Raid on the Sun (10 page)

The truth, though, was very different. Meshad, in fact, had made a date with Marie-Claude Magalle that night. He had been seeing the prostitute on every visit to France since the night Halim had first introduced him to her months earlier. Mossad, who had tapped Meshad’s phone, knew that the Iraqi scientist had a date with the high-priced call girl later that night at the Meridien. According to Ostrovsky, before Magalle arrived, an Arabic-speaking
katsa
named Yehuda Gil had knocked on the door to Meshad’s room. The physicist cracked the door, leaving it chained. Gil quietly informed him that he had been sent from a “power” that would pay “a lot of money” for some information concerning the scientist’s work for Iraq’s Nuclear Research Center. Outraged, Meshad swore at Gil and told him to leave before he called hotel security. Gil, who was instructed only to make the offer, discreetly left the hotel.

Within minutes Marie-Claude arrived at Meshad’s room. Indeed, she may have overheard Gil and Meshad arguing at his doorway. But it did little to spoil the Iraqi scientist’s evening. The two had sex—Meshad, it turned out, had a weakness for S&M—and later that night Marie-Claude left Meshad sleeping peacefully in his hotel room bed. Shortly thereafter, a team of Israeli
kidon,
trained assassins, used a duplicated hotel passkey to silently slip into the scientist’s suite. Without fanfare, they slit Meshad’s throat and left him on the floor of his room, his life running out in a puddle beneath him. The prostitute, Magalle, was not in on the Mossad scheme. In fact, she did not even know that the mysterious men who called her were Israeli secret service. They were simply men who paid her generously to service customers they assigned her to and to provide information about the men afterward. She had her suspicions about who her mysterious employers might be, but what they asked for seemed harmless enough—mostly where her johns went, what they liked, whom they met or talked to, what they said about their jobs or personal lives, things like that. In her line of work it did not pay to ask questions.

But Marie-Claude was shocked when she heard about Meshad’s murder the next day from another professional. She was frightened. For one thing, she worried whether the authorities would try to blame her. And might the people who killed Meshad come after her next? Panicked, she called the Paris police. The investigating officers interviewed her. Magalle told the inspectors about the male voices she had overheard. Not sure what to make of her story, the police took her passport and restricted her to Paris as a material witness. Several weeks later the lead inspector contacted Magalle and instructed her to come to police headquarters on July 12 for a follow-up interview. Two days before her appointment, on the evening of July 10, Marie-Claude was working a busy corner on Boulevard St-Germain on the Rive Gauche. A black Mercedes pulled up across the street. The man inside beckoned to her. As she crossed the street, another black Mercedes jumped out from the curb and, racing down the boulevard, ran straight into the hooker, sending her careening off the hood. She was dead before she hit the asphalt. In a scenario reminiscent of the mysterious black car that had sideswiped the pretty young girl outside the shipping warehouse at La Seyne-sur-Mer months earlier, the Mercedes and the driver were never seen again. Witnesses could not even remember clearly in what direction the car had headed after striking Magalle. Meshad’s murder would go unsolved, if not unforgotten.

The French, however, soon had new mysteries to investigate. Before he had been sent to prison, Khidhir Hamza’s onetime boss, Jaffar Jaffar, had begun pursuing a two-track process to create fissionable, bomb-grade uranium: while construction on Osirak was being completed, Jaffar would also begin work on the method pioneered by the Americans working on “Little Boy,” one of the atomic bombs developed during World War II—magnetic enrichment. This alternate enrichment process uses huge electromagnets to separate uranium isotopes, known as EMIS for electromagnetic isotope separation, inundating the U235 with radioactive neutrons, making it suitable for bomb-grade fuel.

Salman Rashid, a bright, energetic young electrical engineer who had studied in Britain, was recruited to work with Jaffar on designing a huge electromagnet for the uranium enrichment. It was a tough assignment since much of the research was still classified in the West. Making things worse, neither Jaffar nor Rashid was particularly strong in mathematics, and the two encountered a good deal of trouble handling the very involved design calculations. The Iraqi NRC contracted with a Swedish company in Geneva, Brown Boveri, to help Rashid with the design.

About a month after Meshad was killed, Rashid set off for Geneva for a two-month research fellowship, accompanied by an Iraqi security officer and a half dozen assistants. It soon became clear to everyone involved in nuclear research in Geneva that Rashid was interested solely in magnetic enrichment. The week before he was due to return, the young electrical engineer suddenly came down with the flu. It was a particularly virulent case. Rashid was having trouble swallowing, and soon he began to bloat, his neck and jowls becoming alarmingly swollen. He was admitted to the American Hospital in Geneva, but the staff physicians were stumped. An Iraqi doctor was summoned, but he, too, could not identify the virus. No one had seen this kind of flu before. Six days after experiencing the first symptoms, Rashid was dead. An autopsy seemed to point to some kind of poisoning, though the exact agent could not be isolated.

The security officer insisted Rashid was never out of his sight, but colleagues admitted that the young scientist had frequented the many bars and restaurants in Geneva. Plenty of opportunities to poison or infect him had existed if someone so desired.

Several weeks later yet another Iraqi engineer, Abdul-Rahman Abdul Rassoul, visiting Paris on Atomic Energy business, was suddenly taken ill after contracting “food poisoning” at an official French banquet. He died within days.

The epidemic of Iraqi nuclear scientist deaths and the sabotage at La Seyne-sur-Mer continued to raise eyebrows in France, a country never at a loss for conspiracy theories to begin with. By summer the French media were full of speculation about who was behind the mysterious attacks. And more than ever, France’s complicity in Iraq’s nuclear program was continually in the news. The head of France’s Nuclear Energy Commission, André Giraud, a longtime critic of the treaty, warned that Iraq could well be seeking nuclear weapons. Others in the scientific and military communities were alarmed as well. One American nuclear expert pointed out that a reactor such as Osirak was designed for “nations engaged in the indigenous production of nuclear-power reactors. Iraq would have no great economic or energy incentive to establish a nuclear power generating capacity.” What did that leave other than military purposes?

Chirac insisted that the French Atomic Energy Commission was in complete control of the reactor. He had already announced that France would supply Iraq with only the caramelized uranium. But Hussein, it turned out, was having none of that. He began a counter media campaign, deriding the Western nations that were now so afraid of Iraq.

“These Arabs, the Zionists said, could do nothing but ride camels,” Hussein scoffed sarcastically. “How could a people who only know how to ride camels produce an atomic bomb?”

Iraq invoked the treaty: the nation would settle for nothing less than the original deal: seventy-two pounds of 93-percent-enriched weapons-grade uranium. Any substitute, they insisted, would not allow Iraqi scientists the full range of “peaceful” research activities planned at al-Tuwaitha. Changing the deal would force Iraq to suspend payments—and perhaps even the oil shipments—negotiated in the original treaty. France quietly decided to abide by the original agreements: Iraq would get its seventy-two pounds of fully enriched uranium. But Chirac insisted that French scientists were still in charge.

From the earliest days, when he began to plan a possible mission to strike Osirak, General Ivry worried that the reactor would go hot before he could hit it. Once the reactor was radioactive, any bombing would bring the risk of fallout and large civilian casualties, potentially in the thousands. Despite Hofi’s operations, Iraq had continued steaming ahead undaunted. The cores that Ivry had initially hoped to see destroyed at La Seyne-sur-Mer had been repaired and shipped to Baghdad. He knew about the deaths of Meshad and the others, even though Hofi, of course, never spoke of such things openly. But the deaths of a few nuclear scientists, while creating chaos and anxiety inside al-Tuwaitha, did little to stop Iraq’s mammoth nuclear program.

Recent intelligence by AMAN and Mossad reported that Isis, the smaller French “companion” reactor to Osirak, had been completed and was already hot. French scientists working at al-Tuwaitha interviewed by undercover Mossad
katsas
indicated that the main reactor would be fueled by July 1981—less than eighteen months away. Israel’s scientific experts predicted that Iraq could have an atomic bomb by 1985.

Ivry could almost feel the days peeling like fallen leaves off the calendar on the wall behind him, whittling down to the final day when Osiris would become hot and the game would be over. Hussein would soon after have the ability to destroy Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, literally with the flick of a switch, as the cliché went. And still Ivry had no approved plan and no green light from the cabinet to forestall this nightmare.

The general, working at his headquarters with a small, handpicked staff, had already discarded a half dozen plans. At first he had considered putting an insertion team into Iraq, using a combination of air transport and assault tactics similar to the commando raid at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport in 1976 that had freed the Palestinians’ hostages with a minimum of casualties. But there were too many negatives. For starters, maintaining longtime secrecy for such a complex mission, employing hundreds of men and multiple assets from all military branches, would be almost impossible. Next, the logistics were daunting. Transport planes would have no place to wait on-station during the operation. Flying six hundred miles to Baghdad, dropping off the assault team, returning to friendly borders to wait, and then flying back to Baghdad
again
for the extraction was obviously unworkable. Besides, the transport planes would need to be refueled, and the delicate operation of refueling over hostile territory in the unpredictable turbulence of hot desert air hundreds of miles from home was out of the question. Photographs showed that the Iraqis had reinforced the periphery of al-Tuwaitha with twenty-foot-high earthen revetments, ringed at the top by concrete and electrified wire fencing and antiaircraft gun towers, making a successful storming of the fences unlikely. Finally, the probability of men being captured in a ground assault was high, and Ivry refused to risk the certain barbaric treatment of his men at the hands of Iraqi security thugs.

Ivry’s decision was later validated once and for all with the fiasco of the U.S. rescue mission to free sixty-six embassy hostages in Tehran in 1980. The Delta Force raid was a night extraction, the teams flown by transport to a makeshift landing strip in the middle of the desert miles from the capital. Unfortunately, a sandstorm blew in out of nowhere—not uncommon in the region—blanketing the troops and throwing everything into confusion. Unable to maneuver in the heavy winds and zero visibility, one of the army choppers swept sideways into a plane and exploded, killing six commandos and the pilots immediately. The mission was aborted, the U.S. humbled and humiliated. Back in the States the disaster came to symbolize President Carter’s weakness. To Ivry, it was just a hard lesson learned.

“Too many things can go wrong,” he told Eitan.

Month after month Ivry and his staff computed and modeled, calculated and experimented, guessed and second-guessed. Again and again he found himself returning to an air attack. But there were many problems with such a mission as well. The first hurdle was deciding what planes to use. As Ivry and his command staff studied the options, it became apparent that each fighter in the IAF’s considerable arsenal carried a serious negative.

Popular since the Yom Kippur War, the single-engine A-4 Skyhawk and the Israeli-built Kfir were the country’s primary attack fighters. But both aircraft lacked sophisticated new radar and bombing systems, and neither had the range round-trip without refueling. The F-4 Phantom, a heavy-duty, twenty-year combat veteran that the United States had continually upgraded with modern equipment, carried PMGs, precision-guided missiles, an early-generation “smart” weapon whose accurate targeting was controlled from inside the plane and might be needed for such a raid. But the Phantom was bulky, hard to maneuver, and a gas guzzler. Moreover, it flew with a two-man crew, doubling the number of men who could be killed or captured with each plane.

The newest and most sophisticated of the fighters was the American F-15, with twin Pratt & Whitney F-100 engines and a look-down, shoot-down pulse Doppler radar, a highly sophisticated computerized radar that functioned by sending out continuous pulsing signals, which allowed pilots to lock on targets flying as low as twenty feet off the ground and still distinguish them from the “noise,” the confusing ambient signals emanating from the terrain below—a problem with older radar systems. Designed as an air-to-air fighter, the F-15 held the world record for altitude speed climb and had a lock-on target range of one hundred miles, the best in the world. General Avihu Ben-Nun, the northern Israel IAF commander at Tel-Nof Air Base, home of the F-15 wing and Israel’s top-secret nuclear-weapons-capable squadron, lobbied hard for using his planes, arguing that they were the IAF’s most sophisticated asset. Of course, such an important assignment would also confer great prestige and influence on Tel-Nof and Ben-Nun.

But Ivry held off. Some on Ivry’s staff had serious doubts about whether eight F-15s could make the trip to Baghdad and back safely. For one thing, the F-15 engines had not proved reliable and had a high rate of mechanical failure and maintenance. Most damaging, the fighter did not have the range to fly round-trip without CFTs, special conformal fuel tanks that could be bolted to the sides of the fuselage above the wings, doubling the distance the plane could fly. The United States, under pressure from the Soviet Union and Arab states to rein in Israel’s military and preserve the balance of power in the Middle East, refused to sell Israel the conformal tanks as part of its arms control cutback.