Countdown to Osirak

By the late 1970s, Israeli intelligence had drawn a line in the desert southeast of Baghdad. France was building Iraq two nuclear reactors at Tuwaitha — the Tammuz-1 reactor, known as Osirak — and Saddam Hussein, who had told French journalists in 1975 that Iraq's program was "the first Arab step toward gaining nuclear arms," was not building it for electricity. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who had survived the Holocaust as a young man, concluded early: a nuclear-armed Saddam could not be tolerated. "No nation can live on borrowed time," he said.

The intelligence picture behind that conclusion was built piece by piece over years. Mossad cultivated informants among the dozens of foreign experts working on the French-built project, tracked the shipments of equipment out of Europe, and monitored construction progress with satellite imagery — supplemented, in the early 1980s, by Iranian reconnaissance photographs as Iraq and Iran bled each other in their war. Diplomacy was tried and failed: Israeli officials could not move the French government, which treated the reactor sale as a commercial and strategic arrangement.

Then came the shadow campaign. In April 1979, the reactor's first set of core components, waiting at the French port of La Seyne-sur-Mer for shipment to Iraq, was destroyed in a "mysterious" explosion; a caller claiming to speak for a "French Ecological Group" took responsibility, but the group appeared to be fictitious and French investigators suspected Middle Eastern agents — widely understood to be Mossad, which has never confirmed it. In June 1980, Yahya al-Meshad, an Egyptian nuclear scientist working on the Iraqi program, was found murdered in his room at the Hôtel Méridien in Paris; the French police attributed the killing to robbery, but it is widely attributed to Mossad — an attribution Israel has never claimed and which must be read with that caveat. Two more program-linked engineers died under suspicious circumstances. The sabotage and deaths delayed the project by roughly two and a half years — and terrified Iraq's scientists, whom Saddam tried to steady with cash bonuses and luxury cars.

None of it stopped construction. In October 1980, Begin secured conditional cabinet approval for a strike, and a small inner committee weighed the risks: would it merely buy a few years? Would it endanger the new peace treaty with Egypt? Would it rupture relations with France? Intelligence kept reporting the same thing — the reactor was nearing operation. On June 7, 1981, eight F-16s flew low over Saudi airspace on a Sunday afternoon, when the reactor's French technicians were off-site, and destroyed Osirak in under two minutes. A single Iraqi airman was the only casualty on the ground.

The strike established what became known as the Begin Doctrine: Israel will not allow its enemies to acquire nuclear weapons. The intelligence behind it — years of HUMINT in France, satellite and allied imagery, sabotage bought as time — was the prerequisite. Without the picture Mossad assembled, Begin could not have carried a divided cabinet; without the delay the sabotage bought, the reactor might have gone hot before the jets arrived.