Raid on the Sun (16 page)

Fearing more strikes, the following week France and Italy ordered the two hundred techs and engineers employed at al-Tuwaitha to evacuate immediately. Mossad reported that the workers, who lived with their families at a separate compound away from the center, were packing up and heading for home. By November, Mossad was reporting that work at Osirak had come to a complete halt. Khidhir Hamza and his administrative colleagues continued to come to work at al-Tuwaitha, but the constant activity around the reactor, the buzz and comings and goings of the construction crews and the nuclear techs, had all but disappeared.

With the immediate threat of enriched uranium production over—at least for the time being—Begin, under pressure by Saguy and Hofi, called off the mission.

Raz and the F-16 pilots continued training, however. None of the pilots knew what the mission was, let alone Begin’s decision to postpone it. But details were beginning to be revealed. For the first time, Raz informed the pilots of the kind of ordnance they would be carrying: two 2,000-pound dumb bombs. Because of the sensitive placement of the target, he told them, carpet-bombing was out.

“It will be a visual drop. You will need perfect accuracy,” Raz said. “The target is heavily defended by multiple AAA emplacements and SAM-6s.”

The men would have to perform pinpoint targeting while avoiding withering AAA fire.

Flying over the desolate Negev, Raz’s squadron practiced individually at first, diving at between 35 and 40 degrees. The pilots used BDUs, thirty-three-pound dummy bombs that exploded with white phosphorous smoke so pilots and ground personnel could mark the accuracy of the drops. For targets the IAF used painted circles on the ground and, later, old Sherman tanks. To approximate the huge dome of Osirak, Ivry’s command later had the F-16s practice diving at a huge, secret IAF radar dome located in the Negev, though the pilots were not told why they were practicing bombing an Israeli radar dish. The squadron also made several flights dropping live MK-84s on desert targets so they could experience the shock waves and the extent of the frag pattern.

Targeting demanded absolute concentration. The pilot had to fly dangerously low to the ground, constantly looking for unmapped peaks and outcroppings, or even telephone wires, next pop up to ten thousand feet, nearing the speed of sound, and then dive on the target, switching on the weapons system, all the while checking the overhead HUD and being careful to line up the bombsight with the target. After release, turning radically, the pilot would blast off into the ether like a bat out of hell, breaking the sound barrier and streaking to the safety of high altitude, praying that a SAM was not behind him, trailing the heat of the afterburners to soar literally straight up his tailpipe.

Falk thought of it as the “moment of truth.” The flying, the flesh-flattening Gs of right-angle turns, the diving, evading—all the air acrobatics—came to him naturally, as smoothly and easily as an opening aria came in the silence to the mind of a Mozart. But bombing was something else. It was the payoff, the entire point of the mission. To miss, to fail in front of your fellow pilots, your peers, was devastating. You failed yourself, your team.

Early on in training, Falk missed a target during a practice run. He felt so bad, he did not even want to land. He wished he could keep on flying . . . just disappear. Instead, he had to land, trudge to the briefing room, and explain why he had missed.

To make the training as close to real time as possible, the mission team conducted combat games, with the F-16 squadron the Blue Team and a wing of F-15s, standing in for Iraqi MiGs, the Red Team. During the bombing runs the Red Team would try to intercept members of the Blue Team, forcing them to evade and then begin targeting. In real life, over Osirak, the pilots would not have enough fuel to engage in a dogfight and then expect to make the return trip home. A quick evasion was their only hope of completing the mission and returning to base.

While the pilots practiced targeting, the operational team worked out the details of the bombing run. Precision bombing, or pinpoint targeting, was a fairly sophisticated technical undertaking, necessitating exact mathematical calculations and modelings. The two crucial elements were the IP, or initial point, and pop-up. The IP was the exact agreed-upon location, usually some three or four miles from the target, at which the aircraft would begin its climb. The climb was called pop-up. Bombing from a flat approach was out of the question; a bomb released at almost the horizon line would ricochet off the concrete dome. Instead, the pilots would pop up—that is, pull the nose of the plane up, hit the afterburners, and climb to an altitude of between 8,000 and 10,000 feet in order to begin an angled dive at about 30 degrees.

The bombing run consisted essentially of seven elements, or timings. After pop-up, the second element was the pull-down altitude, the preset altitude at which the pilot pushed the nose down and began the dive toward the target. It was imperative that this elevation be as low as possible without endangering the accuracy of the dive because a shorter dive distance lessened the pilot’s exposure to AAA and SAM fire. The third point was the apex altitude. This was the altitude the plane climbed to during the fraction of a second it took the electrical impulse from the control stick to reach the plane’s mechanics controlling the wing flaps. At six hundred miles an hour, the F-16 could cover a considerable distance in a split second. The apex altitude was the exact point at which the dive would start and, like the pull-down point, it had to be as low as possible. The fourth element of the bombing run, called tracking on final, was the actual dive itself, measured from the apex altitude to the release point, the fifth element of the bomb run and the altitude at which the ordnance was dropped. The pilot kept his bombsight lined up on the target until the pipper, or “death dot,” covered the target completely. At that moment he squeezed the red button on the control stick and the bombs were released, or “pickled,” off the wings. The time of tracking on final, from high to low as pilots referred to it, had to be between three and five seconds.

As soon as the pilot released ordnance, he initiated the sixth element, recovery, or escape, firing afterburners and trailing thruster flames, climbing to high altitude. As the pilot began his escape and climb, there was another split second between the time he pulled back on the fly-by-wire control and the actual response of the aircraft mechanics. During this fraction of a second the plane would “settle,” or sink, to a lower elevation. Predetermining this lowest point of the dive, called the recovery altitude, was absolutely essential, since the pilot had to avoid the frag pattern, the bloom of shrapnel and debris following detonation, which, in the case of the MK-84, rose 2,400 feet in nine seconds. The pilot, if not careful, could easily blow up himself and any fellow pilots following too closely. The final element of the bombing run was the escape maneuver, during which the pilot could hit a body-crushing eight Gs while negotiating radical 90-degree turns and climbing to 30,000 feet to defeat SAMs.

To compute the precise distance from the target to initiate pop-up, what angle to start tracking on final, the exact altitude of apex, and all the rest, Avi Sella’s team thumbed through engineering books thick as IRS tax rolls, poring over computer graphs and charts and physics tables to check and recheck their figures. The concept was basically computing backward: first determine the altitude of the frag envelope, then add the recovery time, the pull back, then tracking on final, and so on. Once these figures were computed and added together, the sum determined the exact altitude to the meter at which the squadron commander would begin his dive. Each pilot would then, in turn, follow precisely.

Operations initially determined that pull down should start at around 8,000 feet. The U.S. Air Force routinely added a cushion of 500 feet when computing their recovery altitude. But the Israelis, fearful about the heavy AAA defenses, were determined to squeeze every fraction of a second out of the tracking time. Sella’s team figured that because the bombs would pierce the reactor cupola and fall through before exploding inside, the dome itself would function as a shield, cutting the frag pattern in half. The decision was made to press the attack to the absolute minimum distance, with no safety net. To add a degree of security and ensure that follow-on pilots would continue to have an unobstructed view of the target, the bombs of lead pilots Raz and Yadlin would be rigged with delayed fuses.

Behind every maneuver was the element of speed, sometimes suicidal speed. After weeks of test dives and modeling and more test dives, Raz and his team were able to cut the apex altitude to only 5,000 feet, shaving off valuable seconds in both pop-up and tracking. Every second bought them more time to drop their bombs before Iraqi AAA gunners could fire up their radars and get their weapons systems operational. One day in late December, Raz briefed the team that they would be targeting white bull’s-eye circles on the ground, diving in five teams of two. Shafir was paired with Yadlin. The attack profile called for Shafir to follow Yadlin at a one-second interval—or, at 360 knots, about 200 meters. The pilots fired up their engines, ran through the computerized checkoff, then lifted from the Ramat David tarmac and soared southward toward the Negev. Yadlin popped up and began his dive with Shafir just behind him and to the side. But as Yadlin reached recovery and began pulling out, Shafir was too close and the two planes headed for collision. Shafir careened radically to port, the G forces pinning him against his seat. The two F-16s streaked by each other, the air crackling in thunder. Once back at the base, Raz and Sella’s team reran the computations and quickly adjusted the profile, extending the follow-on and adding a margin of safety.

What was the point of avoiding AAA if all the pilots accomplished was taking one another out?

In January 1981, in a somewhat unusual move, Ivry visited Raz and Nachumi at Ramat David.

“I know you have wondered where you are going,” Ivry said. “Now I will tell you: Your target is the Osirak nuclear reactor at al-Tuwaitha near Baghdad.”

Neither pilot said a word. Both acted as though they had known it all along. But inside, Raz felt his stomach flip. He was sure no one had ever bombed a nuclear reactor before. He knew immediately that the mission would be historic, something schoolchildren, their children, might read about someday. What were the chances of success? Pretty good, he decided. They had trained for this for six months already. It was just a job. Before he left the briefing room, Raz had already filed it into his mental box and put it away. Worrying was not going to change anything.

Several weeks later, on a gray winter afternoon, Yadlin’s wife, Karen, spotted two grim-faced IAF colonels pull to the curb in front of her home and start up the sidewalk. Like all pilots’ wives, it was the moment she lived in constant dread of. She knew their appearance could mean only one thing: Amos had been killed in the line of duty. She was wrong. The messengers of death veered up the sidewalk and knocked on her neighbor’s door, the home of Udi Ben-Amitay, a member of the second team and one of the initial twelve F-16 pilots. He was also one of her husband’s closest friends. Yadlin and his wife would get together often for dinner or Sabbath with the Amitays. Udi had been scheduled to participate in a training dogfight. In this instance, the Red Team, the enemy, comprised two F-4 Phantoms opposing the Blue Team, made up of the leader Ben-Amitay and a second F-16. Tragically, the F-4 leader and Amitay maneuvered too close and collided in midair. Both men were killed instantly. Amitay was the new squadron’s first fatality. There would be an empty desk in the briefing room. Yadlin and the rest of the squadron were devastated when Colonel Spector broke the news to them. The wives, who shared a world much closer than neighbors, gathered to comfort Amitay’s wife, taking turns cooking meals and watching the kids. The entire squadron attended Amitay’s funeral. His death had created a hole in the unit, but Israel was losing many pilots at the time, both to war and to training accidents, as the IAF struggled to find tactics to overcome the technical advantage of Syria’s new SAMs.

Commander Spector was both a symbol and a source of strength for many of the pilots at Ramat David. In a nation of military heroes, Iftach Spector was renowned above all in the IAF. At just forty-one, he had chalked up more combat kills than any pilot in history, having served in the ’67 war, the ’73 war, and the War of Attrition. During the Yom Kippur War alone, Spector had single-handedly shot down fifteen MiGs—an almost incomprehensible number in a profession in which veteran pilots the world over sported medals for shooting down maybe two or three enemy planes in a lifetime.

He was also no stranger to controversy. On the fourth day of the 1967 war, Israel dispatched a squadron of Mirage fighters off the shores of Gaza, allegedly to confirm reports of an Egyptian gunboat. Instead, the Mirages spotted the USS
Liberty,
a high-tech, audio-surveillance ship some miles off the coast. Despite the fact that the
Liberty
was clearly flying U.S. colors and had a score of U.S. Navy sailors on its topdeck, the Israeli squadron leader identified the ship as a “hunt class destroyer” with “no markings” and ordered an attack. The Israelis strafed the cruiser three times, killing eight men and wounding twenty, including the ship’s captain, shot in both legs. In the storm of protest that followed, Israel apologized profusely, insisting it was a mistake. Ultimately the government paid $12 million to the victim’s families. Many in the Pentagon, however, remained unconvinced. They suspected Israel did not want the United States picking up information about its operations in the Suez. Relations between the two militaries remained at an all-time low for years. The Mirage commander who had led the attack on the
Liberty
was none other than Iftach Spector.

Surprisingly soft-spoken but with quick, penetrating dark eyes, he was a collection of contradictions. Named “Iftach” after the tragic judge of the Old Testament, the misbegotten son of a harlot forced to sacrifice his daughter as the price for a desperate victory to save the Hebrews, Spector seemed to have inherited the tragic smile and sad eyes of the doomed prelate along with his name. As though acknowledging as much, he would occasionally turn his sad eyes mischievously on his interlocutor, a hint of an ironic grin crinkling at the corners, and pronounce innocently, “I don’t know why they called me that.” At the same time he was well aware of his near-mythic standing in the air force. He carefully nurtured the image, carrying himself with regal bearing. The effect made him a figure of strength but also of openness to the men who served under him. Indeed, to Nachumi, Katz, Yadlin, and the younger pilots, Spector was like a god. He could do no wrong.