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.