At 22:31, the electronics squad managed to override the alarm system and immediately afterward the breaching squad took care of the heavy iron doors leading to the warehouse. But then, all of a sudden, a problem cropped up: it emerged that just on the day beforehand, the arrangement of the warehouse's contents was changed and a number of items had been moved. Many months of intelligence collection and meticulous planning might have gone to waste.
Jeremy Bob: "Yossi Cohen's view is that Israel is capable of assuming the task of preventing Iran from reaching the bomb at any point in time. There are only nine countries in the entire world with a nuclear capability. Preventing another state from joining that elite club is not impossible, and according to Cohen, Israel must take risks in doing so if necessary,"
Ilan Evyatar: "I don't think that Iran wants the bomb for the express purpose of dropping it on Israel. I believe that it seeks to gradually choke Israel, to undermine the economy, to reach a situation that we are seeing today, where Israeli citizens are unable to return to their homes. The missile attack on April 14 was the most dramatic moment to date in the war between Israel and Iran, but there is absolutely no guarantee that this is its pinnacle."
Jeremy Bob: "Although Iran was not directly involved in the events of October 7, it was definitely the one that issued Hezbollah with a directive from October 8 onwards to engage in an incessant wave of attacks against Israel. It was clear that we need to address this issue in the book, yet on the other hand, you simply cannot constantly sit down, to wait and see what will happen. As we have no idea what developments will occur next month or the month after that."
The woman wandering around the industrial area of Shirobad, a southern suburb of Tehran, aroused no suspicion. She wore the typical attire of the local women, and the language she spoke was fluent Farsi. She never ventured out alone onto the street: she was always accompanied by a man as is customary in conservative Islamic states. The security guards who guarded one of the buildings in the industrial area during the daytime – a simple warehouse bearing no unique outward signs – paid no special attention to her. They might not even have noticed that the very same woman was passing by them time and again, as she took care to appear slightly different on each occasion. Even in their wildest dreams, they would not have imagined that this was an Israeli woman, a Mossad agent with an engineering degree, who had come to Shirobad to collect intelligence on the site they were guarding. Had they suspected her, then one of the most daring operations in the Mossad's distinguished history – stealing Iran's nuclear archive right from under its nose – would probably have failed.
The account of sending the Israeli female agent to Iran, as part of the operation that made waves across the entire world, is one of the many, captivating disclosures in the new book, Target Tehran. The book was published in English last September, shortly before the Hamas attack on October 7, and has recently been published in Hebrew too. The co-authors, Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar provide a rare glimpse into the nerve center of the clandestine war that the Mossad has been waging for many years now against Iran's military nuclear program, a war in which the reality surpasses any fiction. Alongside the operation to pilfer the nuclear archive, they also address the numerous covert actions that Israel has never officially claimed responsibility for, such as, for example, the series of mysterious explosions that rocked a number of nuclear facilities in Iran between June 26 and July 19, 2020. The Iranians themselves have never admitted that this was an orchestrated offensive conducted by a foreign element, but it is clear that the damage incurred by the various nuclear facilities during those weeks, and above all the facility at Natanz, was extremely heavy. The book also recounts the story of the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head of the Iranian nuclear program, an individual who earned the title "Iran's Robert Oppenheimer", and the "Father of the Iranian bomb", and it also exposes details on previous attempted assassinations that did not succeed for various reasons.
The co-authors are journalists with a rich background in covering security-related issues: Jeremy Bob is the Jerusalem Post's senior military correspondent, and Ilan Evyatar has served in the past as Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem Report. The idea for writing the book, they recount, came about following the famous press conference in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the files and the disks from the Iranian nuclear archive, and he used the products gained from the operation to prove that Iran was in breach of the nuclear agreement and continuing its race towards the bomb. "That gave us a strong platform from which to start writing such a book," says Evyatar. "Such matters are not usually exposed, and here a decision was made to make public use of the operation and its achievements for a broad range of objectives."
"That press conference made it easier for me to access Mossad officials, in terms of their willingness to talk about the subject," says Bob. "From there on in, it was purely a matter of my work as a journalist to understand how to reach those people and get them to trust me and tell me what I wanted to know."
Q: Your book describes a whole series of operations that were designed to compromise Iran's nuclear program. To what extent was the archive theft operation unusual?
Bob: "I think it was the most dramatic of them. The degree of sophistication and audacity in that operation was far beyond the norm, and its impact, above all the fact that the US decided to withdraw from the nuclear agreement, was far-reaching."
Evyatar: "I agree. I should also point out that of all the operations and missions that we have written about, that is the only one for which Israel has assumed official responsibility. All the other operations have been attributed to the Mossad only 'according to foreign sources'. At the same time, it is important to remember that the war being waged by the Mossad against the Iranian nuclear program is not restricted to one single event, however striking it may be. The assessment that Iran would be able to produce a nuclear device within the space of two years dates back to the mid-nineties. Almost three decades have elapsed since that time and Iran still has some ground to make to get the bomb. This has occurred both due to the diplomatic pressure that has been brought to bear on Tehran and also as a result of the efforts made by Israel and other states too. We can say for certain that the Mossad has enjoyed phenomenal success in slowing down Iran's nuclear efforts."
24 agents and six and a half hours
The story of the Iranian nuclear archive snatch, as Bob and Evyatar expose in their book, begins back in 2016, a short time after Yossi Cohen took office as Director of the Mossad following Tamir Pardo. Cohen was fully in agreement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it was imperative to invest an all-out effort in order to blow the nuclear agreement (officially termed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) signed between the Western powers and Iran. "Convincing the world that Iran is lying through its teeth with regard to its nuclear program is not sufficient – we must also be able to demonstrate this," Netanyahu told Cohen, and tasked him with getting the desired results.
At that time, the Mossad already knew about the actual existence of the nuclear archive, but its location and precise contents were still a mystery. Cohen decided to plan an operation to capture the archive and convened a meeting with the Mossad's top spy masters. The list of participants at that fateful meeting included, among others, his deputy Ehud Lavi, who had previously headed the Mossad's elite covert operations division known as 'Caesarea', which is responsible for operating agents in enemy states; Dedi Barnea, the current Mossad chief and at the time the head of the intelligence organization's Tsomet Division in charge of recruiting and operating human intelligence sources; as well as Eyal Hulata a doctor of physics who headed the Mossad's Technological Division and was later appointed Head of Israel's National Security Council.
Following the initial planning stage, the Mossad began its attempts to locate the archive. The search; however, did not begin from scratch; the Western intelligence community already had information sources within the Iranian nuclear program's senior echelons. A strong combination of both HUMINT (Human Intelligence) and SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) generated a wealth of information on the program, including various leads with the potential of pointing the way to the nuclear archive. It emerged that a short while beforehand, the Iranians decided to relocate it, with the intention of evading the implementation of one of their key obligations under the agreement – providing the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) unfettered access to documenting their past nuclear-related activity. Iran's Minister of Energy together with the head of its nuclear program, Professor Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, chose a warehouse in Shirobad from a list of potential sites for concealing the archive, based on the assumption that this neglected and run down building would remain under the radar of various foreign espionage agencies. They just failed to imagine that the Mossad would be monitoring the movements of the key figures in the Iranian nuclear program, and thus be able to detect the transfer of the documents.
So, the archive was located, but the Mossad was still in need of a whole series of highly classified details and data in order to be able to stage the 'smash and grab' operation: as it is clearly not possible to smuggle out the entire mountain of documents – which of them would contain the most incriminating information, the smoking gun that would expose the lies of the ayatollahs' regime? What are the security arrangements at the warehouse and how is it possible to circumvent them? What measures are required in order to breach the vaults in which these highly sensitive documents are kept? And beyond all of these questions, there was also the question of the moment after – how would it be possible to extract the materials and enable the breach team to exfiltrate the site? In order to obtain precise and reliable answers to some of these thorny questions, Yossi Cohen decided to send an Israeli spy to Iran, and to be more precise he sent the female spy mentioned earlier. She remained in Shirobad for some time working on the preparations to capture the archive.
Eventually they received the "green light" from the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. A team of 24 agents, apparently composed of both Israelis and Iranians, arrived at the warehouse in the industrial zone. They had six and a half hours to complete the mission before the security guards would begin their morning shift. At 22:31, the electronics squad managed to override the alarm system and immediately afterward the breaching squad took care of the heavy iron doors leading to the warehouse. The entry stage went by without any issues, but then, all of a sudden, a problem cropped up: it emerged that just on the day beforehand, the arrangement of the warehouse's contents was changed and a number of items had been moved. Many months of intelligence collection and meticulous planning might have gone to waste.. Following consultation with the Mossad headquarters, it was decided to go ahead with the mission. The team members used their extensive knowledge about the facility in order to find what they were looking for. One of the squads used special cutting torches capable of generating a temperature of some 3,600 degrees enabling it to cut open the sides of six of the 32 giant vaults that were concealed at the site. Members of the other squad began to sift through the material, extracting the required files while leaving behind the less important documents.
The main objective of the mission was a collection of black folders containing the plans of the nuclear device that Iran sought to build, but while they were working their way through the vaults, the Mossad agents came across an unexpected treasure trove: more than one hundred disks containing 55 thousand files and videos documenting the nuclear program, along with an additional cache with imagery of secret tests. The team members worked at great speed, and within the short amount of time they had been allotted they succeeded in getting their hands on a half a ton of disks and documents. The materials were then loaded on two trucks that left the premises at precisely five o'clock, heading for Azerbaijan via separate routes. Two hours after the team had left the warehouse the Iranians discovered that it had been broken into, but by then it was too late: under the cover of a complex deception plan, the Mossad agents were able to drive the trucks across the porous border between Iran and Azerbaijan. Later on, all the agents taking part in the operation were also extracted. On April 30, 2018, in a special address broadcast from the IDF GHQ at the Kirya in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu exposed the findings indicating that the regime in Tehran had never, for one moment, ceased in its efforts to strive for a nuclear bomb.
This operation might have been the most daring of all, but, as we have stated, it was not the only action undertaken by the Mossad in the effort to put a stop to the Iranian nuclear program. In their book, Bob and Evyatar single out Meir Dagan, the Director of the Mossad during 2002-2011, as the one who decided to move ahead with this matter. "Dagan believed in what he referred to as 'divine intervention'. In other words, all sorts of incidents that occurred mysteriously and slowed down the Iranian program," Evyatar recounts. "However, having said all that, we still cannot avoid the fact that the Iranian bomb is much closer than ever. Only a few days ago, the IAEA warned that Iran is only a number of weeks away from enriching sufficient uranium to manufacture a bomb."
Q: So breathtaking actions such as stealing the nuclear archive were in fact a failure? The mission was accomplished with an impeccable level of performance but the desired outcome was not attained?
Bob: "The main outcome of the retrieval operation was the subsequent withdrawal of the US from the nuclear agreement, and there are varied opinions on this issue. I personally adopt the position of the former IDF Director of Military Intelligence, Amos Yadlin: according to him there was indeed a need to pull out of the agreement; however, not in 2018 but now, towards the upcoming expiration of the limitations on centrifuge activity in Iran in 2025. Pulling out six years ago, without a backup plan – might possibly have been too early, but at the end of the day the superpowers did need to do so in order not to give Iran the green light to move ahead towards attaining a nuclear weapon. And even more importantly: the exposure of the materials from the archive led the IAEA to apply much greater pressure on Iran, and this has had an impact to this very day.
"I personally feel that all the talk about failure results from a lack of understanding. Without the Israeli intervention, Iran would have had its hands on a nuclear weapon already back in the nineties, so that we should be talking about 25 years of success. Is that the end of the story? Of course not. But it is not right to talk about failure."
Having said that, Evyatar actually voices doubts as to the rationale behind the effort to appropriate the archive. "There are people in the Israeli security establishment who definitely objected to the use to which the materials were put. In the book, we bring a number of the arguments surrounding this issue. Only history will be able to judge whether or not the theft was the right thing to do. The current reality of the situation is that Iran is extremely close to attaining a bomb. Usually, there is no point in building alternative scenarios and asking, 'What would have happened had we...?' but this is an important point. Had the nuclear agreement remained valid, then Iran would still ostensibly be subject to limitations that would have prevented it from making a dash to the bomb."
Q: Perhaps in any event the war against the Iranian nuclear program is pointless? After all, this is technology that has been around for almost eight years now. Maybe it doesn't really matter what Israel does, in the end, Iran will have a bomb in any case?
Bob: "That is in fact the approach of the former Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo. He is extremely angry at Netanyahu's decision to push towards abandoning the nuclear agreement and the undermining of our relations with the current US administration under President Joe Biden. According to him, the American commitment to protect Israel also against an enemy armed with a nuclear weapon, is far more important than blocking the nuclear program. It's not that he doesn't want to stop the Iranians; during his tenure, the Mossad was responsible for the assassination of a large number of figures involved in the nuclear program, at least according to foreign reports. Pardo is certainly ready to fight, but his way of thinking is different. In contrast, Yossi Cohen's view is that Israel is capable of assuming the task of preventing Iran from reaching the bomb at any point in time, ever. There are only nine countries in the entire world with a nuclear capability, and according to foreign publications, one of them is Israel. Preventing another state from joining that elite club is not impossible, and according to Cohen, Israel must take risks in doing so if necessary."
Evyatar claims that we do not need to delay the Iranian nuclear program indefinitely: "Though Iran is dashing towards attaining a nuclear capability, but if the pace of this dash is slowed down, as indeed has been the case following the actions taken by Israel and additional states, then changes might occur within Iran itself in the meantime. The ayatollahs' regime will eventually be toppled, and if we succeed in postponing Iran's nuclearization until that point, in effect we will have accomplished our goal."
When we feel the sword on our necks
Yonah Jeremy Bob (46), married with four children, made Aliyah 15 years ago and currently resides in the city of Modi'in in central Israel. His colleague, Ilan Evyatar (58), is married with three daughters and lives in the town of Mevasseret near Jerusalem. They have known each other for many years: "In the past I was the news editor at the Jerusalem Post, and it was here that I got to know Yonah," Evyatar explains. "He is a military correspondent and intelligence analyst, and I also had connections in those specific communities, so we decided to join forces with a view to writing the book."
Bob explains that his connection with the world of intelligence evolved when he worked as a lawyer in the public sector. "I studied law at Columbia University, and even back then when I was a student studying for my bachelor's degree, I worked for a year or so as a volunteer at Israel's embassy in the UN. After completing my degree, I went on to work for a further year at the Israeli consulate in New York. In the US, I worked as an attorney in the private sector, and here in Israel I worked in the International Law Department of the IDF's Military Advocate General's Corps (the MAG Corps) and at the Ministry of Justice, and I was involved, among others, in Israel's effort to contend with the Goldstone Report following the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict in 2009, as well as additional sensitive issues. Working in that field enabled me to forge a variety of ties and this helped me considerably when I decided to turn to journalism, as people tended to look at me slightly differently and perhaps felt that they could trust me. From there, I ended up writing about the Iranian issue and the Israeli intelligence community – the Mossad and the Shin Bet. At a certain point, I interviewed the former Mossad chief, Shabtai Shavit, and subsequently I was able to approach all the past Mossad chiefs as well as additional former senior officials in the organization,"
In relation to this specific point, he refers to the notes and reference pages in the book, where it is stated that the former Director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, was a key partner in gathering the information prior to writing the book. "I held the first public interview with Yossi Cohen to be conducted in English, which was essentially the second interview after he completed his term of office at the head of the Mossad – the first one he gave to Ilana Dayan," notes Bob. "Evyatar and I also spoke with additional figures, and all of them were aware that I no longer work for the state, but my background did enable them to trust me."
Q: This interview is being held less than two weeks after the direct Iranian attack on Israel. In retrospect, would you have preferred to have the book released later on, and thus update it in relation to this significant event and the subsequent Israeli response?
Evyatar: "The two-step between Israel and Iran has been replete with dramatic incidents over the year. We released the book in the US on September 26, 2023, and less than two weeks later the events of October 7 occurred, which shifted the spotlights elsewhere. I believe that the terrorist attack only further underscored the relevance of the book, as even if Hamas did not act on direct Iranian orders, this move was completely in keeping with their 'ring of fire' doctrine – the desire to undermine Israel and to ensure that it is engaged in a constant state of combat.
"There are those who believe that Iran wants a nuclear bomb for the express purpose of dropping it on Israel. I personally do not share that view. In my opinion, Iran wants the bomb as part of that strategy of surrounding Israel with hostile elements from all sides. It seeks to gradually choke Israel, to undermine the economy here, to shake the confidence of Israel's citizens and their trust in the state, and to reach a situation that we are seeing today, where Israeli citizens are unable to return to their homes. That is exactly what Iran seeks to achieve. So, going back to your question, things are constantly changing. Though the missile and drone attack conducted on April 14 was the most dramatic moment to date in the war between Israel and Iran, there is absolutely no guarantee that this is its pinnacle. Iran might attempt to cross the nuclear threshold, and when we feel the sword on our necks, we will reach the conclusion that there is no choice but to attack. There are many diverse possible scenarios. So, had the English version been released two months earlier, it might have been better for us; however, had the Hebrew version gone out two months later, it would not have been such precision timing as now."
Bob states that an additional chapter relating to the events of October 7 was added to the Hebrew version. "That event proved that Israel had no choice but to adopt a different approach to its operations in the Palestinian theater, and it simply could not afford to neglect that issue. Maybe it should have acted with much greater urgency in its efforts to reach agreements, and perhaps more robust military action was needed, but whatever the case may be, it is clear that it had to try a different tack.
"Although Iran was not directly involved in the events of October 7, it was definitely the one that issued Hezbollah with a directive from October 8 onwards to engage in an incessant wave of attacks against Israel. It was patently clear that we needed to relate to this in the book, as the situation vis-a-vis Iran had dramatically changed. On the other hand, you simply cannot constantly sit down, to wait and see what will happen. As we have no idea what developments will occur next month or the month after that." We can only hope that the situation will improve."
Q: The Iranian race to the bomb involves considerable danger but it is also one of the factors leading to the signing of the Abraham Accords. To what extent have the Accords changed the state of affairs in the Middle East?
"These are extremely dramatic agreements for Israel, and it was actually during the recent Iranian missile attack that we saw the real practical application of the Accords. The Saudis publicly censured Iran; even the Jordanians themselves, according to foreign publications, intercepted missiles or drones launched against Israel; the UAE provided real-time intelligence information, and the Saudis apparently also did so. The Arab hostility towards Iran has concrete effects, and in the book we write about the establishment of the joint air defense, the one that was activated on April 14. All this is part of the ongoing process that has been evolving over the last two decades, a pact that has been built based on the shared concern of Iran's growing military power."
Q: And now, turning back to you, what have you learned from the experience of co-authoring a book? How is it different to writing alone?
Evyatar: "On the one hand, it is easier, as each of us conducted research for different parts of the book. Having said that, on occasions it is difficult," he smiles. "In such a process there will always be differences of opinion, but on the whole this is constructive debate and that is only natural."
Bob: "It is good that you can benefit from the perspective of another person, and each one of us brings with him different skills and sources. Of course, there were issues on which we did not agree, and we had to find a formula that we could both live with. But on the whole, the advantages outweigh the difficulties."
