Raid on the Sun(13)
Hofi’s stubborn, mulish eyes clamped on Rabin.
“You run a much greater danger of alienating America than of destroying Iraq’s reactor,” he announced.
“What help will they be if he creates an atomic bomb?” Ivry countered.
Voices grew louder around the room. Though nothing compared to the Israeli Knesset, where parliamentarians routinely screamed at one another at the top of their lungs, hurling insults and threats, the meeting was nonetheless becoming tense and uncomfortable. These men had known and fought beside one another, literally in the trenches, for decades. But the critical nature of the “Arab nuclear question” and how to deal with it had profound and imponderable ramifications—and it cut to the bone of national survival.
The present government, it became immediately clear, was dangerously divided over how to handle Iraq’s nuclear threat. Indeed, Hofi found himself ruling a house divided at Mossad. Most of his department heads supported a raid. Since when, they observed, did Israel care what Europe thought of its policies? Where were their “friends” in ’67 and ’73? David Biran, the head of Tsomet, Mossad’s recruiting department, was already moving ahead with preparations for some kind of intervention by force at Osirak and had ordered the Paris station to find an Iraqi candidate working at France’s Sarcelles nuclear facility, which was overseeing the construction of the reactor, whom they could recruit . . . or compromise.
Shocking the cabinet, the usually hawkish, shoot-from-the-hip prime minister, his shiny bald head and steely black eyes flashing around the table, announced he would not approve any military operation unless he had 100 percent backing of the entire cabinet. Rabin’s election in 1974 had been partially the result of the continuing ideological temblors shaking Israeli politics ever since the trauma of the ’73 Yom Kippur War, when Israel, after fatally misreading Arab troop movements along its borders, found itself in danger of being overrun by Syrian forces during the first three days of fighting. Begin, the hard-line general and infamous Irgun head, had been elected to ensure that such a disaster never happened again. But the kind of raid the cabinet was now contemplating, the first ever on a nuclear reactor, was far too risky, the stakes way too high to go it alone. Begin would need all the political cover he could get.
He ordered the two military chiefs, Eitan and Ivry, to begin drawing up contingency plans. In the meantime, Mossad and military intelligence would ascertain when the reactor would go “hot.”
But Ivry still worried.
“If we are to wait,” he pronounced, cocking an eyebrow at Hofi, “we have to slow things down a bit.”
Begin agreed. They couldn’t just sit around and do nothing.
Though he opposed striking al-Tuwaitha, the crotchety Mossad chief was nothing if not a loyal soldier. Hofi smiled thinly at the group.
“Well, we may have one or two ideas.”
SUNDAY, JUNE 7, 1981
1455 HOURS: T-MINUS 1:06
ETZION AFB, ISRAELI-OCCUPIED SINAI PENINSULA
The thunderous roar of eight Pratt & Whitney jet engines firing up inside the cavernous underground hangar vibrated all the way through the crew chief’s safety earmuffs, seeming to make the foam-rubber-lined earphones jump right off his skull. The F-16 maintenance chief swore he could actually see the sound waves rolling out of the exhaust burners. He glanced up at the cockpit of No. 106. Through the glass canopy the pilot gave him a thumbs-up. He was ready to taxi up the ramp to the runway for takeoff position. Where the pilots were going, the warrant officer had no idea. This was a “black operation,” conducted in complete secrecy. The entire base had been locked down like a prison since Friday. All flight and support crews had been warned by security officers not to talk to anyone and to ask no questions.
Now it was T-minus 1:05 and counting. Takeoff was 1600. The maintenance chief could feel a knot in his stomach. Something big was happening. He ducked under the wing on the three o’clock side for final preflight inspection. He had already rechecked the plane’s parachute fittings and affirmed that all the safety pins were pulled so the ejection seats were armed and ready. The rocket beneath each seat would shoot the pilots several hundred feet into the air above the aircraft in case of bailout. All the pilot had to do was pull the ejection handle. Now, the crew chief looked for hydraulic leaks, fuel leaks, damage to the fuselage. He checked the tire pressure and that the two-thousand-pound MK-84 gravity bomb was secured in its release clip and that the safety pin was still in place. He scanned the external fuel tank, hung between the bomb and the fuselage. The tank held an extra 370 gallons of fuel. He had not seen many external fuel pods. Nearly all IAF combat missions and patrols, even during hostilities, occurred within or just across Israel’s borders. Such a long-distance strike was rare—maybe a first. The warrant officer and the other crewmen could not help but guess where the pilots were going. Most thought deep inside Syria—or maybe Libya. He thought it would be east.