Raid on the Sun(44)
Was it a matter of ego or, as Spector told himself, a conviction that a leader’s place was in the line of fire with his men? Or was it perhaps something less conscious—ego, an inability to let go, to miss the spotlight? Not even Spector knew the answer to that. Whatever the case, it was too late to turn back.
By March 1981, Israel received word that the U.S. Department of Defense had agreed to sell the IAF twelve F-16 centerline fuel tanks. Operations recalculated all the data and factored in the extra fuel accorded by the centerline tanks. When the engineers were done crunching the numbers, the news was not good. At an average airspeed of 331 knots, flying fifty meters above the ground, given the prevailing temperatures, humidity, and wind patterns of the route and taking into account all the extra weight of the fuel itself, including the two external wing tanks and the centerline tank, Operations calculated that the Pratt & Whitney single engines would burn 4,940 pounds of fuel an hour. Factoring in the radical fuel intake when the afterburners were used during takeoff, pop-up, and escape, the operational engineers estimated that by the time the pilots reached the Euphrates River, their aircraft would have already burned through 9,000 pounds of fuel. That left only 6,000 pounds of fuel to get home on—if there were no intercepts or evasions. Indeed, during test flights the pilots were coming up short some forty to sixty miles.
Somehow they had to find another sixty miles—this after already virtually stripping the planes clean. The support team checked and rechecked their modelings, scanned the performance specs. In the end they came up with two last-ditch ideas—both risky. The first was to jettison the wing-mounted fuel pans over the desert as soon as they were empty. That would lighten the planes by several hundred pounds, cut down the drag caused by the hanging tanks, and save as much as ten minutes’ flying time. Indeed, General Dynamics had designed the external fuel pans, which looked a lot like bombs themselves, to be released from inside the cockpit. But there was still a danger. The fuel pans hung beneath the wings next to the two-thousand-pound bombs. The tanks and their wing clips were not designed to be released while the aircraft was carrying ordnance. There was a real risk that the pans, let loose at three-hundred-plus knots an hour, could easily collide with the bombs, damaging their release clips or, worse, causing the bombs to detonate. The pans could also be caught in the updraft and flip up and over the wings, causing damage to the wing flaps.
As weapons officer, Katz was particularly concerned about the idea of jettisoning the external tanks so close to the ordnance. He called the chief design engineer at General Dynamics in San Diego and asked him what he thought the chances were for dumping the fuel pans in flight while fully armed. The engineer rechecked the design specifications and told Katz he thought they could get away with dropping the tanks if they kept their airspeed under four hundred knots. The issue was settled: the wing pans would be dumped over the Saudi desert.
The second idea was to do a “hot refueling” on the runway at Etzion. With the engines running, spewing hot streams of jet exhaust, the F-16s’ tanks would be topped off on the runway by fuel trucks before takeoff, replacing the hundreds of gallons of jet fuel burned while conducting checkoffs and taxiing. It was a dangerous procedure, with a risk of the hot exhaust igniting the fuel and exploding the tanker trucks or the F-16s. Once again the book said it could not be done. They would do it anyway.
By the end of March, Mossad reported to Begin that the foreign workers were returning to al-Tuwaitha and building had resumed at Osirak. France and Italy decided the Iran-Iraq War was likely to drag on for years, bogged down on the border in World War I–style trench warfare. The likelihood of another Iranian air strike on al-Tuwaitha was minimal.
Begin wanted the air strike back on and began lobbying the ministers for final backing. Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin was still very much on the fence, even though he had not challenged Begin outright at the October meeting. Taking no chances this time, Begin did behind-the-scenes arm-twisting. Yadin had been a member of the ’74 blue-ribbon panel chosen to investigate the intelligence failings that had allowed the Israeli military to be taken by surprise in the opening days of the Yom Kippur War. At that time he had been supplied with intelligence material that had been skewed and doctored. Now, for those reasons, Yadin did not trust the military and Mossad intelligence estimates of Osirak. He insisted on seeing the raw data, the original classified reports from the field agents. In early March, Begin arranged for Chief of Staff Eitan to meet secretly with Yadin and show him the raw data. At the meeting, Eitan presented Yadin with the classified Mossad reports and photographs, including the top-secret KH-11 satellite shots that clearly documented the return of the foreign techs to al-Tuwaitha and the resumption of the construction work. By the end of the meeting Yadin agreed to withdraw his opposition to the raid.