French gendarmes dismissed the claim. For one thing, the explosives work had been too professional. And there was no history of the group. But the police had little else to point to, as there were few witnesses, no suspects, and vague motives. With few facts and French law enforcement refusing to comment further, the Paris media were left to speculate wildly about what had happened. France Soir maintained that “extreme leftists” had carried out the sabotage. Le Matin chose the Palestinians; the weekly Le Point laid it at the feet of the FBI. And, of course, everyone considered Israel and the Mossad. But where was the proof?
Back in Tel Aviv, Yitzhak Hofi smiled as he read the various media accounts, especially Le Monde’s exclusive report on the genesis of the mysterious, militant ecoterrorists, Le Groupe des Ecologistes Français. According to ex-Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky, Hofi was especially fond of that article: after all, it was he who had personally made up the name of the “terrorist” group.
The sabotage at La Seyne-sur-Mer yielded an unexpected dividend for Israel. Media attention once again had focused the spotlight on France’s controversial nuclear partnership with Iraq. Why was France helping an arguably rogue nation like Iraq achieve nuclear capability? And what did Iraq, floating on a sea of oil, need with a nuclear reactor? To blunt the growing international grumbling, Chirac announced that France would supply Iraq with only a low-grade uranium not suitable for weapons use, so-called caramelized uranium. Instead of the enriched weapons-grade U235 uranium promised in the original deal, the caramelized uranium was less than 40 percent pure and, though radioactive enough to power a reactor, it was unsuitable for the production of plutonium.
In Iraq, the bombing sent a chill through the scientists working at the Nuclear Research Center. Unlike the French, Khidhir Hamza and his colleagues had no illusions about the identity of the saboteurs: everyone suspected immediately the hand of the Israelis. The notion that Mossad’s deadly eyes had been turned on them caused a great deal of anxiety. Who could say whether the scientists themselves would be the next target? In the meantime, work went on as before. The Seyne-sur-Mer explosion delayed the installation of the cores for several months, an annoyance to be sure. But it had failed to destroy them, and construction at Osirak remained more or less on schedule.
Hofi and Mossad still had work to do.
In July 1979, just months after the explosion at La Seyne-sur-Mer, Iraqi president al-Bakr suddenly—and surprisingly—announced his retirement. Saddam Hussein immediately accepted the presidency. He was supreme leader, president of the Revolutionary Council and the Ba’th Party, and head of the army for life. The new title seemed to fill Hussein with a renewed viciousness.
Soon after followed the infamous Night of the Long Knives. The story had started as only a rumor whispered among Baghdad’s party faithful until a videotape of the unbelievable event surfaced and circulated among the upper classes. Using the pretense of an attempted Shi’ite assassination of his longtime deputy Tariq Aziz, Saddam had ordered a special assembly, calling together hundreds of deputies, ministers, and members of his ruling Ba’th council. At the grand convocation, Hussein took the podium and announced that the government had been betrayed. As he spoke, security guards and agents of the Ba’th Party’s dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat, moved to seal off all the doors in the room. Then, one by one, sixty deputies and ministers, mostly Shi’ite, were called by name to the podium to confess to the room their treason and then, by way of apology, to recite the Ba’th Party oath: “One Arab nation with a holy message. Unity, freedom, and socialism!” When the oath was finished, the bureaucrat, pale and shaking, was led out a side door to a patio, where he was shot to death on the spot. Soon bodies were piled high on the bloody terrazzo. To prove their loyalty, factotums and party hacks—some grandfathers in their sixties, shaking and physically ill—were forced to pull the trigger on their former friends. The scene was straight out of some Brueghelian vision of hell. On the videotape, which Saddam personally ordered to be recorded, the Great Uncle could be seen laughing as the frightened men were marched away to death or prison.
Cut off from normal people, sleeping in a different palace or bunker every night, always fearful of revenge by a survivor or a child of a murdered adversary, Hussein grew more paranoid and eccentric. To confuse enemies he used doubles, men who had undergone plastic surgery to look like him. On the rare occasion he went out to dinner—even at the exclusive private Hunting Club in Baghdad—Hussein’s security men would first storm the kitchen and then observe every step of the cooking process, checking for poisons. Obsessed with germs, like Howard Hughes and Hitler before him—Saddam allowed no one to touch him. If a caller forgot himself and tried to shake the Great Uncle’s hand, bodyguards would billy-club him to the ground before the outstretched hand could violate the Great Uncle. A guard stood duty outside his offices with a doctor’s penlight, checking noses and throats to ensure no one with a cold or the flu passed by.
Stories like these were making the scientists and engineers at Osirak increasingly paranoid themselves. But Saddam more or less left the nuclear scientists to their work. Then one day, in early December 1979, a caravan of black Mercedeses came racing down the road from the main gate at al-Tuwaitha and pulled up to the curb in front of Atomic Energy’s administrative offices. Men in black suits and armed with submachine guns emptied from the cars and quickly sealed off the building. German shepherd police dogs were led through the hallways, sniffing, straining at their leashes. It was obvious: the Great Uncle had come to visit.
Deputy director Abdul-Razzaq al-Hashimi watched nervously as security agents entered his offices and ordered him to round up his top scientists. He quickly obliged. The room soon filled with nuclear engineers, physicists, and directors, including eminent scientists Dr. Hussein al-Shahristani, Dr. Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, and Humam al-Ghafour. Khidhir Hamza had flown to New York days earlier to attend a United Nations nuclear energy conference, but he would hear the harrowing details when he returned.
Saddam Hussein, histrionically, strode into the room without preliminaries. Guards pulled the doors shut behind him.
“When are you going to deliver the plutonium?” he asked the assembled scientists straight out.
An awkward silence hung in the room.
“I said,” he repeated, “when are you going to deliver the plutonium?”
“Plutonium . . . for what?” AE’s director, al-Shahristani, finally replied.
Saddam looked at him, annoyed. “When will you deliver the plutonium for the bomb?”
“Bomb? We can’t make a bomb . . .” al-Shahristani almost stuttered. “Well, theoretically, we could, I suppose, if we had enough plutonium . . . but there are nuclear nonproliferation treaties . . .”
“Treaties are a matter for us to deal with,” Saddam cut him off. “You, as a scientist, should not be troubled by these things. You should be doing your job and not have these kinds of excuses.”
Hussein stared at the group of scientists, who all stared at the floor. Finally, he seemed to make up his mind about something, then turned and walked out the door.
The following day al-Shahristani was not at work. He was not seen again in Tammuz. In fact, as Hamza would learn later, he was jailed, first in Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad and then in Abu Ghraib prison outside the capital. Two days later Jaffar Jaffar was also picked up and jailed. When he returned from New York, Hamza was put temporarily in charge of the nuclear reactor program. Hamza had been let in on Hussein’s ultimate plans for the Nuclear Research Center years earlier in the front room of al-Mallah’s home, but by December 1979, few scientists working at Atomic Energy had any illusions about the real purpose of their work.
New equipment continued to arrive weekly. The Rome-based nuclear manufacturing firm SNIA Technit, following France’s lead, had sold Iraq a critical chemical reprocessing unit used to extract weapons-grade plutonium from spent uranium fuel rods. Iraq was meeting with West Germany and Brazil about importing uranium ore and
purchasing more nuclear reactors. A report by AMAN, the intelligence branch of the IDF, stated that one prospective deal between Iraq and Brazil called for the South American country to build nineteen nuclear reactors for Saddam.
Butrus Eben Halim was an unremarkable, henpecked, forty-two-year-old professional with no children and predictable habits. Every morning at the same time, at the same stop, he caught the same bus from Villejuif south of Paris to the train station at Gare Saint-Lazare Metro. The most interesting thing about him was that he was an Iraqi scientist working at the French nuclear reactor at Sarcelles. It was no surprise then that Halim was immediately intrigued by a rakish Englishman named Jack Donovan, who raced around Paris in a red Ferrari with an ever-present blonde in the passenger seat. Halim noticed him driving by the Villejuif bus stop on numerous occasions. So it was natural that one day, when the Englishman pulled up to the curb, asking if Halim had seen a blond woman waiting at the bus stop, the Iraqi would quickly fall to his charms. The two men struck up a conversation, and Donovan offered Halim a ride to the train station. By the time he had dropped Halim at the Gare Saint-Lazare station, Donovan had begun a friendship with the impressionable Iraqi.
It was exactly what Mossad’s Paris station head, David Arbel, had counted on. Not long after Arbel, a distinguished, urbane man with white hair and impeccable manners, received the Tsomet request to find an Iraqi recruit, a sayanim (sympathetic Jewish volunteer) working in personnel at Sarcelles provided Mossad with a photocopied list of the names of all Iraqi scientists working at the plant. The personnel list had been double-coded at the Mossad station, located in the heavily reinforced basement of Israel’s Paris embassy, using a system that ascribes each phonetic sound of a word a corresponding number. For instance, the sound “ah” in the word about might be a “2,” the sound “bout” a “3.” Thus, about would be 23. The message was then sent encrypted to the research departments at Mossad and AMAN. None of the nondescript scientists at Sarcelles registered a hit on the intelligence computers, so Halim was targeted in the spring of 1978 as a “hit of convenience,” and a yarid (team of break-in, bugging, and security specialists) was assigned to work him.
A field officer, or katsa, observed him for a week, at first using “motionless following,” that is, watching Halim in stages rather than tagging him. Meanwhile, a Shicklut team broke in and bugged his apartment with listening devices in order to learn about his personal life and piece together a profile. And, of course, to ensure that he was not under surveillance by another organization. The yarid would need as much information as possible, for this operation had to be a “cold approach,” and recruiting foreign nationals was delicate work.
According to Victor Ostrovsky, the approach was made in August by an experienced field agent he identified as “Ran S.” It was Ran, Ostrovsky said, who posed as the rich and successful entrepreneur “Donovan,” involved in business from London to Libya. A Mossad phone tap had revealed that Halim’s wife Samira was returning to Iraq to visit relatives for the fall. Donovan took advantage of Halim’s bachelor status to invite him to dinner and walks along the Champs-Elysées. He took him to fine bistros and clubs and to his luxurious hotel suite at the Sofitel Bourbon. They smoked cigars and drank fine wine, something that, as a Muslim, Halim was not used to. But under his new friend’s influence, Halim loosened up and began to enjoy himself. One night after some heavy drinking, Donovan fixed the two of them up with some girls, then, making a phony excuse, left Halim behind with a young French prostitute, Marie-Claude Magalle, who was frequently employed by the Mossad for such jobs, though she had no idea that the organization hiring her was in reality the Israeli secret service.
Finally one night, Donovan invited Halim along on his latest business deal: a scheme to supposedly buy old shipping containers and then resell them to African nations to be used as temporary housing and storage. As Donovan feigned to close the transaction, Halim, aided by some obvious staging by the katsas, noticed that the bottoms of some of the containers were badly rusted. He pointed the damage out to Donovan, who then finagled a discount out of the sellers. When the deal was completed, Donovan celebrated by giving his shocked but grateful new friend a thousand dollars for his help. Though Halim, of course, could not know it, Ran was gradually binding the Iraqi scientist to him using the three time-tested hooks of the spy trade: sex, money, and emotional motivation—in Halim’s case, excitement and friendship. He was now ready for the trap, for some real spy business, some tachless.
One night, some five months after they had met, Halim was having dinner with Donovan and noticed his English friend seemed down. Donovan explained that he was having trouble with a huge deal: he had contracted with a German company to sell pneumatic tubes for shipping radioactive medical materials. The tubes were supposed to have been inspected by an English scientist, but he had disappeared. And now it looked like the deal would, too. Halim, taking the bait, spoke up.
“I can do it. I am a nuclear scientist.”
Surprised, Donovan gratefully accepted his help. The next morning he flew them both to Amsterdam to meet the German businessmen, a Mossad case officer and an Israeli nuclear engineer, according to Ostrovsky, posing as “Mr. Itsik” and “Mr. Goldstein.” After successfully concluding their business, all four went out to dinner. Saying he had to make a business call, Donovan excused himself from the table. Goldstein and Itsik took the opportunity to begin casually querying Halim about his relationship with Donovan and about his work. When Halim divulged that he was working on the Iraqi nuclear project, the two businessmen were taken aback. In an incredible coincidence, they told him, they were at present working on a deal to sell nuclear power plants to Third World nations.
“Your project would make a perfect model for us to use to sell these people,” Itsik remarked. “We could all make a fortune.”
He leaned closer across the table to Halim. “But we have to keep this between us. Donovan will just want a piece of the action.”
Halim was reluctant to supply any plant materials at first, but the two agents worked on him. In the end they convinced him that he had nothing to lose. After all, they only wanted a model of the plant. Nuclear reactors were not exactly state secrets, were they? Donovan paid Halim eight thousand dollars for his services and returned to England. As agreed, Halim went back to work at Sarcelles and provided his new partners with a layout of the nuclear plant at al-Tuwaitha.
The plant outline of al-Tuwaitha showed the schematic of Osirak, the chemical reprocessing plant, the smaller Isis reactor, the administration buildings, and an underground tunnel leading off the main reactor used to channel off free neutrons for further experiments. Paris head Arbel sent the plans back to Hofi in Tel Aviv by armed carrier. There the plans were pored over by IDF intelligence and the IAF, including Ivry. But AMAN and the IDF needed more information. Ran, it was decided, would stay out of the picture while Halim’s new handlers, the Germans, would use him as a “lead” to recruit another more senior scientist or administrator.
Halim was paid generously, but his new friends were much pushier than Donovan. They began demanding more details about the building of the reactor: its capacity, a timetable of shipments. Where were the parts stored before shipping? What was the date Osirak would go “hot”? Did Iraq have other nuclear facilities? Increasingly worried, Halim struggled to supply the men with answers to their endless questions. The fact was, Halim was too afraid not to. Something about these men was far too menacing for them to be simply businessmen. What had he gotten himself into? the Iraqi chided himself. A few weeks later Halim read in the French papers about the mysterious explosion at La Seyne-sur-Mer. Halim realized immediately that he had passed on the exact information about the date and place from where the cores would be shipped: information that the two Germans had been so interested in the previous month. The final straw came when the Germans asked, or rather demanded, that he introduce them to Yahia al-Meshad.
Meshad, an Egyptian-born senior nuclear physicist, had
come to al-Tuwaitha from Alexandria University. He was in his mid-forties, dark and stocky, with a finely honed sense of irony and deadpan style of humor. By 1980, many of the young Iraqi scientists who had gone abroad to study were refusing to return to Iraq, especially the ones in the United States, where they began applying for asylum or appealing to the State Department. So Meshad, who had a reputation for brilliance and thoroughness, was considered quite a catch at the Nuclear Research Center, where he began working under Khidhir Hamza.
Hamza began to use Meshad as a liaison with the French engineers, sending him regularly to the Sarcelles nuclear plant to inspect the manufacturing of Iraqi reactor parts and equipment. When Chirac announced that France was going back on their deal and supplying Iraq with lower-grade caramelized uranium, Hamza assigned Meshad the task of ensuring that only the enriched U235 was sent to al-Tuwaitha. Weapons-grade uranium had to be 93 percent enriched. Caramelized uranium was enriched far below the enrichment required to extract plutonium. The substitute low-grade would be worthless to Iraq’s atomic bomb program. Mossad was not certain how Hussein was going to respond to the new French dictum. Hofi, who opposed a military raid on Osirak, was especialy anxious to know if Iraq would accept the caramelized uranium. If so, then the threat posed by Osirak would be considerably less and perhaps Begin could be argued out of a military attack. The “Germans” were assigned to get the information out of Meshad—one way or another.
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