Yossi Cohen, the dapper chief of the agency, dressed in his usual crisply ironed white shirt, sat at a desk, keeping his eye on the time, while the whole room was in a state of tense expectation, waiting for him to give the order for one of the Mossad’s most audacious operations to begin. On the surrounding walls, an array of plasma screens glimmered, as if waiting for the satellite video feed of the operation to appear on them, providing a real-time view of what was taking place on the ground hundreds of miles away.
The Mossad's sleepless nights
Cohen and dozens of Mossad agents had been working for days, almost without sleep. The moment had arrived. At exactly 10:31 p.m., Cohen said, “Execute,” carefully enunciating each of the syllables of the command, which set in motion a Mossad team poised for action in Iran, specifically in the Shirobad industrial neighborhood on the southern outskirts of Iran’s capital, Tehran. Shirobad wasn’t the kind of place you would imagine as the scene of a spy drama with international consequences.
It was just a drab zone of corrugated-iron-roofed warehouses stretching as far as the eye could see. But on that night, two dozen selected Mossad operatives—most likely a mix of Israeli agents and Iranians opposed to the Islamic Republic’s theocratic regime—were propelled into a swift, well-rehearsed motion.
While Cohen watched the clock back in Israel, they broke into one of the warehouses, used high-temperature blow torches to penetrate a series of steel vaults, and began to remove files, physical and electronic, that contained the entire record of Iran’s strenuous effort to become a nuclear-armed power going back to its beginnings nearly thirty years before. READ MORE