytime hours passed uneventfully for Task Force Camel, each man dealing with his anxieties about the coming night as best he could. For soldiers heading into certain combat, this time was a heavy mix of apprehension, nervousness and fateful resolve — each man working out the relative balance of each emotion quietly as he did everything in his power to exude outward confidence and fearlessness.
Most of the men in this unit had combat experience somewhere inside Lebanon, Gaza or the West Bank, but all of those actions were in situations in which the main power of the Israeli Defense Force was an emergency call away. Here they were completely isolated. There would be no emergency helicopter pickup and no sortie from an F-16 or Apache helicopter to tilt the battlefield in their favor if they were discovered. There would be only a fight to the death and the lingering knowledge that their loved ones may never know their fate. Capture meant torture, humiliation, emotional isolation and, ultimately, execution — probably at the end of a hangman’s noose. Success meant they would be national heroes. The utter juxtaposition of the two possible outcomes could drive the strongest man to despondency. Each man fought an internal war to keep the thoughts of defeat out of his mind. All the men had varying degrees of success.
The luckiest men of the team were Yosef Hisami and Benny Stern. They had something to do that occupied their minds professionally. The men took turns watching the complex, trying to steal precious hours of sleep when they could. It was easier for Benny Stern. The men joked that he could sleep at will — sleeping through an artillery barrage as long as he had a place to rest his head. True to form, once the morning came and he passed watch duty to Hisami, he fell fast asleep. Hisami was supposed to wake him after three hours, but the Kurd felt great when the scheduled time came and he let Benny Stern sleep until two in the afternoon. Besides, thought Hisami, his life might depend on Stern’s aim later that night and he wanted the sniper to be as rested as possible.
The sun set at 5:43 p.m. Iranian time on the mountain. Two hours later, the main body of Task Force Camel had gathered the camouflage net and packed it away. Captain Ben Zeev had every man check his weapons and, for the first time since leaving Israel, told every man to chamber a round in his rifle, being careful to ensure that his weapon’s safety was in the horizontal “Safe” position. After another ten minutes, with the darkness now total, Ben Zeev pointed to one of his team, a man named Isaac Mofaz. He had been born and raised in Israel, but his parents had both been born and raised in Tehran, immigrating to Israel three decades earlier.
“Almost ready,” said Mofaz. He was completing the assembly of a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV, that was not much bigger than a radio-controlled airplane that any hobbyist would fly. The UAV was known as the Boomerang and it was built by an Israeli company called Bluebird Aero Systems Ltd. It was lightweight and, being powered by an electric motor, very quiet. Under its nose, a small gyro-stabilized infrared video camera could lock onto a location and provide up to eight hours of continuous real-time video feed to its ground controller.
When he was done, Mofaz removed what looked like a large tablet computer from his backpack. He booted the machine up. After less than a minute, the tablet and the UAV established an encrypted radio link. The commando waited for the tablet control computer to establish its exact GPS coordinates and then to synchronize those coordinates into the miniature brain of the UAV. The Boomerang, which was painted dark grey, was programmed to takeoff and climb to an altitude of 7,500 feet, roughly half a kilometer above the radar station, and then to establish a wide orbit around a target designated by Mofaz, which would be a point in the middle of the Dehloran radar complex. Once that point was designated, the UAV would autonomously remain in orbit around that point until Mofaz told it to do something else or until its power source died and it fell from the sky.
Isaac Mofaz then unpacked a flat panel receiver and a tripod. The receiver, which resembled a very small phased array radar panel measuring a mere fourteen inches in diameter, would pick up the encrypted video feed from the Boomerang as it flew, so long as it maintained an unencumbered line of sight. A two foot long antenna extended above the receiver panel that enabled it to communicate with the control tablet that would remain with Mofaz. The Israeli checked to make sure that the tablet, the Boomerang and the flat panel receiver were all communicating with each other. He then turned to a team member kneeling beside him. “Take the receiver,” he said. The man lifted the flat panel receiver and its tripod and headed out to place it at a location on the plateau that was above the rock wall formation the team was hiding under.
Finally, Mofaz placed the Boomerang UAV on a metal frame launch ramp that another man had set up. The launch ramp, which measured six feet in length with one end supported in the air by a bipod, looked like a slingshot on steroids. “Everybody stand clear,” he said to the team. He touched a command on his tablet and the silent motor on the UAV came to life in an instant, only the whirr of the propeller indicating its motive force. He reached down and pulled a lanyard that trailed on the ground behind the launch rail, releasing a restraining catch. The UAV shot forward into the air. Within a second, only men using their night vision monocle could still see it. As it flew off, even the men with night vision could soon no longer make it out. The UAV climbed to its programmed altitude and started to circle above its launch point awaiting further direction from Mofaz.