Rodger W. Claire - Raid on the Sun: Inside Israels Secret Campaign that Denied Saddam the Bomb

BROADWAY BOOKS NEW YORK

Classified by the Israeli Air Force until now, this rare group photograph of all eight mission pilots was shot just minutes before takeoff. They are in bombing order (row by row from the front, from right to left): Zeev Raz, Amos Yadlin; Doobi Yaffe, Hagai Katz; Amir Nachumi, Iftach Spector; Relik Shafir, Ilan Ramon.

CONTENTS

To Grace,
my mother and the first scrivener
And, naturally, to the three muses:
Ann, Wren & Kelsey

EPILOGUE

BLOWBACK

No good deed will go unpunished.

ANONYMOUS

Monday morning, June 8, 1981, Khidhir Hamza drove his Passat to al-Tuwaitha, hoping to discover what was going on. But as the director pulled up to the main gate, he was stopped by grim-faced Mukhabarat guards armed with AK-47s. They checked Hamzas identification, then informed him that no one was being allowed inside the compound. An Iraq Air Force explosives team was still securing the grounds.

It would be several days before Hamza and his colleagues were allowed back into the facility. As he walked the familiar pathway to his office in the AE administration building, the scientist saw scores of bomb specialists, sappers, uniformed security, construction laborers, and dark men in blue suits and fedoras combing the area. The uniformed men looked gloomy and nervous, demoralized. The Iraqi army had failed to bring down even one fighter plane. There was no evidence that an enemy plane had even been hit. And not one MiG had been scrambled. It was a repeat of the same sorry performance against the Iranians nine months earlier. Heads would roll, they knew they could count on that. Indeed, when Saddam Hussein learned that the antiaircraft units were at dinner at the beginning of the raid, he had the commander of the AAA batteries taken out and shot.

Hamza walked straight to the crater that had been Osirak. He circled the reactor. The spectacular dome was completely gone. The pool below, where the reactor fuel rods were cooled, was filled with twisted steel and broken concrete. The enriched uranium already exported by France and stored underground next to the neutron guide hall was unharmed. The air force investigators found an unexploded two-thousand-pound bomb in the halls concrete-encased tunnel. At first the sappers thought that it was a booby trap, a bomb equipped with a delayed fuse to blow up innocent civilians. The explosive, of course, was one of Spectors misses. It had been dropped at too low an altitude, and so the fuse had not had time to arm itself.

Typical of Iraqi culture, especially a totalitarian state in which information was hoarded and manipulated to create fear in the general population, fantastical rumors raced through the NRCs workers, even the educated scientists. The day before the raid, suspicious-looking men had supposedly been spotted lurking about the neutron guide hall in a van. They had been delivering radiation detection equipment, but later, it was said, an electronic guidance transmitter had been found inside the hall. The French and Italian workers had all suddenly been called back to the foreign housing compound just hours before the attack. One Frenchman had refused to leaveDamen Chaussepied, the technician who had been killed in the explosions. Iraqi cooks in the foreigners compound reported overhearing loud arguments between the workers that night. Of course, nothing came of the rumors. But they underscored the uncertainty of the centers employees. Would the French return? Would they rebuild? Did they still have jobs? Would the Israelis return and bomb the rest of the plant?

One fact was incontrovertible: Osirak was no more. As the French technician Jacques Rimbaud told the Paris press the day after the raid: The central building is destroyed; the anti-atomic shelter has vanished. If they want to resume work, they will have to flatten everything and start from scratch.

The storm of indignation Menachem Begin had been anticipating ever since his phone call to the American ambassador Sunday night hit like a blizzard Tuesday, June 8. The U.S. State Departments censorious release chastising Israel on Monday was but a snow flurry ahead of the main front. France, not surprisingly, was outraged by the destruction of its nuclear reactor and the end to so many lucrative contracts. And once again, the country was embarrassed by the renewed worldwide focus on its involvement in Iraqs nuclear aspirations. French president Franois Mitterrand, Peress good friend, rebuked Israel. Any violation of the law will lead to our condemnation, he announced to the French populace. Whatever may be our feelings for Israel, this is the case now concerning the intervention decided by Israeli leaders against Iraq, which has led to the death of one of our compatriots. This last reference was to the nations new hero, Damen Chaussepied, the technician killed during the bombing. Immediately, the foreign office ordered home 115 nuclear scientists and engineers from al-Tuwaitha, leaving 15 behind to help ascertain whether there was danger from radiation leaks.

The foreign minister Claude Cheysson charged that the attack was unacceptable, dangerous and a serious violation of international law. I am saddened, he told reporters on June 9. This government has a great deal of sympathy for Israel, but we dont think such action serves the cause of peace in the area.

But France was not content with verbal condemnation. Feeling betrayed by Israel, high-placed French officials and members of the countrys intelligence service began leaking classified information to the world press about the secret reactor and plutonium reprocessing facilities the country had helped Israel construct in Dimona decades earlier. The Arab states in the region began clamoring for a full investigation of Israels nuclear capabilities and her immediate disarmament.

Even Britain denounced the bombing. Usually conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared, Armed attack in such circumstances cannot be justified. It represents a grave breach of international law. Meanwhile, British intelligence officials, still stinging over being shut out of full access to KH-11 photographs while Israeli agents blithely rifled through whatever film they wanted, immediately suspected Israel of using smuggled high-resolution satellite surveillance shots to help target Osirak. The British promptly lodged their complaints with CIA, in effect, telling Casey: We told you so. The complaint prompted the CIA director to initiate the confidential, high-level investigation into Israels ability to access restricted satellite imagery, a study that revealed a complete breakdown in the monitoring system, allowing Israel virtually full run of the satellite-imaging henhouse, as it were. According to writer Seymour Hersh, one angry Pentagon official declared at the time, The Israelis did everything except task the bird, referring to the ultimate ability to select targets and, thus, reroute the orbiting patterns of the satellite in space. In the end, Casey continued to allow Israel access to KH-11, but with the original 1979 restrictions of the Carter administration firmly back in place.