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mysterious explosions like the massive blast at a missile base, which
destroyed ballistic missiles that could reach Israel.
The covert onslaught dovetails with Israel’s history of reaching “over the
horizon” to disarm perceived threats at a distance. To keep advanced arms
from reaching Hamas and Hizballah, Israel in the past year sent warplanes
to bomb convoys and arms depots in Sudan and Syria, respectively,
without apparent retribution. In the case of Iran, however, experts say the
audacity of Israel’s covert campaign stirred Tehran to revive an espionage
effort that lay largely fallow since 9/11. The Spy vs. Spy contest that
ensued would prove woefully one-sided, even in the third-world countries
where Iran chose to strike, hoping to avoid heightened security awareness
in the developed world. In the end, its only success came inside Iran,
where the secret police operate without inhibition.
The shadow war may have started on Jan. 15, 2007, the day Ardeshir
Hosseinpour passed away. Hosseinpour was a specialist in
electromagnetics at the Nuclear Technology Center in the city of Isfahan,
Iran, but his death might have escaped notice had Iran’s government not
kept it under wraps for almost a week, finally attributing it to fumes from
a faulty heater. An online report by the American private intelligence firm
Stratfor suggested another cause — radioactive poisoning — and hinted
that Mossad’s Caesarea section was back in business. Caesarea, named for
an Israeli beach town that dates back to Roman times, is the operations
branch of Israel’s secret service, most notoriously responsible for the
assassinations of some two dozen Palestinians (and an innocent waiter)
after the 1972 Munich Olympics. Assassinations are carried out by a very
small unit dubbed Kidon, the Hebrew word for “tip of the spear.” Kidon
operates at a remove from the legions of Mossad employees working in
less lethal fields.
It would have been a unit called Hatzomet, or “The Junction,” that
recruited Majid Fashi, a handsome young Iranian who dropped out of high
school to pursue a career in kickboxing. By the account he gave on Iranian
state television early in 2011, Fashi presented himself at the Israeli
consulate in Istanbul in 2007 and was vetted for a solid year before being
shown any trust. Two years later, on Jan. 12, 2010, he would place a bomb

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