Back in Washington, after the NRC reps had time to think things over, the three men realized they had all noticed the same thing. As they put it in a follow-up memo drafted about the meeting: “Because of a lack of real interest in underground siting as a protective measure against sabotage, it was unclear whether the Israelis were interested in defending their own plants or destroying someone else’s.”
Curiously, the NRC was not the only U.S. department suddenly having second thoughts about its dealings with Israel in the closing days of 1980. As Ronald Reagan became president-elect in November and William J. Casey prepared to take over the reins of the Central Intelligence Agency from Stansfield Turner, Langley (CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia) began to hear disturbing rumors about Israel possibly compromising one of the nation’s most jealously guarded assets.
To gather intelligence on Osirak, Mossad and IDF had been forced to rely on grainy ground-level photos secreted out of Iraq, the blueprints obtained by the Paris station, and HUMINT, human intelligence, gleaned by agents in Paris and Baghdad. Still, IAF had no comprehensive, big-picture surveillance of the entire facility or its environs. The service was forced to rely on old, sometimes outdated, maps and charts or, worse, on a subject’s description of the area. Israel had no spy satellites orbiting the earth, snapping photographs of foreign bases and military installations hidden deep within the borders of its enemies. The nation had neither the budget nor the technology for such a sophisticated network.
But the United States did.
It was known as KH-11, the National Security Administration’s supersecret, supersophisticated reconnaissance satellite. Launched December 19, 1976, KH-11 represented a stunning leap forward in technology—a sixty-four-foot-long satellite orbiting hundreds of miles above the earth, circling the globe every ninety-six minutes, relaying back high-resolution, digitally enhanced, real-time photographs so clear one could make out parked cars on the ground. As a reward, or more appropriately a carrot, for Menachem Begin’s cooperation with Anwar Sadat at the Camp David summit, President Carter had granted Israel access to the internationally coveted KH-11 photographs in March 1979. Britain, which had been denied first-generation KH-11 intelligence because of a suspected leak in its communications intelligence establishment, was outraged that Israel was granted such access. The many U.S. defense and intelligence agencies that found they now had to vie with Israel for orbiting time were incensed as well. Israeli access would disrupt the delicate scheduling times that had been diplomatically hammered out between the various agencies over the years. Someone was going to be squeezed.
In Israel, access to KH-11 was seen as a monumental turnaround. For years during the Cold War, Mossad and the CIA had shared virtually all Middle East intelligence. So entwined were the agencies that in many respects the Israelis considered themselves virtual partners with the CIA. All that changed in 1977, when Stansfield Turner had severely curtailed the agency’s liaison with Mossad. Convinced that the men in Carter’s administration were naïve and anti-Semitic, Israel had responded in kind, cutting off its flow of intelligence about Africa and the Middle East.
Even now the Carter administration had put restrictions on Israel’s KH-11 access. Israel could receive only I&W, intelligence and warning—that is, satellite photos depicting military activity such as troop movements or artillery placement occurring one hundred miles inside the borders of its Arab neighbors: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. It could not have regional surveillance of the entire Middle East. And certainly not Iraq. The idea was to provide Israel with defensive intelligence only. Any information that could be used to plan preemptive strikes was forbidden. So a routine had been established over the months. The military attaché at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., would drive across the Potomac bridge to the Pentagon and, in an office under the direction of the Defense Intelligence Agency, pick up NSA’s specially processed and carefully edited satellite photographs. These were then flown by diplomatic pouch to Tel Aviv where they were analyzed at the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.
From the beginning of the arrangement, longtime veterans of the American intelligence service anticipated that Israel would do everything it could to circumvent the restrictions. The Israelis would not disappoint them.
For starters, the agreement allowed Israel to make requests for special satellite intelligence. These would be handled on a case-by-case basis. Immediately the Israelis argued that the agreement did not pertain to common enemies of the U.S. and began pressuring NSA for full and unfettered access to all intelligence regarding the Soviet union , including its supply lines into Iraq and Soviet training of Iraqi troops in western Iraq. The CIA turned those requests down. But Israel kept up the pressure. Mossad and the IDF had many friends deep within the agency. To these sympathetic ears they argued that Israel had to see all essential intelligence dealing with the Middle East, and only Israelis could know what was important to Israel. The Reagan administration had been a boon to the Israelis. The administration and CIA director Casey were far more sympathetic to Israel’s arguments. To ensure that nothing was overlooked, Casey early in his tenure provided the Israeli liaison officer with a private office at Langley so Israel could have direct access to the intelligence officers processing real-time KH-11 imagery.