Their Iraqi hosts needed no translation: what they were being offered was a range of bombs, torpedoes, mines, and other destructive gadgetry. The brochures being passed around showed helicopters with cartoonish names—Sea Knight, Chinook, Sea Stallion. One chopper, “Big Mother,” could carry a small bridge; another, “the Incredible Machine,” could airlift a platoon of troops. Leaflets showed guns that could fire two thousand rounds a minute or hit a moving target in pitch-black darkness with a computer-chip sight. Every and any kind of weapon was for sale.
Their hosts spoke an esoteric jargon the salesmen also understood: “twenty on the day,” “thirty at half-and-half minus one”: twenty million dollars on day of delivery, or thirty million dollars for a consignment, payable half down, the balance on the day before the weapons were shipped. All payments would be made in U.S. dollars, still the preferred currency in this closed world.
Watching over this ever-shifting bazaar of dealers and clients meeting over mint tea were officers from the Da’lrat Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amah, Iraq’s main intelligence organization, controlled by Sabba’a, Saddam Hussein’s almost as fearsome half-brother.
Some of the arms dealers had been in the hotel lobby on a very different day seven years before when their stunned hosts had told them that Israel, an enemy even more hated than Iran, had struck a powerful blow against Iraq’s military machine.
Since the formation of the Jewish state, a formal state of war had existed between Israel and Iraq. Israel had felt confident its forces could win a conventional war. But in 1977, Mossad discovered the French government, which had provided Israel with its own nuclear capability, had also given Iraq a reactor and “technical assistance.” The facility was Al-Tuweitha, north of Baghdad.
The Israeli air force began planning how to bomb the site before it became “hot” with the uranium rods in the reactor core. To destroy it then would cause widespread death and pollution and turn Baghdad and a sizable area of Iraq into an irradiated desert—and earn Israel global condemnation.
For these reasons, Yitzhak Hofi, then Mossad’s chief, opposed the raid, arguing an air strike would anyway result in a heavy death toll among the French technicians and would isolate European countries Israel was trying to reassure of its peaceful intentions. Bombing the reactor would also effectively end the delicate maneuvering to persuade Egypt to sign a peace treaty.
He found himself presiding over a divided house. Several of his department chiefs argued that there was no alternative but to neutralize the reactor. Saddam was a ruthless enemy; once he had a nuclear weapon, he would not hesitate to use it against Israel. And since when had Israel worried unduly about winning friends in Europe? America was all that mattered, and the whisper from Washington was that taking out the reactor would result in no more than a slap on the wrist from the administration.
Hofi tried a different tack. He suggested the United States should bring diplomatic pressure to bear on France to stop the export of the reactor. Washington received a curt rebuff from Paris. Israel then chose a more direct route. Hofi despatched a team of
While the French began to build a new core, the Iraqis sent Yahya Al-Meshad, a member of its Atomic Energy Commission, to Paris to arrange the shipment of nuclear fuel to Baghdad. Hofi sent a kidon team to assassinate him. While the others patrolled the surrounding streets, two of them used a passkey to enter Al-Meshad’s bedroom. They cut his throat and stabbed him through the heart. The room was ransacked to look like robbery. A prostitute in an adjoining room told police she had serviced the scientist hours before his death. Later, entertaining another client, she had heard “unusual movement” in Al-Meshad’s room. Hours after she reported this to the police, she was killed in a hit-and-run incident. The car was never found. The kidon team caught an El Al flight back to Tel Aviv.
Despite this further blow Iraq, aided by France, continued with its bid to become a nuclear power. In Tel Aviv, the Israeli air force continued its own preparations while intelligence chiefs wrangled with Hofi over his continued objections. The Mossad chief found a challenge from an unexpected quarter. His deputy, Nahum Admoni, argued destroying the reactor was not essential but would teach “any other Arabs with big ideas a lesson.”
