Protect And Defend

chapter 6
ISFAHAN, IRAN

Adam Shoshan rounded the corner with his cart and counted the paces. To his satisfaction the long barren hallway was empty. He located the faint pencil mark at waist height and unfolded his small footstool. Reaching under the cart, he retrieved a metal box and yanked the wax paper off the back, exposing a sticky surface. After looking over both shoulders, he limped his way up the stool and pressed the device firmly against the wall, securing it in place. With no time to spare he folded up his footstool, set it on top of his cleaning cart, and was off.

Shoshan's mission had evolved in ways no one had predicted. He had been sent in as a spy in the most classic sense of the word. His mission was to surreptitiously collect intelligence on the Isfahan Nuclear Facility and nothing more. No unneeded gambles or risks were to be taken. He was to monitor who came and went and at what time. He was to build dossiers on the key scientists, and most importantly he was to ascertain the capacity of the centrifuge facility buried deep underground. Almost as an afterthought, the air force weighed in with one request. If it was possible, they wanted to get a look at the blueprints of the facility. After all, they would be the ones who would be called on to destroy it, and the more they knew about where to drop their bombs the better their chances were of succeeding.

Shoshan was under strict orders to move cautiously, take his time and make sure he passed on accurate information. This was not to be a quick in-and-out operation. The ops people back at Mossad anticipated he would be in country for a minimum of one year. Shoshan accepted all of this with a sense of duty and honor. Every time the maniacal Iranian president appeared on television and expressed his desire to see Israel consumed by a nuclear fireball, Shoshan was reminded just how much was riding on his ability to sell himself as a Persian.

He blended in and did his job. He cleaned toilets, washed floors, and kept his eyes and ears open. At first he had been extremely cautious. Surprise inspections were not unusual and the security people were unusually hard on the newcomers. The small room where he kept his cleaning supplies was tossed twice in the first month. This caused the already cautious Shoshan to be even more careful. After the second month he learned that the guards inspected his closet not to look for evidence of espionage, but to pilfer supplies. In the passing months Shoshan got to know them better and their suspicion of the newcomer dissipated. In a breakthrough that no one could have predicted, it was Shoshan's lifelong hobby of tinkering with all things mechanical and electric that would prove to make the difference.

Shoshan was cleaning the guards' break room one day when he happened to overhear the men complain about the poor reception of the television. He asked them if he could take a look at it, and they consented. After a quick inspection Shoshan located the problem and fixed it with a few turns of his screwdriver. In the eyes of the guards this elevated him to near-godlike status. In no time at all he was fixing broken TVs, microwaves, radios, and pretty much anything with a circuit board. Word spread quickly that the new janitor was a very handy man to have around. Even Ali Farahani, the head of security, came calling. The hot summer months were upon them, and Farahani's air conditioner was not working.

Shoshan went to Farahani's house and located the problem. He ordered a part and the following weekend installed it free of charge. Farahani was very grateful and asked Shoshan if there was anything he could do for him. Shoshan said there was, and showed the head of security his storage closet at work. In addition to the cleaning supplies, brooms, mops, and buckets, the room now contained haphazard stacks of household appliances that were waiting to be fixed. Farahani was at first enraged, thinking that the janitor was being taken advantage of by the other employees. Shoshan assured him that was not the case. He had no family to go home to. They had all been lost in the earthquake. The work helped him pass the lonely hours in the evening. What Shoshan wanted from Farahani was permission to stay after his shift was over so he could work on the appliances. Not only did Farahani give him permission, he found the janitor a much larger, unused storage room on the third sublevel where he could set up his makeshift repair shop. At the time, Shoshan knew he had reached a critical breakthrough, but he had could have never dreamed just how advantageous this single move would turn out to be.

In the months that followed, Shoshan spent many evenings and weekends at the facility. He explored the corridors by day while pushing his cleaning cart from one room to the next. The guards now paid him only a passing glance as he came and went with boxes of tools, circuit boards, batteries, tubes and all of the other stuff he needed to stock his repair shop. It was during this time that Shoshan got to know Cyrus Omidifar. Omidifar was the chief engineer for the entire facility. He was the man who made sure everything worked properly. The power plant, the elevators, the ventilation systems, the plumbing, the guts of the place, it all fell under the purview of Omidifar. Like Shoshan, he loved to tinker with things.

At first Shoshan did not grasp the importance of Omidifar and all that he oversaw. Shoshan was too busy focusing on the scientists and nuclear program to stop and think about the actual bricks and mortar, or in this case steel and concrete. That all changed one evening when he went to visit Omidifar in his aboveground office. There on the table was a set of blueprints for the entire facility. Shoshan remembered the request from the air force targeting specialist and immediately cursed himself for not having his tiny digital camera with him. He stood over the prints, trying to grasp as many details as possible while his friend finished up a phone call.

When Omidifar was done he joined Shoshan at the table and announced, "An impressive feat of engineering...isn't it?"

Shoshan agreed.

"It is designed to act as a series of nets." Omidifar flipped the top page over and revealed a side elevation of the ground floor. "The top floor is two meters thick with six interlaced layers of rebar. If the Americans drop their bunker-buster bombs, we are very confident this first line of defense will stop them."

Shoshan wasn't so sure. Before going in country he'd been told that the Americans had their best military minds developing a new series of bunker-buster bombs that would get the job done. Shoshan looked at his friend. "And if it doesn't?"

Omidifar shrugged. "There are three more floors the bombs would need to penetrate. They are not as thick as the first floor, but they don't need to be. The first floor will stop or slow even their heaviest bomb. If one happens to get through, it still has to penetrate three more floors. Each of them one meter thick with interlaced rebar. The only way the Americans could destroy this facility would be to use a nuclear weapon, and they would never be so reckless."

"What about the Jews?" Shoshan asked. He'd learned to take a perverse joy in playing role of Jew hater.

The question made Omidifar pause. He was a practical man not prone to spewing anti-Semitic remarks. "I am not so sure about the Jews. I advocated conducting this entire operation in secret, but our fearless president likes to taunt our enemies. Now we have made ourselves a ripe target."

Shoshan smiled and nodded. His eyes returned to the print and his inquisitive mind went to work, not as a spy, but as someone who was endlessly fascinated by how things worked. "How did you support all this weight?"

Omidifar flipped several pages to a new sheet that showed a different cross-section of the facility. "We basically built an underground skyscraper. There is a steel skeleton that supports the entire structure."

That was when it hit Shoshan. He had never been allowed access to the fourth sublevel where the reactor and the centrifuges were located. He had assumed it was built into or under the bedrock. From the air the facility was impervious to all but a nuclear strike and despite the hawkish attitude of some, Shoshan felt that neither the Americans nor Israel would play that card. Isfahan was a city of over a million people. There was no way either country would drop a nuclear weapon in the vicinity of so many civilians. If Shoshan's instincts were right, however, no air strike would be needed. Something far simpler could cripple the entire facility. As Shoshan looked at the prints on that afternoon he paid particular attention to the size and gauge of the steel that had been used. By the time he left Omidifar's office a new course of action was forming in his mind. Shoshan was ready to make the transition from spy to saboteur.

Months later Shoshan was struck by the irony that the destruction of the Twin Towers was what opened his eyes to the facility's central weakness. He did not think of the towers in their pre-9/11 form and the way they dominated the southern tip of Manhattan. He didn't think of them as piles of rubble and twisted steel. His mind fixated on a five-second clip of each building as it collapsed under its own weight.

After leaving work that night Shoshan did not sleep. He played the clip of the towers imploding on themselves over and over in his mind. He knew he had stumbled across the bare underbelly of the dragon. His mind raced ahead, making a list of what he would need, and how he would sneak it into the facility. On that night nearly a half year ago the whole thing seemed crazy, but what bold action didn't at its inception. The next morning he put everything in an encoded report and left it at his dead drop. While he waited for an answer from Tel Aviv, he found an excuse to go back to Omidifar's office and this time he brought his camera.

It took two months of back and forth as the experts debated the merits of Shoshan's plan. The deciding factor ended up being the air force's lack of confidence in their own ability to take out the facility with anything other than a nuclear strike. During those two months Shoshan furthered his plan, exploring the recesses of the third subfloor, locating and photographing as many steel I beams as he could. He passed everything along anticipating the questions before they came. During that time Shoshan also began construction on a false wall in the back of his storage room, foreseeing the necessity to hide the materials he would need to conduct his sabotage.

Shoshan spent countless hours alone with his thoughts trying to piece everything together. Simply striking at one or two points would not do the job. The plan would have to be comprehensive, and that meant it would take hours to carry out. Charges would need to be placed. He would be exposed the entire time, as would the explosives. Even the most witless guard would be likely to stumble upon the devices.

The solution came one afternoon when the facility suffered a brief power outage. Shoshan was cleaning a rest room on the second subfloor when it happened. The room went pitch black for a few seconds and then the emergency lights came on. Shoshan stared up at the square unit attached to the wall just below the ceiling. It consisted of two adjustable floodlights mounted near the top of a beige metal box approximately a foot and a half long by a foot and a half wide. Shoshan left the bathroom and looked down the long hallway. He counted four more emergency lighting units in this area alone. That night he photographed the lights and wrote down the make and model number. The next morning he informed Mossad that he had found a solution to their problem.

Five weeks later the first shipment of a dozen units left Haifa for Mumbai, India. After clearing customs the shipment was repackaged and sent up the coast to the Iranian free trade zone of Chabahar. From there it made its way inland to Isfahan. Two more shipments followed the same route. Each day Shoshan would pull up to the main gate of the facility on his motorbike, which had two saddlebags and an old plastic milk crate strapped to the back fender. The milk crate was almost always filled with parts. The guards had come to expect this. Inside each saddlebag, though, was a counterfeit emergency lighting unit. Not once in a month's time did the guards ever ask him to open the bags.

Following the schematics Shoshan had been through countless dry rehearsals. The experts back in Israel had thought of everything. Instead of using C-4 plastic explosives they packed the devices with relatively new thermobaric explosives. The thermobaric explosives would work extremely well in the underground confines of the facility, literally sucking all oxygen from the air and creating an enormous vacuum effect. They weighed less than conventional explosives and packed nearly three times the punch. Having the devices detonate at precisely the same time created another problem. Running det cord between each of the two units was dismissed immediately. Detonating the devices remotely was also impractical. There was no way for a radio frequency to penetrate all the concrete and steel. The solution was to install a highly accurate clock within each device. Via a master remote Shoshan had the ability to set a designated time for all of the devices to detonate. He did this in his storage room before putting them in place.

Twenty-six devices weighing eight pounds apiece. Just 208 pounds of explosives. Demolition firms used far more explosives to bring down buildings in nice neat little piles. That, however, was not Shoshan's objective. He was not trying to topple a building, and he certainly wasn't worried about how they would haul the mess away. His objective was much simpler. He was going to blow out the main support columns between the fourth and second subfloors. The loss of structural integrity would set off a pancake effect, bringing the upper three floors crashing down on the roof of the final subfloor. All that weight, falling with such force, would snap the vertical steel beams at the bottom of the structure. The four floors would end up pressed together like a stack of pancakes. The entire centrifuge facility and reactor would be smashed into a radioactive mess.

Shoshan limped down the hallway and checked his watch. He had just under thirty minutes to clear the facility. Done placing the devices, all he had to do was put his cart back in his storage room and get topside. Once the explosions started, he would move for the gate and slip out in the ensuing confusion. He opened the door to his storage room and pulled the cart inside. The windowless room had been his refuge for much of the last year. In the evenings when the facility was mostly empty, he would close the door and drop the façade of Moshen Norwrasteh the Iranian. Slowly, Adam Shoshan the Israeli would assert himself. What Shoshan came to realize was that the two men were not all that different.

Those were the moments when he felt most conflicted. When he worried about the nice people he had met and what would happen to them when the attack came. Shoshan felt a pang of guilt over moving up the timetable. Headquarters had made it clear to him that they wanted the facility to be destroyed in the middle of the day. They wanted not only to obliterate the facility, they wanted to extinguish the scientific power behind Iran 's nuclear program. The more people working down in the labs when the bombs went off, the better.

It was not a surprise to Shoshan when he received the order to create maximum damage. He was himself a hard man who had been forced to give orders that to some might seem heartless. Since receiving the directive, though, he had lain awake in bed nearly every night trying to figure out a way around it. He had met some very kind people during his time at the facility. There were a few hate-filled anti-Semites, to be sure, but most of the people were no different from his neighbors and colleagues back in Israel. It seemed wrong to him that they should have to die for following the orders of religious fanatics.

Seeing Imad Mukhtar, though, had caused most of those reservations to simply vanish. There was perhaps no more vile man in the modern history of Israel. Mukhtar was the purveyor of suicide bombers, rocket attacks on civilians, and countless kidnappings. He had the blood of thousands of Israelis on his hands. As one of the founders of Hezbollah, he was hell-bent on the absolute destruction of the state of Israel and nothing less. The mere fact that he was visiting the facility confirmed Israel 's worst fears; that Iran would simply hand off one of their new bombs to a stateless terrorist group like Hezbollah. Catching the man at the facility so close to the appointed hour was simply too difficult to resist.

Shoshan took a brief look around the room, pondering if there was anything worth taking. Sanitizing the place was not a concern. What little he had left was well concealed and would be destroyed by the explosion. Shoshan backed out of the room and closed the door behind him. As he headed for the elevator his thoughts turned to his friend Ali Omidifar. He'd come up with a plan to distract his friend and make sure he was out of the building when the bombs went off. He pushed the call button for the elevator and thought that it was the one humane thing he could do to help assuage his guilt over all the other people who would die.

When the doors opened, he found himself standing face-to-face with Ali Farahani, the facility's head of security. He looked frazzled and in a hurry. Shoshan guessed it had to do with the two men who were standing behind him. Shoshan quickly stepped out of the way and murmured a quiet apology. He kept his eyes averted as the three men got out of the elevator and started down the hall toward Farahani's office. Shoshan stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the ground floor. As the doors began to close, he looked down the hall at the back of Mukhtar's head and his subservient expression gave way to a broad smile.