Raid on the Sun Read online

  “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.

  Like the ambassadors before him, Ivry had taken up his post in the large corner office of the embassy. Here he had spent much of the last week packing up his personal belongings, including his beloved collection of models of Israeli fighter planes, and various mementos and honors of his ambassadorship. Cherished among these was the framed, enlarged print of a postcard he had hung on his office wall, across from his mahogany desk, where he could see it whenever he looked up. For the general, who had been surprised and stung by the criticisms of the Osirak mission hurled at the time by Secretaries Haig and Weinberger and Ambassador Kirkpatrick, the missive had a special meaning. The homemade postcard was actually a blowup of a satellite photograph (ironically, the KH-11 spy satellite) of al-Tuwaitha taken from space in the days after the Israeli attack in 1981. Outlined by a huge rectangle of twenty-foot-high concrete walls and barbed wire was, unmistakably, the bombed-out crater of an immense dome, its once-shiny aluminum cupola crumpled, the concrete crumbling. It was all that remained of Osirak after the Israelis were through with it.

  Handwritten at the bottom of the photograph was a short note, penned a week after the coalition’s successful invasion of Iraq in 1991. It read:

  “With thanks and appreciation. You made our job easier in Desert Storm.”

  It was signed: “Dick Cheney.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Avi, my driver, had gone suddenly ashen. His eyes, usually mischievously bright, were hard and furtive.

  “This is no good,” he said.

  We had stopped at a turnout on the summit of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, just across from the Frank Sinatra Student Center, so I could take in the dramatic view of the Old City, the shiny golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock sparkling among the whitewashed turrets and buildings below. A dusty, beat-up van had pulled in behind us and several young Arab teens jumped out. Avi immediately grew tense.

  “We should go!” he said again. “This is no good.”

  “Come on,” I said playfully, trying to get a rise out of him.

  But Avi was not biting.

  “No good,” he said.

  We climbed into his taxi, and as we sped off, I looked out the back window. Half a dozen Palestinian youths were standing on the asphalt, watching us leave. Avi’s reaction—or overreaction, I thought—depressed me. It showed how deeply the distrust and fear between Israelis and Palestinians had burrowed as the intifada dragged into its second year the summer of 2002. For two weeks Avi had been chaperoning me up and down Israel in his taxi as I interviewed the Israeli Air Force (IAF) pilots who took part in the infamous bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. This day we still had to drive to a remote village above Ramat Hod Sharon, north of Tel Aviv, and Avi was nervous about taking the main road that cut through “the Territories,” the Palestinian-controlled West Bank, now flooded with Israeli army troops trying to stop the infiltration of suicide bombers across the Green Line. We ended up taking the long way around, adding another half hour to the drive. I thought Avi was being paranoid.

  A week later a Palestinian boy exploded a remote-control bomb during lunchtime inside the very same Frank Sinatra Center, killing seven students, including five Americans, and injuring scores of others. A week after that an Israeli driver and his wife were shot to death on the “shortcut” along the West Bank that Avi had refused to take.

  By then, however, I was back home, safe and sound in seaside Santa Monica, California, which, with the exception of dozens of northern Italian restaurants instead of kebab grills and the absence of the occasional suicide bomber, is very much like Tel Aviv. But I had brought something home with me, a valuable lesson that would help me in the writing of this book and that no amount of interviews and research could ever teach: what it is like to live constantly at risk.

  Like most Americans, I first learned of Israel’s attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor through newspaper accounts. At the time, June 1981, the attack seemed rather provocative, even “reckless,” to use the term employed by Secretary of State Alexander Haig—especially given the simmering tensions of the Middle East and the delicate Egypt-Israeli truce in the wake of Camp David. Iraq was one of those faraway Arab countries that seemed vaguely hostile, like Yemen or Syria, but one that in recent years had become an increasingly important U.S. trading partner in the region. But it remained relatively unknown. Next-door neighbor Iran and the ayatollah dominated the evening news back then. Few people had even heard of Saddam Hussein, let alone his weapons of mass destruction.

  It wasn’t until some four years later, when I was working as an editor at Los Angeles magazine, that I began to understand the enormous consequences of the Israeli air raid on the nuclear complex in al-Tuwaitha outside of Baghdad. It came one day after a contact in Southern California’s then-burgeoning defense industry, who had been briefed on the classified raid, related to me—off the record—the inside story of the mission: that Saddam Hussein had a secret atomic-weapons program and planned to use the French-built Osirak reactor to produce weapons-grade plutonium; that the targeting of the reactor by the Israeli pilots was one of the most accurate bombing missions in modern warfare; that the F-16s the Israelis flew were somehow made to fly far beyond the envelope of their design specs; and that the pilots flew six hundred miles no more than a hundred feet off the ground.

  I thought at the time, Geez, what a great book that would make! Except for one problem: the mission and even the names of the pilots in the raid had all been put under wraps by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

  So it remained until June 2001, when I spotted in the Los Angeles Times a short interview with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Gen. David Ivry, the IAF commander who had originally planned the raid on Osirak exactly twenty years earlier. Guessing that Israel might finally be more inclined to open up about the mission—given the perception of Saddam Hussein in the years since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the discovery of extensive biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in Iraq, and Hussein’s refusal in 1998 to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into his country—I sent a letter to the ambassador to request an interview.

  By the first week in September 2001,
I was meeting with Ambassador Ivry on the second floor of Israel’s striking mansion compound, situated just down the street from the vacant-looking Ethiopian embassy along the mini–Embassy Row in Washington’s leafy, redbrick Van Ness district. We talked all morning and again all the next morning. By the time I left, I had a rundown of the entire history of the action. And, thanks to the embassy’s military attaché, Brig. Gen. Rani Falk—who, in a remarkable piece of luck, turned out to be one of the original group of pilots who had trained for the secret bombing attack—I had the name and telephone number of the squadron leader, Zeev Raz. I also had General Falk’s assurance that, depending on the individual decision of each pilot, I could meet with every member of the team—in Israel. I would be the only journalist in twenty years to learn the names of and meet face-to-face with all eight Israeli pilots who had flown to Baghdad in 1981.

  Excited and exhilarated, I returned to my Washington, D.C., hotel room to make plans to fly home early. My return ticket to Los Angeles International Airport was booked for Tuesday morning. That was four days away, and I had already wrapped up my business. But as it turned out, my round-trip ticket on American Airlines from Dulles International to L.A. could not be changed. I had purchased a specially discounted seat, and as part of the agreement I had to stay in Washington through the weekend—obviously to subsidize the hotel industry. The earliest I could book a flight back to Los Angeles was Flight 77, 9:00 A.M., Monday, September 10, 2001. I booked it and had a wonderful return trip home—the flight attendant not only gave me free earphones to watch the in-flight movie but also an extra cookie with lunch.

  The following morning I awoke in Los Angeles at 5:30 A.M., still on East Coast time. I turned on one of the early-morning talk shows while my youngest daughter dressed for her second day as a freshman in high school. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that the broadcast had cut away to a special breaking story: on the screen I saw a distant shot of what looked like a small plane, maybe a Learjet, crashing into the steel-and-glass side of one of the Twin Towers in New York City. An hour later, to the disbelief of all of America, it was clear what had happened. Next came reports of the hijacked Flight 77 out of Dulles, which had circled for an hour before slamming into the Pentagon, killing all aboard—including, I realized with horror, the flight crew I had flown with the day before, including my wonderfully generous attendant. It was chilling to know I could have easily been on that flight.