Forty years later, Israeli fighters trace the daring bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor

Photos: Elchanan Kotler, AP images, GPO

King Hussein of Jordan was spending Sunday, June 7, 1981, lounging with his family on his royal yacht in the Gulf of Aqaba, when he noticed something unusual in the sky. A fleet of low-flying Israeli F-16 fighter jets sped overhead in the direction of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Hussein tensed. He asked one of his advisors to connect him to the Jordanian army’s command center, pronto.

While the king reported what he had just seen, the generals on the other end of the line listened intently. The military alert level was raised, Jordan’s technological capabilities were put into overdrive, but a few moments later, the king received an update that Jordan’s airspace had not been violated, and there did not seem to be any infiltration of aircraft to its territory. Hussein apparently tried to alert his neighboring Arab monarchs about those suspicious warplanes heading for their lands, but the communications systems on his yacht seemed to be scrambled. At least he knew his territory was safe.

Later, the world was stunned when Operation Opera was disclosed: Israeli fighter planes had flown over Iraq undetected and destroyed Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor.

Four years earlier, when Israel discovered that France was providing parts for Iraq to build a plutonium reactor that could be used to make nuclear weapons, the Jewish state knew the clock was ticking. By 1981, Israel had to work quickly: Intelligence sources indicated that by the end of June, the reactor — located 11 miles south of Baghdad — would have nuclear weapon production capabilities, and destroying an operational reactor at that stage would be a radioactive regional nightmare. While no one in the international intelligence community had foreseen that Israel would muster the courage — or the technical capacity — to carry out such an operation, Prime Minister Menachem Begin knew the window of attack was just a matter of days, and so he gave the green light.

Forty years after the operation that stunned the world — at first garnering the expected international condemnation but later praised as a heroic mission that stabilized the region against nuclear destruction — retired Maj. Gen. David Ivry, the IAF commander at the time, and Col. (Ret.) Zev Raz, leader of the mission, reconstruct the pivotal decision that removed the nuclear threat from Israel, and in retrospect, turned out to be crucial not only for Israel but for the entire Middle East.

While the reactor was known as Osirak, the name given by the French suppliers, the Iraqis called it by another name: “17 Tammuz.” They weren’t consciously thinking about the date that Nevuchadnezar breached the walls of Jerusalem and began the final stage of the churban of the First Bais Hamikdash; rather, it corresponds to the date and month on the Iraqi calendar that the Iraqi Baath party rose to power in 1968. (Still, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi despot who directed the construction of the reactor, considered Nevuchadnezar one of the national patriarchs of Iraq, and aspired to follow in his ways.)