Meir Dagan and Cyber Attacks on Iran's Nuclear Facilities

The New York Times describes Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad, as a super spy who believed in the effectiveness of cyber attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities. Dagan, 71, passed away last week in Tel Aviv due to advanced liver cancer. He led Mossad for over eight years until early 2011, but gained more attention after leaving when he strongly opposed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's positions on how to deal with Iran's nuclear program. In his last speech, a month before his death, he tearfully expressed deep concern over the disastrous consequences of the current leadership's policies in a country that had taken so much effort to establish. David Sanger, a New York Times reporter, wrote on March 23 that less than three years after leaving Mossad, Dagan's deep disagreements with Netanyahu regarding Iran were revealed during a conference at Harvard University. Dagan was worried in 2014 that Netanyahu might order an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities at any moment. Sanger wrote that Dagan told him at this conference, 'No one can stop Netanyahu anymore.' Dagan and several other former high-ranking intelligence and military officials believed there were more effective solutions than military attacks on Iran's nuclear sites to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring nuclear weapons. However, according to Sanger, Netanyahu pressured Dagan and his allies to remain silent. Dagan stated at the Harvard conference that an Israeli bombing would only be a half-hearted and futile solution, and at best would only temporarily destroy the Iranian facility's building, while the Iranians would surely restore these facilities with utmost secrecy and certainly underground. The New York Times noted that Dagan had never softened his stance against Israel's enemies; he did not believe in soft countermeasures in his professional record and was known as one of the most ruthless figures in modern Middle Eastern history. Dagan had a photo of his grandfather in his office, kneeling beside a pit dug for a mass grave of Jews moments before being shot by the Nazis. He showed this photo to guests to illustrate his personal motivation for forming secret squads whose mission in Mossad and the army was to eliminate Israel's enemies. Dagan believed in 'never again'; meaning Israel should never allow a Jew to be defenseless against others and succumb to death, and anyone seeking to destroy Jews and Israel must be eliminated. According to the New York Times, Dagan, this bald dwarf, during his military career in the army commanded squads that shot armed Palestinians; Ariel Sharon, who was his trainer and commander, once said his specialty was decapitating Arabs. When Dagan was head of Mossad, many suspected he was involved in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists; in heavy traffic in Tehran, a motorcyclist would suddenly attach a sticky bomb to the door of one of the Iranian nuclear scientists' cars and speed away. The successful repetition of such assassinations even prompted then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to openly condemn the action; Dagan's response was always silence. According to the New York Times, it was Dagan who facilitated Israel's partnership with the U.S. in conducting one of the most complex cyber sabotage operations against centrifuge equipment at Iran's nuclear sites, which may have been the most successful joint operation of the two countries. Dagan was not a computer hacker but praised modern technologies; these technologies long prevented the Iranians from understanding where they were being cyber attacked. The joint operation that Dagan meticulously organized during the tenures of two U.S. presidents (George Bush and Barack Obama) reflected his thinking on how Israel should defend itself in the future; not through the usual overt display of military might that could provoke retaliation, escalate conditions, and invite global condemnation, nor through assassination and occupation, but through soft deception. David Sanger wrote that at the party of the same Harvard conference, Dagan pulled him aside to complain that the 'main part of the story' regarding this operation was not mentioned in the New York Times reports and in Sanger's book about the cyber attack on Iran's nuclear sites. Sanger noted he was surprised that Dagan had no qualms about discussing this highly classified information, only to complain that Israel's role in this cyber attack was downplayed and, according to him, too much credit was given to the U.S. Dagan told Sanger that for this operation, it was Mossad and the Israeli military intelligence eavesdropping unit, known as Unit 8200, that gathered the information and provided it to the Americans. Sanger told Dagan that if he was willing to disclose Israel's role in this operation, he would gladly write it, but Dagan stared at him and laughed, saying, 'I am old and sick; I do not want to spend my last days in prison.' Sanger added that in all the meetings he had with Dagan in the years before his death, he was cautious and did not speak of the details of operations; however, he frequently used the phrase 'if we had done this' to indicate his way of thinking while maintaining his oath of confidentiality regarding the details of covert operations during his tenure at Mossad. However, looking back, it can be said that Dagan, in intensifying his struggle and rivalry with Netanyahu since Netanyahu returned to the premiership last year, pursued two main goals. One goal was to restore his credibility as head of Mossad, which had been tarnished due to the assassination of senior Hamas military branch member Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a hotel in Dubai. In that assassination in 2010, Mossad's assassination teams were exposed, and the secret use of passports of living citizens from several countries was revealed, and Dubai police released multiple videos of many Mossad agents' entries and exits from the airport and the hotel where the murder took place. The second goal was to highlight the success of cyber attacks in slowing down Iran's nuclear program, which was important for Dagan's legacy, but if the world still thought that Americans carried out these operations, it had no benefit for him. Another reason for Dagan's struggle with Netanyahu could be more political than personal; it was to restrain Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, who were eager to bomb Iranian sites. According to Sanger, Dagan, like American officials, believed that revealing some information about the success of cyber attacks showed that there were more subtle and less provocative ways to counter Iran's nuclear program, and disclosing this information would make it harder for Netanyahu and Barak to issue orders to begin Israeli fighter operations in a military attack on Iran. Dagan stated in 2011 at the end of his tenure at Mossad that 'technological problems' created for Iran would prevent the country from reaching a nuclear bomb by 2015; 2015 was also the year Iran and six world powers reached the JCPOA, the final nuclear agreement. However, according to the New York Times, since Netanyahu's message to the world regarding Iran was different, Dagan made his struggle against the government he had worked for more public in the last year of his life - although the cost of this included the confiscation of his diplomatic passport (by Netanyahu's order). Ehud Barak also openly stated in an interview with Israel Radio that Dagan 'undermines Israel's deterrent capability against Iran.' However, Dagan believed that the Iranian government was suffering from deep factional divisions and that a military attack by Israel would only help unite these factions; Dagan considered the divisions within the Iranian government to be real. David Sanger wrote that in the days when Dagan was buried in Israel, his argument had, at least in the short term, prevailed over Netanyahu's view; reaching the JCPOA silenced the voices of those advocating a military attack on Iran, and Iran agreed to remove 98% of enriched uranium from the country. According to the New York Times, in the last two months when Dagan was dying, some Israeli leaders also saw for themselves that Barack Obama's approach to rolling back Iran's nuclear program was much more effective than a military attack. In this context, Dagan, a staunch opponent of Netanyahu's policies towards Iran, passed away.