Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  AFTER I GOT BACK TO ISRAEL, my mother died.

  As if she waited for me to return, she collapsed the same night I arrived. Ali and I spent the next ten days taking turns at the hostel, and at home with the kids. During the long nights, when my mother was unconscious, I sat by her bed, and there I completed the functional engineering description of Halo.

  One night I dozed off in the chair. When I woke I saw Shosh looking at me. At first I thought she didn’t recognize me, but her eyes were again bright and steady. I rose and approached her.

  “Go home. Get some sleep, Iftach.”

  “Do you need anything, Mom? Shall I bring something, or call somebody?”

  For a long time she didn’t answer. I thought she had fallen asleep, but then I heard her say in a weak, almost inaudible voice, “Those last years… were unnecessary.” She sighed and then whispered, “I am so worried.” I could imagine what was worrying her. It was not her future, not even mine.

  A nurse came and took over. I went home. In the morning they called us from the hostel. She had died.

  SHOSH LEFT GIVAT-BRENNER in 1962, after she realized that the Zionist-socialist community had ceased to be her home, if it ever had been. She was named administrative manager of the Naval Officers’ School in Acre, in the north of Israel. That ancient city, a mix of Jews and Arabs, was very similar to the Jaffa of her youth. At the school she worked with the school head, Maj. Gen. (Res.) Shmuel Tankus, a former Palmach soldier and former commander of the Israeli Navy. In her ten years at the Naval Officers’ School Shosh was an excellent manager, and to this day I receive greetings from students who respected her tremendously. During her service there, she changed the name of the school, and now it is named after the lost Palmach Twenty-three. In the mid-1970s she retired and settled in Ramot-HaShavim, a village in the Sharon Valley. She was still active, and began to work as a volunteer in the plant development nursery of agronomist Dr. Yosef Shuv. She was a clever and industrious worker, and under Shuv’s direction she worked in developing new varieties of the flower gerbera.

  Shosh was a feminist before feminism was popular, and a committed Zionist. She named the twenty-two new varieties she developed after Palmach women soldiers who fell in battle. Among them were ‘Haviva’ and ‘Hanna’, after the two parachutists who jumped behind Nazi lines in World War II and were caught and executed. And there was another gerbera flower named ‘Zohara’, after the Palmach pilot Zohara Levitov, who was shot down in her plane during the War of Independence in 1948. And there was ‘Bracha’, after Bracha Fuld, who was shot by the British when she stood, hands raised, between them and the illegal immigrant ship Orde Wingate. And there was also ‘Yardena’, in memory of Yardena Grinstein, who fell during the battle for the northern city of Zefat during the War of Independence.

  And more new kinds of flowers bore more names, and each had a story behind it: ‘Shulamit’, ‘Miriam’, ‘Naomi’, ‘Laila’, ‘Leah’, ‘Bilhah’, ‘Esther’, ‘Tamar’, ‘Hava’. In her way, Shosh immortalized the role of women in the establishment of the State of Israel. After her death on February 19, 1984, Dr. Shuv completed the development of the last flower she had been working on. It is a red flower with a black heart, and Yosef called it ‘Shosh’.

  We buried Shosh in the cemetery at Ramot-HaShavim, the village where she lived out her last years. Some hundreds of her friends and our own friends assembled to pay their last respects. On her gravestone we engraved a line from the Palmach anthem: “Our heads shall not be bowed.” When we finished shivah—the ritual seven days of mourning—I went through her things. The clothes, furniture, and electrical appliances were donated to charity, and we kept only the beautiful mosaic table she made with her own hands. It is in our kitchen to this day.

  I don’t think I ever really knew Shosh. She, like the maze in her eyes, was a mystery to me. In the picture before me I see a young woman about thirty, very straight and serious. On her face I see keen attention, and that tense, alert, and clever expression that characterized her throughout her life. Her mouth is closed, but her lips are relaxed. It is closed because this is how she felt at ease. Only the corners rise slightly, gracefully—not quite a smile. She wears no jewelry, no makeup, and no earrings, only a large ivory brooch in her collar, with the head of Pallas Athena, which she always liked. Her eyes look straight into the camera lens. The picture fails to show the sharpness of her bright eyes.

  When I opened one of the drawers in the empty house, a wave of letters poured out. I opened one of them and instantly closed it. Outside, in her garden that already had begun to go back to nature, a light rain was falling. It didn’t dampen the bonfire I lit, burning all her papers to the last one. I believe that’s what she would have wanted. All remained inside.

  THE PROBLEMS I FACED in the technical characterization of Halo were far from trivial, and every iteration sent me back to basic definitions. Every problem was intertwined with other problems, and sometimes the whole thing seemed a bag of snakes. None of my helicopter pilot friends could help me figure out where the main flight difficulty was, to enable me to build my system along an order of preference. The most complicated of all was the decision about the flight profile according to which the system would be built.

  Was the main problem the loss of spatial orientation? That loss—and the resulting vertigo—were closely associated with looking at the outside world through artificial screens and night vision goggles. In the Jordan Valley stands a memorial for fifty-three soldiers and pilots who died in a crash due to loss of spatial orientation of the crew of a CH-53 Petrel helicopter. I thought I had found a solution for that—a new optical lens that would put all the instrumentation data right on the pupil of the pilot’s eye. Then I found that describing the lens was easier than making it. There was no lens in the world that could spread the required data on twenty-eight degrees of the area of the pilot’s goggles. I had to invent a new kind of lens.

  But then, maybe the main problem was in geographical orientation? At low altitude, especially at night, it’s very easy to get lost. And the area would be full of hidden dangers, enemy forces, and power lines that lurk in the wadis in the dark to snare helicopters. If you got lost, you had to gain altitude, and then you were exposed to the enemy’s antiaircraft and missile batteries. A navigation system was definitely a priority, but no existing system fit helicopters. They all were not accurate enough—they talked in miles, whereas helicopters needed meters—and they all were very expensive and very heavy, way beyond the budget for my complete system. So for navigation I had to break new ground, too.

  Another problem looked even more important to me. I called it the living map. I thought that this was the main problem with military helicopters, if not with any military system. I am talking about the distribution of enemy threats in the area, including mobile ones. This was the same problem that made things difficult for us, the fighter pilots, in our wars against the SAMs. And when you talk helicopters, the problem is twice as difficult. Threats were not limited to few dozen mobile SAM batteries, but included every ground unit. When crossing enemy territory a helicopter must avoid any contact with enemy forces of any kind. They all can do harm. In short, the pilot needs an updated and current battle picture. And my problem was that there existed no precedent nor any idea of how to create such a detailed living map. This problem was really tough.

  The solution to the living map occurred to me suddenly at night, like an epiphany. I was awestruck—how clear it was! I was thrilled.

  During those months of definition it was easy to lose hope. Almost nobody understood what I was after, and whoever did understand, didn’t believe it could be done. There were nights when I felt I was wandering in a maze with no exit. But I believed that the spring did exist somewhere inside me, and at the end it would break out. I would get up from bed and go back to my desk, pushing, pulling more and more out of myself. When my release bonus money ran out, Ali sent me to the bank, and I borrowed against my retirement pension.

&n
bsp; At last, after four months of work, I could hire a typist to type three copies of a fifty-page booklet that described Halo in enough detail for a reasonable presentation. But the turning of my drawings and definitions into a flightworthy system, to be acquired by air forces and armies, was way beyond the capability of a single person like me. I contacted two companies, Elbit in Israel and Hughes in Mesa, Arizona, and asked them to develop Halo under their auspices. In the synopsis I sent them, I put forward clearly the two question marks that hovered over my solution. The first was the required optical lens. Halo depended on successful development of a novel lens for the pilot’s goggles. But I had a solid theoretical base—I attached a theoretical analysis I had bought from a specialist; it that ended with a sentence I was to learn was typical: “It seems the said lens is not out of the limits of physics.” And the second bet was on the then-futuristic global positioning system, GPS, a network of communication satellites that in 1984 was just beginning to be built in space. At that time the performance and even the existence of the GPS were questionable. This was certainly a long shot, but no other solution would be in spec for Halo. And I had a third thing to show them: letters from General Parker and the Israeli Air Force commander, Amos Lapidot, both of them informing me that if such a system became available, it would fit their requirements. Amos was even willing to give me a CH-53 helicopter for flight testing of Halo. With all this, both companies said yes and wanted me to develop the system with them.

  I chose Elbit and went to work in Haifa, Israel. In parallel with the development of Halo I was entrusted with the company’s aerial systems marketing. I had only three requests for Elbit’s president, Emmanuel Gil, before we signed our contract: loan of one great systems engineer; a one-year time frame, and $2.2 million for development. The estimates of time and money were based on the thin blue booklet I gave him. As to the men, I knew that when I had one really good person, others would follow.

  Gil was as good as his word. Haim Kellerman, a young, redheaded engineer, reported to my new office. His former experience was in developing of artificial kidney, and when he first met me he couldn’t tell one end of an aircraft from another. After a week he understood Halo and began to use words I didn’t understand. In a short time other good men joined us—engineers, test pilots, and program managers. Soon Halo became a sea of complicated technical papers that I couldn’t grasp anymore. Meanwhile, GPS had become a reality. The new lens with requisite optical properties was developed also, and a global patent was acquired. This lens became a business unto itself, and serves in various other machines besides Halo.

  When I saw that my men knew better than I how helicopters should fly, I backed off to where I was just working with the main concept. I dealt with management and mainly in marketing. Within a year the CH-53 flew a test flight at Tel Nof Air Base. Even before that, I made the first sale to a foreign country, for our first fifty million dollars.

  When I left Elbit after four years, components of Halo were already installed in all Israeli military helicopters, and the system was being exported. Soon all U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine helicopters were equipped with spatial orientation components of Elbit’s Halo. Although parts of Halo—mainly the “live map”—still needed to complete development, the system and its various components and derivatives brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to Elbit. I was very proud of the success of my brainchild Halo. My concept took wing, and suddenly world avionic producers could propose to their clients integrated, computerized systems for helicopters.

  Halo strengthened my belief in the formula I found for my life: all possibilities came from inside, all from within.

  Chapter

  23

  Tammuz

  TWENTY YEARS AFTER I HAD ENDED my active duty service, and my active participation in the air force (except as a flight instructor in the reserves) ceased, it all came back for one amazing evening. For long time I had been living my life without any connection to aviation, and lo, at the end of May 2001, some fifty of our friends from that time got together in Ali’s and my new home.

  This was on the twentieth anniversary of Operation Opera, the 1981 attack on the nuclear reactor Osirak—which the Iraqis called Tammuz—near Baghdad, Iraq.

  THEY CAME IN THE EARLY evening. Our home has only four rooms, but they are bright and spacious with very large windows, and daylight flooded in, together with the smells of our spring garden.

  When the conversation started it went right to the time we were pulling out of the bombing pass, when Zeevik Raz—the flight leader—sent the word “Charlie” on the radio. Aviem Sela, flying relay, got the word and passed it to David Ivry, sitting at the air force control center in Tel Aviv. The meaning of the word was “Mission accomplished; all safe.”

  All of us, men and women, were meeting as a group after many years. We were delighted to see each other again and to talk openly. We wanted to relive, for just a few hours, that stormy period in Ramat-David in the early 1980s. All of us were twenty years older now, more stooped and wrinkled, and we all wore civilian clothes. No one in uniform or any active politician had been invited to our meeting.

  Everybody had prepared himself well for this reunion. Men and women wrote notes and intended to read them. Some brought objects they had hidden for years and never showed to anybody, and many intended to discuss for the first time things they never had revealed. On the large table along the wall, objects piled up: documents, used maps, logbooks, albums, notes, and strange money, as well as other objects. Everything carried with it some personal connection. On the walls hung photographs, paintings, original maps, and drawings that “were there.” During the break, when dinner would be served on the veranda and lawn, we all would go through these artifacts and study them.

  Everybody had cleared his schedule for the whole evening. But evening passed, night came, and then early morning. We all parted reluctantly at about three o’clock the next morning.

  MAJOR GENERAL (RET.) David Ivry, who had been commander of the air force in 1981, spoke. He and his wife, Ofra, had come from Washington, D.C., where he was serving as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. In his calm, restrained way, David reminded us of the global and historical importance of the destruction of the Iraqi atomic reactor.

  “General Ivry,” Dick Cheney, the American secretary of defense at the time, had written to him, “If you hadn’t attacked that reactor in 1981, the Gulf War of 1991 would have looked totally different.”

  As Israelis, we knew the significance for ourselves: in 1991 Israel was hit by some forty Iraqi Scud missiles, all of them aimed at our cities, and most of them fell on Tel Aviv. We all heard the explosions, we all wore gas masks and sat in sealed rooms with doors and windows taped with plastic sheeting. Bad as this was, we could remain relatively sanguine. There was no nuclear threat: our F-16 fighters had taken out the Iraqi nuclear reactor ten years before.

  In his natural and humble way, Ivry segued into a personal account of how he had first met this small but magnificent fighter aircraft. It happened in the second half of the seventies, when he was visiting the United States. The F-16 prototype was being tested at that time at Edwards Air Force Base. While there, Ivry was shown this fighter of the future. After flying it, and being impressed with its aerial combat features, the IAF commander had no more doubts. And when he was surprised with a proposal to acquire seventy-five of these, three whole squadrons—this was a batch of F-16s that had been produced for Iran but that had no buyer after the fall of the shah—Ivry said, “I’ll take ’em.” Smiles all around the room.

  But Ivry saw beyond the performance of the F-16 in aerial combat. He told us how he had spoken to the two officers he had earmarked to head the first two squadrons, Lt. Cols. Zeev Raz and Amir Nahumi, and ordered them to research one subject: how to attack a ground target at the longest distance possible, by surprise.

  “I saw doubt and bafflement in their faces,” he told us. The F-16 was a marvelous air-to-air machine. This was not the direc
tive they expected to receive from him.

  “I calmed them down,” Ivry said. “There’ll be MiGs, too, plenty of them.”

  He was already thinking about the Iraqi nuclear plant.

  THE IRAQI EFFORT TO ACQUIRE nuclear weaponry began in 1959. Following an agreement with the Soviet Union, a first atomic installation was erected at the Tweita site, some ten kilometers southeast of Baghdad. In a few years the French hurried to help, too. France supplied the Iraqi dictator Sadaam Hussein with an advanced research reactor designed for uranium enrichment. The plant name was changed to Tammuz One. At the same time, the Iraqis continued to seek diligently for ready-made fission materials—including military-grade plutonium, the substance of nuclear warheads—from every possible source. This activity contradicted their announcements that their intention was just to produce nuclear energy for civilian applications. On October 25, 1979, Saddam Hussein declared, “The struggle against Israel will be long and hard—the Israelis may try to use atomic bombs—for this reason, Arabs must prepare the tools for victory.”

  “Prepare the tools for victory.” This was hardly anything but a lame excuse. Israel hadn’t been threatening anybody. There was no doubt that Iraq was trying to justify its acquisition of the atomic bomb.

  There was only one real meaning: a clear and present danger to the people of Israel.

  IN MID-1979, WHEN THE IRANIAN F-16 deal finally passed to Israel, it became clear that seventy-five new ultramodern aircraft, together with their equipment, would arrive in Israel starting in mid-1980. The air base chosen to absorb all of them was Ramat-David, the northern base in the Izreel Valley.

  The Ramat-David of 1979 was an old base, and they had only one year to reorganize it for the new acquisitions. The base commander, Col. Rami Harpaz, began preparations.