With the White House still hoping for a negotiated settlement to the Iran issue, the Americans entered the talks in the option two camp and remained there until the end. The British also liked the “wait and watch” approach, although in their mischievous hearts they wanted to do a bit of “messing about” as well. Option three was the most controversial of the plans—hardly surprising given its source—and in the end it was supported by only one country. Because that country also happened to be the one that would forever have to live under direct threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, its vote carried more weight. “Besides,” argued Shamron emphatically, “Martin is ours. We found him. We fought for him. And we bled for him. We own those centrifuges. And we can do with them what we please.”

A centrifuge cascade is a complex facility. It is also quite fragile, as the Iranians themselves have learned the hard way. One faulty gas centrifuge, spinning at several thousand rotations a minute, can break into deadly shrapnel and blow through a facility like a tornado, destroying adjacent centrifuges along with connective piping and assemblies. Years of painstaking work can be wiped out in an instant by a single fingerprint, smudge, or some other impurity.

In fact, that is precisely what the Iranians first suspected when a calamitous explosion swept through an undisclosed enrichment facility in Yazd at 4:42 a.m. Their suspicions quickly focused on sabotage, however, when a near-simultaneous blast shredded a second undisclosed facility at Gorgan near the Caspian Sea. When reports surfaced of explosions at two other secret enrichment plants, the Iranian president ordered an emergency shutdown of all nuclear facilities, along with an evacuation of nonessential personnel. By dawn Tehran time, the Hammer of Shamron had achieved its first goal. Four previously undisclosed plants lay in ruins. And the mullahs were in a panic.

BUT HOW TO explain the blasts publicly without revealing the great lie that was the Iranian nuclear program? For the first seventy-two hours, it seemed the mullahs and their allies in the Revolutionary Guards had chosen silence. It cracked, however, when rumors of the mysterious explosions reached the ears of a certain Washington Post reporter known for the infallibility of his sources inside the White House. He confirmed the reports with a few well-placed phone calls and published his findings the next morning in a front-page exclusive. The story ignited a firestorm, which is precisely what the men behind it had in mind.