Raid on the Sun (3 page)

Like the ambassadors before him, Ivry had taken up his post in the large corner office of the embassy. Here he had spent much of the last week packing up his personal belongings, including his beloved collection of models of Israeli fighter planes, and various mementos and honors of his ambassadorship. Cherished among these was the framed, enlarged print of a postcard he had hung on his office wall, across from his mahogany desk, where he could see it whenever he looked up. For the general, who had been surprised and stung by the criticisms of the Osirak mission hurled at the time by Secretaries Haig and Weinberger and Ambassador Kirkpatrick, the missive had a special meaning. The homemade postcard was actually a blowup of a satellite photograph (ironically, the KH-11 spy satellite) of al-Tuwaitha taken from space in the days after the Israeli attack in 1981. Outlined by a huge rectangle of twenty-foot-high concrete walls and barbed wire was, unmistakably, the bombed-out crater of an immense dome, its once-shiny aluminum cupola crumpled, the concrete crumbling. It was all that remained of Osirak after the Israelis were through with it.

Handwritten at the bottom of the photograph was a short note, penned a week after the coalition’s successful invasion of Iraq in 1991. It read:

“With thanks and appreciation. You made our job easier in Desert Storm.”

It was signed: “Dick Cheney.”

                                                                                                                                       
AUTHOR’S NOTE

Avi, my driver, had gone suddenly ashen. His eyes, usually mischievously bright, were hard and furtive.

“This is no good,” he said.

We had stopped at a turnout on the summit of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, just across from the Frank Sinatra Student Center, so I could take in the dramatic view of the Old City, the shiny golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock sparkling among the whitewashed turrets and buildings below. A dusty, beat-up van had pulled in behind us and several young Arab teens jumped out. Avi immediately grew tense.

“We should go!” he said again. “This is no good.”

“Come on,” I said playfully, trying to get a rise out of him.

But Avi was not biting.

“No good,” he said.

We climbed into his taxi, and as we sped off, I looked out the back window. Half a dozen Palestinian youths were standing on the asphalt, watching us leave. Avi’s reaction—or overreaction, I thought—depressed me. It showed how deeply the distrust and fear between Israelis and Palestinians had burrowed as the
intifada
dragged into its second year the summer of 2002. For two weeks Avi had been chaperoning me up and down Israel in his taxi as I interviewed the Israeli Air Force (IAF) pilots who took part in the infamous bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. This day we still had to drive to a remote village above Ramat Hod Sharon, north of Tel Aviv, and Avi was nervous about taking the main road that cut through “the Territories,” the Palestinian-controlled West Bank, now flooded with Israeli army troops trying to stop the infiltration of suicide bombers across the Green Line. We ended up taking the long way around, adding another half hour to the drive. I thought Avi was being paranoid.

A week later a Palestinian boy exploded a remote-control bomb during lunchtime inside the very same Frank Sinatra Center, killing seven students, including five Americans, and injuring scores of others. A week after that an Israeli driver and his wife were shot to death on the “shortcut” along the West Bank that Avi had refused to take.

By then, however, I was back home, safe and sound in seaside Santa Monica, California, which, with the exception of dozens of northern Italian restaurants instead of kebab grills and the absence of the occasional suicide bomber, is very much like Tel Aviv. But I had brought something home with me, a valuable lesson that would help me in the writing of this book and that no amount of interviews and research could ever teach: what it is like to live constantly at risk.

Like most Americans, I first learned of Israel’s attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor through newspaper accounts. At the time, June 1981, the attack seemed rather provocative, even “reckless,” to use the term employed by Secretary of State Alexander Haig—especially given the simmering tensions of the Middle East and the delicate Egypt-Israeli truce in the wake of Camp David. Iraq was one of those faraway Arab countries that seemed vaguely hostile, like Yemen or Syria, but one that in recent years had become an increasingly important U.S. trading partner in the region. But it remained relatively unknown. Next-door neighbor Iran and the ayatollah dominated the evening news back then. Few people had even heard of Saddam Hussein, let alone his weapons of mass destruction.

It wasn’t until some four years later, when I was working as an editor at
Los Angeles
magazine, that I began to understand the enormous consequences of the Israeli air raid on the nuclear complex in al-Tuwaitha outside of Baghdad. It came one day after a contact in Southern California’s then-burgeoning defense industry, who had been briefed on the classified raid, related to me—off the record—the inside story of the mission: that Saddam Hussein had a secret atomic-weapons program and planned to use the French-built Osirak reactor to produce weapons-grade plutonium; that the targeting of the reactor by the Israeli pilots was one of the most accurate bombing missions in modern warfare; that the F-16s the Israelis flew were somehow made to fly far beyond the envelope of their design specs; and that the pilots flew six hundred miles no more than a hundred feet off the ground.

I thought at the time, Geez, what a great book that would make! Except for one problem: the mission and even the names of the pilots in the raid had all been put under wraps by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

So it remained until June 2001, when I spotted in the
Los Angeles Times
a short interview with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Gen. David Ivry, the IAF commander who had originally planned the raid on Osirak exactly twenty years earlier. Guessing that Israel might finally be more inclined to open up about the mission—given the perception of Saddam Hussein in the years since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the discovery of extensive biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in Iraq, and Hussein’s refusal in 1998 to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into his country—I sent a letter to the ambassador to request an interview.

By the first week in September 2001, I was meeting with Ambassador Ivry on the second floor of Israel’s striking mansion compound, situated just down the street from the vacant-looking Ethiopian embassy along the mini–Embassy Row in Washington’s leafy, redbrick Van Ness district. We talked all morning and again all the next morning. By the time I left, I had a rundown of the entire history of the action. And, thanks to the embassy’s military attaché, Brig. Gen. Rani Falk—who, in a remarkable piece of luck, turned out to be one of the original group of pilots who had trained for the secret bombing attack—I had the name and telephone number of the squadron leader, Zeev Raz. I also had General Falk’s assurance that, depending on the individual decision of each pilot, I could meet with every member of the team—in Israel. I would be the only journalist in twenty years to learn the names of and meet face-to-face with all eight Israeli pilots who had flown to Baghdad in 1981.

Excited and exhilarated, I returned to my Washington, D.C., hotel room to make plans to fly home early. My return ticket to Los Angeles International Airport was booked for Tuesday morning. That was four days away, and I had already wrapped up my business. But as it turned out, my round-trip ticket on American Airlines from Dulles International to L.A. could not be changed. I had purchased a specially discounted seat, and as part of the agreement I had to stay in Washington through the weekend—obviously to subsidize the hotel industry. The earliest I could book a flight back to Los Angeles was Flight 77, 9:00
A.M.
, Monday, September 10, 2001. I booked it and had a wonderful return trip home—the flight attendant not only gave me free earphones to watch the in-flight movie but also an extra cookie with lunch.

The following morning I awoke in Los Angeles at 5:30
A.M.
, still on East Coast time. I turned on one of the early-morning talk shows while my youngest daughter dressed for her second day as a freshman in high school. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that the broadcast had cut away to a special breaking story: on the screen I saw a distant shot of what looked like a small plane, maybe a Learjet, crashing into the steel-and-glass side of one of the Twin Towers in New York City. An hour later, to the disbelief of all of America, it was clear what had happened. Next came reports of the hijacked Flight 77 out of Dulles, which had circled for an hour before slamming into the Pentagon, killing all aboard—including, I realized with horror, the flight crew I had flown with the day before, including my wonderfully generous attendant. It was chilling to know I could have easily been on that flight.

The world, at least the world of Americans, had changed immutably within hours. And so too had the world of the book I was planning to write about the Israeli raid on Osirak. No longer was my proposed book simply a great military tale. Given the increasing malignancy of Islamic fanaticism, the war on terror, and, finally, the annunciation of the so-called Bush Doctrine, which held that the United States was justified in attacking peremptorily any enemy it considered a threat, without warning, anywhere in the world, the Israeli raid in 1981 became overnight not only relevant but perhaps a blueprint for future U.S. actions.

By the time I landed in Israel in the summer of 2002, all eight pilots who had flown the bombing mission to Osirak had agreed to talk to me. For the first time, the pilots told a reporter their personal stories of how they entered the air force, how they were chosen and trained, how it felt to fly into what IDF intelligence had characterized as a “hornet’s next of AAA and SAM batteries,” in which at least a quarter of the pilots were expected to be lost. Gen. Amos Yadlin even showed me actual video footage of the air raid taken from the nose cameras of the F-16s. It looked like being caught in the middle of a Fourth of July fireworks display, with the sound of exploding AAA (antiaircraft artillery) and tracers drowned out by the increasingly frenetic radio chatter coming from panicked antiaircraft gunners below. I could hear a pilot’s rhythmic breathing suddenly quicken over the radio as his plane nosed down into the chalky streaks of missile contrails and hot tracer bullets.

As it turned out, the eighth pilot, Ilan Ramon, was back in Houston, Texas, waiting to board the next Columbia shuttle as Israel’s first astronaut. I spoke to Ilan that summer, and we agreed to get together for a more extensive follow-up interview after he returned from the NASA shuttle’s science mission the following February. Tragically, we never kept that meeting. As I watched in horror, Ramon perished when Columbia broke up over Texas on February 1, just minutes from completing its historic mission. The youngest and maybe the most beloved among the Osirak pilots, Ramon was still full of boyish energy and a self-deprecating warmth. What he was most concerned about regarding our interview was not that he be given credit for his part in the Osirak raid, but that the release of his name might expose his family to danger from Saddam Hussein. His extensive travel and exposure abroad as Israel’s first astronaut would make him an easy target for Iraq’s murderous Mukhabarat security agents. If the Iraqi dictator were crazy enough to attempt to assassinate President George H. Bush, he was easily mad enough to want to liquidate one of the men responsible for ending his nuclear dreams.

Indeed, the constant dread of attack by Saddam Hussein that so colored Israel’s wrenching decision to take out his nuclear reactor twenty years earlier was still palpable in all the pilots I met. It was one of the reasons why the IDF insisted that the pilots’ names remain classified for two decades. Many of the team had gone on to second careers in electronics or Israel’s defense industry and traveled abroad extensively. None of them wanted to be surprised by an Iraqi bullet on a street in Istanbul or New Delhi.

Who at the time could have predicted that within a year, Saddam Hussein and his Ba’thist regime would be no more? Perhaps because of this New World Order, or because after a year of telephone and e-mail exchanges, of questions and answers and just plain talk, everyone involved in telling about the raid had come to trust one another. Or maybe, after twenty years, it was just time for the full story to be told. Or maybe for all those reasons, I was able for the first time to tell the entire story of this remarkable raid using all the real names and actual documents—from the first Israeli intelligence reports of a meeting between French prime minister Jacques Chirac and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 1974 to the epic political battles within Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin’s government over whether to attack Iraq to the personal tales of the bombing as seen through the eyes of the pilots themselves.

It is a remarkable story of courage and conviction—and of an action that proved to be a turning point in the history of Saddam’s Iraq. In fact, it could well be argued, the Coalition’s stunning military victory in finally liberating Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein in May 2003 began on a cloudless evening over al-Tuwaitha on June 7, 1981.

R
ODGER
W
.
C
LAIRE
Los Angeles, California

                                                                                                                                       
CAST OF CHARACTERS