At 8:45 p.m. Israeli time, while the 24 planes of 69 Hammer Squadron were on their way to Point Romeo, the IRGC men inside the apartment in Abasan al-Kabirah were scanning the dark sky to the east with binoculars and night vision equipment when the man in next room started to call out. This man was looking at the flat panel display of a very sophisticated and expensive forward-looking infrared unit mounted on the roof of the building and cleverly concealed inside one of the six air conditioning condenser units. Even the fan on top of the faux unit would turn on when other units came on, but the east facing metal side wall would lower on command to allow the unit an unobstructed view toward Israel. The device enabled the man to see aircraft coming in from the north and apparently descending toward Hatzerim Airbase. The two men in the living room looked out the window in the indicated direction.
After half a minute, one man spoke out: He had acquired an F-15 moving slowly and descending. It had its navigation lights on and was following a standard landing approach route into Hatzerim that the IRGC had witnessed countless times in the past. He verbally directed the other man to the plane. The other man picked it out as well, along with several other F-15s. Over the next ten minutes, the two men counted twenty F-15 aircraft returning to Hatzerim and landing, all apparently with their heavy payloads still in place. The proper note was created and taken by runner to a nearby home, where another Iranian volunteer put the paper in his pocket and headed toward Khan Yunis on a motorcycle.
At that moment, 20 F-15E Strike Eagles of the U.S. Air Force’s 492 Fighter Squadron, the “Madhatters,” which had departed Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily two and a half hours earlier, were directed to refueling tarmacs at Hatzerim. Lieutenant Colonel James “Slim Jim” Nolan, commanding officer of the squadron, exited his plane and was welcomed by the commanding officer of Hatzerim, who presented the squadron commander with the flag of Israel. None of the men of the 492 knew why they were visiting Israel this particular evening, but they knew they had received orders earlier that day to be on standby at Sigonella ready to take off within ten minute’s notice to proceed by the most direct route to Hatzerim. They also knew that they would be welcomed with food, soda, coffee and bathroom facilities, and they knew that they would be taking off to return to Sigonella approximately 70 minutes after their arrival. Once back at Sigonella they would be free to get some sleep before returning the next day to their base at Lakenheath in England.
Thirty-two minutes later, as the 69 Hammer Squadron was refueling at Point Romeo, the team at Unit 8200’s listening post just to the northeast of Urim, a kibbutz in the Negev not far from Hatzerim Airfield, intercepted another telephone call originating from the city of Khan Yunis to a number in the West Bank. The intercepted message was interpreted and forwarded to Mount Olympus by email. A young woman working at Mount Olympus as an IAF communications officer printed out the email and walked over to the adjacent desks of General Schechter and Amit Margolis. She was smiling broadly as she handed the printed email to Margolis. The co-commander of Block G stood and handed the paper to David Schechter, who looked at him expectantly.
Amit Margolis simultaneously punched his right fist in the air and loudly shouted, “Hell, yes.”
General Schechter smiled and clapped his hands. “Amit, please do the honors. You earned it.”
“Attention, please,” Margolis shouted to the large team within the command room at Mount Olympus. Sixty-two men and women, many crammed into tiny cubicles just large enough to hold their computer screens, stopped and turned toward Margolis. “The Iranian command has been officially notified that twenty of the twenty-four aircraft of Hammer Squadron have now returned to Hatzerim.”
A round of applause erupted along with scattered whoops and yells. The senior air defense officials of Iran were now concluding that this night was going to pass without an Israeli attack. They would be proven wrong.
As expected by the Olympus planners, IRGC headquarters in Tehran sent an update of the status of 69 Hammer Squadron to the night watch commanders of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Air Force and the Air Defense Forces. But unknown to anyone at Mount Olympus, inside Iranian Air Force headquarters at Doshan Tappeh Air Base in Tehran, Brigadier General Hassan Shahbazi, the senior commander of the Iranian Air Force on duty that evening, sent along a coded message to the commander on duty at every air base in Iran. The message let the commanders know that 69 Hammer Squadron was at its home base in Israel and therefore unlikely to attack Iran this evening.
This communication, which took advantage of the valuable intelligence about 69 Hammer Squadron that came from the Gaza Strip, had been implemented by the Iranian Air Force fourteen months earlier. The extended periods of being on tripwire alert every night had resulted in meaningful fatigue among the crews and mechanics of the Air Force. Men who were highly trained had been leaving the service in numbers that threatened the viability of the Air Force if it persisted. So a decision had been made after much debate to limit the highest levels of alert readiness to those times when at least half of 69 Hammer Squadron was away from its home base.
At 8:22 p.m. Israeli time, exactly one hour after Gadget’s F-15I lifted off, the first six of 55 F-16I Sufa strike aircraft lifted off from Ramon Airbase, taking off in pairs and using all three parallel runways. The planes had a one hour flight to Point Romeo where they would line up to refuel behind the seven KC-707s that had just finished refueling 24 F-15Is and 20 F-15Cs. Minutes later, a flight of 20 F-16Cs took off from Ovda Airbase, just north of the city of Eilat, to join the Sufas on the trip into Iran. The F-16Cs would be dedicated to Combat Air Patrol, or CAP, missions this evening. Refueling at Point Romeo in under two minutes per plane, the entire flight of 55 Sufas and 20 F-16Cs would take only nineteen and a half minutes to refuel behind seven KC-707s.
Like the F-15I, the F-16I Sufa represents the cutting edge development of the F-16 fighter-bomber, incorporating advanced Israeli electronic communications and counter-measure equipment and conformal fuel tanks that give the plane substantially more range than the typical F-16. All of the F-16Is were configured for strike missions, carrying a mix of guided bombs, Delilah missiles and the Popeye Lite standoff cruise missile. At 2,500 pounds, the Popeye Lite could be launched from as far away as 95 miles from its target, depending on the altitude of the F-16I at launch. For this night, all of the Popeye Lites were autonomous once launched, delivering their 776 pound high explosive warheads by a combination of GPS and inertial guidance.
Fourteen minutes after the Sufas began to depart from Ramon, two G550 Special Electronics Missions Aircraft, or SEMA, aircraft took off from Nevatim. They would soon join the growing wave of aircraft overflying Iraq to enter Iran at or near a point on the map that the Olympus planners referred to as Point Delta. Each plane was packed with the latest radar and communication jamming electronics — far more powerful and sophisticated than the jamming systems built into the Hermes 450Ms already on their way into Iran. These two planes would be in the line of fire, both flying deep into Iran before the night was over.
57 — Esther Loads Her Sling
On October 2, two Ilyushin 76 cargo aircraft bearing the insignia of Swiss-Arab Air Cargo landed a half hour apart after 10 p.m. at Nevatim Airbase in Israel. One plane had flown in from delivering cargo to Sarajevo and the other had delivered cargo to Kiev earlier in the day. The captains of each plane, Oleg Kolikov and Jim Miller, taxied their respective aircraft into two separate hanger buildings and then were driven, along with their crews, to a building where they could get some sleep. For Oleg Kolikov, a secular Russian Jew, this was the first time he had ever stepped foot in Israel. For Jim Miller, a secular American Jew, it was only the second time, the first time having been with his parents as a teenager almost five decades earlier. All of the other eight members of both crews were Jews, most of them Israelis, working for SAAC under false identities.