Attack - and Fallout: Israel and Iraq

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evacuated most of their 150 technicians from El-Tuwaitha, and the Israelis assumed that work on the reactor would be halted indefinitely. But after the war bogged down, the French returned. Another attack date was set for February, but it was canceled after Yadin reiterated his strong objections. A third date, in March, was scrubbed for undisclosed reasons. In May, the ministerial committee authorized Begin to choose his own date for the raid, but strong objections about timing were raised by Opposition Leader Shimon Peres, who had been briefed on the scheme, and the strike was once more postponed.

After so many false starts, the cloak of secrecy sheltering the operation was beginning to fray. On May 22, word of the raid was leaked to Moshe Shahal, a Knesset opposition party leader. His source: former Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, who viewed the proposed strike as "adventurist." At roughly the same time, Begin's office received two additional intelligence reports that the Iraqis were prepared to activate the reactor (make it "hot" in technical jargon) as early as the first week in July. On June 5, Begin gave orders to launch the attack two days later. His day of decision was the 14th anniversary of the Six-Day War.

The Israeli Air Force had not been idle during these months of deliberation. A full-scale model of the entire reactor area had been built in a restricted part of the Sinai Desert, and a carefully selected group of the most talented Israeli pilots practiced their bombing runs until, in the words of one high-ranking officer, they knew "every tree and house" along their eventual attack route. Despite the scope of the rehearsals, the U.S. says that it did not detect the operation, either by satellite or other means. Originally, the plan called for the bombing to be carried out by F-4 Phantom jets. However, the first batches of 75 light, agile F-16 fighters, ordered from the U.S. in August 1977, had arrived in Israel. The Israeli Air Force had the innovative notion of making a bomber out of a fighter designed for jet-age dogfights. Tests showed that the F-16s, equipped with special bomb racks and additional fuel tanks, could just make the 1,300-mile round trip to Baghdad without aerial refueling if they were not attacked and made only one bombing run on the target.

At 4:40 p.m. local time on June 7, the first of the F-15 support fighters that had been stored in underground bunkers lifted off from Israel's Etzion airbase in the eastern Sinai. The F-15s avoided using their afterburners to conserve fuel. Soon the F-16s joined them, and the jets headed east, flying low, the escorting F-15s above and on either side of the bombers.

The formation headed across the Gulf of Aqaba toward Jordan, following a top-secret route designed to take advantage of blind spots in Arab radar coverage along the borders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq. The aircraft stayed close to the terrain, but varied their altitudes in a weaving pattern that had been tested by the Israeli Air Force as a means to further reduce radar visibility.

Even so, as they crossed the eastern bank of the Gulf of Aqaba and began to climb over the nearby rocky red mountains, the higher-flying F-15s were picked up by Jordanian radar based at Ma'an. The station radioed the planes in Arabic, using international emergency frequencies. The Israelis were