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.”
The three generals stood off the runway, next to the taxi vans: Ivry, the commander who had conceived the raid; Eitan, the general who had ordered it; and Saguy, the intelligence chief who had once opposed it. After years of planning and worry and failure, they were spectators now, impotently standing on the sidelines, each left to his thoughts.
Ivry squinted down the tarmac at the fighter-bombers, the wavy, superheated air from the jet exhausts obscuring the outline of the planes as though some flawed pane of glass had been dropped between them. Soon the Falcons would hurl down the runway and lift off to the sky, two at a time, climbing eastward, looking very much like the birds of prey they were named after.
Would their pilots come home safe? Would they be successful? What would the world think? What would be the final reckoning of this Raid on the Sun? Ivry thought.
The general turned wordlessly back in the direction of the command bunker, where he would wait and wonder what the night would bring.
NOTES
Author’s note: The first time a work or interview is referenced, I have included all relevant information. All subsequent references to the work are sourced by the last name of the interviewee or author only.
PROLOGUE: THE ROAD TO BABYLON
“General David Ivry’s wife . . . ‘Shalom.’ ” The episode was told to me by former ambassador David Ivry during my first interview with him in September 2001. Other observations come from discussions with Mark Regev, the Israeli embassy’s communications director.
“A staff car . . . planning this mission.” Ivry.
“Waiting for him . . . minus six hours and counting.” Ivry; also The Life and Times of Menachem Begin, Amos Perlmutter (Doubleday: New York, 1987).
“The planes below stood menacingly anonymous . . . either side of the fuselage.” There is very little written about the Osirak raid. An early and almost completely overlooked book about the mission is Bullseye One Reactor by Dan McKinnon (House of Hits: San Diego, 1987), a former USAF pilot who wrote a remarkably well-researched telling of the attack, especially considering the muzzle the IDF had kept on the media and a lack of access to the pilots, who are referred to by pseudonyms. The out-of-print book was recommended to me by Amir Nachumi, who shared many of his early recollections with McKinnon.
“As Ivry walked up . . . Israel for trial.” Perlmutter.
“Raful’s son, Yoram . . . seven days of seclusion.” McKinnon; Ivry; interview with mission pilot Doobi Yaffe.
“Eitan caught Ivry’s look . . . Eitan said.” Conversation is a reconstruction through discussions with Ivry and Regev.
“Eight pilots would have to fly . . . nuclear reactor.” Interviews with mission pilots Zeev Raz and Hagai Katz.
“The modeling experts . . . antiaircraft fire.” Interview with mission pilot Gen. Amos Yadlin.
“The two generals moved . . . ‘the mission blown.’” Interview with mission pilot Amir Nachumi and Ramat David commander Iftach Spector; McKinnon.
“The crew chiefs . . . four planes to a line.” Ivry, Yaffe, Nachumi.
TERROR OF THE TIGRIS
“Before the birth . . . since the earliest days of the regime.” The section of the chapter dealing with Saddam Hussein’s early life and rise to power was compiled from interviews, background research, and the invaluable help of several good books on Iraq and its Ba’thist president: Instant Empire: Saddam Hussein’s Ambition for Iraq, Simon Henderson (Mercury House: San Francisco, 1991); Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography, Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi (MacMillan, Inc.: New York, 1991); Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, Said K. Aburish (Bloomsbury: London, 1999); The Continuing Storm: Iraq, Poisonous Weapons and Deterence, Avigdor Hasekorn (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1999); J. Snyder, “The Road to Osirak: Baghdad’s Quest for the Bomb,” Middle East Journal, vol. 37, no. 4, 1983; interview with Sayyed Nassar, an Arab nationalist who befriended Saddam Hussein when the Ba’thist was in exile in Cairo in the 1960s.
“Halfway across the world . . . it already had close to one hundred of them.” This section of the chapter, recounting Dr. Khidhir Hamza’s experiences in Iraq’s Nuclear Research Center, is based on both a 2002 interview with Dr. Hamza outside Fredericksburg, Virginia (hereafter referred to as “Hamza”), and his autobiographical book about his adventures, Saddam’s Bombmaker (Scribner: New York, 2000).
“The year was 1956 . . . except Saddam Hussein.” The section recounting Israel’s secret atomic bomb program beginning in 1956 is drawn from numerous sources, chief among them author Seymour M. Hersh’s excellent investigative history, The Sampson Option (Random House: New York, 1991); Nuclear Deterrence, Shai Feldman (Columbia University Press: New York, 1982); Six Days of War, Michael B. Oren (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2002); interview with Tom Moberly, engineer with TRW; reports of the Canadian Nuclear Association; Hamza, McKinnon.
“By 1971, Khidhir Hamza . . . in the brown flatlands of the Tigris.” Hamza, McKinnon; Saddam’s Bombmaker; Le Monde, Paris, p. 1, September 25, 1975; interview with Entifad Qanbar, a former Iraqi civil engineer who worked for Hussein’s interior ministry. He defected to the United States in 1985.
“The two Israeli generals . . . ‘we may have one or two ideas.’” Ivry, Perlmutter; Flames over Tammuz, Shlomo Nakdimon (Edanim Publishers: Jerusalem, 1986). A respected veteran Israeli journalist, Nakdimon was the first to reveal the deep political infighting over Osirak within Begin’s cabinet, from the earliest days of mission planning until its final execution in 1981; Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors, Gordon Thomas (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1999).
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
“The drivers of the two cargo trucks . . . Hofi and Mossad still had work to do.” Many of the precise details of the sections dealing with Mossad’s secret missions to derail the construction of Osirak come from Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy’s fascinating By Way of Deception (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1990). A former Mossad agent, Ostrovsky revealed many of the Israeli secret service’s classified operations over three decades, outraging the spy agency. I was able to verify much of his account of the agency’s Osirak exploits through other sources, who asked to remain anonymous. Also, Thomas, McKinnon, Hamza, Karsh & Rautsi, Ivry.
“In July 1979, just months . . . nineteen nuclear reactors for Saddam.” Hamza, Karsh.
“Butrus Eben Halim was an unremarkable . . . Meshad’s murder would go unsolved, if not unforgotten.” Once again, I have drawn heavily from Ostrovsky, as well as from several other sources speaking on the condition of anonymity. The Mossad terms come from Thomas and Ostrovsky. Also, Hamza, Karsh, McKinnon.
“The French, however, soon . . . French scientists were still in charge.” Hamza, Karsh, Nakdimon, McKinnon.
“From the earliest days . . . After all, what were friends for?” Technical details about the F-16 come from Jane’s Aircraft Upgrades, Ninth Edition, David Baker (Jane’s Information Group Limited, 2002) and interviews with USAF Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Dishart, as well as McKinnon, Ivry; interviews with mission squadron leader Zeev Raz and mission pilot Doobi Yaffe.
“Conceived as a faster . . . perhaps, a little crazy.” Jane’s, Oren, McKinnon, Ivry, Raz; interviews with mission backup pilot and present military attaché to the Israeli Embassy, Washington, D.C., Rani Falk.
“In the fall of ’79 . . . the second team to Hill.” Interview with second team leader Amir Nachumi; Ivry, Raz, Yaffe, Oren.
“By February, the Italian . . . buying Ivry more time.” Interview with mission pilot Hagai Katz; Ivry, Karsh, Ostrovsky, Hamza.
THE WARRIORS
“Hagai Katz couldn’t believe his luck . . . What could Ivry be thinking?” Interviews with mission pilot Relik Shafir and IAF F-16 pilot Dubi Ofer, one of the first twelve to go to Hill AFB; Falk, Yaffe, Raz.
“The reports out of Baghdad . . . November was set as a tentative date.” Ivry, Hamza, McKinnon, Nakdimon, Per
lmutter; IAF website.
“Raz and his squadron . . . ‘defending their own plants or destroying someone else’s.’” Ivry, McKinnon, Raz; Washington Post article, p. 1, by George C. Wilson, June 15, 1981.
“Curiously, the NRC was not . . . Osirak would be hot by midsummer 1981.” Hersh.
“Soon after Kivity and Saltovitz . . . God help them, probably nuclear.” Ivry, Raz, Nachumi, Katz; phone interview with mission pilot Ilan Ramon in Houston.
THE WAITING
“For months, Operation’s engineers . . . And then things got complicated.” Ivry, Raz, Falk, Yaffe, Shafir, Katz, Nachumi; interviews with Raz’s wingman, Amos Yadlin.
“Ever since Ayatollah . . . only hope of completing the mission and returning to base.” Hamza, Saddam’s Bombmaker, Karsh & Rautsi, Ivry, Nakdimon, Falk, Yaffe.
“While the pilots practiced targeting . . . accomplished was taking one another out?” McKinnon, Dishart, Raz, Falk; Raz interview with operations commander Aviem Sella for use in this book.
“In January 1981 . . . not going to change anything.” Nachumi, Raz.
“Several weeks later . . . Syria’s new SAMs.” Yadlin.
“Commander Spector was both . . . too late to turn back.” Oren, Yadlin; interview with mission pilot Iftach Spector; Ivry, Nachumi, Raz, Falk.
“By March 1981 . . . would do it anyway.” Ivry, Raz, Katz.
“By the end of March . . . ‘call it Operation Babylon.’” Nakdimon, Perlmutter, Ivry, Raz.
“A week later, at Ramat David . . . ‘what else matters?’” Falk, Raz, Yadlin, Nachumi.
WHEELS-UP
“Heading back after the security . . . Ivry wondered.” Ivry, Perlmutter, Nakdimon, Falk, Yadlin, Nachumi.
“Begin read the note . . . Would this be the Sunday?” Peres’s letter is reprinted in Perlmutter, McKinnon, and, in original Hebrew, in Nakdimon. The political ramifications are recounted by Perlmutter and Nakdimon, who reportedly had a source inside Begin’s security cabinet.
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