Recent intelligence by AMAN and Mossad reported that Isis, the smaller French “companion” reactor to Osirak, had been completed and was already hot. French scientists working at al-Tuwaitha interviewed by undercover Mossad katsas indicated that the main reactor would be fueled by July 1981—less than eighteen months away. Israel’s scientific experts predicted that Iraq could have an atomic bomb by 1985.
Ivry could almost feel the days peeling like fallen leaves off the calendar on the wall behind him, whittling down to the final day when Osiris would become hot and the game would be over. Hussein would soon after have the ability to destroy Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, literally with the flick of a switch, as the cliché went. And still Ivry had no approved plan and no green light from the cabinet to forestall this nightmare.
The general, working at his headquarters with a small, handpicked staff, had already discarded a half dozen plans. At first he had considered putting an insertion team into Iraq, using a combination of air transport and assault tactics similar to the commando raid at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport in 1976 that had freed the Palestinians’ hostages with a minimum of casualties. But there were too many negatives. For starters, maintaining longtime secrecy for such a complex mission, employing hundreds of men and multiple assets from all military branches, would be almost impossible. Next, the logistics were daunting. Transport planes would have no place to wait on-station during the operation. Flying six hundred miles to Baghdad, dropping off the assault team, returning to friendly borders to wait, and then flying back to Baghdad again for the extraction was obviously unworkable. Besides, the transport planes would need to be refueled, and the delicate operation of refueling over hostile territory in the unpredictable turbulence of hot desert air hundreds of miles from home was out of the question. Photographs showed that the Iraqis had reinforced the periphery of al-Tuwaitha with twenty-foot-high earthen revetments, ringed at the top by concrete and electrified wire fencing and antiaircraft gun towers, making a successful storming of the fences unlikely. Finally, the probability of men being captured in a ground assault was high, and Ivry refused to risk the certain barbaric treatment of his men at the hands of Iraqi security thugs.
Ivry’s decision was later validated once and for all with the fiasco of the U.S. rescue mission to free sixty-six embassy hostages in Tehran in 1980. The Delta Force raid was a night extraction, the teams flown by transport to a makeshift landing strip in the middle of the desert miles from the capital. Unfortunately, a sandstorm blew in out of nowhere—not uncommon in the region—blanketing the troops and throwing everything into confusion. Unable to maneuver in the heavy winds and zero visibility, one of the army choppers swept sideways into a plane and exploded, killing six commandos and the pilots immediately. The mission was aborted, the U.S. humbled and humiliated. Back in the States the disaster came to symbolize President Carter’s weakness. To Ivry, it was just a hard lesson learned.
“Too many things can go wrong,” he told Eitan.
Month after month Ivry and his staff computed and modeled, calculated and experimented, guessed and second-guessed. Again and again he found himself returning to an air attack. But there were many problems with such a mission as well. The first hurdle was deciding what planes to use. As Ivry and his command staff studied the options, it became apparent that each fighter in the IAF’s considerable arsenal carried a serious negative.
Popular since the Yom Kippur War, the single-engine A-4 Skyhawk and the Israeli-built Kfir were the country’s primary attack fighters. But both aircraft lacked sophisticated new radar and bombing systems, and neither had the range round-trip without refueling. The F-4 Phantom, a heavy-duty, twenty-year combat veteran that the United States had continually upgraded with modern equipment, carried PMGs, precision-guided missiles, an early-generation “smart” weapon whose accurate targeting was controlled from inside the plane and might be needed for such a raid. But the Phantom was bulky, hard to maneuver, and a gas guzzler. Moreover, it flew with a two-man crew, doubling the number of men who could be killed or captured with each plane.
The newest and most sophisticated of the fighters was the American F-15, with twin Pratt & Whitney F-100 engines and a look-down, shoot-down pulse Doppler radar, a highly sophisticated computerized radar that functioned by sending out continuous pulsing signals, which allowed pilots to lock on targets flying as low as twenty feet off the ground and still distinguish them from the “noise,” the confusing ambient signals emanating from the terrain below—a problem with older radar systems. Designed as an air-to-air fighter, the F-15 held the world record for altitude speed climb and had a lock-on target range of one hundred miles, the best in the world. General Avihu Ben-Nun, the northern Israel IAF commander at Tel-Nof Air Base, home of the F-15 wing and Israel’s top-secret nuclear-weapons-capable squadron, lobbied hard for using his planes, arguing that they were the IAF’s most sophisticated asset. Of course, such an important assignment would also confer great prestige and influence on Tel-Nof and Ben-Nun.