Raz smiled. “Why don’t you explain that, Doobi.”
The room went quiet, waiting for this momentous intelligence.
Looking sheepish, Yaffe told the room about the bet he and Ramon had made the night before the attack. Ilan was only reminding Yaffe that he owed him a dinner at the Alhambra Restaurant. The crowd broke into a cheer. Ivry and Eitan both demanded invitations. Finally, toward midnight, almost punch-drunk from exhaustion and spent adrenaline, the eight pilots climbed aboard the prop plane for the final trip home to Ramat David—and a few days of rest. The next day, Monday, was a national holiday, Shavuot, a celebration of the Feast of the Pentecost, the giving of the law to Moses and the Jewish people by God. It was one of the most popular holidays of the year, a summer festival that combined the feel of the United States’ Fourth of July and Halloween, a day of picnics, concerts, beach cookouts, and hayrides.
The holiday was one of Katz’s favorites. As he made ready for sleep that night, he thought for a moment how strange it was that less than twelve hours ago he had wondered briefly if he would ever celebrate that holiday again.
Richard V. Allen, President Reagan’s head of the National Security Administration, was at home outside Alexandria, Virginia, Sunday afternoon, relaxing on the sundeck, drinking iced tea and flipping through the weekend homework of position papers, memos, and classified reports when the telephone rang. A White House aide in the Situation Room, the round-the-clock communications center located in the basement of the West Wing, reported that Israel had just informed the State Department that its air force had bombed the Iraqi nuclear plant at al-Tuwaitha.
“When?” Allen asked.
“About five-thirty, six o’clock their time.”
Allen quickly rang off and was patched through to President Reagan, who was spending the weekend at his favorite retreat, Camp David, deep in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. The officer on duty told Allen that President Reagan was just boarding the White House helicopter to return to Washington.
“Better get him off,” Allen instructed.
A minute later Reagan was on the telephone. Allen could hear the whump-whump of helicopter blades rotating in the background.
“Yes?” Reagan said.
“Mr. President, the Israelis just took out a nuclear reactor in Iraq with F-16s,” Allen said.
“What do you know about it?”
“Nothing, sir. I’m waiting for a report.”
“Why do you suppose they did it?” Reagan asked, then, not waiting for a response, answered the question himself. “Well,” he shrugged, “boys will be boys.”
If nonplussed, Reagan’s response was not surprising. The president had been fiercely pro-Israel and a staunch foe of anti-Semitism his entire professional life, dating back to his days as a Hollywood liberal. An FBI dossier on Ronald Reagan from the post–World War II years recounted an episode at a Hollywood party when Reagan nearly came to blows with a guest who had accused the Jews of war profiteering. His support for Israel was one of the bedrock convictions that survived Reagan’s political transformation from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican during the 1950s. It was made all the stronger by what even his friends confessed was a piecemeal understanding of the complex history of the Middle East. He only knew that Israel’s interests were the United States’ interests. The president’s well-known loyalty to Israel did not extend to every member of his administration, however.
The Israelis’ audacious military attack sent shock waves from the White House to Foggy Bottom and across the Potomac to the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was given a rundown of the raid at Defense’s Monday morning meeting held at the Pentagon. Weinberger had mixed feelings about the attack. On the one hand he was generally sympathetic to Israel and her security needs. Nonetheless, he questioned the wisdom of this unilateral action without prior notification to the United States and in direct violation of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, which stipulated that all U.S.-supplied weaponry be used for defensive purposes only. Even more troubling was how the other Arab nations would respond. The United States was selling a tremendous amount of military hardware to nearly all the countries in the region, including Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. In fact, Saudi Arabia would quickly argue that Israel’s violation of its airspace during the mission justified extending the sale to the sheikh of two more AWACS. Every one of these countries was restricted by the same conditions of sale. Weinberger worried that if the United States failed to sanction Israel, would that send a message to the Arab states that they, too, could now use their American-supplied arms to attack Israel—or one another?