Fearing more strikes, the following week France and Italy ordered the two hundred techs and engineers employed at al-Tuwaitha to evacuate immediately. Mossad reported that the workers, who lived with their families at a separate compound away from the center, were packing up and heading for home. By November, Mossad was reporting that work at Osirak had come to a complete halt. Khidhir Hamza and his administrative colleagues continued to come to work at al-Tuwaitha, but the constant activity around the reactor, the buzz and comings and goings of the construction crews and the nuclear techs, had all but disappeared.
With the immediate threat of enriched uranium production over—at least for the time being—Begin, under pressure by Saguy and Hofi, called off the mission.
Raz and the F-16 pilots continued training, however. None of the pilots knew what the mission was, let alone Begin’s decision to postpone it. But details were beginning to be revealed. For the first time, Raz informed the pilots of the kind of ordnance they would be carrying: two 2,000-pound dumb bombs. Because of the sensitive placement of the target, he told them, carpet-bombing was out.
“It will be a visual drop. You will need perfect accuracy,” Raz said. “The target is heavily defended by multiple AAA emplacements and SAM-6s.”
The men would have to perform pinpoint targeting while avoiding withering AAA fire.
Flying over the desolate Negev, Raz’s squadron practiced individually at first, diving at between 35 and 40 degrees. The pilots used BDUs, thirty-three-pound dummy bombs that exploded with white phosphorous smoke so pilots and ground personnel could mark the accuracy of the drops. For targets the IAF used painted circles on the ground and, later, old Sherman tanks. To approximate the huge dome of Osirak, Ivry’s command later had the F-16s practice diving at a huge, secret IAF radar dome located in the Negev, though the pilots were not told why they were practicing bombing an Israeli radar dish. The squadron also made several flights dropping live MK-84s on desert targets so they could experience the shock waves and the extent of the frag pattern.
Targeting demanded absolute concentration. The pilot had to fly dangerously low to the ground, constantly looking for unmapped peaks and outcroppings, or even telephone wires, next pop up to ten thousand feet, nearing the speed of sound, and then dive on the target, switching on the weapons system, all the while checking the overhead HUD and being careful to line up the bombsight with the target. After release, turning radically, the pilot would blast off into the ether like a bat out of hell, breaking the sound barrier and streaking to the safety of high altitude, praying that a SAM was not behind him, trailing the heat of the afterburners to soar literally straight up his tailpipe.
Falk thought of it as the “moment of truth.” The flying, the flesh-flattening Gs of right-angle turns, the diving, evading—all the air acrobatics—came to him naturally, as smoothly and easily as an opening aria came in the silence to the mind of a Mozart. But bombing was something else. It was the payoff, the entire point of the mission. To miss, to fail in front of your fellow pilots, your peers, was devastating. You failed yourself, your team.
Early on in training, Falk missed a target during a practice run. He felt so bad, he did not even want to land. He wished he could keep on flying . . . just disappear. Instead, he had to land, trudge to the briefing room, and explain why he had missed.
To make the training as close to real time as possible, the mission team conducted combat games, with the F-16 squadron the Blue Team and a wing of F-15s, standing in for Iraqi MiGs, the Red Team. During the bombing runs the Red Team would try to intercept members of the Blue Team, forcing them to evade and then begin targeting. In real life, over Osirak, the pilots would not have enough fuel to engage in a dogfight and then expect to make the return trip home. A quick evasion was their only hope of completing the mission and returning to base.
While the pilots practiced targeting, the operational team worked out the details of the bombing run. Precision bombing, or pinpoint targeting, was a fairly sophisticated technical undertaking, necessitating exact mathematical calculations and modelings. The two crucial elements were the IP, or initial point, and pop-up. The IP was the exact agreed-upon location, usually some three or four miles from the target, at which the aircraft would begin its climb. The climb was called pop-up. Bombing from a flat approach was out of the question; a bomb released at almost the horizon line would ricochet off the concrete dome. Instead, the pilots would pop up—that is, pull the nose of the plane up, hit the afterburners, and climb to an altitude of between 8,000 and 10,000 feet in order to begin an angled dive at about 30 degrees.