Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Still, the Israelis had other sources: French scientists, technicians, secretaries, and midlevel managers. Some were paid handsomely. Others, Jews, did so for ideological reasons. Through one of these sources, the Mossad obtained the “project book,” a document detailing all the deals signed with Iraq. Several hundred pages long, it had been written in English by the French scientists. “From that book,” says Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Raphael Ofek, a nuclear physicist at Ben-Gurion University recruited by AMAN, “we learned a lot, including the layout of the project site where the reactor and adjoining laboratories were situated at Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center.”

  Unit 8200, AMAN’s SIGINT arm, established a top-secret task force, nicknamed “Apocalypse,” that tapped into telephone and telex lines, and Rainbow agents planted bugs in the Iraqis’ Paris offices.

  With reams of damning intelligence, Israel called on the international community to halt the program. But exasperated foreign leaders, critics of Israel, and even some domestic opponents of Begin charged Israel with alarmism. The Iraqi project could not possibly harm Israel, they insisted. The French continued to maintain that the project was an entirely legitimate research program and that they were using enough security mechanisms to ensure that Iraq would not be able to develop nuclear bombs.

  Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, who returned from a visit to Paris appalled at the French indifference to his requests, tried the Americans next, asking Washington to pressure the French, also to no avail.

  Israel concluded that the diplomatic path had failed. In November 1978, the security cabinet authorized the prime minister to take “necessary actions” to halt the Iraqi nuclear project. The Mossad was given the green light to act. “Osiris,” the cabinet concluded, “must be killed.”

  Not long after came the explosion at the shipping hangar on the French Riviera. The components the operative blew up that night were badly damaged, and the Israelis believed they’d set back Saddam’s nuclear ambitions by at least two years, the amount of time it would take the French to manufacture new components.

  But the Iraqi dictator would not allow such a delay. He ordered the project to proceed on schedule. Iraq’s minister of defense demanded that the French repair the parts and deliver them on time. The French countered that a repaired casing would not be as strong. It would be risky to use and would almost certainly have to be replaced in just a few years. But no one dared cross Saddam Hussein.

  Iraq could still have nuclear weapons within a few years. Frustrated Mossad officials decided that they needed to begin using more aggressive tactics.

  They would start killing scientists.

  —

  THE MOST OBVIOUS TARGETS for elimination were the heads of the Iraqi program, Khidir Hamza and Jafar Dhia Jafar. The latter was “the brains of the project, the most important scientist,” according to Dr. Ofek. He was a graduate of Birmingham University, held a Ph.D. in physics from Manchester University, and had worked as a researcher at the Centre for Nuclear Engineering of Imperial College, in London.

  But both men rarely left Iraq, where successfully killing either one would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Yet just as Nasser had hired Germans to build his missiles, Iraq had recruited Egyptians to help develop its nuclear program. The most important among them was Yehia al-Mashad, a nuclear physics prodigy at Alexandria University who became a senior scientist at the Nuclear Research Center at al-Tuwaitha, in Iraq. Mashad traveled frequently between Egypt, Iraq, and France. The Mossad began to track his moves in February 1980 and shadowed him constantly whenever he was in Paris or at the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety at Fontenay-aux-Roses, near the capital.

  In early June, the French prepared a shipment of uranium for the Iraqis to use in their Isis small reactor. Mashad came to France to check the quality. He traveled with two aides who never left his side, making him difficult to reach. The Mossad’s plan, then, was to poison Mashad via some common and innocuous item, similar to the way Wadie Haddad had been killed with tainted toothpaste in 1978.

  But at the last minute, Mashad decided to cut short his stay in France. He wanted to visit his family in Egypt. That meant the Mossad operatives didn’t have enough time to implement their original plan. But Mashad also decided to spend his last night in Paris alone. “He let his two Iraqi assistants go, because the hotel he was in was very expensive,” Hamza said. “He was a kind man. He told them, ‘Okay, you might want to stay in a more convenient shopping neighborhood and a cheaper hotel that would be more accessible to you. So you can go ahead.’ ”

  With no aides to protect him, Mashad suddenly became a much more vulnerable target.

  He returned to his hotel at about six o’clock on the evening of June 13. He showered and changed, had a drink and a sandwich in the lobby, then went back to his room on the ninth floor. Carlos, the commander of Bayonet, and another operative hid in a recess in the corridor, watching the door. The plan had changed so rapidly, they weren’t sure what to do. Carlos had a pistol, but the standing orders were that guns could not be used in hotels under any circumstances, since bullets can go through walls and hit innocents. Carlos was adapting on the fly.

  The elevator opened at about 9:30. A young woman got out, a prostitute. She walked by the two Bayonet men but ignored them. She knocked on the door of 9041. Mashad let her in.

  Carlos and his partner waited for four hours, until the prostitute finally left at 1:30 A.M. By then Carlos had found an ashtray with a stand near the elevator, a yard tall, with a heavy base, a narrow leg, and a plunger mechanism at its top end for disposing of accumulating cigarette butts. He examined it carefully, weighed it in his hands, felt its heft. He decided it was solid enough to use.

  “Take out your blade,” Carlos told the other operative, who was armed with a large Leatherman pocketknife. The two men approached Mashad’s door and the companion knocked.

  “Qui est là?” Mashad said. “Who’s there?” He sounded sleepy, relaxed.

  “Hotel security,” Carlos told him. “It’s about your recent guest.”

  Mashad shuffled across his room and opened the door. Carlos brought the ashtray down hard on his head. Mashad lurched backward and crumpled to the floor. Carlos lunged after him, hit him again, and then once more. Blood formed a spreading stain on the carpet. There was no need for the knife.

  The two operatives washed the blood off their arms and rinsed off the ashtray. Carlos removed his bloodstained shirt, crumpled it up, and shoved it into his pocket. As they left, they made sure the DO NOT DISTURB sign dangled on the doorknob. They put the ashtray back where it belonged, took the elevator down to the lobby, and sauntered out of the hotel.

  Hotel security found Mashad’s body fifteen hours later. Police at first thought he’d been battered in a sex game gone wrong, but they found the prostitute and quickly cleared her. Mashad hadn’t been robbed, and he’d had no other visitors. But the prostitute remembered seeing two men in the hallway.

  The French figured out pretty quickly that the Mossad had killed Mashad. So did the Iraqis. “I thought we were all targeted,” Hamza said. “After that, I would travel only with an Iraqi intelligence officer with me.”

  Saddam Hussein understood that the targeted killings could devastate morale among the scientists working on his nuclear project. He handed out luxury cars and cash bonuses to all the senior scientists and paid Mashad’s wife compensation of $300,000, an enormous sum at the time in Egypt, and promised her and Mashad’s children a lifelong monthly pension.

  It did nothing, however, to stop the killings. Three weeks after Mashad was killed, a British-educated Iraqi engineer named Salman Rashid was sent to Geneva for two months of training in the enrichment of uranium by means of electromagnetic isotope separation.

  He had a bodyguard who never left his side. A week before he was to return to Iraq, Rashid became violently ill. Doctors in G
eneva suspected a virus. Six days later, on September 14, Rashid died in agony. An autopsy showed that there had been no virus: The Mossad had poisoned him, though how, and with what toxin, no one could say for certain.

  Two weeks later, another senior Iraqi engineer, Abd al-Rahman Rasoul, a civil engineer who handled the construction of the various buildings for the nuclear project, took part in a conference sponsored by the French Atomic Energy Commission. Immediately after the cocktail party and official reception that opened the conference, he came down with what seemed to be food poisoning. He died five days later in a Paris hospital.

  In early August, many of the French participants in the Iraqi project received a letter containing a blunt warning that they would be in danger if they did not leave immediately. Saddam Hussein was furious, and a few days later he delivered a particularly angry speech against Israel, not mentioning the attacks against the scientists but threatening to “reduce Tel Aviv to rubble with bombs.”

  Saddam’s scientists began to panic. “Nobody would want to travel,” Hamza said, “so we were given bonuses if we traveled.” They also received training in personal security and self-defense. “A Mukhabarat [intelligence] man would tell us how to eat, not to accept an invitation after dark, always be accompanied. We were trained to carry with us our toothpaste, our toothbrushes, our shaving equipment, either in a small bag or in our pocket.”

  A few French contractors resigned in fear, and the Iraqi nuclear project was slowed down slightly. But Saddam had put the resources of an autocratic nation into building a bomb, and he could spare a technician or three in the process. All of the scientists, both the dead and the frightened, were quickly replaced. France sent twelve kilograms of enriched uranium and filled a second order shortly afterward.

  At best, Israel had bought some time before Saddam could complete the construction of the reactors and begin to activate them: perhaps eighteen months, perhaps two years. But Iraq still expected—and Israel still feared—that Saddam would have fully operational nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them by the end of the decade.

  Yitzhak Hofi, the Mossad director, knew that intelligence, targeted killings, and sabotage operations could do only so much. “I give up,” he told Begin in October 1980. “We will not be able to stop it. The only way still open is bombing from the air.”

  The only way left, in other words, was an outright act of war.

  —

  THERE WAS DISAGREEMENT AT the top in Israel. Some of the country’s leading intelligence officials warned that bombing the Iraqi reactor would have dire international consequences, that it would take years before the reactor would produce enough fuel for a bomb, and that destroying it would push Saddam to take an alternate, more secretive approach, about which it would be far more difficult to gather information. There was so much tension that at one stage Begin stopped inviting the head of his own Atomic Energy Commission, Uzi Eilam, because he opposed the attack. One of Eilam’s staffers, Professor Uzi Even, who feared that destroying the reactor would only lead to the transfer of the Iraqi nuclear project to secret installations, which Israel would not be able to keep under surveillance, leaked the plan for the anticipated attack to the head of the opposition, Shimon Peres. He, in turn, wrote a memo in his own handwriting to Begin, warning that if Israel went through with the attack, it would be isolated internationally, “like a bramble in the wilderness,” using the prophet Jeremiah’s metaphor for how alone Israel would be if God abandoned it.

  But Prime Minister Begin, Ariel Sharon, who had recently been promoted to minister of defense, and IDF chief of staff Rafael Eitan rejected every argument against the mission. They subscribed to the opinion of Admoni and other top intelligence officials that the reactor should be attacked as soon as possible, before it became “hot,” in order to avoid the horrific humanitarian disaster that would take place in the event of a nuclear radiation leak. At the New Era forum, the physicist and officer Dr. Ofek repeatedly insisted that in order to ensure the total destruction of the reactor, one objective had to be achieved: “Enough explosives to wreck the internal pool in which the uranium rods were to be immersed.”

  On June 7, at four o’clock in the afternoon, eight F-16 planes took off from the Etzion base, in Israeli-occupied Sinai, to attack the Osirak reactor. They were escorted by six F-15s to provide cover, and another sixty aircraft were deployed to support the operation—some of which circled in the air while others remained at the ready on the ground. They included Boeings adapted for midair refueling and for airborne command and control, Hawkeye planes to provide intelligence, and helicopters in case a plane went down and a rescue operation was necessary. The F-15s could handle any Iraqi MiG that might challenge the Israeli planes, and they also carried advanced electronic warfare systems to jam the radar of antiaircraft missile batteries on the ground.

  The route was six hundred miles long, crossing northern Saudi Arabia and the south of Jordan. The pilots flew very low, less than three hundred feet above the ground, in order to avoid Jordanian, Saudi, and Iraqi radar.

  The planes reached the target toward sundown, at about 5:30 P.M. The eight F-16s climbed to an altitude of one thousand feet, executed a roll maneuver, and released their bombs at an angle of thirty-five degrees. One after the other, they dropped two one-ton bombs each on the concrete dome of the reactor. Half of the bombs were set to explode on contact, and the other half would go off only after they had burrowed deep into the structure. Seven of the eight pilots hit the target, and twelve of the sixteen bombs penetrated the dome. Ten Iraqi soldiers and one French technician were killed as well.

  The Iraqis were taken completely by surprise. Not one missile was fired at the attacking planes, and only sporadic, harmless antiaircraft fire was aimed at them on their way back. All the planes made it safely home to base. To this day, they bear an image of the reactor on their nose, along with the circles that represent planes downed in combat.

  By midnight, the video footage taken by the airborne cameras had been analyzed, documenting the huge damage done to the reactor. At 3 A.M., Unit 8200’s Apocalypse Team intercepted a phone call made by one of the engineers describing an inspection of the bombed-out site in darkness. The engineer had looked for the pool, the critical part at the heart of the structure, but, with the help of his flashlight, he found only “chunks of blasted concrete covered by the water”—the sections of the dome that had collapsed inward. In the “immediate intelligence survey” that was distributed to the top government officials and heads of the intelligence community, AMAN confirmed that the reactor pool had been irreparably damaged and that “the reactor has been totally destroyed.”

  Before the attack, the intelligence community had recommended that Israel not claim responsibility. They believed that without an embarrassing public humiliation, Saddam would not feel pressure to stage a counterattack on Israel. He would have room to maneuver.

  In the end, however, Begin decided otherwise. The bombing raid had been perfectly executed, Iraq’s reactor left in smoldering ruins, and Saddam’s nuclear ambitions perhaps permanently stalled. Begin wanted to acknowledge those facts, even to boast of them. He had a keen sense of the mood of the Israeli public. In a speech in the Knesset, he equated Saddam with Hitler, and the perils of a nuclear Iraq with the Nazis’ Final Solution. “What could we have done against such a terrible danger?” he asked.

  “This country and its people would have been annihilated. Another Holocaust would have happened in the history of the Jewish people.”

  Saddam delivered a speech of his own in private to the leadership of the Baath Party. “It is painful,” he admitted with a sigh, referring to the bombing, “because this is a dear fruit that we labored very hard to harvest, one of the fruits of the revolution and one for which we have exerted tremendous efforts politically, scientifically, economically for a long period of time.”

  But he quickly moved into his customary
pugnacious tone, cursing the “Zionist entity” and Menachem Begin.

  Saddam then continued: “Begin and others have to realize that what they call preemptive strikes, which aim to prevent the advancement and rise of the Arab nation, and prevent it from using science and technology, will not prevent the Arab nation from moving toward its goals, and this method of preemptive strikes will not provide the Jews with the security of which he is speaking.”

  Three weeks later, Begin celebrated again, this time with a victory in the general election.

  The Mossad and the IDF were also triumphant over the success of the operation and what they saw as the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear project. They relegated Iraq to the bottom of the list of intelligence priorities.

  —

  BUT SADDAM’S REACTION TO the bombing of the reactor in Baghdad was precisely the opposite of what Israeli intelligence had expected.

  “Saddam under pressure…becomes more aggressive and becomes more determined,” said Dr. Hamza. “So the $400 million project became a $10 billion project and the four hundred scientists became seven thousand.”

  Saddam issued orders for a major effort to be invested in any and all scientific paths that could lead him in the shortest possible time to the acquisition of an atomic bomb, and the means for delivering it to a target. Very quickly, he found Western companies that were ready to supply him—in exchange for vast sums of money—equipment and raw materials that, while ostensibly for civilian purposes, could also be applied to military ends for the development of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons of mass destruction.

  Israel uncovered only small traces of these efforts. One plan it did uncover was the Condor project, a joint Iraqi, Egyptian, and Argentinean effort to develop missiles of various types. A large amount of information about the project was obtained and conveyed to Israel by Mossad agents in the German companies involved in the project and in Argentina’s scientific world, as well as by Jonathan Pollard, the spy working for Israel deep inside an American intelligence agency. The Mossad began torching the offices of the European companies involved, and systematically terrorizing the scientists, in a manner similar to the way the German rocket scientists in Egypt had been intimidated in the 1960s. They received anonymous phone calls telling them, “If you don’t desist immediately, we’ll kill you and your family.”