Raid on the Sun (17 page)

As base commander, Spector was responsible for everything on the air force base, not only the planes, personnel, pilots, and squadron commands but niggling nuts-and-bolts details from mess supplies to infrastructure maintenance, all the while remaining an active fighter pilot and squadron commander involved in tactics and mission planning. When the new F-16 Fighting Falcon squadron was constituted at Ramat David, Spector became commander of that unit as well. It was an all-consuming responsibility.

Nevertheless, Spector made himself the squadron’s first pupil. As the commanding officer, he felt it a weakness to have men under his command who were expert in areas he knew nothing about—especially men he had mentored. As base commander he was one of the few allowed to know about the secret Osirak mission. A week after the first four F-16s were delivered to Ramat David, he began training in the Falcon. He worked up his own solo modelings, practiced simulated attacks, flew low-level, long-range navigations south along the Mediterranean coast and down the Sinai Peninsula. He said nothing to the men about this. But Raz was a little annoyed. What was Spector doing flying the F-16?

As Raz suspected, Spector had a plan. He knew the historic importance of the mission. A man used to the spotlight, he knew the notoriety it would bring. How could he, the nation’s most renowned fighter pilot, the commander of these men, stay behind while they flew into certain danger—and perhaps immortality? It would look like he was shirking.

“I want to join the Osirak mission,” Spector told Ivry in his office.

Ivry was stunned.

“I am their commander,” Spector said. “It is my duty to take my place with the men in this mission.”

“But you have not had the conversion training of the other men in the F-16,” Ivry replied.

“I have trained myself. I am as ready as anyone,” he argued. “I command many missions. Why would I not be part of this? It would be inappropriate for me, as their commanding officer, to remain at base while the men under me risk their lives on this mission.”

Ivry had long respected Spector as one of the IAF’s greatest pilots. But his gut told him Spector was not prepared. The mission pilots had all been carefully selected by him personally. They had trained hard for nearly a year, had logged hundreds of hours, had come together as a team. Spector would be in over his head in the new plane. And adding Spector to the mission would mean that one of the other pilots would be shoved out, pulled at the last second because an air force bigwig suddenly decided he wanted a piece of the action. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t good generaling.

“No,” Ivry said. “I’m sorry. I have to deny your request.”

Spector was stunned. He couldn’t believe it. He flew back to Ramat David chewing over what he should do. Could he just walk away? How would it look? No, he thought he had to be on the team leading his men. He decided he would have to go over Ivry’s head and make his request directly to the chief of staff, Raful Eitan. It was a fateful decision that would ultimately affect many people—but no one more than Spector.

Spector made an impassioned plea to Eitan to intervene. The chief of staff was in an impossible position. He had known Spector for twenty years and respected him immensely, both as a pilot and friend. How could he possibly humiliate him, Israel’s most celebrated fighter pilot? On the other hand, Eitan held Ivry in no less regard. And how could he undermine a commanding general by overturning his decision, completely violating the Israeli military’s sacrosanct chain of command? More critical, inserting Spector into the mission at such a late date could be dangerously disruptive. It was a lose-lose proposition however he cut it.

From the beginning the F-16 squadron had been under the command of Zeev Raz. As originally envisioned, the Ramat David F-16 wing would initially be broken into two squadrons, the 117 under Raz and the 110 under Nachumi, as more F-16s arrived from the United States and more pilots were trained. The mission team, on the other hand, consisted of eight pilots and two backup pilots, made up from the first three conversion teams sent to Hill. After Ben-Amitay’s death, the initial squadron consisted of Raz, Amos Yadlin, Doobi Yaffe, Hagai Katz, Amir Nachumi, Relik Shafir, Ilan Ramon, and Rani Falk. As within any group of very competitive men, there had been some jockeying for position and leadership. By late 1980, Nachumi had been chosen by Ivry to head the second F-16 squadron, the 110.

Since first conceived, the mission profile had gone through several modelings. At one point, when Begin pressed for an early mission in November 1980, Operations thought they could go with only four aircraft. When word of this came down the line, Nachumi grew agitated, fearing that he and his group would be bumped off the mission. He lobbied Spector hard, then began flying regularly to Tel Aviv and haranguing Ivry and IAF command to include his team in the raid. Day after day Nachumi appeared at Kirya, arguing his case, asking if they had made a decision yet.

Finally, Ivry, annoyed, snapped at him. “Okay, okay, you’re in. Now go away!”

Nachumi pointed out that early on, IAF had planned that the mission would be made up of two formations of four planes, one drawn from each squadron, Raz’s 117 and Nachumi’s 110. Nachumi argued that missions were assigned to squadrons, not men, so he and Raz were equal. Raz—and the majority of the pilots—considered himself the mission leader and Nachumi the leader of the second team. This rivalry caused some friction between the pilots. Some on Raz’s team considered themselves one eight-man attack squadron working together. Why split it up? The men found themselves constantly gravitating between Nachumi and Raz. Both were terrific pilots and both had very strong egos. But there was a distinct personality difference between the two. Each had followed a different career path to arrive at command. Nachumi came from Spector’s crack Phantom group in Beersheba in the south. Raz had moved up through northern command fighting in Syria and the Golan Heights and was close to Ivry. Raz was detail-oriented, no-funny-business, acutely sensitive to any challenge to his authority. Nachumi was more outgoing and not at all reticent about his accomplishments and his talents. This unspoken rivalry brought a sharper edge to the inevitable competition between two strong, ambitious leaders and, in turn, their two competing squadrons. It fell to Iftach Spector to play the diplomat, smoothing things over, controlling a rivalry that could actually be healthy by keeping the men focused and finely tuned.

Spector’s move to force himself into the mission, and going over Ivry’s head to do it, tipped this delicate balance and brought some of those vague, lingering feelings below boiling to the surface. Ivry, understandably, was annoyed. He could not believe that Spector would have the “bad form” to go over his head. It was disrespectful. Raz and Falk were furious. It was likely that Falk, who had rotated into a secured slot when Amitay had died, would be bumped to backup status if Spector were assigned to the mission. He couldn’t help resenting it. The men had spent nearly a year training for the mission together. Now at the last minute the base commander wanted to walk in and grab a spot. Falk thought to himself, “Hey, come on, you had your time. Give it to the kids.”

As for Raz, he had never held Spector in any particular awe. If anything, Raz was probably a little contemptuous of Nachumi and the others’ reverence for the commander. He respected Spector’s combat record and career as much as the next man, but who was he to think he had the right to simply walk onto Raz’s squadron? He never even approached Raz, the group leader. To add insult to injury, Spector would knock his friend Rani out of the mission.

Even the men who had more or less been Spector’s disciples—Yaffe, Katz, and Yadlin—felt that adding the commander to the mission at such a late date was not a good idea. Despite his peerless abilities as a combat pilot, the fact was, Spector did not have the expertise in the sophisticated F-16 that the other pilots did. And it was not fair to bump one of the men who had trained so long and so hard. As a group, the pilots met with General Ivry and informed him of their opinion.

Despite the opposition, General Eitan could not bring himself to disappoint his most heralded commander. He called Ivry and, as much friend as superior, asked the IAF head to make room in the mission for Spector. After all, he was already the men’s commander. Ivry relented. But, he insisted, Raz stayed mission leader.

Ivry informed the squadron leaders in person. Iftach Spector was a member of the Osirak mission.

“I won’t have him in my squad,” Raz bridled.

An awkward silence fell among the airmen.

“He can be my wingman,” Nachumi said.

Spector was assigned as second-in-command of the second team and as sixth pilot in the bombing run, following second team leader Nachumi. As the senior officer, it was a bit awkward and certainly unconventional for the commander to be under the command of junior officers, but Spector was not going to complain.

As simple as that: Spector was in, Falk was out. Falk was respectful, but decidedly cool around the commander. Raz, all business, swallowed the decision and moved on. But, it would turn out, the squadron was transformed in a much deeper sense than anyone suspected. For the first time, it became obvious that there were now
two
teams. And two team leaders. Spector was no longer just the base commander: he was a member of the second group, Nachumi’s team. The commander was aware of the latent animosity, but he was determined to overcome it. He took his place on the mission team. He was friendly, unassuming. He respected each of the pilots and was sure, given time, that they would accept him. In any event, he wasn’t going anywhere.

Was it a matter of ego or, as Spector told himself, a conviction that a leader’s place was in the line of fire with his men? Or was it perhaps something less conscious—ego, an inability to let go, to miss the spotlight? Not even Spector knew the answer to that. Whatever the case, it was too late to turn back.

By March 1981, Israel received word that the U.S. Department of Defense had agreed to sell the IAF twelve F-16 centerline fuel tanks. Operations recalculated all the data and factored in the extra fuel accorded by the centerline tanks. When the engineers were done crunching the numbers, the news was not good. At an average airspeed of 331 knots, flying fifty meters above the ground, given the prevailing temperatures, humidity, and wind patterns of the route and taking into account all the extra weight of the fuel itself, including the two external wing tanks and the centerline tank, Operations calculated that the Pratt & Whitney single engines would burn 4,940 pounds of fuel an hour. Factoring in the radical fuel intake when the afterburners were used during takeoff, pop-up, and escape, the operational engineers estimated that by the time the pilots reached the Euphrates River, their aircraft would have already burned through 9,000 pounds of fuel. That left only 6,000 pounds of fuel to get home on—if there were no intercepts or evasions. Indeed, during test flights the pilots were coming up short some forty to sixty miles.

Somehow they had to find another sixty miles—this after already virtually stripping the planes clean. The support team checked and rechecked their modelings, scanned the performance specs. In the end they came up with two last-ditch ideas—both risky. The first was to jettison the wing-mounted fuel pans over the desert as soon as they were empty. That would lighten the planes by several hundred pounds, cut down the drag caused by the hanging tanks, and save as much as ten minutes’ flying time. Indeed, General Dynamics had designed the external fuel pans, which looked a lot like bombs themselves, to be released from inside the cockpit. But there was still a danger. The fuel pans hung beneath the wings next to the two-thousand-pound bombs. The tanks and their wing clips were not designed to be released while the aircraft was carrying ordnance. There was a real risk that the pans, let loose at three-hundred-plus knots an hour, could easily collide with the bombs, damaging their release clips or, worse, causing the bombs to detonate. The pans could also be caught in the updraft and flip up and over the wings, causing damage to the wing flaps.

As weapons officer, Katz was particularly concerned about the idea of jettisoning the external tanks so close to the ordnance. He called the chief design engineer at General Dynamics in San Diego and asked him what he thought the chances were for dumping the fuel pans in flight while fully armed. The engineer rechecked the design specifications and told Katz he thought they could get away with dropping the tanks if they kept their airspeed under four hundred knots. The issue was settled: the wing pans would be dumped over the Saudi desert.

The second idea was to do a “hot refueling” on the runway at Etzion. With the engines running, spewing hot streams of jet exhaust, the F-16s’ tanks would be topped off on the runway by fuel trucks before takeoff, replacing the hundreds of gallons of jet fuel burned while conducting checkoffs and taxiing. It was a dangerous procedure, with a risk of the hot exhaust igniting the fuel and exploding the tanker trucks or the F-16s. Once again the book said it could not be done. They would do it anyway.

By the end of March, Mossad reported to Begin that the foreign workers were returning to al-Tuwaitha and building had resumed at Osirak. France and Italy decided the Iran-Iraq War was likely to drag on for years, bogged down on the border in World War I–style trench warfare. The likelihood of another Iranian air strike on al-Tuwaitha was minimal.

Begin wanted the air strike back on and began lobbying the ministers for final backing. Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin was still very much on the fence, even though he had not challenged Begin outright at the October meeting. Taking no chances this time, Begin did behind-the-scenes arm-twisting. Yadin had been a member of the ’74 blue-ribbon panel chosen to investigate the intelligence failings that had allowed the Israeli military to be taken by surprise in the opening days of the Yom Kippur War. At that time he had been supplied with intelligence material that had been skewed and doctored. Now, for those reasons, Yadin did not trust the military and Mossad intelligence estimates of Osirak. He insisted on seeing the raw data, the original classified reports from the field agents. In early March, Begin arranged for Chief of Staff Eitan to meet secretly with Yadin and show him the raw data. At the meeting, Eitan presented Yadin with the classified Mossad reports and photographs, including the top-secret KH-11 satellite shots that clearly documented the return of the foreign techs to al-Tuwaitha and the resumption of the construction work. By the end of the meeting Yadin agreed to withdraw his opposition to the raid.