Raid on the Sun

by Rodger W. Claire

  In the classroom the team once again studied the F-16’s weapons, communications, navigation, and mechanical systems, from design specifications to operational capabilities. Since the IAF pilots had already spent months studying the design, theory, and mechanics behind the F-16s, on numerous occasions they were much more informed about the technical aspects of the aircraft than even the instructors. Used to American “kids” just out of college, the USAF instructors were surprised when the Israelis peppered them with technical questions about the plane’s design and performance specifications. Oftentimes the OTUs had to refer the pilots to General Dynamics engineers for answers. To their younger American classmates, mostly in their twenties, the Israelis carried a kind of cachet. Not only were they older, they had all seen combat—with multiple kills. The United States had not been involved in a full-fledged air war for a decade. In general only the veteran instructors like Michaels, who had served in Vietnam, had seen air-to-air combat. Even more than the IAF pilots’ experience, the U.S. instructors were impressed by their thoroughness and their mastery of the aircrafts’ mechanics.

  But there were cultural clashes. The IAF culture emphasized pilot initiative and independent judgment. This created an independence and informality that could, on occasion, clash with the American military’s rigid notion of order and protocol. Not long after the Israeli F-16s were delivered, Raz took one of the single-seaters out for a test run. During the flight he thought the navigation system was off. “Bumpy” was how he thought of it. He landed on the runway, taxied to the operational area, and parked the plane. He strode through the security checkpoint and returned to the squadron area to check the technical manual on the navigation system. He found the section he needed, put the book under his arm, and began the walk back to the aircraft.

  Hill was laid out in two separate areas—the operational area, where the planes were manned, and the squadron area, where the flight personnel carried on the support business. The two areas were separated by a long cable some twenty inches off the ground. Personnel were prohibited from entering the operational area except through the security gate at the end of the field, about one hundred yards down the cable fence. Raz thought the extra hike down to the main gate a supreme waste of time, so he simply hopped the cable and cut directly across the field to his plane. In less than twenty seconds, two jeeps full of armed MPs screeched to a halt in front of him, their M-16 rifles pointed at his head.

  “Hold it right there, mister,” one of the MPs barked.

  “But that’s my plane . . .” Raz began.

  “Hands up!” the MP cut him off, motioning upward with his rifle barrel.

  “But—”

  “Up!”

  Raz raised his hands above his head and was arrested on the spot.

  Meanwhile, Yaffe happened to be making his way from the squadron area to operations when he turned a corner and, to his surprise, saw his squadron commander being escorted out of the area at gunpoint by three MPs. Proud and a perfectionist, Raz strode by, silently. Yaffe stared back in complete shock as the guards marched his leader away, his face set hard as granite, his eyes betraying a look of impotence, humiliation, and fury.

  Several weeks later, after Gary Michaels and the base OTU officers had straightened things out between the Israelis and base security, Yaffe, Shafir, and Katz found themselves in another disagreement over base procedures. During a training run one of the planes malfunctioned. The Israelis reported the problem to the crew tech on duty in the operations hangar.

  “We want to switch planes,” Yaffe informed him. “Tell maintenance.”

  “We don’t do that,” the tech answered. “That’s not how it works. You just don’t take a new plane.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Yaffe said. “We need a new aircraft.”

  The men argued with the tech until the crewman strode angrily out of the hangar. The Israelis mulled around the hangar for a minute or two until they heard the unmistakable sound of a jeep roaring to a stop outside. Seconds later three MPs marched to the pilots, the same MPs who just weeks before had arrested Raz.

  “You again,” Yaffe said.

  The MPs were not amused. The IAF pilots argued their case, but the guards showed little interest in their troubles. They were breaking rules. That was all that was important. Unlike poor Raz, however, the men were not arrested.

  At the end of training, the OTU officers threw Raz’s team a going-away party. During the bash the lead instructor, Michaels, approached Yaffe, who had sent him scrambling on more than one occasion to find the answer to some complex design question.

  Michaels smiled.

  “You know,” the instructor said, scratching and shaking his head. “It was a very refreshing experience having you here.”

  Raz’s team returned to Ramat David in May to await delivery of the first four F-16s on Israeli soil, now scheduled for early July. As Raz, Yaffe, Katz, and Shafir set up housekeeping in the officers’ quarters on the base, Amir Nachumi’s team, including celebrated pilot Udi Ben-Amitay, left for their OT at Hill. At last the squadron received word that the F-16s would be delivered to Ramat David July 4. But the American pilots assigned to deliver the planes began complaining that they would miss Independence Day if they were held to the present schedule. To accommodate the USAF pilots, delivery was moved up to July 2. The American volunteer pilots flew the four F-16s in an eleven-hour, six-thousand-mile nonstop flight that required three in-air tanker refuelings. The IAF celebrated delivery of the planes like a national holiday, feting the American pilots as brothers. After more than a year, Israel’s elite new fighting squadron finally had aircraft—a small but nonetheless crucial beginning.

  Weeks after returning from the United States, Raz received orders from General Ivry to report to him at IAF headquarters in the Kirya in Tel Aviv. Raz flew in a small prop plane from Ramat David to the tiny air base at the northern edge of the city.

  After some polite conversation about his time at Hill, Ivry shifted gears.

  “I want you to begin training in low-level, long-distance navigation,” Ivry said cryptically. “Start with shorter distances and work up.”

  “Yes, sir,” Raz responded. “Anything specifically I’m looking for?” he added, fishing a bit.

  “We want to know the extreme range of the plane’s operational envelope,” Ivry replied.

  Raz said nothing, but Ivry had taken him by complete surprise. He had returned to Israel anticipating pulling together the new F-16 squadron and perhaps notching a few more Syrian MiGs with the sophisticated new fighter. The last thing on his mind was long-range navigation. What could Ivry be thinking?

  The reports out of Baghdad were all bad. The nondescript, Soviet-era administration buildings that Khidhir Hamza had encountered on his first visit to al-Tuwaitha ten years earlier had disappeared completely, replaced by a vast, modern fortress more akin to Russia’s Star City than anything found in the deserts of the Middle East. Officially dubbed Project Tammuz 17, the first of many such planned future complexes, the Nuclear Research Center covered one-quarter square mile and included dozens of labs, plants, shops, and buildings. In the north corner, landscaped with flower planters and hedges, stood the main administration building. Another building containing the main entrance hall, administrative offices, and a data center faced administration. To the south was the Italian-made fuel fabrication facility. Iraq’s Atomic Energy claimed that the fabrication facility’s purpose was to supply fuel for its ambitious power plant program, but Israel’s scientists determined that the facility existed for one reason: to assemble uranium fuel packages for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. Just east of the fabrication plant was a radioactive waste facility to dispose of toxic detritus. In the southeast corner stood a large machine shop for manufacturing and repairing tools and hardware to support the reactors.

  In the center of it all rose the mammoth thirty-foot-high dome of Osirak, officially renamed Tammuz I by Hussein. In his long-range plans, Osirak would be
the first of numerous nuclear reactors built around the country. The Osirak reactor beneath the dome was essentially an open pool, thirty feet deep and filled with light water, which covered the plumbing, coolants, and the control and fuel rods. The light water would help modulate the rate of fission along with the control rods, slowing down the flow of free neutrons between the uranium pellets. The arching cupola functioned as an airtight vacuum to prevent radiation leakage. Scientists conducting experiments worked directly in the pool, manipulating the machinery by hand. Beneath the pool, ten feet underground, was the drive mechanism for the control rods and, extending west, the neutron guide hall, a large concrete room 60 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 30 feet high. Equipped with a twenty-ton bridge crane that traveled up and down the length of the room on steel beams, the hall was used to conduct separate experiments with free neutrons, which were siphoned from the fissioning uranium in the reactor.

  A ground-level control room flanked the reactor pool and the dome. Within the building, adjacent to the reactor, was the Italian-made hot cell used to separate plutonium from uranium, which the Iraqis had renamed Project 30 July in honor of the Ba’thist revolution. Next door to Osirak stood the smaller French reactor, Isis.

  A large guardhouse stood near the main gate, framed by a metal detector and X-ray machine. Soldiers in combat fatigues carrying AK-47s roamed the open spaces, which were ringed with closed-circuit television cameras. As Mossad had seen, the entire facility was fortified by a hundred-foot-high earthen revetment. Positioned at all four corners were AAA, antiaircraft armament, including batteries of Soviet-made ZSU 23mm guns on modified tanks, which fired four hundred rounds a minute. In between the AAA emplacements were Soviet-made SAM-6 surface-to-air missiles and radar-tracking units.

  The photographs of the installation and reports out of Iraq had sparked a new urgency in Begin and the pro-raid ministers. For one thing, Iraq, exuding a new sense of invincibility, was no longer being as careful about hiding the ultimate use of its new nuclear program. In October 1980 the Iraqi daily Al Thawara ran an article about the Nuclear Research Center at al-Tuwaitha, reporting that Iraq intended the facility to be used “against the Zionist enemies.” Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence estimates predicted that Iraq would have enough plutonium to produce two atomic bombs by 1982.

  Pressed by Saguy and Hofi, Begin agreed to one final attempt at diplomacy. Israel’s foreign minister Yitzhak Shamir called on the French embassy in Tel Aviv to warn the chargé d’affaires that Baghdad’s French-built nuclear reactor could ignite a conflict in the region and set back recent gains in attaining peace in the Middle East. In a final plea, Begin sent a personal diplomatic letter to French president Giscard d’Estaing virtually begging him to pull out the French technicians from al-Tuwaitha and hold back from sending Iraq the remaining twelve kilos of enriched uranium. Giscard d’Estaing replied that he could not comply, but once again reassured Begin that France would never allow Iraq to develop weapons using the Osirak reactor.

  A week later Mossad reported to Begin that Osirak would go hot within six months.

  Begin made up his mind. About October 15 (the actual date remains classified), the prime minister called together a second secret meeting of the ranking cabinet ministers at his offices in Jerusalem. Yadin, Hofi, and Saguy continued to have serious objections to a raid. Yadin, in fact, had threatened to resign if Begin went through with the mission. Hofi and Yadin doubted that an attack could destroy the twelve kilos of enriched uranium France had already sent to al-Tuwaitha. Mossad had determined that the uranium was stored inside a concrete pyramid in an underground chamber located next to the neutron guide hall. Israel would be risking worldwide condemnation for nothing. Saguy believed that Israel still had no firm evidence that Iraq was yet capable of building an atomic bomb, and he was not persuaded that any perceived threat to Israel’s security was justification for an unprovoked military attack on a sovereign nation.

  “I do not believe fears of a ‘Second Holocaust’ justify the Israeli military taking any steps it thinks fit,” Saguy told the assembled ministers.

  Defense Minister Weizman had been so vehemently against a military raid that he had resigned in May in order to run against Begin within his own conservative Likud Party. Outside the administration, the Labor Party candidate for prime minister, Shimon Peres, and Labor Party chieftain Mordechai Gur had been leaked word of a proposed military strike against Osirak and were adamantly opposing any such operation, fearing it would endanger Israel’s relations with the United States and the Europeans, isolating the tiny state.

  Agriculture Secretary Ariel Sharon laughed derisively at that argument.

  “If I have a choice of being popular and dead or unpopular and alive,” Sharon scoffed, “I choose being alive and unpopular.”

  Since the first security cabinet meeting three years earlier, Begin had pledged he would not green-light a mission without the support of the entire cabinet, or at least the ranking political ministers. Hofi and Saguy were considered military, not political. The prime minister had grown impatient in the intervening years while Hussein continued to piece together his would-be atomic juggernaut. That Iraq could not produce an atomic bomb until 1982 or 1985 was beside the point to Begin. The important date was June 1981, when Israeli intelligence estimated Osirak would go hot, and after which Israel could not strike without the risk of causing widespread civilian casualties. Israeli scientists had estimated that destroying al-Tuwaitha and setting off a nuclear reaction could, depending upon the prevailing winds at the time, kill as many as one hundred thousand people as far away as Baghdad.

  There was another pressing consideration as well: Israeli national elections were scheduled for the fall. Peres and Labor were enjoying a significant lead in the polls already. If Begin were to lose the prime ministry and a new government was formed, the opportunity to end Iraq’s nuclear threat could be lost forever. The prime minister did not believe Labor had the stomach to deal with the crisis. In any event, by the time a new government was formed, the reactor would be up and running. Begin needed an endgame—and Ivry and Eitan, who had spent the last three years hammering out various plans and then discarding them, had finally delivered.

  Dubbed Operation Hatakh Moshem, or “Ammunition Hill,” after the famous ’67 battle led by Doobi’s uncle, the mission was to be carried out by IAF pilots flying F-16s, nonstop and without refueling, at low-level navigation from Israel to al-Tuwaitha. The mission had to be timed perfectly: the attack would commence at sunset on a Sunday to ensure the maximum safety of the French and Italian technicians who would be home on their day off (Israel miscalculated: the end of the workweek and the Iraqi “Sabbath,” or day of rest, was Friday, and though many foreign technicians did take Sundays off, the plant was open for business). In addition, a late attack would give Israeli CSAR teams all night to rescue any downed pilots under cover of darkness. Of course, if the attack were launched too late, the ground would be too dark to distinguish from the horizon—a very dangerous environment for pilots on a bombing run.

  Each fighter would carry two bombs. The target would be solely the Osirak reactor. How the F-16s would exceed their deadhead range of 540 to 560 miles to accomplish the 600-mile flight to Baghdad remained to be worked out, as would the type of ordnance used, the exact number of planes, the nature of tactical support, and myriad other details. But Ivry and Eitan assured the cabinet that the mission would be surgical and carry a low risk of casualties—at least, as low as could be expected in such a dangerous operation.

  The unlooked-for addition of the F-16s, the thoroughness of the mission planning, and Ivry’s assurances allayed many of the fears of the ministers who harbored doubts about a military operation. In addition, the political ministers, if not completely convinced of the wisdom of a raid, were loath not to support Begin, given the stakes. The prime minister made it clear that Saguy’s earlier pronouncement that he would refuse to take any “responsibility” for a raid, even threatening at one point t
o withhold intelligence about Osirak from the IAF, would not be brooked.

  After the hours of debate and squabbling Begin stood and looked down the table, his dark eyes flickering from the face of one cabinet member to the next. Some of these men he had known for four decades, had fought next to against the British in ’47. He put both hands on the edge of the table and leaned in toward the generals and ministers, his chin up (some wondered later, was it jutting?), and announced, “There will be no other Holocaust in this century! Never. Never again!”

  The ministers remained silent. No one dared oppose him—at least to his face. Ivry’s mission was approved. He and Eitan were ordered to put the plan into action. No D day was set, but Begin made it clear he wanted it soon. November was set as a tentative date.

  Raz and his squadron pilots at Ramat David continued long-range navigation training. Their numbers grew with the return of the second and third conversion teams from Hill. In the meantime General Ivry and his right-hand man, Col. Aviem Sella, one of the IAF’s leading nuclear bombing and targeting experts, pulled together a secret ten-man operational team of engineers, scientists, computer experts, and combat strategists at IAF headquarters in Tel Aviv. Sella himself had served as an F-4 Phantom pilot at Tel Nof as a member of Israel’s “black” squadron, a nuclear-weapons-capable wing assigned to the nation’s ultimate defense. His experience in targeting and bombing was invaluable. As soon as Ivry had the green light, the operations team gathered in a top secret meeting that included Mossad and army intelligence analysts and their best nuclear scientists to pore over the blueprints of al-Tuwaitha obtained by Arbel’s Paris station. The experts agreed that the key to the entire facility was the reactor itself—without it, the rest of the equipment was harmless. The actual target—ground zero—would be the reactor’s thirty-foot-high dome, which was only several inches thick and composed of reinforced concrete.