It is hard to believe today, but there was a time when Iran and Israel were not just friendly—they were allies. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Israel described Iran as its most valuable ally, even above the United States. Their common enemy was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and their shared nightmare was Saddam acquiring nuclear weapons. The problem went back to the 1960s, when Iraq began building a civilian nuclear program.
By the mid-1970s, Iraq was looking to buy a reactor. Most countries wouldn’t touch the deal, but France did. In 1974-75, the French agreed to sell Iraq an Osiris-class research reactor, 72 kilograms of 93% enriched uranium, and training for Iraqi personnel. The deal was worth about $300 million at the time—roughly $1.
7 billion today. Construction of the 40-megawatt light-water reactor began in 1979 at the Al Tuwaitha nuclear center near Baghdad. The French called it Osirak; the Iraqis called it Tammuz 1. A smaller ISIS-type reactor was named Tammuz 2.
Israel’s Mossad immediately began sabotaging the program. On April 6, 1979, agents damaged the reactor while it was still in France. Then they assassinated Professor Yaya El Mashad, the Egyptian scientist who was to head Iraq’s nuclear program, killing him in his Paris hotel room. But Iraq still received 12.
5 kilograms of highly enriched uranium in July 1980, the first of six deliveries from France. Both France and Iraq insisted the reactor was for peaceful civilian use. But Israel, Iran, and the United States all believed Iraq was on the verge of producing plutonium for a nuclear weapon. A military option was needed.
Israel first tried diplomatic pressure on France and the United States, but the French were unmoved. The longer Israel waited, the greater the chance Saddam would build a bomb. The Mossad poisoned two Iraqi engineers in Switzerland and France and sent threatening letters to French personnel, frightening some off. Still, work on the reactor continued.
In 1979, the Shah of Iran was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution, and Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. He was no friend of Israel, but Israel still urged Iran to bomb the Iraqi reactor. Iran didn’t need much convincing. The new hardline regime in Tehran hated Iraq and saw it as a greater threat than Israel.
When the Iran-Iraq War broke out, both Iran and Israel had a common interest in destroying Saddam’s nuclear ambitions. Iran had inherited the world’s fifth-largest air force from the Shah, but most of its planes were American-made, and with the United States now an enemy, spare parts were scarce. Incredibly, Israel secretly shipped US-made aircraft spares to Tehran so the Iranian air force could put together a viable strike force. The Osirak reactor site was defended by a single battery of Soviet SA-6 missiles, three batteries of French Roland 2 missiles, and some Soviet anti-aircraft guns.
Because of the state of the Iranian air force, its F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers could only jam the SA-6s, not the Rolands. The pilots would have to fly very low and fast, and leave just as quickly. Israel and Syria provided the Iranians with up-to-date intelligence on the site. There was also a fear: if the reactor was fully fueled, bombing it might release nuclear fallout over Baghdad.
Operation Scorch Sword began on September 30, 1980. Four F-4 Phantoms flew to the Iraqi border, refueled from an Iranian Boeing 707 tanker escorted by two F-14 Tomcats. Each Phantom carried six Mark 82 bombs, two AIM-7 Sparrow missiles, and a 20mm cannon. The four planes raced into Iraq at very low level, then climbed briefly to let Iraqi radars paint them, confusing the Iraqis about their direction, then dropped low again and turned toward the reactor.
One pair bombed the reactor; the other pair attacked its power station. The first pair pulled up about 2. 5 kilometers from the target and released twelve bombs. The other two Phantoms hit the power station at Tuwaitha, knocking out electricity to Baghdad for two days.
Two bombs hit the Tammuz 1 reactor, and others started a huge fire, destroying equipment, laboratories, and support buildings. No shots were fired at the Iranian planes. The Iraqi nuclear program was disrupted, though the Iraqis listed the damage as minor. A second Iranian mission was ordered on November 30, 1980, when a Phantom overflew the damaged reactor to take photographs.
But Israel was not satisfied. The reactor was damaged, not destroyed, and the Iraqis were already working to repair it. Israel decided to bomb it themselves. In a secret meeting in France, Israeli and Iranian officials agreed that any Israeli planes in trouble during the attack could land safely in Iran.
The Israeli mission would be much longer—the reactor was 990 miles from the nearest Israeli bases. The planes would have to overfly Jordan and Saudi Arabia without permission, making air-to-air refueling impossible. Ariel Sharon was the main proponent of the action. But Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defense minister until 1980, opposed it.
He worried about Israel’s improving relationship with Egypt, and that an attack might upset the Egyptians and fuel Arab concerns about Israel. It might also damage Israeli-French relations. But Prime Minister Begin believed the operation had to happen before Iraq gained a viable nuclear weapon, which Israeli intelligence estimated would occur within two years. The United States provided Israel with satellite imagery of the reactor site, suggesting it would be fully operational by June 1981.
The Israeli cabinet voted 10 to 6 in favor of military action. The operation was code-named Opera. Israeli A-4 Skyhawks practiced the mission while the country waited for delivery of new US F-16 Fighting Falcons. Israeli F-4 Phantoms made reconnaissance flights over southern and western Iraq.
On one occasion, an Israeli Phantom was intercepted by a MiG-21, but the Iraqi plane ran out of fuel and the pilot ejected. The reconnaissance missions found a blind spot in Iraq’s radar on the border with Saudi Arabia, and the Israelis decided to enter through that gap. At the time, the Iraqi Air Force was fully committed to the war with Iran, losing many aircraft to Iranian bombing raids, including two Tupolev 22 Blinders and three Tupolev 16 Badger strategic bombers that the Iraqis would likely have used to bomb Israel in retaliation. The Israeli attack force comprised eight F-16As, each armed with two unguided Mark 84 2,000-pound delay-action bombs.
Six F-15As provided cover. One of the pilots was Ilan Ramon, who would later die aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003. On June 7, 1981, the Israeli force departed. They passed through Jordanian and Saudi airspace, telling Jordanian air traffic control they were a Saudi patrol that had gone off course, and telling the Saudis they were a Jordanian patrol that had gotten lost.
They dumped their empty fuel tanks over the Saudi desert and split up over Iraq. The F-16s climbed to 6,900 feet twelve miles from the reactor, then dived at 680 mph, releasing bombs at 3,600 feet. Eight of sixteen bombs hit the reactor containment dome. Iraqi anti-aircraft fire opened up, but the F-16s climbed away unharmed.
The operation caused outrage at the United Nations, and Israel was widely condemned. The attack killed ten Iraqi soldiers and one French civilian engineer. Saddam was determined to rebuild the reactor with French assistance, but the ongoing war with Iran and payment problems killed that off.
In 1991, during the First Gulf War, the United States bombed the facility out of existence permanently.
