Raid on the Sun (27 page)

“When?” Allen asked.

“About five-thirty, six o’clock their time.”

Allen quickly rang off and was patched through to President Reagan, who was spending the weekend at his favorite retreat, Camp David, deep in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. The officer on duty told Allen that President Reagan was just boarding the White House helicopter to return to Washington.

“Better get him off,” Allen instructed.

A minute later Reagan was on the telephone. Allen could hear the
whump-whump
of helicopter blades rotating in the background.

“Yes?” Reagan said.

“Mr. President, the Israelis just took out a nuclear reactor in Iraq with F-16s,” Allen said.

“What do you know about it?”

“Nothing, sir. I’m waiting for a report.”

“Why do you suppose they did it?” Reagan asked, then, not waiting for a response, answered the question himself. “Well,” he shrugged, “boys will be boys.”

If nonplussed, Reagan’s response was not surprising. The president had been fiercely pro-Israel and a staunch foe of anti-Semitism his entire professional life, dating back to his days as a Hollywood liberal. An FBI dossier on Ronald Reagan from the post–World War II years recounted an episode at a Hollywood party when Reagan nearly came to blows with a guest who had accused the Jews of war profiteering. His support for Israel was one of the bedrock convictions that survived Reagan’s political transformation from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican during the 1950s. It was made all the stronger by what even his friends confessed was a piecemeal understanding of the complex history of the Middle East. He only knew that Israel’s interests were the United States’ interests. The president’s well-known loyalty to Israel did not extend to every member of his administration, however.

The Israelis’ audacious military attack sent shock waves from the White House to Foggy Bottom and across the Potomac to the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was given a rundown of the raid at Defense’s Monday morning meeting held at the Pentagon. Weinberger had mixed feelings about the attack. On the one hand he was generally sympathetic to Israel and her security needs. Nonetheless, he questioned the wisdom of this unilateral action without prior notification to the United States and in direct violation of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, which stipulated that all U.S.-supplied weaponry be used for defensive purposes only. Even more troubling was how the other Arab nations would respond. The United States was selling a tremendous amount of military hardware to nearly all the countries in the region, including Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. In fact, Saudi Arabia would quickly argue that Israel’s violation of its airspace during the mission justified extending the sale to the sheikh of two more AWACS. Every one of these countries was restricted by the same conditions of sale. Weinberger worried that if the United States failed to sanction Israel, would that send a message to the Arab states that they, too, could now use their American-supplied arms to attack Israel—or one another?

Later that morning, at the regular Monday meeting of Reagan’s NSA team, the White House chieftains were all in high dudgeon over what they considered unwarranted Israeli aggression. Secretary of State Alexander Haig, normally a staunch Israeli supporter, called the raid “reckless.” He argued that the United States had no choice but to formally protest the attack and should impose sanctions on Israel immediately. Reagan’s chief of staff James A. Baker agreed that “some kind” of sanctions were called for. Israel had violated the strict conditions of the sale of military hardware. Its raid was clearly an offensive action.

Finally, it was Weinberger’s turn to speak. He told Reagan that, in his estimation, they had no other choice but to suspend the remainder of the F-16 sale to Israel—at least, temporarily. Four new planes were sitting in the hangar at General Dynamics awaiting delivery even as they spoke.

Throughout the meeting, Reagan listened patiently and said nothing. Privately, however, the president could not see what the big deal was. In fact, at one point he looked across the table at Richard Allen and rolled his eyes, as if to say, “Oh, brother!”

But in the end, Reagan agreed to go along with the recommendations of his advisers. The State Department would immediately release a statement strongly condemning Israel’s “aggressive” and “unprovoked” attack on Iraq. Invoking the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, Secretary of State Haig announced that the United States was immediately suspending any further sales of F-16s to Israel, including the four planes sitting at General Dynamics.

Haig and the administration bureaucrats had had their way: they had slapped Israel on the wrist—hard. But prevailing opinion concerning Israel’s action was hardly lockstep inside Washington’s corridors of power. As early as the first Monday morning meeting of Defense, it was clear that many around the table, including ranking members from the Joint Chiefs, had at least a grudging admiration for the boldness and the remarkable precision of the attack. Others, like Richard Perle, at the time an assistant secretary of defense under Weinberger, disagreed with the decision to censure Israel and were outspoken in their support of the Israeli action. Perle thought it a great act of antiproliferation, the exact thing the United States should be doing more of.

Indeed, late Monday afternoon, when Richard Allen brought in the highly classified KH-11 satellite photos of al-Tuwaitha to show to the president, Cap Weinberger, and the Pentagon generals, the reaction of the group was amazed silence. Clearly seen were the surrounding fences, the outlying buildings, the main gate, the guard towers—everything perfectly, immaculately intact. But in the middle of it all stood a deep, gaping hole: the site of the former Osirak reactor, utterly and surgically obliterated.

Reagan studied the photographs, then finally said what many present had silently been thinking.

“Okay, yeah, yeah, I see,” the president said, referring to the putatively damning evidence of Israel’s perfidy. “But what a terrific piece of bombing!”

Monday morning, July 8, Hagai Katz headed with his family to the countryside to celebrate Shavuot with tractor rides, picnicking on hay bales, and listening to the outdoor songfests. Radios everywhere played traditional Israeli folk songs and music. Katz and his wife were sitting on a hay bale, nibbling on their packed lunch, when a man picnicking next to them leaned toward Hagai and announced, “Did you hear? We just blew up Iraq’s nuclear reactor!”

Katz couldn’t believe his ears. What the hell? he thought. They had all just been resworn to secrecy the night before. How did the news get out?

Zeev Raz and his wife had elected to celebrate Shavuot by staying home and relaxing for the first time in months. At 3:30 in the afternoon, the music programming on the radio was interrupted by a special announcement: the Israeli Air Force had successfully destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, a critical part of the country’s plans to produce an atomic bomb.

Raz was shocked by the announcement. But he said nothing.

The last eighteen months had been a hard time for Raz and his wife. He had been gone long hours, involved in something intense and serious, something she had been completely cut out of. She worried, and she hated the many, many hours he spent away from home. Something had been eating at him. She could see it in his face, feel it in his body. Especially in the last few weeks. But he wouldn’t tell her. She felt cheated and, gradually, resentful.

Now, finally, it was clear. With the announcement, she knew how important her husband’s work had been. Her eyes filling with tears, she walked to Raz and hugged him.

“Now I know why you’ve been working so hard all this time,” she whispered.

Raz was relieved that his wife finally knew, but like Katz, he wondered how word had gotten out. Who had leaked?

Two hours after Raful Eitan called to tell him the attack had been a success, Begin had phoned the United States ambassador to Israel, Samuel Lewis, and informed him that the Israeli Air Force had just bombed Iraq’s Tammuz nuclear reactor.

“You don’t say?” Lewis deadpanned. He then immediately telephoned the State Department in Washington, D.C., and relayed the news.

Begin was bound by honor and diplomacy to inform Israel’s closest ally of the attack. But Begin secretly hoped that the United States would break the announcement to the world, thereby implicitly involving itself in the attack and taking some of the heat off Israel. Moreover, the Israeli parliament, when informed of the raid, made Begin promise that no one in the government would talk about the mission unless word of it broke first in an outside source. But the prime minister was impatient to get the story out—first, because the raid had been an unqualified success; and second, because he wanted to take the offensive position to blunt the international outcry he knew would be forthcoming. In fact, he had already ordered his press secretary, Uri Porath, to draft a press release detailing the mission. All Monday morning the prime minister waited for news to break in the world press. But the Reagan administration had refused to bite. They were staying way away from this one.

Finally, around noon, Begin saw an opening. During a public debate in the Jordanian Parliament broadcast over the nation’s airwaves, the Jordanian prime minister accused Israeli planes of taking part in the Iran-Iraq war. The prime minister was not alluding to the attack on Osirak, since even Iraq was not sure at the time of the nationality of the fighter planes that had bombed al-Tuwaitha, but Begin heard what he wanted to hear: Israel was being named as the perpetrator of the air strike.

“Release the statement,” he ordered his press secretary.

Hours later there had still been no announcement. Begin, irate, called in Porath.

“Didn’t you release that statement?” he snapped.

“Yes, I called it in hours ago.”

Begin stormed to his telephone.

Just before three o’clock, Emmanuel Halprin received a phone call at his staff office at KOL YISRAEL, the Voice of Israel. The call was from his uncle, Menachem Begin.

“Yes, Uncle?” Halprin answered dubiously, wondering what was going on.

“Did you receive a press statement from my office this afternoon?” Begin snapped.

“Well . . .”

In fact, Halprin had been puzzling over a bizarre “press release” talking about a bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which had been dictated over the phone to the radio station earlier, supposedly from the prime minister’s office. Because of the Shavuot holiday, the radio station had only a skeleton crew. The announcement sounded too incredible. Maybe the receptionist had been taken in by a prankster. Halprin had decided to hold it.

“We thought it was a hoax,” Emmanuel said. “Is it real?”

“Yes, dammit,” Begin snorted. “Get it broadcast. Now!”

Emmanuel hung up the phone and immediately walked the statement into the announcer’s booth. Programming was interrupted for a special announcement: “The Israel Air Force yesterday attacked and destroyed completely the Osirak nuclear reactor which is near Baghdad. . . .”

That Sunday, the cavernous lobby of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel was crowded, as it was on many such weekends that summer. The sea of smiling faces and tailored dark suits perched on gilded chairs or standing on the plush red carpet telegraphed the universal sign of successful salesmen everywhere. In this case, they belonged to international arms dealers, gathered to ply their latest high-tech weapons systems, bombs, torpedoes, radars, tanks, and mines to the world’s biggest buyer. They passed out brochures in French, Russian, English, and Serbian, touting comic book–sounding names like Chinooks and Big Mothers and Phantoms. For these men it was business as usual on Sunday, though their hosts, more than one salesman remarked, seemed unusually distracted this evening. The normally obliging Iraqi ministers had either canceled meetings or left appointments early. The Iraqi media gave not a hint of anything untoward.

By late Monday afternoon, however, the dealers had all learned the truth of their Iraqi hosts’ sudden anxiety. The rumor of the destruction of Osirak ran throughout the hotel. The salesmen were quick to commiserate. It was a dangerous and unjust world they all lived in, they consoled. But then, all was not lost. Iraq could always rebuild. After all, the oil was still flowing. Now more than ever, Iraq needed the latest in Western technology and defenses. In fact, as the French arms dealer pointed out, they were selling an entirely new generation of advanced early-warning radar defenses. France could deliver within the month.

PROLOGUE

                                                                                                                                       
THE ROAD TO BABYLON

The noise of battle is in the land,
the noise of great destruction.

—
JEREMIAH 50:22

JUNE 6, 1981
RAMAT DAVID, JEZREEL VALLEY, ISRAEL

General David Ivry’s wife, Ofera, had invited friends in for the weekend. He had tried to make the best of it, yet over dinner that night and later over coffee he had been poor company. He was distracted, preoccupied. The guests assumed it was his “job.” After all, the commander of the Israeli Air Force was bound to bring home the cares of office some days, even on the Sabbath. His wife wasn’t so sure. Her husband had seemed tense ever since returning that morning from the official ceremony in Naples celebrating the change of command of the United States’ 6th Fleet, stationed in the Mediterranean.

Short and compact, Ivry had the keen eyes and efficient movements of a bantamweight. Even sitting at the dinner table, he was as square and straight as an executive in a boardroom. His face, framed by short graying hair and a military mustache, was still youthful, showing none of the signs of a lifetime of holding the buck. Born in the small town of Gedera in southern Israel in 1935, Ivry was barely fourteen when the country won its independence. Like most of the men who made up the leadership of the nation, he was part of that first generation to be born, raised, and educated an Israeli—the first time a Jew could call himself that in two thousand years. And like his peers, he had been forced to defend that privilege most of his life. At eighteen he joined the IAF, and by forty had already flown combat missions in the ’56 Sinai campaign, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the War of Attrition in ’70. Though years in the military made him short on get-to-know-you conversation, he was not without warmth. He had a quick smile, and his eyes grew soft and shiny whenever he talked about his wife—or his pilots. But this evening, Ofera knew, something was wrong.

Later that night, after the guests retired and as Ivry and Ofera prepared for bed, he spoke up in spite of himself.

“Tomorrow, at sunset,” the general began, looking at his wife carefully, “we will launch fighter planes to Iraq to attack a nuclear facility Saddam Hussein is using to make atomic bombs. It is a very risky mission. Never before in history has anyone bombed a nuclear reactor. If it fails, Iraq could attack us. The world may turn against us. Israel could be isolated.”

Ofera did not respond at first. They had been married a long time, through four wars. He had left her to fight in each one, and each time he had left without telling her the details of his mission, leaving her to wonder and worry. And each time he had returned safely. Why should this time be any different?

“Is there nothing else to do?” she said, knowing the answer already.

“No.”

Ivry hugged his wife. He had frightened her, but, almost perversely, he felt suddenly relieved. He had not slept an entire night through for weeks. But that evening, the minute his head hit the pillow, he was fast asleep.

His wife sat up awake the entire night.

Ivry got up early Sunday, drank a little coffee and picked at a roll, then kissed Ofera good-bye.

“Shalom,” he said.

“Shalom.”

A staff car drove the general to the small air force base in the north of Tel Aviv, in the shadow of the Mediterranean city’s towering landmark utility “chimney” winking its red aircraft-warning lights. Saluting the two corporals at the main gate, Ivry’s driver passed the concrete barriers and followed the narrow asphalt road to IAF headquarters, where the general had spent the last year planning this mission. Waiting for him was Maj. Gen. Yehoshua Saguy, chief of Israel’s military intelligence, known as AMAN. The two generals walked to the airfield tarmac and climbed aboard a waiting Sikorsky CH-53, the helicopter’s long, razor-sharp blades whipping the air above its desert-brown-camouflage fuselage. The chopper would fly the commanders the relatively short hop south to Etzion Air Force Base in what had been Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula before the Six-Day War. Located inland from Eilat, the chic Israeli resort town on the Red Sea favored by Scandinavian, German, and local tourists, Etzion was part of the territory Israel was about to cede back to Egypt as part of the Camp David Accords that Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat had signed in 1978. What effect would the surprise attack have on Sadat and these negotiations? Ivry wondered, quickly pushing the thought aside.

The CH-53 soared above the arid plains of the Negev and southern Israel. The men spoke little during the hour-long journey. The air outside was already growing warm. Thank goodness it was still June, Ivry thought. In a month, temperatures in the Negev would be scorching. Finally, the helicopter banked left toward the gray ribbon of Etzion Airfield and the cluster of residential houses surrounding the base. It was midmorning, but the streets below were eerily quiet. As Ivry knew, most of the inhabitants had been evacuated in the preceding days—nonessential personnel and base staff had been given leave or temporary reassignment. Weekend passes had been canceled and all military personnel were confined to base. Telephone communication into and out of Etzion was cut. Few inside the base had noticed that twelve F-16 Fighting Falcons had been landing on the far runway since early Friday. Operation Babylon, code-named after the ancient biblical name for Iraq and planned in complete secrecy for more than two years, was minus six hours and counting.

The Sikorsky landed with a thud. The generals jumped from the gangway, ducking beneath the blades and holding their caps against the rotor wash as they dashed across the tarmac toward the briefing room. Walking past the camouflaged underground hangars, Ivry could see dozens of crew chiefs and maintenance techs who were readying the huge fighters. The planes below stood menacingly anonymous, tinted in brown desert camouflage, the signature blue six-point Star of David on their tails painted over for this mission. Forklifts flanked by ordnance specialists on either side ferried two-thousand-pound MK-84 bombs to the planes, where they were raised to the release clips beneath the wings of the F-16s and mounted, the ordnance techs couldn’t help thinking, perilously close to the pair of external fuel tanks that also hung beneath the wings on either side of the fuselage.

As Ivry walked up the short wooden ramp to the pilots’ briefing room, he was surprised to see “Raful,” Gen. Rafael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. Eitan was a larger-than-life character whose exploits as the tough commander of Israel’s crack paratroopers during the bloody Sinai campaigns in ’67 and ’73 were legendary in the IDF. With thick shoulders, a handsome, open face, and big, burly eyebrows, he looked more like a back-alley brawler than a three-star general.

Though he had suspected Eitan would come, Ivry was surprised nonetheless to see him standing there, his uniform immaculate and trim as always, but his usually animated face gaunt, his eyes ringed and tired. Raful’s son, Yoram, a young IAF fighter pilot, had been killed just four days earlier right there on the base. Impetuous, irrepressibly energetic, the young pilot had lost control of his Kfir fighter during a training exercise and plummeted helplessly five thousand feet to the desert floor in a “dead man’s” spin. They had interrupted the general in the middle of a mission readiness meeting to tell him of his son’s death. “Raful” had left the base immediately to sit shivah, the traditional Jewish mourning period of seven days of seclusion. That was in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. Now, Sunday morning, without advising anyone, the chief of staff had requisitioned a plane and flown down by himself in order to be with the men as they began their mission, gathering now inside the briefing room for the final run-through.

Eitan caught Ivry’s look of concern. He smiled wanly.

“We ask a lot of these boys, don’t we?” Eitan said.

Ivry understood the question. He had also lost a son in the service several years before.

“Maybe a little more this time,” Ivry replied.

Eight pilots would have to fly the new, computerized, and highly sophisticated, almost futuristic American-made F-16 Falcons nearly six hundred miles over hostile territory to bomb Iraq’s nearly completed Osirak reactor in al-Tuwaitha, a heavily defended nuclear installation twelve miles south of Baghdad. The mission would be the longest, most dangerous, most technologically challenging military operation in Israel’s history. It would be the first time Israeli pilots had engaged an enemy at such a distance and so far from Israel’s borders. The first time sleek and speedy F-16s would attempt takeoff carrying a weight that exceeded nearly twice the planes’ design specs. The first time anyone, anywhere, had bombed a nuclear reactor.

The very idea seemed somehow blasphemous. Since the beginning of the Manhattan Project in the forties, statesmen, philosophers, even the physicists themselves had questioned the hubris of attempting to harness the frightening power of nuclear fission and, even more worrisome, nuclear fusion, the elemental energy that fueled the sun, the fountainhead of all life on earth. What, then, would such men think of Ivry’s audacious plan to obliterate the engine of this forbidden energy—and, God forbid!—maybe unleash it on the world? In a last, unintended irony that conjured exactly such prophetic warnings, the attack on Osirak was timed to commence exactly at sunset.

It was 1300 hours. Ivry and Eitan watched as the men filed into the briefing room, smiling and nodding hello to one another in the easy manner of a family gathering at breakfast time, despite an obvious tension in the air. General Ivry had personally picked each of the eight pilots for the mission. In a country that had already fought five wars in twenty-five years, the armed services were an elemental part of Israeli society. Most of the country’s leaders and policymakers were former military men. Military service was compulsory for all Israelis at age eighteen—men served three to four years and one day a month in the reserves until age fifty-five, women two to two and one-half years and one day a month until age twenty-five. Young men and women shouldering M-16s were a common sight on downtown streets in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Everyone served. But those who chose to become IAF pilots, to become one out of ten who passed years of flying school and intense training, were an elite breed.

They wore with pride the berets and insignias of their command. They were recognized throughout the nation as belonging to an exclusive military caste. As they grew older, they would attend one another’s sons’ and daughters’ graduations and weddings, and the births and bar mitzvahs of their children’s children. Ivry and his team had spent a year together training in secrecy every day. They had shared jokes and meals. Had met one another’s wives. Each man had become like a son to the two generals. And now they might never see some of their faces again.

The modeling experts in Operations who computed these kinds of things quietly projected at least two casualties—one due to equipment failure, one to enemy antiaircraft fire.

“I wish I were going with them,” Eitan said, letting slip more emotion, Ivry thought, than he meant to.

The two generals moved to the front of the room and took their seats before the mission briefing, sitting just to the right of the podium and a huge map of the Middle East. One by one the operations specialists updated the pilots on the weather and flying conditions; General Saguy and military intelligence again covered the Saudi radar and AWACS patrols, the Iraqi airfields outside Baghdad, and the formidable antiaircraft and SAM (surface-to-air missile) battery emplacements surrounding al-Tuwaitha. The team leader rehashed the flight plan. They would navigate only a hundred feet above the ground over Aqaba, Saudi Arabia, and western Iraq. They were reminded to observe radio silence the entire journey. Each plane would carry only two air-to-air Sidewinder missiles instead of the usual four and no jamming devices to scramble MiG and SAM-6 radars. Too much weight. They had barely enough fuel to get to Baghdad and back even without the extra poundage. Each pilot had been requisitioned a day’s ration of food and water, a pistol, five thousand Iraqi dinars, and PRCs, the electronic homing devices that would guide SAR (search-and-rescue) teams to their positions should they be shot down.

“But do not activate your PRC until nightfall,” the team leader ordered. “We cannot take the chance your signal might be picked up by bad guys and the mission blown.”

At 1440 hours the mission briefing ended and the pilots filed out the door. The sun was now high overhead, the desert air heavy. Inside the underground hangar the F-16s sat silently under the bright lights, lined in two rows, their noses down and brooding. Each pilot made a last visual inspection of his aircraft, then climbed the steel ladder up to the cockpit.

The crew chiefs followed the pilots up the ladders, carrying their flight helmets. With a farewell pat on the shoulder and wishes of “Good luck” from the chiefs, the pilots pulled down the glass-bubble canopies, the unique see-through feature that had given rise to the plane’s nickname, dubbed by skeptical veterans, the “glass coffin.” One at a time the F-100 Pratt & Whitney engines were lit. The high whine of turbines and sucked air created a deafening roar that shook the asphalt beneath. Inside the cockpits, the pilots went through the computerized BITS, built-in test systems, checking off the navigation, weapons, mechanical, and electrical systems before final takeoff. Then, slowly, finally, the fighters taxied up and out of the hangar and onto the tarmac at the head of the runway, staggered in two parallel lines, four planes to a line. The flight controller ran before the planes, wearing protective hearing mufflers and carrying red signal flashlights. The team leader gave the thumbs-up though the glass canopy. The mission was “Go.”