31 — Election Time
“Gentlemen, please be seated.” Prime Minister Eli Cohen was once again calling a meeting of the Kitchen Cabinet to order. The date was Tuesday, January 31, 2012. “I want to thank everyone for coming in on this cold, rainy day, especially our guests in from Tel Aviv.” Cohen nodded towards the other end of the conference table. “Everyone of course knows General Fishel and General Schechter.” At the far end, General Natan Fishel, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force, and General David Schechter, the operational commander of Project Block G, nodded slightly in acknowledgement. “I don’t think that all of you have yet met Amit Margolis.” Margolis raised his right hand off the table and smiled faintly to the six members of the Kitchen Cabinet who were present.
“I hope everyone,” continued Cohen, “is keeping Ben Raibani in your prayers. My wife visited him yesterday at Hadassah at Ein Kerem.” Raibani had suffered a mild stroke a week earlier. “He is doing as well as could be expected.”
Cohen continued. “I am happy that Reuben has agreed to join the Kitchen Cabinet in General Raibani’s unfortunate absence.” Seated to the prime minister’s right was Minister of Finance Reuben Herzog. He looked down at the table as the prime minister introduced him. “Of course, everyone here knows Reuben, except I am not sure if you have met Mister Margolis or General Schechter?” The question was directed to Minister Herzog.
Reuben Herzog looked up and to his right. “No, I have not.” He stood and offered his hand to Amit Margolis, who was seated about ten feet away, and then to David Schechter. The three men exchanged greetings.
“Reuben is a wizard with numbers,” added Prime Minister Cohen. He had a habit of treating the much younger minister of finance more as his son than as a peer.
Once Herzog sat back down, the prime minister turned to the issues at hand. “Well, let’s get to the business of the day. We have two and a half hours until we will expand this into a full Security Cabinet meeting. I have asked Natan, David and Amit here today to review the state of readiness of Block G. My goal today is simple. I want consensus on the plan from this group and then final clearance from the Security Cabinet to green light the operation based on conditions. I yield the floor to Chief of Staff Fishel,”
“Thank you, Mister Prime Minister,” responded Natan Fishel. “I think everyone here knows that this show belongs to the two men sitting to my left, so I am not going to steal their thunder. All I will say is that I am here on behalf of the entire general staff of the IDF to tell you that the IDF is fully behind this plan. General Schechter has the full support of the each branch of the IDF and he has my full backing. With that, I turn the floor over to General Schechter.”
“Thank you, General.” Schechter stood and walked to a large flat panel TV mounted on the side wall of the conference room. The TV displayed the computer screen in front of Amit Margolis. The IAF general spent the next hour walking through the plans for Project Block G, starting with the preliminary operations that would lay the groundwork for the main IAF action. After that review, the general detailed the IAF attack on the identified targets encompassing the Iranian nuclear program. The assault involved 206 aircraft of the IAF in a single coordinated sortie over Iran, plus dozens of other aircraft in support roles. Everything had been planned in extreme detail, including the assignment of specific flight crews to specific targets. The timetable had been calculated down to exact takeoff times for each aircraft involved. Even the loss of aircraft — whether that loss was the result of mechanical failure, crash or hostile action — was planned for, with redundancy taken into account by the separation of key assets into varied sorties.
When Schechter was finished, Amit Margolis stood and switched places with the general, who took over operation of the computer. Amit presented the non-conventional portion of Project Block G to the Kitchen Cabinet, the portion known as Esther’s Sling. The Mossad agent presented the same level of detail on the attack portion of his plan as Schechter had on the IAF portion. But he left out any discussion of some of the private companies he had established to support his plan. For Reuben Herzog, this was the first time he had heard anything about Esther’s Sling, including the codename. He was completely focused on every word spoken by the Mossad agent turned operational co-commander.
When Margolis was finished, Eli Cohen looked at Reuben Herzog. “What do you think?”
Minister of Finance Herzog had the hint of a smile on his face. “Can we do that?”
Cohen laughed. “That’s exactly what I thought the first time I heard it. We can do it and we will.”
Margolis stepped to his side and switched places with Schechter once again. The general started to speak as he walked the few steps to the spot in the room that had become the invisible podium. “Before we move on, let me bring up a serious issue that we face. A few days ago an Eitan UAV crashed while testing was underway with under-wing weapons.”
Everyone in the room was fully aware of the news. The Eitan had been introduced into active service for the IDF in late 2010 and was one of the most sophisticated weapons systems in the Israeli arsenal, the latest and greatest example of the growing prowess of Israeli technology in unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. The Eitan was very large by UAV standards, measuring over 80 feet in length. It had been designed and built by Israeli Aircraft Industries initially to fly at high altitude for an extended period of time over long distances conducting surveillance and electronic eavesdropping. But it had always been the intention of IAF officers to put weapons onboard the Eitan, creating a rival to the success of America’s Predator drones. Indeed, the Eitan had succeeded in launching Hellfire missiles. The latest testing was to add 500 pound laser-guided bombs and other sophisticated weapons under the wings.
“What do we know about this, Zvi?” Cohen asked. He did not want General Schechter to explain what happened; he wanted to hold his defense minister accountable.
Zvi Avner responded. “It is still early in the investigation, but it appears that the wing snapped while at altitude.”
Cohen snapped his finger. “Snapped. Just like that?”
“We don’t know for sure yet, but that’s the way it looks. The load on the wings may have been too great.”
“What are we doing on this?”
“This is a top priority. We have grounded the Eitan fleet until we finish the investigation and then we can look at alternatives or place restrictions on the airframe.”
General Schechter jumped back in. “As you all saw from my presentation, the Eitan has been incorporated into our planning and has become important. This is not on my next slide, which reviews which weapons we still need, but it should be. We will have to change some of our planning without the Eitan.”
“I am sure the review will be handled quickly. Hopefully this won’t be much more than a few weeks,” said Cohen. “Please continue.”
The TV now contained a bullet point slide of the list of items still required for Block G. A small number of weapons had yet to be obtained and estimates were provided by Schechter for when they would be ready. Finally, Amit hit the computer’s down arrow and the last slide came up. This slide had a bullet point list of the operational conditions necessary to launch Block G and the timetable from initiation to the IAF attack.
Schechter ran through the slide. “Here are the keys,” he said. “We need to launch the IAF strike at night within two nights on either side of the night of a new moon. My strong preference is the night of the new moon or the night immediately before or after. We need good weather. There can be no rain clouds and ideally, no cloud cover at all. We need the best possible GPS reception and communications. Hopefully we will have low solar flare activity since solar activity can interfere with GPS signals and our communications, but this is only predictable about eighteen hours in advance. So, large solar flare activity could cause us to delay the attack date within our lunar window. I am a little concerned because this year we are entering a period of maximum solar activity.” Schechter paused for a moment to elicit questions. None came.