The Man Who Wanted to Fire a Satellite from a Gun

On 22 March 1990, Gerald Bull — Canadian artillery engineer, dreamer, and, by then, one of the world's most dangerous consultants — stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor of his Brussels apartment building in Uccle. Someone was waiting. He was shot five times — twice in the head and three in the back, according to accounts of the investigation — with a silenced pistol. No one saw the killer. When police arrived, they found his key still in the door lock and his unopened briefcase containing nearly US$20,000 in cash. Whatever the motive was, it was not robbery.

Bull was a genius of a particular kind: he believed you could launch satellites with artillery. After a career at Canada's CARDE and McGill University, he spent the 1980s building ever-larger guns. His last employer was Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Project Babylon was the apotheosis: a supergun with a barrel 515 feet long, a caliber of one full meter — and, in the Western powers' reading, capable of lofting chemical, biological, or nuclear warheads as far as Israel. The smaller "Baby Babylon" had already been tested. The big gun was rising from the Iraqi desert, its enormous barrel segments fabricated by firms across Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland, and Italy — shipments that intelligence agencies and customs authorities were already seizing.

The murder was never officially solved. No one was ever charged. What exists instead is a whodunit with too many suspects, each with a plausible motive — and no evidence on the public record that would convict any of them.

The dominant theory, repeated in much of the Western press, points to the Mossad. The logic is clean: Bull was building a gun for Iraq that could hit Israel, and improving Iraq's ballistic missiles at the same time. Investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, in his book Rise and Kill First, attributes the killing to a Mossad hit team, approved, he alleges, by then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. But Bergman's attribution is investigative journalism, not a court finding, and Israel has said nothing — before or since — about Gerald Bull.

The other theories are not trivial. Iraq itself is a candidate: Bull may have known too much, or fallen out with his paymasters. Iran had every reason to want Iraq's gun program stopped. Syria, the CIA, and even British intelligence have been floated in various accounts. Arms dealers, Bull's world, were a treacherous fraternity; he had accumulated powerful enemies across a lifetime of dealing. A writer for the Redlands Fortnightly Club paper on Bull reported that three men had met with Bull in Brussels before his death — presumably, the account suggests, to warn him off — and that rumors in the arms-dealer world linked a hired Palestinian gunman. None of it has been proven.

What is established is the aftermath. Project Babylon died with its designer: after the Gulf War, the United Nations ordered the dismantling and destruction of the gun's remains along with Iraq's other weapons programs. The big gun never fired.

Why it matters: the Bull case is the perfect Cold War whodunit because it exposes how attribution actually works when evidence is absent — by motive, by pattern, by who benefited. The Mossad theory dominates not because it is proven, but because it is the most narratively satisfying: the Israeli intelligence service had already shown, with the Iraqi nuclear scientist Yehia El Mashad — clubbed to death in a Paris hotel room in 1980, as Bergman's reporting also recounts — that it would kill weapons scientists on European soil. But pattern is not proof, and the file on Gerald Bull remains what it has been since that March evening: officially, a murder by unknown perpetrators.