Raid on the Sun

by Rodger W. Claire

  Operations quickly discarded the idea of using so-called “smart bombs.” These were mostly U.S.-made GBU-15s, which were dropped at a distance from the target and then guided by the pilot through remote-control movable fins and a television camera in the bomb nose. But the bombs were large and cumbersome, and the added weight and drag would reduce fuel efficiency, already a crucial factor in the long-range mission. Moreover, the new smart bombs were not 100 percent reliable and, worse, would demand the pilots’ attention and add to their workload at the precise time they were most vulnerable to AAA fire. The success of the mission, Ivry was convinced, rested on simplicity and the element of surprise.

  The team determined that the most efficient means of penetrating the dome and destroying the reactor beneath was to drop two-thousand-pound MK-84 slick, or “dumb,” bombs, which simply used gravity. The bombs created a horizontal destruction pattern extending thirty-four hundred feet—more than enough to take out the entire reactor. They could be rigged for either instant detonation or delayed fusing and were simple, foolproof, and effective—something the pilots, taxed already with sophisticated mechanical and navigational systems, would welcome.

  IAF wanted to be absolutely certain the bombs would do the job. No one had ever bombed a nuclear reactor before, and no one in Israel really knew for certain just what would happen if one were detonated. To find out, the IDF discreetly contacted two Israeli nuclear engineers at Haifa’s prestigious Technion University, Joseph Kivity and Joseph Saltovitz, and recruited them for a mission. The scientists would travel to Washington and meet with representatives of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licensed and regulated nuclear energy facilities in the U.S. The scientists could not, of course, tell the NRC officials the truth about what Israel really wanted to know: what was the most efficient means of destroying Iraq’s unfinished nuclear reactor at al-Tuwaitha. Instead, Israeli intelligence created a cover story for the engineers. They would pose as representatives of the Israeli Electric Company, which supposedly was considering purchasing an electric-power reactor from the United States. The Israeli scientists would tell NRC the electric company was concerned about terrorism and threats from Arab neighbors and wanted to know what the effect would be if the facility were bombed.

  The fact that Israel was deceiving its closest ally, indeed, its lifeline in the Middle East, did not seem to overly concern the planners. It was a defining distinction between Israel’s political and military institutions and those of Western nations. The IDF, though highly trained and highly professional, nonetheless retained some of the seat-of-the-pants instincts, the risk-taking, that had marked the outlawed citizen army of the Haganah that had fought for the independence of the Jewish state. Such a serious mission, if considered by the United States military, would have occasioned months of bureaucratic second-guessing. Decisions in the Pentagon, as Vietnam had so vividly shown, tended many times to be driven more by fear of failure than will to succeed. Again, in the wake of the Iraq War, political considerations about how U.S. intentions might be perceived by Iraqis and the world community drove the military’s occupying strategy rather than adherence to strict military tactics or even pragmatic solutions. The IDF, by comparison, seemed almost reckless.

  Bypassing the usual diplomatic State Department or Defense channels, the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., contacted the NRC directly to ask for a meeting with the electric company scientists. A meeting was set up for October 9, 1980. The two engineers, Kivity and Saltovitz, flew to Washington on the eighth and met the following day with John O’Brien, James Costello, and Shou Hou in the NRC’s local research offices. Kivity and Saltovitz wanted to know, specifically, what would happen to their reactor if, say, “a 1,000-kilogram [2,200-pound] charge penetrated [the] concrete barriers and detonated after penetration.”

  The officials, drawing from numerous studies conducted by the NRC, the U.S. military, and the Defense Department, detailed for Kivity and Saltovitz what systems in the reactor were most vulnerable to such an explosion and whose failure would result in “significant consequences,” as Costello put it, and thus were “optimal targets for sabotage.” In general, these were the reactor’s fuel rods and the cooling systems. When Kivity and Saltovitz finished debriefing Costello, O’Brien, and Hou of all the knowledge and data they needed, the Israelis thanked their fellow scientists, shook hands, and then caught the first El Al flight back to Tel Aviv. There, they informed Ivry and his staff that the two-thousand-pound dumb bombs would be more than sufficient to destroy Osirak—if it were bombed before going hot. If the reactor were bombed while fueled with fissionable uranium, the NRC had confirmed, there would be danger of an uncontrolled reaction precipitating a nuclear event.

  Back in Washington, after the NRC reps had time to think things over, the three men realized they had all noticed the same thing. As they put it in a follow-up memo drafted about the meeting: “Because of a lack of real interest in underground siting as a protective measure against sabotage, it was unclear whether the Israelis were interested in defending their own plants or destroying someone else’s.”

  Curiously, the NRC was not the only U.S. department suddenly having second thoughts about its dealings with Israel in the closing days of 1980. As Ronald Reagan became president-elect in November and William J. Casey prepared to take over the reins of the Central Intelligence Agency from Stansfield Turner, Langley (CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia) began to hear disturbing rumors about Israel possibly compromising one of the nation’s most jealously guarded assets.

  To gather intelligence on Osirak, Mossad and IDF had been forced to rely on grainy ground-level photos secreted out of Iraq, the blueprints obtained by the Paris station, and HUMINT, human intelligence, gleaned by agents in Paris and Baghdad. Still, IAF had no comprehensive, big-picture surveillance of the entire facility or its environs. The service was forced to rely on old, sometimes outdated, maps and charts or, worse, on a subject’s description of the area. Israel had no spy satellites orbiting the earth, snapping photographs of foreign bases and military installations hidden deep within the borders of its enemies. The nation had neither the budget nor the technology for such a sophisticated network.

  But the United States did.

  It was known as KH-11, the National Security Administration’s supersecret, supersophisticated reconnaissance satellite. Launched December 19, 1976, KH-11 represented a stunning leap forward in technology—a sixty-four-foot-long satellite orbiting hundreds of miles above the earth, circling the globe every ninety-six minutes, relaying back high-resolution, digitally enhanced, real-time photographs so clear one could make out parked cars on the ground. As a reward, or more appropriately a carrot, for Menachem Begin’s cooperation with Anwar Sadat at the Camp David summit, President Carter had granted Israel access to the internationally coveted KH-11 photographs in March 1979. Britain, which had been denied first-generation KH-11 intelligence because of a suspected leak in its communications intelligence establishment, was outraged that Israel was granted such access. The many U.S. defense and intelligence agencies that found they now had to vie with Israel for orbiting time were incensed as well. Israeli access would disrupt the delicate scheduling times that had been diplomatically hammered out between the various agencies over the years. Someone was going to be squeezed.

  In Israel, access to KH-11 was seen as a monumental turnaround. For years during the Cold War, Mossad and the CIA had shared virtually all Middle East intelligence. So entwined were the agencies that in many respects the Israelis considered themselves virtual partners with the CIA. All that changed in 1977, when Stansfield Turner had severely curtailed the agency’s liaison with Mossad. Convinced that the men in Carter’s administration were naïve and anti-Semitic, Israel had responded in kind, cutting off its flow of intelligence about Africa and the Middle East.

  Even now the Carter administration had put restrictions on Israel’s KH-11 access. Israel could receive only I&W, intelligence and warning—that is, satel
lite photos depicting military activity such as troop movements or artillery placement occurring one hundred miles inside the borders of its Arab neighbors: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. It could not have regional surveillance of the entire Middle East. And certainly not Iraq. The idea was to provide Israel with defensive intelligence only. Any information that could be used to plan preemptive strikes was forbidden. So a routine had been established over the months. The military attaché at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., would drive across the Potomac bridge to the Pentagon and, in an office under the direction of the Defense Intelligence Agency, pick up NSA’s specially processed and carefully edited satellite photographs. These were then flown by diplomatic pouch to Tel Aviv where they were analyzed at the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.

  From the beginning of the arrangement, longtime veterans of the American intelligence service anticipated that Israel would do everything it could to circumvent the restrictions. The Israelis would not disappoint them.

  For starters, the agreement allowed Israel to make requests for special satellite intelligence. These would be handled on a case-by-case basis. Immediately the Israelis argued that the agreement did not pertain to common enemies of the U.S. and began pressuring NSA for full and unfettered access to all intelligence regarding the Soviet Union, including its supply lines into Iraq and Soviet training of Iraqi troops in western Iraq. The CIA turned those requests down. But Israel kept up the pressure. Mossad and the IDF had many friends deep within the agency. To these sympathetic ears they argued that Israel had to see all essential intelligence dealing with the Middle East, and only Israelis could know what was important to Israel. The Reagan administration had been a boon to the Israelis. The administration and CIA director Casey were far more sympathetic to Israel’s arguments. To ensure that nothing was overlooked, Casey early in his tenure provided the Israeli liaison officer with a private office at Langley so Israel could have direct access to the intelligence officers processing real-time KH-11 imagery.

  Over time, as the Israeli liaison established a friendly working relationship with the KH-11 officers, the original strictures became blurred. The Israeli officer was seen as an ally, relaying Israel’s intelligence needs to the directors of the KH-11 program. What could it hurt to help them out on an informal basis? As a senior intelligence officer told author Seymour Hersh, “It was in our national interest to make sure in 1981 that the Israelis were going to survive.” There was also the conviction that if Israel were refused intelligence, it would simply turn around and lobby supporters in Congress for the money to build its own satellite. By 1981, less than two years after Carter had first given them limited access to KH-11, Israel was extracting virtually any photograph they wanted, including satellite photographs of al-Tuwaitha. Israel had even managed to finagle a seat on the tasking committee to request its own flyovers. The mission pilots at Ramat David as well as most of the high command were never told of the existence of the photographs, but Mossad had seen them all. And so Hofi knew for certain that Osirak would be hot by midsummer 1981.

  Soon after Kivity and Saltovitz returned from the NRC, General Ivry called Raz and Nachumi to Tel Aviv. The two pilots flew the sixty miles south in a fixed-wing prop plane, the farm fields of the Jezreel beneath giving way to the small villages and suburbs like Hod Ha’sharon and Ramat Gan outside Tel Aviv. Soon the winking warning lights showed atop the chimney standing sentinel at the north end of Ha’ Yarkon Street. Four months had passed since the delivery of the squadron’s first four F-16s to Ramat David. The squadron now had twelve F-16s of the Block 5 model, the original “Iranian” planes ordered in 1978. More planes from the current generation, Block 10, which included GD’s new upgrades to the navigation, electrical, and weapons systems, were already coming off the production lines. IAF planned that ultimately there would be three F-16A/B squadrons. Raz would lead the first mission squadron of eight planes—though no one outside of high command was to know the target. The pilots had been told only to train in long-range, low-level navigation.

  Raz and Nachumi took their seats in Ivry’s office, and after the usual small talk, the general got quickly to the point.

  “I want you to concentrate on an air-to-ground mission,” he said, “air-to-ground” being militaryspeak for “bombing.”

  Nachumi saw Raz raise his eyebrows ever so slightly. Otherwise he showed no emotion.

  “Remember, this is classified,” Ivry said levelly. “You’re not to discuss the mission with anyone. Not even your wives.”

  The men could have smiled. So far, there had been almost nothing to discuss. Following the first meeting in May when Ivry had told him to train for long-range navigation, Raz had gone straight to the Ramat David operations room and looked at the huge map of the Middle East mounted on the wall. Using a calculator, he quickly determined the optimum distance of the F-16 to be 560 miles. He cut a piece of string to match the map’s legend of 600 miles, pinned one end of the string at Tel Aviv and then traced a 600-mile circle around the map. Looking at his rotating bull’s-eye, Raz guessed somewhere inside Syria.

  Ilan Ramon was the youngest of the eight pilots. He was twenty-seven and the only bachelor in the squadron. With thick dark hair and boyish good looks, he usually commanded the attention of any unattached female within hailing distance. But his good-natured, self-effacing charm and studious devotion to work also made him a favorite among the men. So did the fact that Ramon’s mother and grandmother were both Holocaust survivors who had made their way to Israel after surviving the Auschwitz death camp. Ramon was acutely aware of his family’s legacy, an unspoken yet profound conviction that seemed to bestow a kind of nobility to his youth and made his easy manner and openness all that more engaging. Ramon had been assigned as the squadron navigator. As a result, early on he had been apprised of the mission profile: a low-level, 600-mile flight with a tailwind to mission target; then a 600-mile, low-high return (which meant climbing and flying at high altitude) into headwinds. In the Middle East the prevailing winds are always easterly, blown in from the Mediterranean Sea, which sits off the western coast of Israel. Going with a tailwind meant flying east: looking 600 miles to the east on the map, Ramon was led to only one conclusion—Iraq. But where in Iraq, he wondered . . . Baghdad?

  Hagai Katz, too, knew that a tailwind meant east, and that most likely indicated Iraq as the target. Then in September, Katz saw the headlines about the mysterious explosions at the Rome headquarters of SNIA, which was doing business with Hussein. Immediately he recognized Mossad’s handiwork and quickly put two and two together to come up with the Osirak reactor at al-Tuwaitha. As the realization dawned on him, he felt surprised, apprehensive, and elated all at the same time. Though he felt sure he had divined the target, Katz, remembering his security agreement, vowed to keep it to himself.

  Ivry meanwhile had anticipated all along that his pilots would be doing their own calculations, trying to guess the target. Though it seemed like overkill to worry so intensely about secrecy, surprise was the single most critical element of the raid—without it the chances of success were very slim. To throw the pilots off, during a briefing Ivry let slip a reference to “Habbaniyah,” an Iraqi airfield west of Baghdad that was home base to Saddam’s squadron of Soviet-made Tupolev fighters that had the range to reach Tel Aviv. He hoped that this red herring would misdirect the pilots. After all, Habbaniyah was a credible threat. But the pilots were already way ahead of him, and by the end of 1980 most of them had quietly decided that the target was somewhere deep inside Iraq—and, God help them, probably nuclear.

  SUNDAY, JUNE 7, 1981

  1510 HOURS: T-MINUS 00:51

  ETZION AIR FORCE BASE, OCCUPIED SINAI PENINSULA

  The controller’s voice crackled in his headphones.

  “1–3–3 Squadron cleared for takeoff.”

  “Roger,” the pilot, a lieutenant colonel stationed out of Tel-Nof AFB in the north, replied.

  Six F-15s had taxied out of their camouflaged h
angars at the end of the runway and were holding on the tarmac, open to any intelligence satellites from the United States or the Soviet Union that might be orbiting overhead. The squadron leader barely gave it a thought. Like his superiors, he knew it was too late for any prying eyes to figure out what they were up to. The pilot returned to his preflight checkoff. The F-15 pilots did not have the luxury of the main attack squadron’s F-16s and their computerized BITS, which automatically isolated and assessed each of the aircraft’s weapons, navigation, electrical, mechanical, and communications systems. Instead, they had to manually check off each system one at a time, flipping switches and waiting for the green lights to blink back, a time-consuming process. As one of the support fighters that would shadow the attack group all the way to target, he was among the few who knew the mission destination. He had never flown into Iraqi territory. Not that it mattered.

  His team was ready for takeoff now, an hour ahead of the mission squadron. They would circle west of Aqaba and wait for the eight F-16s to re-form, then follow them into Iraq. His job was to jam Iraqi radar over al-Tuwaitha with the F-15s’ powerful ECMs and engage any MiGs that challenged the attack. Besides four Sidewinder air-to-air and four radar-guided Sparrow missiles, his plane carted 500 rounds of 20mm cannon fire that could be dispensed at the rate of 6,000 rounds a minute in short bursts. Enough to shred a MiG in seconds. At last the squadron leader gave the Go signal. He pulled back on his joystick, hearing the plane’s twin engines rev and feeling the plane vibrate with the power as the first two hunter jets in front of him shot into the air and soared eastward. Following, he hit the afterburners and was pinned to his seat, his plane hurtling heavenward, for now blue, calm, and cloudless.