“Now I know why you’ve been working so hard all this time,” she whispered.
Raz was relieved that his wife finally knew, but like Katz, he wondered how word had gotten out. Who had leaked?
Two hours after Raful Eitan called to tell him the attack had been a success, Begin had phoned the United States ambassador to Israel, Samuel Lewis, and informed him that the Israeli Air Force had just bombed Iraq’s Tammuz nuclear reactor.
“You don’t say?” Lewis deadpanned. He then immediately telephoned the State Department in Washington, D.C., and relayed the news.
Begin was bound by honor and diplomacy to inform Israel’s closest ally of the attack. But Begin secretly hoped that the United States would break the announcement to the world, thereby implicitly involving itself in the attack and taking some of the heat off Israel. Moreover, the Israeli parliament, when informed of the raid, made Begin promise that no one in the government would talk about the mission unless word of it broke first in an outside source. But the prime minister was impatient to get the story out—first, because the raid had been an unqualified success; and second, because he wanted to take the offensive position to blunt the international outcry he knew would be forthcoming. In fact, he had already ordered his press secretary, Uri Porath, to draft a press release detailing the mission. All Monday morning the prime minister waited for news to break in the world press. But the Reagan administration had refused to bite. They were staying way away from this one.
Finally, around noon, Begin saw an opening. During a public debate in the Jordanian Parliament broadcast over the nation’s airwaves, the Jordanian prime minister accused Israeli planes of taking part in the Iran-Iraq war. The prime minister was not alluding to the attack on Osirak, since even Iraq was not sure at the time of the nationality of the fighter planes that had bombed al-Tuwaitha, but Begin heard what he wanted to hear: Israel was being named as the perpetrator of the air strike.
“Release the statement,” he ordered his press secretary.
Hours later there had still been no announcement. Begin, irate, called in Porath.
“Didn’t you release that statement?” he snapped.
“Yes, I called it in hours ago.”
Begin stormed to his telephone.
Just before three o’clock, Emmanuel Halprin received a phone call at his staff office at KOL YISRAEL, the Voice of Israel. The call was from his uncle, Menachem Begin.
“Yes, Uncle?” Halprin answered dubiously, wondering what was going on.
“Did you receive a press statement from my office this afternoon?” Begin snapped.
“Well . . .”
In fact, Halprin had been puzzling over a bizarre “press release” talking about a bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which had been dictated over the phone to the radio station earlier, supposedly from the prime minister’s office. Because of the Shavuot holiday, the radio station had only a skeleton crew. The announcement sounded too incredible. Maybe the receptionist had been taken in by a prankster. Halprin had decided to hold it.
“We thought it was a hoax,” Emmanuel said. “Is it real?”
“Yes, dammit,” Begin snorted. “Get it broadcast. Now!”
Emmanuel hung up the phone and immediately walked the statement into the announcer’s booth. Programming was interrupted for a special announcement: “The Israel Air Force yesterday attacked and destroyed completely the Osirak nuclear reactor which is near Baghdad. . . .”
That Sunday, the cavernous lobby of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel was crowded, as it was on many such weekends that summer. The sea of smiling faces and tailored dark suits perched on gilded chairs or standing on the plush red carpet telegraphed the universal sign of successful salesmen everywhere. In this case, they belonged to international arms dealers, gathered to ply their latest high-tech weapons systems, bombs, torpedoes, radars, tanks, and mines to the world’s biggest buyer. They passed out brochures in French, Russian, English, and Serbian, touting comic book–sounding names like Chinooks and Big Mothers and Phantoms. For these men it was business as usual on Sunday, though their hosts, more than one salesman remarked, seemed unusually distracted this evening. The normally obliging Iraqi ministers had either canceled meetings or left appointments early. The Iraqi media gave not a hint of anything untoward.
By late Monday afternoon, however, the dealers had all learned the truth of their Iraqi hosts’ sudden anxiety. The rumor of the destruction of Osirak ran throughout the hotel. The salesmen were quick to commiserate. It was a dangerous and unjust world they all lived in, they consoled. But then, all was not lost. Iraq could always rebuild. After all, the oil was still flowing. Now more than ever, Iraq needed the latest in Western technology and defenses. In fact, as the French arms dealer pointed out, they were selling an entirely new generation of advanced early-warning radar defenses. France could deliver within the month.