Raid on the Sun (2 page)

The June 7 raid unleashed other unexpected aftershocks for Begin as well. During his monumental press conference two days after the attack, the prime minister, in his zeal to praise the IDF, bragged that the Israeli F-16s had destroyed a secret facility buried “forty meters beneath the reactor”—a hidden plant for the production of atomic bombs. There had been no such secret facility beneath Osirak—the closest thing to it might have been the nuclear guide hall, the experimental laboratory to investigate the property of neutrons that extended beneath the ground from the reactor. To the horror of Mossad’s Hofi and the IDF’s Saguy, what Begin was describing did in fact exist, but not at al-Tuwaitha. He had confused Osirak with Israel’s own supersecret A-bomb plant 120 feet belowground at Dimona.

The prime minister’s press office tried to recoup the next day by explaining that Begin meant to say “four” meters under the ground, not “forty,” when describing the facility at Osirak. But the damage was done: the CIA, which had been deeply suspicious of the Israeli nuclear facility for years, was more than intrigued by the “misquote” and knew immediately what Begin had done. He had blown his government’s secret operation. Mossad director Hofi was furious. He had spent a year in the doghouse being punished by Begin over his opposition to Osirak. Now Hofi had no sympathy for Begin. Two weeks after the PM’s press conference, the Mossad director granted a rare interview to the Israeli press. In it, Hofi complained bitterly about “politicians” who were compromising the nation’s secret intelligence and undermining the security of the state. There was no doubt within the Israeli political elite about whom Hofi was referring to.

The Arab nations capitalized on the opportunity to refocus world attention on Israel’s atomic aspirations. Joined by France, Germany, Italy, the United States, and the United Nations’ IAEA, they demanded an investigation into Israel’s nuclear capabilities and a full disclosure by the nation concerning its production and distribution of any and all atomic weapons. Begin adamantly refused. The result was an avalanche of negative press that portrayed Israel as an aggressor, a dangerous nuclear power, even a pariah state in the Middle East. The flap set back Israel’s foreign relations with many European countries for much of the ’80s. The country’s opposition Labor Party, headed by Peres, accused Begin of setting the nation on a suicidal path of global isolation.

As for Hofi, his opposition to the raid cost him his job. His deputy director, Nahum Admoni, had disagreed with his boss about Osirak from the beginning, arguing at one point that even if destroying the reactor was not a matter of life and death, it would teach “any other Arabs with big ideas a lesson.” The onetime close friends gradually became hardened political enemies. A majority of the Mossad sided with Admoni, as Hofi became more and more isolated at the top. A little more than six months after the raid, Yitzhak Hofi, who had headed the secret intelligence service since 1975, was squeezed out in January 1982, replaced by Admoni.

Inside Iraq, the June 7 attack brought to a screeching halt the nation’s secret plans to use plutonium extraction from spent reactor fuel rods as a route to creating an atomic bomb. But it did not end Saddam Hussein’s dreams of nuclear dominance. There were, after all, other ways to obtain enriched uranium.

By November 1981, the Nuclear Research Center was already beginning to retool to accommodate new technology. The Osirak reactor was cleared of rubble, but remained for the most part a neglected crater in the middle of the compound. Hearing about deteriorating morale among his scientists after the raid, Hussein made a second visit to Atomic Energy, arriving early in the morning, dressed for battle—black beret, olive green army togs, and a holstered pistol on his hip.

“If you are scared now, how do you think you would do in a real shooting war?” Hussein excoriated Khidhir Hamza and the hundreds of scientists and employees who had been rounded up to be lectured to by the Great Uncle.

“You think the Iranian mullahs are weak? You think those bearded fanatics will give up?” he snapped. “No, they are not weak. They will never give up. They can’t wait to die for Allah!”

Did they want to be oppressed by religious fanatics who would force their women to cover themselves in veils? No, they had to fight.

Before departing, Hussein offered his carrot, announcing he was leaving behind twenty-six brand-new automobiles as a gift. They could decide among themselves who best deserved them. And then he was gone.

Soon after, Jaffar Jaffar, the former head of AE, was suddenly released from prison and transferred back to al-Tuwaitha. Under the umbrella of Atomic Energy, a new, independent, top-secret department was formed called the Office of Research and Development. Headed by Jaffar Jaffar and staffed by al-Ghafour and Khidhir Hamza, reporting directly to Hussein’s brother-in-law Barzan al-Tikriti, the organization would follow simultaneously two new routes to producing enriched uranium: the first technique was use of centrifugal technology; the second was use of magnetics.

The centrifugal process was used by Pakistan in that nation’s atomic weapons program. Complex and expensive, the technique converts uranium ore into a uranium gas, then separates out small U-235 atoms from U-238 by repeatedly spinning the uranium-compound gas inside a rapidly rotating cylinder, enriching lighter uranium at the center. The second process, pioneered by the Manhattan Project scientists working on the Little Boy bomb during World War II, creates enriched uranium by using powerful electromagnets. Both processes were incredibly technical, time-consuming, and required a great deal of highly sophisticated and expensive scientific equipment, much of which was on the IAEA’s list of proscribed technology.

Already facing such formidable obstacles, the nuclear scientists’ work was hampered even more critically by Hussein’s bloody, costly war with Iran, which continued to drag on for most of the eighties. Both sides had become mired in demoralizing, WWI-style trench warfare along Iraq’s eastern borders, neither side giving nor gaining ground. In the end, the conflict would cost both nations over a million lives, seriously damaging Iraq’s once-thriving economy. The conflict would also drain off many of the Nuclear Center’s resources and funding. Procuring the necessary technologies to implement either centrifugal or magnetic processes for enriching uranium tooks years sometimes. Meanwhile, well before Iraq was ready to produce its first weapons-grade uranium and begin creating its own atomic bomb, Saddam Hussein invaded the tiny principality of Kuwait on the eastern border of Iraq. Hussein had long claimed Kuwait and its wealthy oil fields—arbitrarily sectioned off of the country by the British in 1932—as a part of the Iraqi empire. Convinced that the United States would go along with the annexation, Hussein overran the undefended state in days, his troops looting and terrorizing the mostly upper-class citizens of the kingdom all the way to Kuwait City. President George H. W. Bush responded by piecing together the now-famous worldwide coalition that swept Hussein’s armies out of Kuwait and the southern Shi’ite territories of Iraq within weeks. During the nearly monthlong bombing campaign that preceded the ground offensive, Khidhir Hamza’s Nuclear Research Center at al-Tuwaitha was heavily targeted by Allied sorties.

By the end of the war, the once-proud campus was a moonscape of rubble and destruction. What the Israelis had done to the Osirak reactor, coalition bombers had done on a mammoth scale to the entire complex. The buildings and laboratories were either leveled or gutted, the towers toppled. In the peace that followed the Gulf War, United Nations weapons inspectors would harry and hound the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s secret nuclear weapons programs underground until 1998, when the inspectors were pulled out prior to Coalition bombing ordered by President Clinton in the wake of Hussein’s refusal to cooperate with U.N. strictures. The atomic programs would continue, but at a pace nowhere near what Hamza and his colleagues had overseen during the heady days at al-Tuwaitha. The seeds of destruction of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions had been sown on June 7, 1981, and Hussein was never to see his dream become a reality. In the passing years, many of Iraq’s scientists would defect, seeking asylum in the West. Khidhir Hamza fled Iraq in 1995, finally moving to the United States and being granted asylum after months and months of hiding from Iraqi agents and negotiating with the CIA. Eventually, Hamza would renew his teaching career and become one of the outspoken Iraqi exiles, lobbying against Hussein’s regime and warning of the nation’s ongoing nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs.

On June 7, 2001, the eight mission pilots along with the two backup pilots and all their wives gathered together for the first time in two decades to mark the twentieth anniversary of the raid on Osirak. They met for dinner at the beautiful, airy home of Iftach Spector in a bucolic neighborhood some twenty miles outside Tel Aviv. Many of the pilots had not seen one another in years. Generals Rani Falk and Amos Yadlin were still in active service in the IAF. Ilan Ramon was on active duty, but now reassigned as Israel’s first astronaut, training with the Columbia Shuttle crew in Houston, Texas. Others, like Relik Shafir, remained in the reserves. Raz, Hagai, and Nachumi had retired and were working in the public sector.

The years after the raid had brought them all an odd kind of anonymous celebrity. Their deed was known throughout the world and lionized in the Israeli press, but because of the military’s insistence on continued secrecy about the mission, which, at least officially, remained classified, few outside the IAF, wives, and family knew who they were. But the pilots were satisfied with the respect and appreciation of those colleagues and high-level professionals who understood exactly what they had accomplished. For months, in fact, the Pentagon had refused to believe that the pilots had truly flown to al-Tuwaitha and back without refueling. There were rumors that the F-16s had actually been refueled over Saudi Arabia by tankers disguised as commercial planes. Other fantastical stories had it that the pilots had flown the entire distance grouped so tightly together that ground radar would mistakenly “read” them as a commercial flight. Amazed by the accuracy of the targeting, the Arab nations charged that Mossad spies had planted secret homing devices in the reactor. The pilots would quietly shake their heads and laugh.

Katz, in fact, was given the task of walking a skeptical U.S. Air Force captain sent from the Defense Department and an official from General Dynamics step-by-step through the entire mission in order to demonstrate how they had pulled off the attack on “one tank of gas.”

Now at Spector’s home, the pilots reminisced and swapped stories about the raid and the training—events they had forgotten, things they had never told. Nachumi recalled that the day after the raid, when the ground crews had rolled out the F-16s for a routine maintenance check, not one of the eight planes had started. All had mechanical failures.

“Who says planes do not have souls,” Nachumi declared.

For the first time, too, the wives shared their experiences: who had known about the raid beforehand, and who had not. After catching up on old business and family history, the men gathered for a video presentation assembled by Amos Yadlin and Relik Shafir. For the first time in twenty years, they watched videotaped highlights of the attack captured by their nose cameras. Many of the men had forgotten over time the terrible sounds of the AAA fire, the streaking SA-7s, and the hysterical radio chatter of the ground crews below.

During the evening, Katz found himself thinking more than once about Spector. He had felt that, knowing the commander the way he did, the bitter memory of missing his target that day would have eaten at him for the last twenty years. Those misses were indeed still on Spector’s mind. He presented the squadron with a bottle of champagne and a card he had made up in his immaculate block print. It read: “Our mathematical magic: 7 divided by 8 = 100 percent.” Even though only seven pilots out of eight hit their target, the squadron together was perfect. It was Iftach Spector’s way of honoring his fellow fliers and acknowledging his personal failure. Then, that night, for the first time in twenty years, Spector explained to the men what had happened, that he had been sick and dizzy and perhaps had blacked out. He could not be sure. Two decades had passed and he still could not remember.

And he could not forget.

Rani Falk asked why he had waited twenty years to tell them. Spector just shrugged. The revelation only made more acute a sense of guilt Nachumi had carried for two decades. At the most critical moment, he had put even more pressure on his unhealthy wingman by so perilously closing up the attack formation and then not focusing on his position at all—at the very moment he may have caught blackout.

General David Ivry did not make the pilots’ reunion. In 1998 the former head of IAF had been appointed Israel’s ambassador to the United States, and that summer of 2001 he would be wrapping up his tenure in Washington, D.C., where he had become one of Israel’s most popular and respected officials. Indeed, a Who’s Who of Washington turned out at his retirement party the following April, held inside the tented courtyard of the great gray-stoned fortress that is the Israeli embassy. Tucked away on leafy Consulate Row in D.C.’s Van Ness district, surrounded by a tall iron fence and patrolled by many guards, some in uniform, some not, the three-story estate sits on a corner lot just down the street from the shuttered Ethiopian embassy. Alighting from their limousines that night were Vice President Richard Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Senator Lindsey Graham, publisher Mort Zuckerman, and, seemingly, an entire delegation from the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, whose membership, like its famed conceptualists Wolfowitz and then Defense Advisory Board chairman Richard Perle, had been inspired by Ivry’s groundbreaking preemptive strike on Osirak, holding it up as the prototypical example of the kind of first-strike “defensive” action they argued should form the basis of a new, aggressive American foreign relations philosophy, especially regarding Iraq.