Raid on the Sun (7 page)

“What did you think of Jabir’s book?” Sharif asked, referring to the Palestinian’s much talked about study of Israel’s atomic bombs. The question, apropos of nothing, alerted Hamza that this meeting was a setup.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Hamza replied. In truth, Hamza did not believe that Israel had the capacity to produce enough plutonium to make atomic bombs. And how could they have tested their designs to make sure their bomb worked? Certainly Israel had no Nevada test ranges. He looked at the disappointed faces of his bosses. He had given the wrong answer. He was, he realized, being arrogantly dismissive.

Al-Mallah, with some satisfaction, informed Hamza that, in fact, Saddam believed every word of the book. Not only that, but the Great Uncle had ordered the Nuclear Research Center to create an atomic bomb for Iraq. Al-Mallah then explained that if the scientists at al-Tuwaitha could not show any progress, the Great Uncle was liable to grow impatient, and that would be a danger to all of them. On the other hand, if the the three of them could come up with a viable plan, then funds, resources, and prestige would flow to them all. But, for security reasons, they would have to keep this a secret between them. Hamza felt his chest tightening. Good God, he thought, how could they possibly build a nuclear bomb? What would the West do if they found out?

On the other hand, the idea of creating an atomic bomb from scratch took his breath away. It was truly Faustian: to be given every resource, the latest technology, the country’s finest minds to compete against the West’s best and brightest to build what was truly the ultimate prize in nuclear physics. And yet, what would he sacrifice—his morals, his professional ethics . . . his soul? Years later, Hamza would feel pangs of regret about his part in enabling Saddam’s ambitious plans to become a nuclear state, but as a young scientist eager to prove himself, trapped inside Hussein’s crazy world of intimidation and dreams of world power, he could not resist. Over al-Mallah’s dining room table that night, Hamza, al-Mallah, and Sharif began planning the creation of the first Arab bomb. And, they agreed at once, they would follow the lead of the Israelis.

Once he had dispensed with the Soviets, Hussein began searching for a new partner and, like the Israelis before, he quickly discovered the French. For all their cultured sophistication, in truth, the French loved nothing more than a good bargain. And no one knew how to bargain better than Saddam Hussein.

Early on, Hussein had learned that people were motivated by two things: fear and greed, or at least the prospect of easy money. For the first, Hussein turned to his stick, the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s sadistic secret police; for the latter, he relied on an oil-reserve carrot of $45 billion. He had the power and the wealth. What he didn’t have was time. The ticking clock, as with all dictators, was his enemy—the one thing he could not control.

Indeed, Saddam’s obsession with speed was a constant torture to Baghdad’s construction industry. Neophytes to government service quickly discovered the dangers inherent in working for Hussein. Entifadh Qanbar—who years later would flee Iraq through the dangerous no-man’s-land of the northern Kurdish border and ultimately return with the exile group headed by Ahman Chalabi in 2003—was a young, bright engineer working in Baghdad in the seventies. Short, dark, full of nervous energy, Qanbar looked like an Iraqi Joe Pesci. He had been hired to refurbish Baghdad’s historical palaces as part of Hussein’s vision to restore the city to its Mesopotamian glory. At the time, a friend from engineering school was bidding on his first government contract: a three-story government chemical plant in south Baghdad. Among many stipulations, the bidding specs for the plant called for a one-year construction schedule. Qanbar’s friend had always been a bit of a character—roguish, a gambler who was not averse to cutting corners. In the army he would routinely forge weekend passes for himself at a time when the brutal officers of the Iraqi military were shooting soldiers for far lesser transgressions. Determined to win the bid, the engineer slashed his construction time to six months and submitted his estimate to Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and the minister overseeing all military procurements. Following standard procedure, Kamel read the proposal, accepted it, and automatically cut the engineer’s deadline in half, to three months, before sending it on to Hussein, who had to approve all government contracts. Hussein read the proposal, okayed it, then slashed the schedule in half once again, this time to forty-five days.

“You have forty-five days,” Kamel informed the shocked engineer. “I’ll give you all the help you need. You can change what you want, requisition whatever you need, charge whatever you decide. But you
have
to have this done in forty-five days!”

To his horror, the next morning a detail of Hussein’s security men arrived and surrounded the engineer’s work crew and the construction site. No one was allowed to leave until the job was finished. For the next two weeks the engineer and his crew—carpenters, masons, bricklayers, painters, laborers—worked day and night, eating and sleeping in shifts on the construction site. Dispensing with normal construction processes of erecting a building floor by floor, from foundation to roof, the crew poured the foundation, and while it dried, threw up all three floors at once—plus exterior brick walls and roofing, all braced by scaffolding and girders—and then allowed it to dry as one piece in place. Two weeks later they tore down all the scaffolding and retaining braces and there it was, a brand-new building.

The contract also called for a five-hundred-space parking lot. Normally such a lot would be graded out and then refilled gradually with dirt while being compacted every two feet by tamping machinery to ensure a stable foundation. Once solid and leveled, the asphalt would be laid and rolled flat. It’s a time-consuming process. But with two days to complete the entire job, the engineer simply dug out a three-acre rectangular pit and then filled the hole in with thousands of cubic yards of concrete. Scores of cement trucks lined up for miles, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars of concrete for twenty-four hours straight. When the concrete dried, it was asphalted over. Instant parking lot—and one of the most expensive pieces of land in Baghdad.

In fourteen days Saddam Hussein’s military, biological, and chemical weapons division had a new research building. Qanbar’s friend charged the government one dinar a brick—a rate that would translate in American dollars to charging three dollars apiece for twenty-five-cent bricks. Kamel and military procurement did not raise an eyebrow at the exorbitant fee.

With outsiders, Saddam’s business strategy was less Draconian but just as direct: You give me what I want—hard-to-get items like tanks and uranium and nuclear reactors—and I will give you rich contracts—obscenely rich contracts. This was in essence what he told Jacques Chirac during the French prime minister’s groundbreaking visit to Baghdad in early 1974. It turned out to be an offer the French P.M. could not refuse.

The infamous OPEC oil embargo of 1973–74 had just ended, sending gasoline prices to unimaginably high levels and shifting a trillion dollars of global wealth suddenly eastward. France was already dependent on Iraq for 20 percent of its oil. As part of the deal, Hussein offered France 70 million barrels of oil a year at present market prices for ten years. In addition, Iraq would purchase billions of dollars of French military hardware, including tanks, helicopters, antiaircraft missiles, radar, and one hundred Mirage F-1 fighters. Chirac practically trembled when Saddam threw in gratis contracts to purchase 100,000 Peugeots and Renaults in two blocks of 50,000 each. And as a final sweetener, the French would develop a planned billion-dollar lake resort outside Habbaniyah, the location of a large air force base west of Baghdad. In return, Saddam got his nuclear reactor.

In September 1975, Hussein entered Paris like a conquering pasha out of
1001 Arabian Nights.
Flanked by a troupe of barrel-chested bodyguards, he led a parade of festively clad Iraqi fishermen bearing flaming braziers of roasted Tigris River fish down the banks of the Seine. As news cameras rolled, Jacques Chirac and various government ministers of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s administration gathered around the Middle Eastern cooking demonstration, tittering and smiling gamely as they sampled bites of fish served on aluminum foil, Baghdad-style.

“C’est bon,”
they declared, fastidiously wiping fish oil from their fingers with paper napkins.

The fishermen, their hair tousled and looking as though they had slept in their clothes on the plane ride over, moved self-consciously between the fish and the French, exchanging anxious glances lest someone make a mistake. Faux pas in the service of the Great Uncle could often be fatal. But nothing was amiss this beautiful fall night along the glittering bank of the Rive Gauche, while above it all Saddam looked on, beaming like the proud father.

Those of the educated class back in Baghdad would cringe in mortification at the television news images of their leader, like some cartoon Ahab, trying to impress the gourmand diplomats with fish in foil. But smiling in his trademark black fedora, Saddam was enjoying his own private joke. As wags later quipped, he knew Chirac and his entire cabinet would happily have eaten old tires from the Tigris if it would have bought them hundreds of millions of dollars in cheap oil.

Hussein’s trip was the reciprocal visit to seal the deal struck in Baghdad. Hamza and his colleagues had picked out the perfect reactor for the Nuclear Research Center: the Osiris reactor, a huge, aluminum-domed, top-of-the-line research reactor, named for the Egyptian god of the underworld. France would oversee the production, shipping, and construction of the reactor and train Iraqi technicians in its operation. Ironically, as it turned out, many of the French companies contracted to do the work were the exact same government-approved outfits that had secretly built Israel’s Dimona reactor a decade earlier. France also expanded the original nuclear trade treaty to include yet another, smaller research reactor, “Isis,” named after Osiris’s wife, which would be erected alongside Osiris. Finally, in a rare and controversial decision, France agreed to supply Iraq with seventy-two kilograms of highly regulated enriched, or “weapons-grade,” uranium for start-up fuel. This last agreement quickly caught the attention of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which kept a keen watch on any movement of U235 because it could be readily converted to use in an atomic bomb.

The reactor “listed” for $150 million. The price tag for Saddam was
$300
million.

“We were happy to pay,” Hamza would recall later. “After all, who else was going to sell us a nuclear reactor?”

Euphoric, Hussein rechristened the nuclear reactor
Osiraq
(incorporating the name
Iraq
), or “Osirak” in English, and the Nuclear Research Center “Tammuz,” after the Arabic word for
July,
in honor of the month of the Ba’th revolution. Tammuz would form the centerpiece of Iraq’s new nuclear energy industry centered at al-Tuwaitha, “the truncheon,” in the brown flatlands of the Tigris.

The two Israeli generals, David Ivry and Raful Eitan, stared in silence at the row of grainy eight-by-tens, dealt like a poker hand on the table before them—aces and eights, a dead man’s hand. Smuggled out of Iraq at great personal risk by Mossad agents, the photographs showed a veritable Nuclear Oz populated by steel-and-glass laboratories, a nuclear fuel reprocessing unit, modern administration buildings, a square mile of electrified fences, and, rising Venuslike in the center of it all, the huge, gleaming aluminum dome of the Osirak nuclear reactor.

Taken from ground level at al-Tuwaitha, the blowups were incontrovertible proof that Saddam Hussein’s blueprint for an ambitious, modern nuclear program was proceeding at an alarming pace. Israel had known about the center, of course: Mossad had alerted Yitzhak Rabin to the possibility back at the time French prime minister Jacques Chirac first visited Baghdad in 1974 to discuss the trade treaty between France and Iraq. At the time, Israeli prime minister Rabin had called for Jewish-American organizations to pressure the Ford administration to help kill the deal. Defense Minister Shimon Peres had personally appealed to his close friend Chirac to cancel the contract. But the French could not bring themselves to abandon such a fat cash cow. Chirac reassured Peres that perhaps he could do “something” later, after the French national elections. In the end, Rabin decided to “wait and see.”

Now, three years later, in May 1977, it was clear Hussein had much bigger plans than a simple research reactor. Israeli intelligence estimated Osirak would go “hot,” that is, be fueled with radioactive uranium, within three years, four tops. Israeli scientists figured the reactor would produce enough enriched weapons-grade uranium to build two or three Hiroshima-size bombs a year. The contingency people calculated that one “small” atomic bomb dropped on Tel Aviv would kill at least one hundred thousand people.

Begin had just defeated Israel’s liberal Labor Party to become the conservative Likud Party’s first prime minister, and he quickly made dealing with al-Tuwaitha one of his government’s first pieces of business. Thus, this secret Sunday morning meeting at the prime minister’s heavily guarded offices in Jerusalem. Seated before him, along with Eitan and Ivry, was Begin’s new “shadow security cabinet”: Minister of Defense Ezer Weizman, large and bilious, one of Israel’s founding fathers; Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin; Military Intelligence chief Yehoshua Saguy, heavy eyebrows and brush mustache framed by a round face with perennial raccoon circles under his eyes; Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a no-nonsense military general; Agriculture Minister and legendary slash-and-burn tank commander Ariel “Arik” Sharon; and, finally, the chief of Mossad (officially the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations), Yitzhak Hofi, tough, compact, and stubborn as the craggy Jerusalem pine.

It was obvious to everyone present that diplomacy had failed badly with Hussein. The United States and Britain had expressed official diplomatic “concern” about the sale of a nuclear reactor to Iraq, but the U.S. was not keen on a showdown with the country. Hussein had begun to distance himself from the Soviet Union and encourage trade with the West. Iraq was importing more domestic goods from America than from the Soviets. Already, trade had reached some $200 million. Within two years, that figure would triple and, it was estimated, there would be two hundred American businessmen stationed in Baghdad. Having been blackmailed with an oil embargo, Europe was in no hurry to provoke the Arabs again. Certainly, France, which was making billions of francs on its nuclear trade with Iraq, had no intention of stopping work.