Spies Against Armageddon (40 page)

The opposition leader went to Begin and warned him not to launch an attack, because Israel would be so strongly condemned internationally that it would be a pariah state. “We will be like a thistle standing alone in the desert,” Peres intoned.

Begin, angry about the leak, was unstoppable. He decided to postpone the operation, but he insisted that a new date be set right away.

Finally, eight attack planes would fly on Sunday morning, June 7. American-made F-16A fighter-bombers were to carry out the attack, escorted by F-15 fighter planes to defend the bombers, if necessary.

They flew over Jordan, and King Hussein looked up from his yacht in the Gulf of Aqaba and noticed Israeli airplanes heading east on some mission unknown. Aman overheard a report from the king to a military control post in his capital, but it seemed that neighboring Iraq was not informed. The jets continued at a very low altitude—as low as 150 feet—over Saudi Arabia, heading into Iraqi airspace.

The pilots had, in their gear, Iraqi money provided by the Mossad—just in case they had to bail out and somehow buy their way to freedom.

While they were flying, around a dozen military and intelligence chiefs gathered in the situation room—known in Hebrew as
ha-Bor
(the “Pit”)—inside the defense ministry headquarters compound in Tel Aviv.

One senior officer was missing. Yehoshua Saguy was not invited—by order of the IDF chief of staff, Rafael Eitan. This was a pre-emptive strike by the top general who suspected that his intelligence chief, because he opposed the operation, would leak it and force another cancellation.

The 90-minute flight to Baghdad was smooth. The reactor dome came into sight, “shining in the sun,” said Relik Shafir, one of the eight pilots in the formation who later would be a brigadier general in the air force. “We faced no problems. I was much more emotional about the historical significance of the mission, rather than any operational difficulties. Everything went according to plan. The training was actually much more difficult than the real thing.”

As the Israeli pilots flew away, heading almost straight up to 42,000 feet, they felt the massive gravity of seven times their weight. The Iraqis did fire at them from the ground, including at least one missile, but they missed. And one Iraqi air force MiG scrambled but never caught up with the Israelis.

They left behind a completely destroyed burning ruin of a nuclear facility. The iconic dome of the reactor collapsed inward and was erased from the face of the Earth.

The successful mission was meant to be kept secret, with Israel preserving deniability. There was even a deception option. For two days, the Iraqis thought the attack was the work of the Iranians—as they were near the beginning of a bitter eight-year war with them.

Prime Minister Begin, however, decided to change the strategy. He ordered his press secretary to issue a statement taking responsibility for the attack on Osirak. Begin was proud, not ashamed, and he wanted to send a double message: not only “never again” in a Holocaust context, but also that Israel would not tolerate any effort by any country in the Middle East to have nuclear weapons.

He did not say it in so many words, but this strategy could be interpreted as the Begin Doctrine. A lot of it was based on fear and the feeling that Jews were always in peril. The State of Israel, in his perception, was besieged and in danger of annihilation. But also hidden between the lines was a fortress mentality: an Israeli determination to maintain its nuclear monopoly in the region.

While the attack was admired by many in the world, it was formally denounced by many governments—including Israel’s friends in the West. They were concerned about the implications. For the first time, one country holding nuclear weapons had taken violent action against another nation on the nuclear threshold.

The Reagan Administration joined in the condemnation and even punished Israel—postponing the delivery of the next set of American-made planes, but for only two months. Privately, Ronald Reagan was delighted, as he told a top aide: “It shows that the Israelis have claws, a sense of strategy, and are able to take care of problems before they develop.”

The same sentiment was expressed, though in secret, by some Arab and European officials. Even France seemed quite happy that its customer had been knocked out of the nuclear market. The French could not say it in public, but they admitted—years later—that the Israeli decision had been bold and correct.

Israel did not take much time, however, to rest on its laurels. Israeli intelligence noted that Saddam Hussein drew some lessons from the Osirak attack and re-started his program, but this time diversifying it: building facilities in various locations and not putting all his nuclear eggs in one basket. Instead of a plutonium-based program at a reactor, Saddam opted for a uranium-based track using centrifuges.

Of even more concern was the development of nuclear weapons in Pakistan. True, that nation was far away from Israel and—despite its Islamic and often radical sentiments—it never joined with Arab countries in their wars against the Jewish state. Yet, there were reasons for the Mossad to pay close attention.

Pakistan had developed its own nuclear arsenal, based on drawings that showed how to enrich weapons-grade uranium by using centrifuges—without the need for a nuclear reactor. A Pakistani scientist who was considered the father of his country’s nuclear bomb, A. Q. Khan, stole the drawings from a European consortium in the Netherlands called Urenco.

When Israel’s Lakam obtained similar drawings, with future Hollywood mogul Arnon Milchan facilitating, that was from another part of the same Dutch-based consortium.

Israeli intelligence feared that the Pakistani bomb would eventually become an Islamic bomb. It was a reasonable fear. In the late 1970s, when Khan was helping his nation build its first bomb, Pakistani leaders were approached by Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi, who offered them money in return for one nuclear device. Fortunately for most of the world, the offer was rejected.

There was a possibility that Saudi Arabia, a close religious and strategic ally of Pakistan, would also share in a widened nuclear arsenal. It was quite natural that the Mossad would try to find out as much as possible about Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities and intentions.

In that era, when Israel did not yet have spy satellites and Pakistan was too far away for reconnaissance aircraft flights, the Mossad had to be inventive to keep an eye on Pakistan. Teaming up with India—always highly vigilant toward its hostile neighbor—was one route. Most Indians were not friendly toward Israel, however, as they enjoyed status as leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement that had close links with the Arab world.

An excellent opportunity arose in 1985, when Pakistan was hoping to hire experts who could renovate and upgrade Soviet military equipment. Israeli defense contractors had a lot of experience at that, so some of them teamed up with a Belgian company to make a pitch to the Pakistanis.

Negotiations advanced to the point that the Pakistani military invited a delegation from Israel. Several Israeli corporations that did military work sent representatives, and so did the Defense Ministry’s Lakam unit, in its capacity as the guardian of technological secrets. Lakam wanted to ensure that these companies would not sell or reveal more than they were permitted to share.

When the Mossad heard about the group getting ready to leave for Pakistan, it decided to jump on the wagon. But it had very different intentions, not rooted in Israeli-Pakistani commerce. A senior Mossad operative joined the delegation, and all the Israelis had false foreign passports provided by the spy agency.

Everything went smoothly, and the business meetings in the capital, Islamabad, with defense officials seemed promising. But then, one afternoon, when the delegation had a half-day off, the man from the Mossad suggested—actually, he ordered—his fellow Israelis to board their bus, and they traveled to a location outside the capital. It was Kahuta, where Pakistan assembled its nuclear weapons.

Posing as innocent tourists, the Mossad guy and the group—somehow imagining that they were not under surveillance—went about taking photographs and soil samples. Upon returning to their hotel, they were confronted by a senior officer from Pakistani intelligence. He demanded that the rolls of film be handed over, though the Mossad man probably managed to keep one of the rolls.

That was the end of the trip. The angry Pakistanis could have detained the Israelis as spies, but instead decided to expel them on the first flight the next day. The business delegates were also unhappy because the Mossad had ruined their chance of getting a nice contract. The whole trip now seemed devised as a cover for an intelligence operation, and they felt like extras in a scenario staged by the Mossad from the outset.

Some of the participants claimed later that if they had been able to make their deal, they might have influenced the Pakistanis to break off their dangerous liaisons with Iran and Libya.

Yet, the overall Israeli intelligence assessment was that A.Q. Khan would never have agreed to be restrained. He was determined to spread nuclear knowhow and profit from it. In the 1990s he traveled through the Middle East, offering his services to various countries. Most governments declined to hire him, but Libya and Iran signed lucrative contracts with him. That was enough for Khan to gain the reputation of being the world’s greatest nuclear proliferator.

The Mossad made sure to track Khan’s travels. “We knew about his movements, but the larger picture escaped us. We didn’t realize how bold, daring, and greedy he would be. He’s one of the rare examples of a single person determining the course of history,” Shabtai Shavit, who was then the director of the agency, admitted years later.

“So we didn’t attach too much importance to his meetings and offerings. I regret that we didn’t assassinate him. That could have saved Israel a lot of worries.”

While doing all it could to preserve its nuclear monopoly, Israeli intelligence also continued its policy of nuclear ambiguity.

The notion of ambiguity was first conjured up by Peres’s delicate dance of words in 1963, when he was chatting with President John Kennedy at the White House. Israel would “not be the first to introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East, Peres had told the president. That almost immediately became Israel’s policy.

It was a unique choice for a nation with nuclear weapons. Israel would always refuse stubbornly to confirm that it had—or did not have—a nuclear arsenal, though the whole world believed that it did. Officials and the military censor enforced an almost ridiculous policy: turning Dimona and everything about it into a taboo. The Israeli media and the public were not allowed, for years, even to discuss the ramifications of having a nuclear option.

One nuclear technician threatened to jeopardize the decades-old policy, and he made a mockery of the enormous security around it.

Mordecai Vanunu, a Moroccan-born Jew who immigrated with his parents to Israel in the 1950s thanks to secret efforts by Israeli intelligence, developed strong but mercurial opinions and behavior.

First, as was traditional in his community, he studied at a religious school. Later, he stopped wearing a yarmulke (
kippa
is the Hebrew term) on his head, and he was open to the temptations of the secular world. Throughout, he felt that as a Sephardic (Eastern) Jew he was rejected by what he saw as the dominant Ashkenazic (European) culture in Israel.

In 1977, at age 22, while studying at the local university of the desert town Beersheba, he applied for a job at the Dimona nuclear reactor, administered by the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. After passing the exam, he underwent a short course in nuclear physics and chemistry, including lessons on plutonium and uranium with which the new recruits would be working.

Vanunu started working as a technician on the night shift. The routine was boring, and he compensated for that by plunging into the bustling life of the university by day. He volunteered to pose as a nude model for art classes, and he also shifted his political views from right-wing Likud politics to left-wing radicalism.

His newly adopted ideology was deepened by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. His extracurricular behavior was noticed by the university’s chief security officer. Israel being a small society with a shared sense of mission, security officers around the country tend to work closely together. Even at an academic institution, they feel obliged to cooperate with the government’s security apparatus.

The university security officer told his counterpart at Dimona about Vanunu’s activities. The man at Dimona reported to Malmab—the Defense Ministry’s security office in charge of enforcing the ambiguity policy and protecting all defense-based scientific institutions. Those included the Dimona reactor and the biological institute at Nes Tziona.

The counter-espionage department of Shin Bet was also brought into the picture, and the authorities together decided that it would be best to put pressure on Vanunu to leave. They warned him about his political and personal behavior.

Vanunu only became more defiant. For reasons he never explained, he started wandering around the Dimona facility’s secret corridors, taking photographs with a camera that he smuggled in.

That was a clear security breach, and he should have been spotted in the heavily guarded facility. But officials never knew that Vanunu had snapped photos.

The security chiefs did find an excuse to fire him in November 1985, when there were some budget cuts at the atomic energy commission. Vanunu complained that he was a victim of both political and ethnic discrimination, but he left Dimona.

He still had his rolls of film, however, and when he left the country soon after losing his job, he felt fed up with Judaism and the Jewish state.

Allowing him to leave Israel so easily was yet another in a string of failures by Malmab and Shin Bet. Israelis with classified jobs frequently are visited and reminded of security requirements before they go on foreign trips. Vanunu was overlooked and his actions neglected.