Raid on the Sun

by Rodger W. Claire

  The macabre, almost routine cycle of bloodbaths in Baghdad finally came to an end at three o’clock in the morning, July 17, 1968, when the Ba’thists stormed the presidential palace and ousted Qassem, and al-Bakr, the new prime minister and commander in chief, proclaimed the Age of Revolution.

  It would be another year before Saddam would emerge from the shadows behind the al-Bakr throne. Then it was revealed that Saddam was second in command to his uncle, vice president of the secretive, all-powerful Revolutionary Command Council—and had been since the earliest days of the regime.

  Halfway across the world, the carnage that roiled his homeland and filled his father’s letters with worry seemed far away and almost dreamlike to Khidhir Hamza, as though he were hearing about someone else’s Third World nation. The young middle-class Iraqi had lived in the United States for six years, studying at MIT and working for his doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics at Florida State University. Hamza’s world had been filled, like all American students at the time, with campus antiwar demonstrations and the “flower power” culture. Indeed, Khidhir felt more American than Shi’ite Iraqi. To him the Ba’thi sounded like some organization from another century, if not from another planet. Hamza had received his doctorate and just begun teaching at a small black college, Fort Valley State in southern Georgia, when in 1970 he received a notice from the new Ba’thist Iraqi government. He was expected to return to Baghdad and repay his government student loan or his father would be held “accountable,” a threat that in Iraq in those days could mean prison. It was a nightmare, an inconceivable turn of events Khidhir and his father had never even considered when they signed the loan document in 1962 under an entirely different regime. Only twenty-nine, unmarried, tall, with deep brown eyes and soft, light features, the young professor knew nothing about the Ba’th Party except what he had been told by friends—that “these guys are not fooling around. They kill people.”

  Hamza had no choice but to return to Iraq. He reluctantly resigned his teaching position, organized his affairs, shipped what few possessions he had to his father’s home, and took the seventeen-hour flight to Baghdad, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst. Bleary-eyed, Hamza stared out the porthole as his plane descended to the hot desert runway below. The Baghdad airport looked run-down, bleached of color and life by years of sun and wind and neglect. Carrying his own bags through the eerily deserted terminal, he caught a beat-up old Citroën taxi outside, which drove him to the Kuwait Hotel (the irony of the name would not be apparent for another twenty years, of course). There, a request awaited him from Dr. Ali Attia, director general of Iraq’s impressive-sounding Nuclear Research Center of Atomic Energy, that he stop by for a visit.

  Located south of Baghdad at al-Tuwaitha, past the al-Rasheed military base and the Iraqi army medical school and next to a tiny village-slum, the center was then a cluster of concrete government buildings surrounded by a high steel fence. Although al-Bakr was prime minister, everywhere Hamza looked on the center’s walls hung portraits of Saddam Hussein, smiling under the thick Jerry Colonna mustache and wearing his trademark black fedora. Attia informed the nuclear scientist that he was to start as a researcher in the physics department, at $150 a month.

  “That’s only a tenth of what I was making in the United States,” Hamza protested.

  “We do not have the budget to pay more at present,” Attia said. “But that will change.”

  Attia confided that Hamza was to be groomed to become his number-two man. Over the next weeks and months the scientist discovered he had joined an impressive team of Western-educated Iraqi scientists that included such respected researchers as Dr. Hussein al-Shahristani, Dr. Moyesser al-Mallah, and Dr. Abdullah Abul-Khail. All had been brought to al-Tuwaitha, he would discover, under the personal direction of Saddam Hussein. Though unbeknownst to Hamza at the time, Saddam, in fact, was not only vice president of the Ba’th Revolutionary Command Council, RCC, he had seen fit to appoint himself head of Iraq’s atomic energy commission.

  Al-Bakr was allowed to rule the far-flung Ba’th bureaucracy, but it was Saddam who plotted and wheeled and dealed discreetly behind the scenes for ten years to build Iraq into the dominant Arab power in the Persian Gulf—the modern Mesopotamia he had dreamed of. Far from the dumb thug his enemies liked to portray him as being, Saddam had impeccable instincts and a quick mind. In 1970 he foresaw a multipower world, with Iraq joining the Western powers as one of the pillars of global influence. Nasser had failed in his gambit to unite the Arab nations under Egypt. But Saddam would succeed where Nasser had failed, because he knew that the key was WMD, weapons of mass destruction—especially nuclear weapons.

  Atomic weapons, in fact, became an obsession with Hussein. When a journalist once asked his son Udai what he wanted to be when he grew up, Udai had answered, “a nuclear scientist,” eliciting an approving chuckle from his father. For Saddam, nuclear power was the ultimate symbol of the world player, a prerequisite for regional hegemony, and, of utmost importance, the “great equalizer” to finally match Israel’s power.

  In a little-known historical irony, the man who planted the seed of Hussein’s fixation on atomic weapons was none other than Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. By 1970 the Palestinian intelligentsia had become the leading scholars of Baghdad. Palestinian refugees had flooded into Baghdad, along with most of the militia and their leadership, in the wake of Black September, when Jordan’s King Hussein, thwarting a plot by the PLO to overthrow him, unleashed a bloodbath to drive the terrorist refugee camps from Jordan. Traditionally, Arab émigrés were desperate to disappear into their adoptive cultures, anxious to leave behind the bad memories of oppressive dictatorships. But the Palestinians, especially the educated classes, bound together as a minority, recruiting and fomenting the fight for the liberation of their homeland. This circle of energized scholars, educators, and propagandists became the hub of Baghdad’s intellectual life, its café society.

  One of the most talked-about books in the Arab universe in 1970 was The Israeli Bomb, written by a Palestinian-American academic named Fouad Jabir. Rumors had circulated for years that Israel had secretly produced an atomic bomb, but nothing had been proved. Not even United States intelligence knew for sure. Jabir’s premise was that not only did Israel already have the “bomb,” within ten years it would have a hundred atomic bombs. As long as Israel had this nuclear superiority, the Arab world would face a bleak future. Without a Muslim bomb and a “balance of terror,” Jabir argued, Arabs would always be treated like second-class citizens, subservient to Zionists.

  Eager to spread anything anti-Israeli, the PLO flooded the Middle East’s urban centers with the book, and Arafat made sure the tome was brought to the attention of Hussein and the Ba’this through PLO operatives in Baghdad. For months Hamza saw stacks of the book piled in the Nuclear Research Center offices. The Israeli Bomb became a popular topic of debate throughout Iraq, where its message was tailor-made for Ba’thists like Saddam, whose dream was to lead the Arab nations to destroy Israel. Even more important, the book had provided Hussein with a blueprint on how to join the nuclear club. Ironically, as Israel would soon discover to its chagrin, he would do so by following, step by step, Israel’s own model.

  For Fouad Jabir, as it turned out, had been right all along—he had just been too conservative. Israel not only had an atomic bomb—it already had close to one hundred of them.

  The year was 1956, and Israel’s beloved “old man,” David Ben-Gurion, had been unable to connect with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The white-maned founder and leader of Israel for a quarter century embodied the passion of the freedom fighter with the soul of a rabbi, but his charms had eluded the U.S. president. Eisenhower had refused to form a security agreement with Israel. He had steadfastly adhered to a status quo policy in the Middle East, despite continuing signs of Arab aggression. He and the suite of Wall Street lawyers surrounding him seemed, if anything, to Ben-Gurion, more predisposed to
the sheikhs who supplied the U.S. with oil, which drove its economy, than to Israel, which offered friendship and moral arguments.

  The rebuff only deepened Ben-Gurion’s continual sense of being alone. American journalist Seymour Hersh recalled a Ben-Gurion aide confiding to him once that the prime minister would sometimes cry out, “What is Israel? Only a small spot. One dot! How can it survive in this Arab world?”

  As many an Israeli would note, to the West, Israel looked like David; to the Arabs, the nation looked like Goliath. But to the Israelis themselves, they felt more like Job. It was true that Israel had vanquished the combined armies of Jordan (then TransJordan), Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and even a token force from Iraq in its War for Independence in 1948, an event the Arabs call al-Nakbah, “the disaster.” There was a sense of invincibility about the Israel Defense Forces, whose soldiers and pilots were among the best trained in the world, but, ironically, there existed an almost equal sense of vulnerability. Like many of his generation, Ben-Gurion could not escape a feeling of doom, the conviction of ein brera, “no alternative,” that his nation was surrounded by enemies who would never change and would never accept them, thus forcing the Israelis to do anything to protect themselves or face a second Holocaust, an Arab version.

  Nasser had risen to the height of power in the Arab world by promising a day of reckoning with the “Zionist entity.” Playing the Cold War chessboard, he had allied Egypt with the Soviet Union and received huge shipments of military aid, modern artillery, MiGs, tanks, and training, making his army the largest in the region. Egypt had been girding for war for four years, forming military alliances with the other Arab nations. Now, in early 1956, Egyptian forces had amassed on the Sinai border across from Israel. But still the United States and Europe refused to act. Finally, fed up with Washington and convinced that Israel could count on no one but itself, Ben-Gurion called on Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Ernst David Bergmann, Israel’s Oppenheimer, to fly secretly to Paris to request France’s help in developing a nuclear reactor. The Israeli leader had concluded that the only way to ensure Israel’s survival was by atomic bomb.

  Six weeks after Peres left, in October, the war in the Suez broke out. Nasser continued to rattle sabers, moving infantry, tank companies, and Eygyptian MiGs far forward into the Suez Peninsula. Finally, he effectively declared war when he ordered a blockade of Israeli shipping in the Red Sea north of Sharm al-Sheikh at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. Aligning with Israel, France agreed to sell Israel the nuclear reactor, and in a secret agreement joined the British in a pact to reoccupy the Suez Canal, which had been ceded to Egypt. The plan called for Israel to attack Egypt, and then, as a ruse to restore order between the warring Israelis and Egyptians, Britain and France would intervene and reoccupy the canal. Right on cue, Israel unleashed its tank corps and quickly cut a devastating swath all the way to the canal. France and Britain deployed to invade and capture the Suez, but the Soviets, smelling out the plan, threatened to dispatch troops to reinforce Nasser. The United States and overwhelming international pressure brought Israel to a halt. Israel and Egypt suspended hostilities, and a United Nations force was decamped to ensure the neutrality of the Sinai Peninsula. Britain and France were sent packing from the Middle East, as it would turn out, for good. The balance of power between the Middle East and the European continent was irrevocably altered. But France was still on the hook for a nuclear reactor, the state-of-the-art EL 102, which could produce 24 million watts of thermal power and, at full capacity, twenty-two kilograms of enriched uranium a year, enough to make four bombs the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

  Groundbreaking on the reactor commenced quietly, without public notice, early in 1958 on a remote, restricted patch of barren desert in Dimona, near the ancient city of Beersheba in the heart of the Negev. It would soon be the most important piece of real estate in Israel. For the next ten years, hundreds of French technicians, Israeli scientists, construction workers, thousands of tons of equipment, and an unending caravan of covered trucks and earthmoving tractors moved in and out of the tiny watering hole. Dozens of U-2 overflights had aroused deep suspicions within the Pentagon and the NSA about what the Israelis were up to, but in truth, most of the people in Defense and State, as well as CIA, were sympathetic to Israel, even if it wasn’t stated U.S. policy. Until there was confirmable proof, conventional wisdom said it was better to say nothing and wait. This cat and mouse game would continue for an entire decade.

  By 1960, France’s new president, Charles de Gaulle, began to have second thoughts about his nation’s secret nuclear alliance with Israel. Effectively squeezed out of its onetime colonial playground in the Middle East, France was increasingly concerned about finding a cheap oil supply. De Gaulle, never overly warm to the Israeli state, leaned more and more toward the Arabs. He sent word to Ben-Gurion that Israel would have to reveal publicly that it had developed a nuclear reactor, or France would go ahead and divulge it. In December, Gaullists leaked the story of France’s construction of the Dimona reactor to London’s Daily Express anyway. Deeply hurt, Ben-Gurion was forced to reveal to the Knesset that Israel had constructed a nuclear research reactor in the Negev, but for purely peaceful means. To offset protests, Israel promised to allow inspection teams from the United States into Dimona to confirm that no weapons development was taking place.

  A team of scientists and nuclear specialists from the Atomic Energy Commission (the precursor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) was duly sent to Israel. Climbing through the tunnels and excavations, the inspection-team members found no evidence that the reactor was being used to produce weapons. It was, just as the Israelis claimed, a twenty-four-megawatt research reactor. Everything was clean—in fact, incredibly clean, since some rooms showed evidence of fresh plaster and paint. What the American engineers and scientists did not know was that they were looking at a nuclear version of The Truman Show. On Ben-Gurion’s orders, Israeli engineers had constructed a false control room, replete with fake control panels, a jimmied computer, and needles and dials displaying phony readouts from a putative twenty-four-megawatt reactor. The technicians had practiced the charade for weeks, making sure everyone knew their part. There could be no mistakes. The inspection team, after all, was not stupid.

  But it was fooled. Completely. Had the inspectors ventured to check the reactor core, they would have discovered huge stores of heavy water, a tip-off that the reactor was being used far above its stated capacity and generating great quantities of potential plutonium. To avoid that happenstance, Israel claimed that the reactor was in full operation—far too dangerous to allow inspectors into the core.

  In truth, in view of Israel’s ultimate intentions, even the “real” reactor was something of a Trojan horse. Israel was not so much interested in the energy produced by the reactor, which was converted into heat and steam and, ultimately, electricity, but in the by-product of the energy’s production—the spent uranium fuel from which could be extracted plutonium, the essential ingredient of an atomic bomb.

  The physics involved in a nuclear reactor is actually fairly basic. A reactor consists of a containment vessel, bundles of fuel rods filled with pellets of uranium 235, control rods (typically cadmium or boron, which absorb neutrons), heavy water (deuterium oxide produced from normal water by a process involving electrolysis), loops of pipe to carry superheated water, and a steam turbine outside the reactor vessel to produce electricity. The primary energy comes from the fissioning, or nuclear chain reaction, caused by the uranium 235 atoms, which, in concentrated and contained form, emit neutrons traveling at the speed of light. These neutrons collide with other highly charged U235 atoms, splitting the atoms’ centers, or nuclei, smashing them into fragments, and, at the same time, releasing heat and even more neutrons from the separated nuclei. The free neutrons collide with yet more atoms, creating a chain reaction that, if left unchecked, ultimately results in a nuclear explosion. But in a nuclear reactor, the fuel rods and pellets of uranium
are immersed in heavy water, which absorbs neutrons and modulates the fissioning. In addition, control rods are inserted between the fuel rods to absorb even more neutrons, slowing down the rate of the splitting atoms or, when withdrawn, speeding the rate of fissioning. The heavy water and control rods allow nuclear techs to sustain what is essentially a controlled nuclear reaction. The immense heat produced by the continually fissioning uranium is transferred to the pipes of freshwater, which run through the reactor. Inside the pipes the water becomes steam, which is then used to drive the electric turbines outside the reactor.

  What was important about a nuclear reactor in terms of building an atomic bomb was the by-product—the spent uranium fuel pellets inside the rods. While being bombarded with neutrons, the uranium becomes enriched with plutonium isotopes. This plutonium can be extracted from the spent uranium by a chemical process, then fabricated by a special machine into a metal form.