Raid on the Sun

by Rodger W. Claire

  As simple as that: Spector was in, Falk was out. Falk was respectful, but decidedly cool around the commander. Raz, all business, swallowed the decision and moved on. But, it would turn out, the squadron was transformed in a much deeper sense than anyone suspected. For the first time, it became obvious that there were now two teams. And two team leaders. Spector was no longer just the base commander: he was a member of the second group, Nachumi’s team. The commander was aware of the latent animosity, but he was determined to overcome it. He took his place on the mission team. He was friendly, unassuming. He respected each of the pilots and was sure, given time, that they would accept him. In any event, he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Was it a matter of ego or, as Spector told himself, a conviction that a leader’s place was in the line of fire with his men? Or was it perhaps something less conscious—ego, an inability to let go, to miss the spotlight? Not even Spector knew the answer to that. Whatever the case, it was too late to turn back.

  By March 1981, Israel received word that the U.S. Department of Defense had agreed to sell the IAF twelve F-16 centerline fuel tanks. Operations recalculated all the data and factored in the extra fuel accorded by the centerline tanks. When the engineers were done crunching the numbers, the news was not good. At an average airspeed of 331 knots, flying fifty meters above the ground, given the prevailing temperatures, humidity, and wind patterns of the route and taking into account all the extra weight of the fuel itself, including the two external wing tanks and the centerline tank, Operations calculated that the Pratt & Whitney single engines would burn 4,940 pounds of fuel an hour. Factoring in the radical fuel intake when the afterburners were used during takeoff, pop-up, and escape, the operational engineers estimated that by the time the pilots reached the Euphrates River, their aircraft would have already burned through 9,000 pounds of fuel. That left only 6,000 pounds of fuel to get home on—if there were no intercepts or evasions. Indeed, during test flights the pilots were coming up short some forty to sixty miles.

  Somehow they had to find another sixty miles—this after already virtually stripping the planes clean. The support team checked and rechecked their modelings, scanned the performance specs. In the end they came up with two last-ditch ideas—both risky. The first was to jettison the wing-mounted fuel pans over the desert as soon as they were empty. That would lighten the planes by several hundred pounds, cut down the drag caused by the hanging tanks, and save as much as ten minutes’ flying time. Indeed, General Dynamics had designed the external fuel pans, which looked a lot like bombs themselves, to be released from inside the cockpit. But there was still a danger. The fuel pans hung beneath the wings next to the two-thousand-pound bombs. The tanks and their wing clips were not designed to be released while the aircraft was carrying ordnance. There was a real risk that the pans, let loose at three-hundred-plus knots an hour, could easily collide with the bombs, damaging their release clips or, worse, causing the bombs to detonate. The pans could also be caught in the updraft and flip up and over the wings, causing damage to the wing flaps.

  As weapons officer, Katz was particularly concerned about the idea of jettisoning the external tanks so close to the ordnance. He called the chief design engineer at General Dynamics in San Diego and asked him what he thought the chances were for dumping the fuel pans in flight while fully armed. The engineer rechecked the design specifications and told Katz he thought they could get away with dropping the tanks if they kept their airspeed under four hundred knots. The issue was settled: the wing pans would be dumped over the Saudi desert.

  The second idea was to do a “hot refueling” on the runway at Etzion. With the engines running, spewing hot streams of jet exhaust, the F-16s’ tanks would be topped off on the runway by fuel trucks before takeoff, replacing the hundreds of gallons of jet fuel burned while conducting checkoffs and taxiing. It was a dangerous procedure, with a risk of the hot exhaust igniting the fuel and exploding the tanker trucks or the F-16s. Once again the book said it could not be done. They would do it anyway.

  By the end of March, Mossad reported to Begin that the foreign workers were returning to al-Tuwaitha and building had resumed at Osirak. France and Italy decided the Iran-Iraq War was likely to drag on for years, bogged down on the border in World War I–style trench warfare. The likelihood of another Iranian air strike on al-Tuwaitha was minimal.

  Begin wanted the air strike back on and began lobbying the ministers for final backing. Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin was still very much on the fence, even though he had not challenged Begin outright at the October meeting. Taking no chances this time, Begin did behind-the-scenes arm-twisting. Yadin had been a member of the ’74 blue-ribbon panel chosen to investigate the intelligence failings that had allowed the Israeli military to be taken by surprise in the opening days of the Yom Kippur War. At that time he had been supplied with intelligence material that had been skewed and doctored. Now, for those reasons, Yadin did not trust the military and Mossad intelligence estimates of Osirak. He insisted on seeing the raw data, the original classified reports from the field agents. In early March, Begin arranged for Chief of Staff Eitan to meet secretly with Yadin and show him the raw data. At the meeting, Eitan presented Yadin with the classified Mossad reports and photographs, including the top-secret KH-11 satellite shots that clearly documented the return of the foreign techs to al-Tuwaitha and the resumption of the construction work. By the end of the meeting Yadin agreed to withdraw his opposition to the raid.

  The prime minister called for a top-secret security meeting on March 15, 1981, to be attended by all ten ministers. Several of the ministers, including Health Minister Eliezer Shostak and Deputy Defense Minister Mordechai Tzitori, remained deeply uneasy about an attack. To convince the last of the doubters, Begin ordered Generals Eitan and Ivry to the meeting to present the IAF’s secret plan of attack. To discuss the mission in detail, General Ivry brought with him Zeev Raz. Together, Ivry and Raz outlined for the ministers in precise detail the entire raid, from takeoff to return. The exacting specifications of the plan and its exhaustive attention to every detail clearly impressed the assembled ministers. Raz confidently answered every question and put to rest any doubts. At the end of the presentation, Begin called for a vote. The mission was unanimously approved by all ten ministers. Begin then set the day of the attack: May 10, 1981, a Sunday, seven weeks before the June 30 national elections.

  “What are we calling the attack?” Begin asked Eitan at the end of the meeting.

  The bushy-eyed chief of staff fixed the prime minister in his stare.

  “‘The noise of battle is in the land, the noise of great destruction,’ ” Eitan recited, quoting Jeremiah from the Old Testament. “‘Before your eyes I will repay Babylon and all who live in Babylonia for all the wrong they have done in Zion, declares the Lord.’ ”

  Eitan smiled thinly.

  “We will call it Operation Babylon.”

  A week later, at Ramat David, Raz called the entire squadron into the briefing room. Nachumi, Yadlin, Yaffe, Katz, Shafir, Ramon, Falk, and Spector all took their seats.

  “I know you all have been wondering for a while what our target is going to be,” Raz said evenly. “I can tell you now. On May 10 we will take off from Etzion Air Base and fly to al-Tuwaitha, a nuclear facility south of Baghdad in Iraq. There we will bomb the Osirak nuclear reactor.”

  The silence in the room was deafening, as Rani Falk would think of it later. Ramon, Nachumi, and Spector had long known the destination. Katz had figured it out, but the others were clearly stunned. Later, the men would contend that they had already figured out the target. But looking around the room, Falk saw by their stricken faces that no one in their wildest imaginings had guessed the target would be a nuclear reactor.

  As Raz detailed the mission and discussed the formidable AAA gun emplacements and SAM batteries surrounding the complex, the many risks involved were plainly obvious to each pilot. The fact was in 1981, Israeli Air Force tactics and weapons syste
ms still lagged far behind the efficiency of the new Soviet antiaircraft and SAM technologies. Syria’s advanced, computerized, and radar-guided Soviet-made SAM-6s, which locked onto the exhaust heat of the fighters’ thrusters, had shocked the IAF in the opening days of the Yom Kippur War. One Skyhawk squadron lost 17 of 30 planes to SAMs in two days over the Golan Heights. Yadlin’s unit alone lost nine pilots—an unthinkable casualty rate before ’73. In the past thirty years, dating from the beginning of the Vietnam War, 90 percent of all air force kills were due to AAA fire. Much of the reason was that the now widely used heatseeking SAMs were forcing pilots to take more and more dangerous avoidance maneuvers, ultimately causing them to accidentally wind up in the AAAs’ deadly line of fire. The majority of the losses were between 1,500 and 4,500 feet—exactly the elevation of the pilots’ tracking on final. The consensus was, you had no more than ten seconds to go low to low—that is, pop-up to release—or you were a dead man.

  Worse, Mossad reported that in the wake of the Iran bombing, Iraq, besides putting all units on full alert, had beefed up the number of AAA batteries and SAM emplacements surrounding Osirak. That intelligence and the images of gigantic towering tethered balloons ringing the fortresslike facility were hard to keep locked away in a pilot’s mental box.

  Indeed, Operations had secretly run out the risk assessment numbers and determined that, given the mission parameters, the probability was the mission team, due to either AAA fire or mechanical failure, could expect to lose at least two aircraft. Ivry had chosen not to pass that grisly statistic on, but word of the death math had leaked out nonetheless. The pilots did not need to be told what they were up against.

  A few days after Raz’s briefing, Ivry ordered Raz and Nachumi to Tel Aviv.

  “We have heard from all the engineers and the experts,” Ivry told them. “Now we’d like to know what you, the pilots, think of the mission.”

  “We will destroy the reactor,” Nachumi said. Then, making it clear that there was really no room for discussion of personal safety, he added: “After that, what else matters?”

  SUNDAY, JUNE 7, 1981

  1601 HOURS: T-MINUS 00:00

  ETZION AIR FORCE BASE, OCCUPIED SINAI PENINSULA

  The ordnance crew technician checked his watch, then walked in front of the F-16, making sure Raz could see him from the cockpit, then, bending deeply at the knees, ducked under the plane’s wing for a final look at both MK-84 gravity bombs. Each was secure in its release clips, fastened just in front of its tail fins, which served to stabilize the bomb and keep it from wobbling as it was lobbed forward in its downward arc to the target. The clips had to be sturdy enough to hold the two-thousand-pound bombs, which would be bounced up and down, along with the wings, during the rocky ride hundreds of miles through hot, unstable desert air. When the technician was sure the clips were secured properly, he pulled the metal safety pin from each bomb. He was amazed at how close to the ground the overloaded plane was. The intake manifold was barely twelve inches off the tarmac. Holding pins in his left hand as he ducked back out from under the port wing, careful to avoid the scalding-hot exhaust from the plane’s tailpipe, the tech signaled “all clear” to Raz. He then jogged off the tarmac, where he joined the other ordnance techs, each of whom had performed the exact same maneuver on the F-16s. He did a last-minute check of the runway for any gravel or small obstruction that could be sucked into the manifold and destroy the engine. Theirs would be the final inspections. No sooner had the techs cleared the asphalt than the first two fighters were already barreling down the runway, picking up speed. From now on, the mission was beyond the immediate help of Etzion.

  CHAPTER 5

  WHEELS-UP

  A man’s character is his fate.

  —HERACLITUS

  Heading back after the security meeting at the prime minister’s office that March, Ivry’s driver took the main road out of Jerusalem, down the winding brown mountain pass dotted with green Jerusalem pines that thrived in the cooler air of the elevation—a phenomenon that surprised first-time visitors to Israel expecting to see nothing but desert and wadis. Deep in thought, Ivry stared out the car window as they passed the charred, red-rusted ghosts of vintage lorries and jeeps junked by the side of the road, silent sentries that lay where they had been shelled nearly three decades before in 1948—monuments to the first Israeli soldiers who had tried to fight their way up the mountainside under murderous artillery fire from Jordan’s crack Legionnaire Brigade in their doomed attempt to capture the ancient Hebrew capital. That attack had failed in the end.

  Ivry’s could not.

  But within weeks the mission was threatened yet again. Israel’s neighbor on its northern border, Lebanon, had been unraveling into an anarchic feudal battlefield of warring strongmen and radical ethnic Sunni, Shia, Maronite, Greek Orthodox, and Christian Druze factions all protecting their own business interests and territories—and all kept in check by neighboring Syria, which considered the country its de facto client state. Adding to the chaos, PLO leader Yasser Arafat and twenty thousand PLO fighters had moved into Beirut after being chased out of Jordan. Begin’s government, pressured by right-wing hard-liners, began funneling support to Lebanon’s aristocratic leader Bashir Gemayel and the militant Christian Phalangists, hoping moderate Maronites would unite the country under a more benevolent and Israeli-friendly stewardship. The Sunnis, backed by Syria, rose up immediately, sparking civil war. The Phalangists appealed to Israel for support.

  In February, Syria deployed SAM batteries into the Bekaa Valley to support thirty thousand troops, well within range of the Israeli border. Israel demanded that Syria pull out the SAMs or the IAF would take them out itself. Skirmishes followed. U.S. special ambassador Philip Habib, a Lebanese by birth, negotiated a fragile peace that lasted until April. It was then that Syria refused to pull back its batteries from the Bekáa, and Begin laid down an ultimatum to either evacuate the SAMs or Israel would bomb them. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, scheduled to meet with Begin at Sharm al-Sheikh as part of the Camp David agreement, was anxious to use the May meeting to diffuse the Syrian-Israeli conflict. Unfortunately, the day of the historic meeting was May 10, the day of the Osirak attack.

  Israel, with a bank account of goodwill in the U.S., well-organized and powerful lobbying organizations, and a strong moral argument, figured it might get away with an attack on Osirak or the Bekáa. But no one in the government believed it could get away with attacking both. The prime minister called another emergency cabinet meeting. Once again Ivry saw his mission on the cutting block. Begin was forced to choose between two evils—Syrian missiles or Iraqi nukes. In the end Begin decided there was no choice, really. They would deal with Lebanon later.

  “We will destroy Osirak,” he declared. “We must delay this Satanic plan for years to come.”

  The weekend of May 10, 1981, was unusually busy inside the walled compound of Etzion Air Force Base, some twenty miles inland from the Israeli resort town of Eilat. Most Israeli soldiers were routinely given the weekend off to observe the Sabbath. But this weekend all leaves and passes at the base had been canceled. The base’s telephone lines, with the exception of key operational communications, were cut off by order of the army’s Security Field Service.

  Altogether, fifty aircraft, CH-53 helicopters, and hundreds of troops were mustering for the attack, though only the mission pilots and high command knew what the target was. The CH-53s carrying combat search-and-rescue crews would take off an hour before the F-16s and then hover over the eastern borders of Israel for the remainder of the mission. Eight F-15s would fly support: two two-man F-15s to follow behind the F-16s and circle high above Saudi Arabia while serving as communications relay stations, and six F-15 fighters from Squadron 133—two to provide radar jamming above the target area, and four flying at a high altitude and distance to provide air-to-air combat support if needed.

  Early Sunday afternoon, in the huge hangar, hundreds of technicians were checking and rechecking the twel
ve F-16s, loading ordnance, and affixing air-to-air Sidewinder missiles beneath the wings. At the door of the base squadron room, dozens of F-16 and F-15 pilots, crew members, and commanding officers, having completed final briefing, were climbing the stairs from the briefing room to ground level. The men’s faces were taut, expressionless. There was no small talk. Rani Falk was as keyed up as the others. But his excitement was tempered with disappointment. After all, he had trained for this day alongside the other men from the beginning. Until recently he thought he would be going with them. Now he was a backup pilot—on hand only for the most dire emergency. He was not angry or resentful. But he felt let down. He had to keep himself ready, though. You never knew. He would fire up his F-16 and taxi it out of the hangar just like the others.

  A Mossad officer, his right hand clutching a black briefcase, approached the group of pilots outside. Suddenly the snap of his briefcase popped and the bottom fell open, spilling out thousands of dollars in Iraqi dinars. The bills blew down the runway past surprised mechanics and passersby. The dinars were for the pilots in the event someone was downed behind enemy lines. The money could be used as a bribe for safety. The officer hurriedly gathered up the bills, too panicked to be shamefaced. Amos Yadlin smiled grimly. So much for any doubts about the destination of their top-secret mission.

  The time just before takeoff was the worst. Once in the air the men would be busy with the job at hand. But waiting around . . . the thoughts began to creep in. The mental box opening ever so much. The doubts, though, were a fear of making a mistake, of somehow letting the team down. Few thought about personal safety.