No people in the world were better trained or better equipped to move fast in a crisis than the Israelis. Speed of reaction was a life-or-death reflex in a nation whose principal city could count on only two minutes’ warning of an enemy attack from its northern borders, five minutes’ from the south. As a result, the Israelis possessed probably the most highly perfected command communications network in the world, and on this December morning the speed with which it went into action was dazzling.
As soon as the Cabinet’s decision was taken, General Dorit got up and went to a special telephone in the anteroom. That phone gave him a direct link to “The Hole,” Israel’s underground command post 160 feet below her Pentagon at Hakyria between Tel Aviv’s Kaplan and Leonardo da Vinci Streets.
“The walls of Jericho,” he said to the major sitting at the command console in “The Hole.” His code phrase activated the command net which linked every one of Israel’s twenty-seven senior military officers day and night.
Whether they were jogging along the Tel Aviv waterfront, hoeing their garden, making love to a wife or a girl friend, or simply going to the toilet, each of those twenty-seven men was required to have a telephone or an ultrasophisticated portable shortwave, two-way radio transmitter within an arm’s length of his person at all times. They were all assigned code names that were changed on the fourth day of the month by a computer at Hakyria, the new names being selected at random from an assigned category such as flowers or fruits.
Dorit ran out of the government headquarters, toward one of the two completely duplicated communications trucks which always traveled with his gray Plymouth. By the time he had settled into its seat, all twenty-six of his key subordinates were on line, standing by for his orders. Exactly three minutes had elapsed since Menachem Begin had given the order to destroy Libya.
In “The Hole,” an Israeli female soldier, her khaki miniskirt clinging to her buttocks, unlocked the safe next to the command console. Inside were banks of envelopes, two for every potential enemy Israel possessed. The Israelis well knew there would be no time for planning once a crisis started, and those envelopes contained alternative sets of plans for a nuclear assault on any nation apt to menace her existence. Option A was designed to maximize the effect of the strike on the countries’ population centers, Option B to maximize the effects on military targets. The clerk plucked out the envelopes for “AmberLibya” and set them on the command console before the major who coordinated communications.
He quickly reviewed them by radio with Dorit. Everything the commander needed to know was contained in those envelopes: the radar frequencies; strike times calculated down to the last second; a complete description of Libya’s radar and aircraft defense; the best attack routes to each target; up-to-date aerial-reconnaissance photographs. In addition, duplicates of those envelopes were on file at the Israeli air bases where the pilots who would have to execute the plans they contained waited.
Dorit ordered Option B prepared. It would pose some spectacular problems: the commanding general wanted all targets struck simultaneously to heighten surprise. Because of the length of Libya’s coastline, the planes hitting Tripoli would have to cover 1,250 miles; those striking the eastern borders, half that distance.
As Libya was beyond the range of Israel’s Jericho B rockets designed to carry nuclear warheads six hundred miles, the strike would have to be delivered by her fleet of F-4 Phantom jets. Even more important was keeping the attack off unfriendly radar screens until the Phantoms were over their targets. Libya’s radar was not a serious problem. But the radars of the U.S. Sixth Fleet steaming west from Crete were. Dorit ordered BenGurion Airport to prepare Hassida for takeoff. “Hassida,” Hebrew for “stork,” was the code word for a Boeing 707. From the outside, it resembled a jet of Israel’s national airline, El Al. The resemblance ended at the cabin door.
Inside was a forest of electronic equipment.
Israel had pioneered the techniques of “masking” an aircraft’s flight pattern from enemy radar with the material the plane contained. It was thanks to such Israeli skills that the planes bearing Egypt’s commando assault team had been able to land at Nicosia airport undetected by Cypriot radar during their illfated effort to rescue a group of hostages held by Palestinian gunmen. In flight, that 707 would create a series of electronic “tunnels” through which the attacking Phantoms would streak, undetected, to their targets.
By the time Dorit’s truck had reached the Monastery of Latrun, halfway to Tel Aviv, be had finished. In less than twenty minutes, enveloped by the olive groves, the ageless hills of Judea, he had planned the first preemptive nuclear attack in history.
One task remained; choosing a code name for the strike. The major manning the command console proposed one. Dorit accepted it immediately. It was “Operation Maspha,” for the Biblical site where the thunder of Yahweh had routed the Philistines.
On every side the low and level sands stretched far away. Only the black stain of a herd of goats, the bleached white stone of a nomad’s tomb or the bat-wing profile of a Bedouin’s tent intruded on the endless ochre seas. Once the caravans of antiquity had passed by here; so, too, probably had the Children of Israel struggling homeward from their Egyptian exile. And here, under those Negev wastes, in three widely separated underground passageways, the children of modern Israel had stored for more than a decade the terrible weapons that were their nation’s arms of last resort, a score of atomic bombs.
Instants after General Dorit’s first alert had reached “The Hole,” a series of red lights had erupted in a coded burst on the control panel of each tunnel, activating at the same time the wail of a klaxon siren.
At the sound, a score of technicians in each tunnel leaped from desks, bunks and backgammon boards and raced down the brightly lit corridors to the nuclear vaults. On one side of each tunnel, in airless containers, were shiny silver balls not much larger than the grapefruits grown in the orchards of the kibbutzim a few miles away. They were the plutonium cores of Israel’s latest generation of nuclear weapons. As one team removed them from the containers, another was wheeling in the high explosive cladding, the jacket into which each was designed to fit.
Their separation was a strategem. Since an atomic bomb existed only when these two halves were assembled, Israel had always been able to maintain publicly that she had not introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East.
It was a subterfuge similar to that employed by the aircraft carriers of the U.S. Seventh Fleet whenever they visited Japanese ports. Assembling them was a precise, delicate process, but those technicians spent hours every month rehearsing it until, like infantry soldiers breaking down and reassembling a rifle, they could do it blindfolded.
Only once before had those bombs been assembled with the terrible knowledge that they might have to be used. It was in the predawn hours of October 9, 1973, barely seventy-two hours after the outbreak of the 1973 war. Earlier that night, the Syrians had pierced the last Israeli defenses standing in their path on the northern front. The heartland of Israel, the rich plains of Galilee, lay exposed and undefended before their columns.
Moshe Dayan, in a state of extreme nervous agitation, had warned Golda Meir with an ancient Hebrew phrase that their nation faced a catastrophe comparable to the destruction of ancient Israel’s Second Temple by Rome’s rampaging legions.
Dismayed, dangerously close to suicide, she had responded with the order she had prayed she would never have to give, the order to prepare Israel’s nuclear weapons for use against her enemies. The Syrians did not attack, however, and the crisis passed, but not before the Soviets had rushed a shipload of nuclear warheads from their Black Sea naval base of Nikolaev to Alexandria to be incorporated into their Scud missiles already in Egypt.