‘This is Cody Zero One. Ra’am is not airborne. Acknowledge.’
‘Roger that, Cody Zero One. Ra’am not airborne. Out.’
I wasn’t cutting off the phone. I was just making sure he didn’t rattle on with the commentary until I needed to know.
Pilots all over the world like to give themselves nicknames. There are Lightning Strikes, Cobras, Hell Hawks, Flying Buccaneers - all sorts going on. 69th Squadron of the Israeli Air Force called themselves Ra’am - the Hebrew for thunder.
It was hard not to take the piss, but then again, I wasn’t an Israeli with a fucking great mushroom cloud taking shape right on my doorstep. Nor was I a Yank with worries about what the fervently anti-American Iranians were up to. I was just a Brit low down the food chain doing a job, and that was the way I liked it.
I unzipped the day sack. First out was my very Gucci Nikon digital camera, together with the world’s supply of lenses and all the leads and bits and pieces to download pictures onto my Sony notebook. I’d had to explain to Security that I used the extending umbrella with the silver-coated interior as a reflector to help with my photography. These three bits of kit were all I was going to need to do my bit of the job.
The Brits had confirmed that al-Kibar was a nuclear plant. Up until then, the Israelis had had no concrete evidence of its use - or who was helping build it. All they knew was that the Syrians received high-ranking military delegations from North Korea. Mossad was convinced that they were intent on upgrading Syria’s military capabilities. North Korea had already helped Damascus develop medium-range ballistic missiles, and chemical weapons such as Sarin and mustard gas. So were they now taking them to the next level?
If that was the case, Israel would retaliate exactly the same as it had in Iraq in 1981 - when they flew over the border and bombed the fledgling Osirak reactor near Baghdad back to the Stone Age. There was no fucking about. They asked no one. They just went and did it. They broke international law, but nobody gave a shit. The only victim was Saddam. The fact that they themselves had nuclear weapons didn’t come into the equation. A lot of people belonged to that club. Even Pakistan and India were members. But the line in the sand had to be drawn at Axis-of-Evil countries, like Syria and Iran.
The Israelis suspected what was happening at al-Kibar, but they lacked hard intelligence. And Syria was a different kettle of fish from Iraq. Washington wouldn’t back an attack without the int. But then things changed. In November 2006 Mossad came to the Brits for help. A senior Syrian official was staying at a big fancy hotel in Kensington that cost PS1,600 a night. The Security Service went in and had a mince around. The guy had been incredibly careless. He’d gone out for the night and left his laptop in his room. MI5 opened up the back and inserted a Trojan horse program. Over the next couple of months, they drained out the construction plans for al-Kibar, together with hundreds of emails and photographs.
The photographs did the most damage. They showed the complex at various stages of construction since 2002. The main building looked like a tree-house on stilts, with pipes leading into a pumping station on the banks of the Euphrates. It was going to need a lot of water to create fissile material. As the building grew, it sprouted concrete piers and roofs, which could only have one function - to camouflage the place from above. Al-Kibar’s core design, they could now prove, was the same as North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor, even down to the number of holes for fuel rods.
The clincher was a photo that showed an Asian guy in blue tracksuit trousers standing next to one of the Arabs who’d been working there all the time. The Brits quickly identified the Asian as Chon Chibu. He was the chief engineer behind the North Koreans’ plutonium reactor at Yongbyon.
The Israelis were wetting themselves with this int, but it still wasn’t enough for the US. Washington thought it would be years before the Syrians were capable of producing a bomb. They could be fucked up without the US getting drawn into another war.
Things might have stayed that way had not a high-ranking Iranian decided to switch sides. General Ali-Reza Asgari was