Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Now, for the moment, he was code-named “Kamal” with a perfectly faked Iranian passport in his pocket. Meir Dagan had stressed to him the importance of his mission: to confirm the role of al-Hamed in the dangerous relationship, which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad had formed with North Korea.

Kamal had known before he left Tel Aviv the ship had sailed from Namp’o, a North Korean port in the high security area south of the capital, Pyongyang. An NSA satellite image had shown it steaming out into the Yellow Sea on a journey, which had taken it across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the Atlantic and through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, and finally into Tartus harbor. At some stage of its voyage, it had re-flagged itself at sea and the crew had painted on the stern plate the port of registration as Inchon. The newness of their work was still apparent against the drab gray of the rest of the hull.

Through a contact in the Tartus harbormaster’s office, Kamal had managed to check the al-Hamed’s manifest and all day had watched trucks being loaded with the cement it listed. Then, as the sun began to set, military trucks arrived at the dockside and from the ship’s hold cranes lifted crates covered in heavy tarpaulin, which soldiers guided into the trucks. Using a high-resolution camera no bigger than the palm of his hand, Kamal photographed the transfer. When he finished, he pressed a button on the camera to transmit the images to a receiving station inside the Israeli border with Lebanon. In an hour, they were in Mossad headquarters.

Kamal knew then his trip had achieved all Meir Dagan had hoped. Though he could not see inside the crates, the spy intuitively knew the steel-cased containers were holding weapons-grade plutonium, the element which had fueled the American atomic attack that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. In his mission briefing, Kamal had been told by Professor Uzi Even, who had helped to create Israel’s own nuclear facility at Dimona, that the plutonium would, in its raw form, be easily transported as nuggets in lead protective drums and the shaping and casting of the material would be done in Syria.

On that warm September day almost fifty-two years after Nagasaki had been destroyed, sufficient plutonium had been delivered to Syria to devastate an entire country, its neighbor, Israel.

Shortly before noon on September 4, 2007, a number of cars drove past the concert hall of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv and entered the heavily guarded headquarters of Major General Eliezer Shkedy, the country’s air force commander. As a fighter pilot he had won a deserved reputation for daredevil tactics coupled with a cool analytical mind. His speciality had been flying dangerously close to the ground, maneuvering past peaks and rocky outcrops, then hurtling skyward to ten thousand feet, nearing the speed of sound, before diving on the target, his weapon system switched on, his eyes flitting between the coordinates projected on his hood screen to the bombsight and the target. Weapons released, he would turn radically, the screech from the strain on the airframe like a banshee wail, and he would once more hurtle skyward. From dive attack to his second climb, it would take him only seconds.

For the past week Shkedy had prepared for an unprecedented operation, which would require those tactics to be carried out by pilots he had hand-picked because their flying skills matched his own. But they would be flying not the F-16 fighter plane he had once commanded, but Israel’s latest jet, the F-151. Flying at almost twice the speed of sound and capable of delivering a five-hundred-pound bunker-busting bomb, it was the most formidable fighter plane in the Israeli Air Force.

For weeks the pilots had practiced the flesh-flattening G-force of right-angle turns, diving and evading, to hit a small circle, the IP (initial point), carrying out bombing runs at an angled dive of thirty degrees. They had practiced all this in the pitch black of night in the Negev Desert. At first many of the dummy bombs had fallen wide of the IP, but soon they were landing inside, a number scoring the required bullseye. Shkedy called them “my Top Guns”—though they were far removed from the Hollywood version of Top Gun pilots. His fliers were sober-sided, led quiet lives, rarely partied, and had trained day and night for when they would finally be given the order to fly tactical strikes against Iran. Those attacks, they had been told, would take place at dawn or dusk. But all they knew so far about the mission they were spending weeks training for was that it would take place in the dead of night. No one had yet told them when or where, and they were content it should remain so. Curiosity was not one of their traits.

While F-151 twin afterburners glowed over the desolate night landscape and the pilots dropped their dummy bombs, which exploded white phosphorous smoke on the ground’s IP to determine the accuracy of the drops, in Shkedy’s Tel Aviv complex his staff studied the approach to the target and discussed the precautions each F-151 must take from the moment its pilot pressed the red button on the control stick to release his bomb. The time they would spend over the actual target, TOT, would have to be between two and four seconds. In that period with its bomb released, an F-151 would sink dangerously toward the ground, giving the pilot a second to fire his afterburner to climb and avoid the “frag pattern,” the deadly metal fragments of spent explosive, which would follow the detonation. A bomb’s shrapnel would rise to three thousand feet in seven seconds and unless the aircraft was clear of the target area, it could be blown up and other pilots already at various stages of their bomb runs would fly into a curtain of lethal fragments, which could destroy them. To avoid this, each pilot would have to endure body-crushing pressure of eight Gs while negotiating a radical ninety degree turn away from the IP after bombing and climb to thirty thousand feet from the target zone to avoid ground missiles.

To calculate the precise distance from take-off to target and the exact angle for the attack, the planners pored over computer graphs, satellite images, and physics tables to check and re-check figures. The targeters calculated that because the bombs would pierce the target roof before exploding inside, the roof would momentarily serve as a shield, reducing the frag pattern by between 30 and 40 percent. To help further protect the lead aircraft over the target, it would have its laser-guided bomb fitted with a delay fuse, providing a precious two-second lead time before the detonation.

Given the distance to the target, it was clear the F-151s would each have to carry two external fuel tanks, one under each wing. Filled with five hundred gallons of fuel, each tank added three thousand pounds to the aircraft weight. That required further complex calculations to be made: the exact point at which the bombing dive would start and the altitude at which the ordnance would be dropped.

In late August, while the al-Hamed was entering the Strait of Gibraltar, General Shkedy flew to the base of the sixty-ninth squadron in the Negev; the squadron was the Air Force’s frontline air assault force trained to attack Iran. Waiting for Shkedy in the airfield briefing room were the five pilots whom he had selected to carry out the raid. With an average age of twenty-six, many came from families who were Holocaust survivors, like Shkedy himself.

For him the pilots had a kind of nobility to their youth; behind their relaxed and open manner was steel. Once before, he had flown to speak to them at the start of their special training and had begun by saying they had been selected for an air-to-ground mission, military speak for bombing a ground target. He had looked into their faces, glad to see they showed no emotion. No one had looked at the huge wall map of the Middle East. Nevertheless he anticipated each would be creating in his mind the potential mission profile: a low level flight to the target, then a high level return very possibly into headwinds. It could be Iran. But they had not asked him then and they did not do so on that late August morning when Shkedy once more met them in the briefing room.