Esther's Sling (31 page)

But for the second time in his life, he could feel his path changing as he watched the video of the World Trade Center towers collapsing. He knew immediately that radical Islamic terrorists were to blame, even if he had not previously heard of Osama bin Laden. And he knew immediately that he could not keep his head buried in his work as the world collapsed around him. He thought endlessly about the Jews of Europe during the
1930s who did nothing as the dark clouds of death enveloped them. He was a Jew. He had never called himself that prior to that day, but as the footage was repeated over and over, he screamed it to himself.
I am a Jew
.

The next evening he knocked one more time on the door of his rabbi, his mentor. What he told Solomon Rothstein that night was simple. He wanted to fight the terrorists. He wanted to fight for Israel. He was well placed to help his people. Rothstein told him to visit again in a week. A week later Rothstein told him to come back the night of October
10. When Hamak showed up that night, his rabbi simply gave him a note with the name and address of a coffee bistro downtown. Rothstein said simply, “Be there by nine tonight. There are booths in the back. Sit in one of those. Shalom.” Rothstein smiled and shook the hand of the man he had come to love as a son.

Two hours later
, Hamak’s new life as an agent for Israel began when a man sat down across from him in the booth and introduced himself as a businessman in need of a logistics provider. This was not what the Armenian was expecting, but he found himself being sized up by a man wearing a nice business suit. For half an hour the man quizzed him about his business and his travels through Iran. He asked him about his contacts in the Persian nation and whether the Armenian could deliver “sensitive” cargo to the Iranian military. Hamak told him that he had only done business with civilian businessmen in Iran and had no contacts in the military other than the border guards and customs officers he had come to know over the years. The man asked Hamak what he thought of Iranians. Hamak was honest. Finally the man asked Hamak about his mother. What was her name? When Hamak responded, the man said “No, I want to know her maiden name.” Hamak gave the man what he wanted. The man stood. “Are you in your office tomorrow morning?” Hamak nodded. “Good. I will visit. I want to see your operation.” Hamak did not stand up, but he reached across the table top to shake the man’s hand.

By the following morning Mossad agents in Tel Aviv had researched the family background of Hamak Arsadian. They had the history as supplied by Solomon Rothstein, but they wanted to verify the history of both Hamak’s mother and his father. When the Mossad agent showed up at the Armenian’s small office by
Zvartnots International Airport, he had the green light from Tel Aviv to formally recruit Hamak Arsadian into the service of Mossad. For the next five years Arsadian provided routine intelligence to Mossad about his travels throughout Iran. Who he met. Where he went. What he delivered. It was very routine and, after the first few months, very boring. Arsadian wondered what the point was. He could not imagine that there was any value to the mundane information he provided.

But excitement finally came. He received a real mission in March of 2007. For the first time he was actually given a shipment from his Mossad contact. It came in from Pakistan, a shipment of computer parts – chips and circuit boards – that needed to be delivered to a company called
Shahid Hemat Industrial Group. The delivery warehouse was inside a military facility known as Parchin, located just to the south and east of Tehran. The delivery was routine, but Hamak was smart enough to put the pieces of the puzzle together in his mind. He wasn’t sure what the parts he delivered were for, but he was sure that he had just done something important for Israel. The rush of excitement he felt on this trip was addictive. He wanted more.

More came only six months later. For the first time his Mossad handler asked him to rendezvous with a specific person as he passed through Tabriz. The role he played was simple. He was told to be sure he stopped for fuel at the
Behran Petrol Station on Road 32 just outside and to the west of Tabriz. He was to be there at one in the afternoon on the day he entered Iran from Armenia. Arsadian knew this station well. He always planned his travels so that he could stop there on the way into or out of Iran. The best part of travelling to the Islamic Republic was taking advantage of the subsidized cost of diesel fuel. Hamak never filled his tanks in Armenia.

On this trip he needed to make contact in the food store with a man named Hassan. When Hamak walked in, Hassan looked exactly as described and the two men exchanged simple and innocuous code phrases about driving conditions in the city that day. Hassan then went to the restroom and left. Hamak purchased some items and went to the restroom before going back outside to his truck. While in the restroom, which had only a single toilet, he lifted the lid on the toilet tank as he was instructed. Taped to the underside of the lid was a small package wrapped in plastic. Hamak removed the package and placed it in the small of his back, the bottom edge tucked under his waist band and the entire package underneath his shirt, furth
er obscured by his windbreaker.

It was not until he was back on the road that Arsadian realized that, unlike the simple retelling of his travels that he had been providing the Mossad for years, he was now involved in real espionage. This was the type of activity that got men arrested and tortured in Iran. But what shocked the Armenian truck driver was the realization that thinking about what he was doing made his adrenaline surge. He was excited, not frightened or nervous. For the first time he felt like he was a warrior in the struggle against a regime that threatened Israel at every turn. He was contributing and the contribution was real and tangible. He loved it. His delivery that day was a small load in Tabriz itself. He unloaded by 3 p.m. and was at his office in Yerevan by midnight, where a Mossad
-supplied and installed safe was the final repository of the real payload on this trip. Sometime the next day his Mossad handler would stop by the office and use his own key to enter, open the safe and retrieve the contents before driving the short distance to the airport for a flight out of Yerevan to Istanbul, where the package would be delivered safely to the Israeli Embassy. Arsadian never opened the package and never knew its contents, but he had just spirited the latest construction plans for the underground Fordow Enrichment site, Complex I and II, out of Iran.

To his Mossad handler and his handler’s superiors in Tel Aviv, Hamak was proving himself a real asset. He could handle the situations that made many people panic. When in 2011 Amit Margolis devised a way to get a small elite team of Israeli commandos to the Dehloran Radar Site, the men at Mossad who knew about Hamak Arsadian knew that he was the right asset for the job. For Hamak, he recognized that this new mission, when he first learned about it in
early 2013, was something different, something hugely important. His payment was the tractor-trailer rig that he now piloted south down Iran Road 15. He already had title to both the tractor and the trailer in the name of his company with no liens attached. It was a nice rig, one of the nicest to be found in this region of the world. If Hamak made it home alive, the rig was his to keep, complete with its secrets.

But Hamak was a bright man who had become a news junkie as he aged. He had always been good at putting the pieces together. He guessed that this mission was the prelude to an Israeli assault on the Iranian nuclear program. He hoped he was right but knew better than to ask his handler even the most basic questions. The unstated rules were clear: Hamak was told only what he needed to know and any prying beyond that was both unprofessional and potentially
dangerous to his health. When Yoni Ben Zeev was introduced to him in Yerevan several months earlier using the name Younis Mohammed, Arsadian was convinced that his suspicions about the importance of this mission were correct. The moment he laid eyes on Ben Zeev, he knew the young man in front of him was a special forces operator. Ben Zeev was straight out of central casting, a man who looked liked he could be dropped into the middle of the Himalayas with nothing but a pair of shorts on and still find his way back to civilization no worse for wear.

So the journey that brought Hamak Arsadian to this day on a rural road in Iran began when he was 15 years old. It had been a journey of discovery and self-fulfillment for the Armenian. Now he prayed that he would live to someday tell his grandchildren about his exploits. But at this moment he still had 96 miles of driving ahead of him from the turn off of Road 21 to reach Point Kabob. The easy and relatively flat driving of the prior few hours was giving way gradually to the Zagros mountain range. Soon he would be climbing up steep switchbacks, his tractor struggling in its battle against gravity, the length of his rig demanding every available inch of pavement – and more. Sporadic guardrails and crumbling road shoulders would test his mettle and his skills. As he thought about the coming drive, Hamak realized the wisdom of the load he carried that someone in the Mossad had dreamed up. The 449 remaining cartons of Charmin in his trailer weighed
less than his typical load and the new MAN tractor he was driving had 175 more horsepower than his prior tractor. He was enjoying the combination. This tractor-trailer rig performed better loaded than his old one when it was empty.

At 7:58 p.m., Arsadian turned right around a sharp mountain corner. The drive had been uneventful since his near miss with the pickup truck. The
nighttime weather was beautiful and the temperature was falling rapidly. He was only a mile from the Iranian Kurdish village of Dezli. That meant he was only a few miles from Point Kabob where he could pull over and get some sleep as he waited for Ben Zeev and his team to arrive.

Suddenly the Armenian slammed his foot on the brake pedal, engaging the engine braking system and forcing highly pressurized air into the push rods that rotated S-cams on both front wheels as well as the wheels on the single tractor axle and three trailer axles. In turn, each S-cam forced its mated brake pads against their braking drums, turning kinetic energy into heat. The brake management system of the MAN GTX took over to coordinate all of the numerous braking points, including implementing the anti-lock system for the inside wheels of the trailer brakes. The truck was going uphill at only 21 kph, but the small sedan in front of him was at a dead stop and Hamak had only a short distance to bring his rig to a full stop. He made it with about a meter to spare, much to the relief of t
he family sitting in the sedan.

Hamak looked down the road as is straightened out in front of him. There was a line of about a dozen cars all stopped. A single straight truck broke the silhouette of the cars in the line. The Armenian’s eyes followed the line, expecting to see an accident at the front. What he saw made his pulse quicken. An Iranian military truck was placed perpendicular to the road, ensuring that no vehicle passed through. Several soldiers were mulling around the truck, each of them fondling his G3 assault rifle. As the air brakes released their pressure, loudly announcing the arrival of the big tractor-trailer rig, Arsadian saw a soldier walking on the road past each of the vehicles, clearly heading to the latest traveler to hit this roadblock. As the man grew larger, Hamak was not certain about his uniform. He was wearing a heavy dark olive pea coat.
Once the soldier approached the tractor door, Arsadian recognized the patch of the Army of the Guardians of the Iranian Revolution, more generally known as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or IRG for short, on the soldier’s dark olive patrol cap. Arsadian’s Mossad handler had given him a book to study the various uniforms of the Iranian military and police branches. The IRG emblem, a raised forearm clutching a stylized AK-47, was easy to spot. The driver could not tell the man’s rank, but his bearing suggested he was an officer.

He lowered his window and smiled. The cold air hit the Armenian hard. He had climbed several thousand feet since he last exposed himself to the outside air and had paid no attention to the thermostat on his dashboard. He looked down quickly to see how cold it was. The readout said
“39ºF/4ºC.” His breath was instantly visible as condensation. The clear skies had come with the first cold front of the fall.

“As-
salamu alayka.” This officer was very different from the customs agent earlier in the day. He was young and in good shape. Hamak guessed his age to be only 24 or 25. There was an intensity in his eyes that immediately put the Armenian on notice: This was not a courtesy call.

“
Wa’ alayka s-salam. Has there been an accident?”

“No.” The young officer was curt. He was not used to having questions asked of him by civilians. The tone of his answer was intended to make that fact clear to Arsadian, who absorbed the message. “You are not Persian.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Armenian.”

“You are Christian?”

“Yes.” This question did not concern Arsadian. Most Iranians respected Christians as fellow believers in the one true God. Still, thought the driver, it was not the same as if he were Muslim and the man he was talking to now was a zealot – the patch on his cap proved that much.

“What are you doing here?”

“I am delivering my load to Ahvaz.”

“Delivering what?”

“A shipment of toilet paper.”

The IRG officer hesitated, not knowing how to respond to that information. “Let me see your papers.”

Arsadian passed the same clipboard to this officer that he had passed to his friend Abdul Hamid, the customs officer in Nordouz, about nine hours earlier – only this time there was no money strategically placed for quick retrieval. The officer looked at the first two items and turned away to walk back to his comrades hanging around the military truck at the front of the line. The Armenian’s passport was attached to the clipboard and this action by the IRG officer violated the first rule of international travel: Never let your passport out of your sight. Arsadian had no options, however. The power at this moment was completely on one side of the equation.