RW Johnson: A warehouse in Tehran

Key topics:Mossad’s covert pager operation cripples Hezbollah’s capabilitiesCohen’s team steals Iran’s secret nuclear archive in daring 2018 raidEvidence exposes Iran’s bomb pursuit, leading to years-long setbacks.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By RW Johnson.Yossi Cohen, the director of Mossad, says he had “a quiet smile” when Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House after Trump’s second inauguration and presented him with a golden pager, a sly reference to the deception which had devastated Hezbollah just as it launched itself against Israel. And while the world marvelled at the ingenuity which had placed these exploding pagers and laptops in Hezbollah hands – even getting the terrorists to pay for them – it was often not appreciated that these devices had been telling the Israelis for years exactly where their owners were going, revealing who they met and where their most secret meeting places were. Moreover, the final signal sent meant that the owner then had to press buttons with their two thumbs. This guaranteed that their owners would effectively hug them to their chests – and thus be put out of action with damage to their hands, faces and abdomens. This also minimised harm to other civilians. The result was a crippling blow to Hezbollah, both materially and in morale..Read more:. Israel’s decapitation strike: A game changer for Hezbollah.It is, of course, difficult to write about the Middle East amidst the fiercely held opinions on both sides but I am not attempting to enter that debate. Just as one can only admire the remarkable exploit (Operation Achse) of Otto Skorzeny in staging the glider-based raid which freed Mussolini from captivity in his Alpine prison in September 1943, so one cannot but admire the sheer professionalism of Cohen’s Mossad. Churchill himself, in telling the House of Commons of Skorzeny’s raid, said no one could be blamed, for it had been “a daring attack, completely beyond all foresight”. But it’s worth noting that although the Israeli media referred to the pager-laptop deception as “Cohen’s masterpiece”, Cohen actually takes greater pride in another operation altogether.The Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015 had apparently headed off the possibility of Iran acquiring an atomic bomb. The Iranians themselves insisted they had no such ambition and were purely concerned with nuclear development for peaceful purposes. Cohen was certain they were lying and that a massive, secret military nuclear programme was under way. But as the Manhattan Project had shown, this was an enormous enterprise, taking years, costing enormously, and involving large numbers of people. Crucially, every smallest step in the programme had to be documented not only so that it could later be replicated but so that in case of a mistake one could go back and see exactly where the mistake had occurred. What that meant was that somewhere there had to be a huge archive of such documents. If only one could gain access to that, it would lay all secrets bare. For Cohen and his men it was an existential question. Iran had declared its intention to obliterate Israel from the map and there was no doubt that if Iran got the Bomb, Israel was doomed. And it was no use expecting the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency to find this archive for its whereabouts were clearly secret.So Mossad examined the attempts of the Ayatollahs’ regime to rent warehouses in various parts of Tehran. Some of these had occurred under special restrictive orders, so that narrowed the search. Even so, a lengthy effort of identifying containers relevant to the nuclear effort followed, their movements followed, filmed, analysed and their differences defined – all in the utmost secrecy. Ultimately this pointed to a particular warehouse with three containers in it. Surveillance was maintained including a careful analysis of the trucks arriving at and leaving the site. Then in January 2017 the contents of the warehouse were shifted to a different part of Tehran. Mossad monitored the move via satellite and aerial surveillance plus its agents on the street, noting that greatly increased secrecy precautions were now in place. They also noted the order in which the containers were moved, leading them to conclude that the first two containers were the most precious, the third less so.This move was a blow: the new locale had to be examined and analysed in great detail. Who went there and when ? How did they enter and exit ? What would the temperature be like inside the warehouse ? It now appeared that inside the containers were a number of safes, doubtless housing the key documents. What sort of safes, what sort of locks ? What sort of equipment and expertise would be required to open them ? For Cohen had now conceived a plan so bold that many literally thought he must be mad. The obvious thing to do was to break in and then microfilm the key documents. And indeed, he would detail agents to film all they could. But that wasn’t good enough. If they just did that, the Iranians would claim that the microfilms were forgeries and that the Israelis had rigged up dummy documents of their own. And Cohen wanted to be able to hand Israel’s allies and friends conclusive proof that Iran was developing a Bomb. The only way to do that was to steal the entire archive.That made everything hugely more difficult. Mossad would need to infiltrate scores of operatives into Tehran – and there is no riskier job in the world than being a Mossad agent inside Iran. Each agent would have to have a carefully contrived false identity, and they would also need a great deal of sophisticated equipment. Thus, for example, Cohen now knew that there were 32 safes inside the containers and that each safe was over six metres tall. His team would have to open them using special blowtorches which burned at 1100 degrees Celsius. After a lot of experimenting with safe-blowing they found a method which resulted in the safe door being blown outwards, thus causing no damage to its contents. Apart from the fact that the warehouse was guarded and that the guards had fierce dogs, all those people and their equipment would need to get over high walls in complete silence. Similarly, the guards and dogs would also have to be dealt with in complete silence. An exact replica of the warehouse and all the streets around it was built at Mossad HQ and their team trained endlessly on it. Meanwhile their agents on the ground in Tehran monitored the site and all the factories and offices around it. Nothing could be left to chance.By now they realised that the first two containers alone contained some 50,000 documents. All of these would somehow have to be loaded over the wall and loaded onto trucks waiting outside. This greatly increased the risks. By now Cohen knew that his team could not start the operation until 10 pm and that a whole set of new guards would arrive at the site by 7.00 am the next morning. So, he calculated that the entire team, their equipment and all 50,000 documents would have to be gone by 5.00 a.m. Cohen knew, of course, that even if everything went as he hoped, the Iranians would be in a murderous frenzy once they discovered the theft. And they would realise that the Israelis must have carted away their prize in heavy trucks. Which in turn meant that they must still be in Iran, for it would be physically impossible to get scores of people plus their trucks out of Iran in just two hours. So they would turn the country upside down looking for them. Anyone they caught would be tortured and executed. Every member of the Mossad team, men and women, would know that and they would need nerves of steel.At the last minute Cohen discovered that the Iranians were about to move the contents of the warehouse to yet a third site. That would be a disaster: no doubt it would be even more secure, perhaps quite impregnable – and the whole Mossad effort would be back to square one. So it was essential to move fast, before that move took place. But the team was not quite ready and nothing could be rushed: proper professionalism required that every last detail must be in place first..Read more:.Michael Cohen’s testimony unveils Trump’s dark secrets: Timothy L. O’Brien.The due day arrived: 31 January 2018. Cohen and his team were able to watch the entire effort in real time on closed circuit TV at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. For he had cameras on satellites, body-cams and at ground-level vantage points. The team went over the wall at 10 pm and finally exited at 4.59 am the next morning – “the longest six hours and fifty-nine minutes of my life”, as Cohen put it. He was able to talk to his team throughout as they opened and filmed files, some of warhead designs, production schedules and so on. It became clear that they wouldn’t have time to open the third container but miraculously, they got all 50,000 documents plus a huge store of CDs and computer discs. At one point Cohen broke off to talk to Netanyahu about what they’d found. He warned that it might take months to get everything out of Iran.Meanwhile Cohen was thinking ahead about the inevitable pursuit. It would be essential, in case of capture, that all this material should immediately be duplicated and then sent back to Tel Aviv electronically or burned into CDs which could be hidden. Sure enough the next morning many thousands of police, detectives, intelligence officers and Revolutionary Guards were on the case, described by Ayatollah Khameini as “a national disaster”. All flights were halted, the transport system froze almost solid and everywhere there were roadblocks and barricades. But the team had split up, using a variety of escape routes to different staging posts and safe houses. Many of the team had to face questioning but no one cracked and meanwhile they deliberately sowed disinformation to put their pursuers off. In the end the entire team returned to Tel Aviv unscathed, bringing with them every CD, every memo, every blueprint. Complete copies of all the material were made and handed to the CIA and MI6. Mossad made no attempt to convince them of what they were getting: that was left to them. Both concluded that Mossad was right: Iran had a full-blown nuclear bomb project and had been lying all the time. Cohen then personally briefed the intelligence chiefs of France, Germany, Russia and China. It was one of the greatest intelligence coups of all time.This wasn’t the end of the story: the Iranians continued their nuclear effort. The next phase came on a dusty country road outside Tehran where a broken down pick-up truck is jacked up on the side of the road, with a load of metal pieces in the back. On a nearby road comes a convoy of cars led by Iran’s chief nuclear scientist, Dr Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. He’s in a hurry – it’s a Friday afternoon and he’s keen to get home. Mossad has been studying him for fifteen years. Meanwhile an agent has quietly put together the metal pieces in the back of the pick-up truck. Once assembled it is an automated 7.62 mm. machine gun, a very sophisticated and heavy object weighing over a ton. It has been brought into Iran in many pieces over a considerable period, thus evading scrutiny. The agent, his work done, scatters. Yossi Cohen is watching all this on closed circuit TV in Tel Aviv, which is also where the sniper is. At a certain point an order is given and the sniper lets fly with fifteen bullets. Fakhrizadeh is killed instantly. His wife, sitting next to him, is entirely unharmed. The nuclear programme is heavily set back.The last chapter, we know, came in 2025 after Israeli air force planes had taken down Iran’s air defence system, allowing them to attack Iran’s nuclear development facilities, an attack rounded off by the USAF’s B-2s, dropping their “bunker-buster” smart bombs. This has probably set back Iran’s nuclear bomb effort by several years. But the struggle goes on. Iran will probably not give up and Mossad certainly won’t. Yossi Cohen has retired from Mossad and now works for Soft Bank, but you can bet that he still has most unbanker-like dreams about a warehouse in Tehran.

RW Johnson: A warehouse in Tehran

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