Raid on the Sun
Authors: Rodger W. Claire
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 Hamza’s 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 hall’s 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 Spector’s 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 NRC’s 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 leave—Damen 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 center’s 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 Department’s 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 Iraq’s nuclear aspirations. French president François Mitterrand, Peres’s 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 nation’s 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 don’t 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 country’s 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 Israel’s 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 Israel’s 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.
Most of the First World nations around the globe also joined France and Britain in lambasting Israel. Japan stated, “Israel’s action cannot be justified under any circumstances.” The West German foreign ministry said it was “dismayed and concerned” by the raid. The Greeks called it “unacceptable.” Even the Argentine Foreign Ministry declared Israel’s action “a threat to the peace and security in the Middle East.”
In a stinging blow to Prime Minister Begin, and to Ivry, who had been surprised by the bitterness of the State Department’s response, the United States populace seemed to be siding against Israel as well. A
New York Times
editorial on Tuesday following the raid excoriated Israel, charging, “Israel’s sneak attack on a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad was an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.”
Time
magazine maintained that the attack endangered the historic gains of the Camp David Accords, insisting that “Israel has vastly compounded the difficulties of procuring a peaceful settlement of the confrontation in the Middle East.”
And in a historic turnabout, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, blistered the Israelis, calling the raid “shocking” and going so far as to compare it to the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The United States also approved the passing of United Nations Resolution 487, which strongly condemned “military attacks by Israel in clear violation of the United Nations Charter and the norms of international law” and called for Israel to make “appropriate redress” to Iraq.
The entire Arab bloc damned the attack on Iraq’s sovereign territory. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who had just met publicly with Begin in the Sinai that weekend to further the road to peace, was furious. Privately, he told colleagues that he felt ambushed by the raid, made to look as though he were somehow complicit in the attack. The Egyptian parliament requested the United States to reassess its military aid to Israel.
Back in Baghdad, Hussein and the Iraqis took full advantage of their new role as aggrieved victim. Ironically, Iraq was not even sure who had bombed Osirak until Begin released the news bulletin on Monday. Hussein found himself deluged with messages of outraged support from Kuwait, Jordan’s King Hussein, the PLO, Syria, which decried the “Zionist enemy aggressions,” the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and even Kenya, which called the raid “indefensible.” Libya’s loose cannon, Col. Muammar Qaddafi, called on his Arab brothers to blow up the Israeli nuclear reactor in Dimona in revenge.
On June 23, Saddam Hussein finally addressed the public for the first time since the raid. He called on “all peace-loving nations of the world to help the Arabs in one way or another acquire atomic weapons” in order to offset Israel’s “nuclear capability.” Hussein, however, quickly distanced himself and his Ba’th Party from the disaster at al-Tuwaitha, accusing the French of complicity with Israel and denouncing his own Atomic Energy administration for lax security and failing to anticipate a hostile military attack—even though Hussein himself had vetoed plans early on to construct the reactor belowground.
Begin closely monitored the foreign reports and media stories. He was furious over the international outcry. Nearly beside himself with indignation, against the advice of his advisers, the prime minister immediately took to the offensive. On Tuesday, flanked by Eitan, Ivry, and Saguy, Begin, looking every bit the unbowed fighter, held a fiery press conference to rebut the global censure, defiantly declaring that Saddam Hussein had already butchered his closest colleagues and would have had “no hesitation in dropping three or four or five of those bombs on Israel.” Not for a second, Begin insisted, did he regret his decision.
“Israel has nothing to apologize for,” he snapped into the microphone in front of him. On the contrary, he exclaimed, “I feel like a man who’s left prison. I feel like a free man!”
Indeed, the raid solidified Begin’s popularity in Israel as a defender of the nation. Before the June 7 raid, a poll in the
Jerusalem Post
showed Shimon Peres’s Labor Party continuing to hold a steady lead over Begin and the Likud Party. By the evening of election day, June 30, 1981, Begin and Likud had been swept to victory, ushering in a political and cultural revolution. For the first time in the history of Israel, the Socialist-Zionist alliance of European and American Jews that had guided the nation from its inception had been repudiated, replaced by the most hawkish government ever assembled in Jerusalem. Indicative of its conservative bent was Begin’s appointment of Ariel Sharon as defense minister and Yitzhak Shamir as foreign minister.
Even the one true political setback proceeding from the raid, the United States’ suspending the sale of the F-16s, seemed to turn around to Begin’s side. At a June 16 news conference following Osirak, President Reagan seemed anything but angry about the preemptive strike. When reporters asked about his reaction to Israel’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Reagan responded, nonplussed, “Well, I haven’t given very much thought to that particular question there,” then added that it was difficult “to envision Israel as being a threat to its neighbors.” By September 1, 1981, the sale of F-16s to Israel was quietly resumed.
Perhaps in somewhat the same way that the United States’ stunning victories in Afghanistan more than twenty years later would embolden George W. Bush’s administration to launch an offensive against Iraq, so Osirak in 1981 precipitated a series of bold political and military moves by a newly confident and invigorated Menachem Begin. In the prime minister’s estimation, Osirak had given him a mandate to quash all of Israel’s enemies once and for all. Heartened by the success of the attack, Begin and Sharon were determined to drive Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization out of Beirut. Within the year, Begin made his fateful decision to invade Lebanon and lay siege to Beirut. In the bloody chaos that followed, Sharon would fatally miscalculate the military’s control over Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies. While under the supposed protection of the IDF, a renegade Phalangist battalion swooped into the densely populated Palestinian refugee camps at Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila farms and massacred 750 men, women, and children while Israeli military forces stood by impotently and watched. The resulting outcry both worldwide and within Israel nearly toppled Begin’s government and ultimately led to Sharon’s dismissal and years of bitter political exile.
