Raid on the Sun Read online

  BROADWAY BOOKS NEW YORK

  Classified by the Israeli Air Force until now, this rare group photograph of all eight mission pilots was shot just minutes before takeoff. They are in bombing order (row by row from the front, from right to left): Zeev Raz, Amos Yadlin; Doobi Yaffe, Hagai Katz; Amir Nachumi, Iftach Spector; Relik Shafir, Ilan Ramon.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Cast of Characters

  Abbreviations

  Maps

  PROLOGUE The Road to Babylon

  ONE Terror of the Tigris

  TWO Mission Impossible

  THREE The Warriors

  FOUR The Waiting

  FIVE Wheels-up

  SIX Sixty Seconds Over Baghdad

  SEVEN Check Six

  EPILOGUE Blowback

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Photo Insert

  To Grace,

  my mother and the first scrivener

  And, naturally, to the three muses:

  Ann, Wren & Kelsey

  EPILOGUE

  BLOWBACK

  No good deed will go unpunished.

  —ANONYMOUS

  Monday morning, June 8, 1981, Khidhir Hamza drove his Passat to al-Tuwaitha, hoping to discover what was going on. But as the director pulled up to the main gate, he was stopped by grim-faced Mukhabarat guards armed with AK-47s. They checked Hamza’s identification, then informed him that no one was being allowed inside the compound. An Iraq Air Force explosives team was still securing the grounds.

  It would be several days before Hamza and his colleagues were allowed back into the facility. As he walked the familiar pathway to his office in the AE administration building, the scientist saw scores of bomb specialists, sappers, uniformed security, construction laborers, and dark men in blue suits and fedoras combing the area. The uniformed men looked gloomy and nervous, demoralized. The Iraqi army had failed to bring down even one fighter plane. There was no evidence that an enemy plane had even been hit. And not one MiG had been scrambled. It was a repeat of the same sorry performance against the Iranians nine months earlier. Heads would roll, they knew they could count on that. Indeed, when Saddam Hussein learned that the antiaircraft units were at dinner at the beginning of the raid, he had the commander of the AAA batteries taken out and shot.

  Hamza walked straight to the crater that had been Osirak. He circled the reactor. The spectacular dome was completely gone. The pool below, where the reactor fuel rods were cooled, was filled with twisted steel and broken concrete. The enriched uranium already exported by France and stored underground next to the neutron guide hall was unharmed. The air force investigators found an unexploded two-thousand-pound bomb in the hall’s concrete-encased tunnel. At first the sappers thought that it was a booby trap, a bomb equipped with a delayed fuse to blow up innocent civilians. The explosive, of course, was one of Spector’s misses. It had been dropped at too low an altitude, and so the fuse had not had time to arm itself.

  Typical of Iraqi culture, especially a totalitarian state in which information was hoarded and manipulated to create fear in the general population, fantastical rumors raced through the NRC’s workers, even the educated scientists. The day before the raid, suspicious-looking men had supposedly been spotted lurking about the neutron guide hall in a van. They had been delivering radiation detection equipment, but later, it was said, an electronic guidance transmitter had been found inside the hall. The French and Italian workers had all suddenly been called back to the foreign housing compound just hours before the attack. One Frenchman had refused to leave—Damen Chaussepied, the technician who had been killed in the explosions. Iraqi cooks in the foreigners’ compound reported overhearing loud arguments between the workers that night. Of course, nothing came of the rumors. But they underscored the uncertainty of the center’s employees. Would the French return? Would they rebuild? Did they still have jobs? Would the Israelis return and bomb the rest of the plant?

  One fact was incontrovertible: Osirak was no more. As the French technician Jacques Rimbaud told the Paris press the day after the raid: “The central building is destroyed; the anti-atomic shelter has vanished. If they want to resume work, they will have to flatten everything and start from scratch.”

  The storm of indignation Menachem Begin had been anticipating ever since his phone call to the American ambassador Sunday night hit like a blizzard Tuesday, June 8. The U.S. State Department’s censorious release chastising Israel on Monday was but a snow flurry ahead of the main front. France, not surprisingly, was outraged by the destruction of its nuclear reactor and the end to so many lucrative contracts. And once again, the country was embarrassed by the renewed worldwide focus on its involvement in Iraq’s nuclear aspirations. French president François Mitterrand, Peres’s good friend, rebuked Israel. “Any violation of the law will lead to our condemnation,” he announced to the French populace. “Whatever may be our feelings for Israel, this is the case now concerning the intervention decided by Israeli leaders against Iraq, which has led to the death of one of our compatriots.” This last reference was to the nation’s new hero, Damen Chaussepied, the technician killed during the bombing. Immediately, the foreign office ordered home 115 nuclear scientists and engineers from al-Tuwaitha, leaving 15 behind to help ascertain whether there was danger from radiation leaks.

  The foreign minister Claude Cheysson charged that the attack was “unacceptable, dangerous and a serious violation of international law.” “I am saddened,” he told reporters on June 9. “This government has a great deal of sympathy for Israel, but we don’t think such action serves the cause of peace in the area.”

  But France was not content with verbal condemnation. Feeling betrayed by Israel, high-placed French officials and members of the country’s intelligence service began leaking classified information to the world press about the secret reactor and plutonium reprocessing facilities the country had helped Israel construct in Dimona decades earlier. The Arab states in the region began clamoring for a full investigation of Israel’s nuclear capabilities and her immediate disarmament.

  Even Britain denounced the bombing. Usually conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared, “Armed attack in such circumstances cannot be justified. It represents a grave breach of international law.” Meanwhile, British intelligence officials, still stinging over being shut out of full access to KH-11 photographs while Israeli agents blithely rifled through whatever film they wanted, immediately suspected Israel of using smuggled high-resolution satellite surveillance shots to help target Osirak. The British promptly lodged their complaints with CIA, in effect, telling Casey: “We told you so.” The complaint prompted the CIA director to initiate the confidential, high-level investigation into Israel’s ability to access restricted satellite imagery, a study that revealed a complete breakdown in the monitoring system, allowing Israel virtually full run of the satellite-imaging henhouse, as it were. According to writer Seymour Hersh, one angry Pentagon official declared at the time, “The Israelis did everything except task the bird,” referring to the ultimate ability to select targets and, thus, reroute the orbiting patterns of the satellite in space. In the end, Casey continued to allow Israel access to KH-11, but with the original 1979 restrictions of the Carter administration firmly back in place.

  Most of the First World nations around the globe also joined France and Britain in lambasting Israel. Japan stated, “Israel’s action cannot be justified under any circumstances.” The West German foreign ministry said it was “dismayed and concerned” by the raid. The Greeks called it “una
cceptable.” Even the Argentine Foreign Ministry declared Israel’s action “a threat to the peace and security in the Middle East.”

  In a stinging blow to Prime Minister Begin, and to Ivry, who had been surprised by the bitterness of the State Department’s response, the United States populace seemed to be siding against Israel as well. A New York Times editorial on Tuesday following the raid excoriated Israel, charging, “Israel’s sneak attack on a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad was an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.” Time magazine maintained that the attack endangered the historic gains of the Camp David Accords, insisting that “Israel has vastly compounded the difficulties of procuring a peaceful settlement of the confrontation in the Middle East.”

  And in a historic turnabout, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, blistered the Israelis, calling the raid “shocking” and going so far as to compare it to the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The United States also approved the passing of United Nations Resolution 487, which strongly condemned “military attacks by Israel in clear violation of the United Nations Charter and the norms of international law” and called for Israel to make “appropriate redress” to Iraq.

  The entire Arab bloc damned the attack on Iraq’s sovereign territory. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who had just met publicly with Begin in the Sinai that weekend to further the road to peace, was furious. Privately, he told colleagues that he felt ambushed by the raid, made to look as though he were somehow complicit in the attack. The Egyptian parliament requested the United States to reassess its military aid to Israel.

  Back in Baghdad, Hussein and the Iraqis took full advantage of their new role as aggrieved victim. Ironically, Iraq was not even sure who had bombed Osirak until Begin released the news bulletin on Monday. Hussein found himself deluged with messages of outraged support from Kuwait, Jordan’s King Hussein, the PLO, Syria, which decried the “Zionist enemy aggressions,” the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and even Kenya, which called the raid “indefensible.” Libya’s loose cannon, Col. Muammar Qaddafi, called on his Arab brothers to blow up the Israeli nuclear reactor in Dimona in revenge.

  On June 23, Saddam Hussein finally addressed the public for the first time since the raid. He called on “all peace-loving nations of the world to help the Arabs in one way or another acquire atomic weapons” in order to offset Israel’s “nuclear capability.” Hussein, however, quickly distanced himself and his Ba’th Party from the disaster at al-Tuwaitha, accusing the French of complicity with Israel and denouncing his own Atomic Energy administration for lax security and failing to anticipate a hostile military attack—even though Hussein himself had vetoed plans early on to construct the reactor belowground.

  Begin closely monitored the foreign reports and media stories. He was furious over the international outcry. Nearly beside himself with indignation, against the advice of his advisers, the prime minister immediately took to the offensive. On Tuesday, flanked by Eitan, Ivry, and Saguy, Begin, looking every bit the unbowed fighter, held a fiery press conference to rebut the global censure, defiantly declaring that Saddam Hussein had already butchered his closest colleagues and would have had “no hesitation in dropping three or four or five of those bombs on Israel.” Not for a second, Begin insisted, did he regret his decision.

  “Israel has nothing to apologize for,” he snapped into the microphone in front of him. On the contrary, he exclaimed, “I feel like a man who’s left prison. I feel like a free man!”

  Indeed, the raid solidified Begin’s popularity in Israel as a defender of the nation. Before the June 7 raid, a poll in the Jerusalem Post showed Shimon Peres’s Labor Party continuing to hold a steady lead over Begin and the Likud Party. By the evening of election day, June 30, 1981, Begin and Likud had been swept to victory, ushering in a political and cultural revolution. For the first time in the history of Israel, the Socialist-Zionist alliance of European and American Jews that had guided the nation from its inception had been repudiated, replaced by the most hawkish government ever assembled in Jerusalem. Indicative of its conservative bent was Begin’s appointment of Ariel Sharon as defense minister and Yitzhak Shamir as foreign minister.

  Even the one true political setback proceeding from the raid, the United States’ suspending the sale of the F-16s, seemed to turn around to Begin’s side. At a June 16 news conference following Osirak, President Reagan seemed anything but angry about the preemptive strike. When reporters asked about his reaction to Israel’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Reagan responded, nonplussed, “Well, I haven’t given very much thought to that particular question there,” then added that it was difficult “to envision Israel as being a threat to its neighbors.” By September 1, 1981, the sale of F-16s to Israel was quietly resumed.

  Perhaps in somewhat the same way that the United States’ stunning victories in Afghanistan more than twenty years later would embolden George W. Bush’s administration to launch an offensive against Iraq, so Osirak in 1981 precipitated a series of bold political and military moves by a newly confident and invigorated Menachem Begin. In the prime minister’s estimation, Osirak had given him a mandate to quash all of Israel’s enemies once and for all. Heartened by the success of the attack, Begin and Sharon were determined to drive Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization out of Beirut. Within the year, Begin made his fateful decision to invade Lebanon and lay siege to Beirut. In the bloody chaos that followed, Sharon would fatally miscalculate the military’s control over Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies. While under the supposed protection of the IDF, a renegade Phalangist battalion swooped into the densely populated Palestinian refugee camps at Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila farms and massacred 750 men, women, and children while Israeli military forces stood by impotently and watched. The resulting outcry both worldwide and within Israel nearly toppled Begin’s government and ultimately led to Sharon’s dismissal and years of bitter political exile.

  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 negativ
e 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.