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by the increasingly frenetic radio chatter coming from panicked antiaircraft gunners below. I could hear a pilot’s rhythmic breathing suddenly quicken over the radio as his plane nosed down into the chalky streaks of missile contrails and hot tracer bullets.
    As it turned out, the eighth pilot, Ilan Ramon, was back in Houston, Texas, waiting to board the next Columbia shuttle as Israel’s first astronaut. I spoke to Ilan that summer, and we agreed to get together for a more extensive follow-up interview after he returned from the NASA shuttle’s science mission the following February. Tragically, we never kept that meeting. As I watched in horror, Ramon perished when Columbia broke up over Texas on February 1, just minutes from completing its historic mission. The youngest and maybe the most beloved among the Osirak pilots, Ramon was still full of boyish energy and a self-deprecating warmth. What he was most concerned about regarding our interview was not that he be given credit for his part in the Osirak raid, but that the release of his name might expose his family to danger from Saddam Hussein. His extensive travel and exposure abroad as Israel’s first astronaut would make him an easy target for Iraq’s murderous Mukhabarat security agents. If the Iraqi dictator were crazy enough to attempt to assassinate President George H. Bush, he was easily mad enough to want to liquidate one of the men responsible for ending his nuclear dreams.
    Indeed, the constant dread of attack by Saddam Hussein that so colored Israel’s wrenching decision to take out his nuclear reactor twenty years earlier was still palpable in all the pilots I met. It was one of the reasons why the IDF insisted that the pilots’ names remain classified for two decades. Many of the team had gone on to second careers in electronics or Israel’s defense industry and traveled abroad extensively. None of them wanted to be surprised by an Iraqi bullet on a street in Istanbul or New Delhi.
    Who at the time could have predicted that within a year, Saddam Hussein and his Ba’thist regime would be no more? Perhaps because of this New World Order, or because after a year of telephone and e-mail exchanges, of questions and answers and just plain talk, everyone involved in telling about the raid had come to trust one another. Or maybe, after twenty years, it was just time for the full story to be told. Or maybe for all those reasons, I was able for the first time to tell the entire story of this remarkable raid using all the real names and actual documents—from the first Israeli intelligence reports of a meeting between French prime minister Jacques Chirac and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 1974 to the epic political battles within Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin’s government over whether to attack Iraq to the personal tales of the bombing as seen through the eyes of the pilots themselves.
    It is a remarkable story of courage and conviction—and of an action that proved to be a turning point in the history of Saddam’s Iraq. In fact, it could well be argued, the Coalition’s stunning military victory in finally liberating Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein in May 2003 began on a cloudless evening over al-Tuwaitha on June 7, 1981.
    R ODGER W . C LAIRE
Los Angeles, California

                                                                                                                                       
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