Raid on the Sun(16)

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.