--- title: "Operation Opera: Israel's Daring 1981 Raid on Iraq's Osirak Reactor" description: "It is remembered as one of the most daring airstrikes in modern history, and it was carried out with near surgical precision. Dubbed Operation Opera, and sometimes Operation Babylon, Israel's bombing of Iraq's nuclear facility in 1981 was intended to eliminate the possibility of Saddam Hussein developing nuclear weapons. To the Israeli government, it was a last resort against what it judged to be a potential global threat.\n\nThe mission spanned far more than the two minutes it took eight F-16s to flatten the reactor. It reached back years, into a shadow campaign of bombings and assassinations meant to slow the project before a single jet ever took off. And it depended, at the decisive moment, on a chain of coincidences and outright luck that no planner could have engineered.\n\nWhat follows is an account of the full operation: the diplomatic failures and covert killings that preceded it, the meticulous planning and flawless execution of the airstrike, and the strokes of fortune that allowed a handful of Israeli pilots to fly across two hostile nations, destroy a reactor outside Baghdad, and return home unscathed. It is also a story without a tidy moral, because decades later the question of whether Operation Opera made the world safer or more dangerous remains fiercely contested.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Operation Opera, also called Operation Babylon, was Israel's June 7, 1981 airstrike that destroyed Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad in an attack lasting less than two minutes.\n- Iraq acquired the 40-megawatt Osiris-class reactor and 72 kilograms of enriched uranium from France in 1975 for roughly 300 million dollars, despite having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.\n- Before the airstrike, Israel waged a covert campaign that included the 1979 destruction of a reactor shipment in France and the 1980 assassination in Paris of Egyptian scientist Yahya al-Meshad, who ran Iraq's nuclear program.\n- Iran struck Osirak first, in 1980, with two F-4 Phantoms under Operation Scorch Sword, damaging surrounding buildings but not the reactor core.\n- Eight Israeli F-16s, escorted by six F-15s, flew low across Jordan and Saudi Arabia, deceiving air controllers in Arabic, and arrived to find the reactor's defenses unmanned and its radar switched off.\n- The strike provoked unanimous condemnation from the UN Security Council, anger from France and the United States, and lasting damage to Israel's international reputation.\n- Its legacy is disputed: some credit it with stopping Saddam's nuclear ambitions, while others, including former Iraqi scientist Khidir Hamza, argue it drove Iraq toward a far larger and more secretive weapons effort.\n\n## Power of the Atom\n\nThe story begins in the early 1970s, when Iraq was under the de facto control of Saddam Hussein. Saddam had ambitious plans for the nation under his rule and intended for Iraq to one day become the dominant regional power, stronger than Egypt, stronger than Iran, and, most importantly, stronger than Israel. The development of nuclear weapons offered the surest path to that standing.\n\nThere was a complication. If Iraq launched an overt nuclear weapons program, it would almost certainly be detected by the United States and the Soviet Union, who would likely move to shut it down. The only viable route, then, was to pursue the atom under the cover of scientific research and civilian energy production. So in the 1970s, Saddam began shopping abroad for a nuclear reactor.\n\nIraq had long before purchased a small reactor from the Soviet Union, capable of producing only 2 megawatts. Now, flush with cash, Saddam wanted something far larger. The USSR denied his request, and he was outbid on a couple of other purchases. Finally, in 1975, France agreed to sell Iraq a 40-megawatt Osiris-class research reactor, which the French named Osirak, along with 72 kilograms of enriched uranium, all for around 300 million dollars.\n\n## Israel's Growing Alarm\n\nBy the time the deal was signed, Israel was already deeply wary of Iraq's intentions. Iraq had put its name to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in effect promising never to invest in nuclear arms, and had agreed with France that the reactor would serve no military purpose. Yet Israeli intelligence reports claimed Saddam was still seeking to weaponize the atom.\n\nThe task of stopping him only grew harder once Saddam reluctantly agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to examine the plant and install monitoring cameras. Even with those safeguards, weaponization was not impossible. One theory held that Iraq intended to eventually reconfigure the reactor to produce plutonium. Another held that the long-term aim was to build a domestic copy of the foreign reactor once Iraq had its hands on the original, a clone that would carry no international ties and face no inspections.\n\nTo Israel, all of this was a terrifying prospect, and it openly opposed the purchase. In one public statement, the Israeli government declared that \"from sources whose reliability is beyond any doubt, we learned that this reactor, despite its camouflage, is designed to produce atomic bombs.\"\n\nIsrael tried to persuade the United Nations to block the sale and lobbied France directly to cancel the deal. Both efforts failed. When diplomacy could not stop the transaction, the problem passed to Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, which was prepared to thwart the reactor by decidedly less diplomatic means.\n\n## A Campaign in the Shadows\n\nThe first covert mission came in April 1979. Allegedly, Israeli agents operating in France located a warehouse holding the first of many shipments bound for Iraq and blew it up. A previously unknown organization calling itself the French Ecological Group claimed responsibility for the explosion. No one had heard of the group before, and it has not been heard from since, making the true author of the operation fairly evident. The bombing destroyed enough material to delay the shipment by roughly six months, a useful setback but not the permanent solution Israel wanted.\n\nA year later, the campaign escalated. In 1980, the Egyptian nuclear scientist Yahya al-Meshad, who oversaw Iraq's nuclear program, rejected a shipment of French uranium on the grounds that it failed to meet the proper specifications. France apologized for the inconvenience and invited Meshad to fly in and personally inspect the next shipment before it was sent on to Iraq. He agreed, and spent time in Paris testing fuel rods and certifying their quality.\n\nOnce his work was done, Meshad bought a ticket home, but he never reached the plane. Returning to his hotel room for a final night in Paris, he was assassinated by Israeli agents, who slit his throat and left his body on the bed, where a maid found it the next morning. The only potential witness to the killing, a prostitute known as Marie Express, was killed in a hit-and-run accident a week later.\n\nThat same year, Israel was suspected of being behind several more bombings and acts of sabotage aimed at slowing construction. Despite these efforts, the project moved forward, and it was soon discovered that the reactor could become operational within months. With other options seemingly exhausted, the Israeli cabinet voted ten to six in favor of forcibly disabling the reactor. The reasoning was urgent: bombing a reactor that was already operational risked spreading radioactivity into Baghdad. They had to act before it was too late.\n\n## Mission Impossible\n\nAs Israel's senior commanders began drawing up plans to strike Osirak, the strategic picture turned upside down. In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, igniting a horrific and deadly war that would last eight more years. Suddenly Iran and Israel shared a common enemy, and the two began cooperating to destroy the reactor.\n\nJust after the war began, Iran made the first move against the plant, sending two F-4 Phantoms in an operation codenamed Scorch Sword. The jets reached the site, located just south of Baghdad, and inflicted extensive damage on the control rooms and research laboratories surrounding the reactor, but failed to damage the core. After the raid, the skies between Iran and Iraq became too heavily guarded for an Iranian follow-up. It was now Israel's turn, and for the Israeli pilots the task would be far more difficult.\n\nThe biggest obstacle was distance. To reach the reactor, the fighters would have to take off from an airbase in southern Israel, cross the southern tip of Jordan, an enemy nation, fly across Saudi Arabia, another enemy nation, and then enter Iraq. Once in Iraqi airspace, they would still need to traverse most of the country before reaching the reactor and dropping their payload.\n\n## Planning the Impossible\n\nThe sheer distance meant the F-16s, recently acquired from the United States, would have to carry external fuel tanks, making them heavier and less maneuverable. Because the route ran deep through enemy territory, the pilots would need to fly extremely low to evade radar, speak only Arabic over the radio, and mimic the flight formations of other air forces. At the target, they would have to execute the bombing runs with absolute precision, evade anti-aircraft fire and interceptors, and somehow make it home. The whole undertaking was, in spirit, closer to the desperate plan to destroy the Death Star in Star Wars than to a routine sortie, and there was little guarantee the pilots would survive.\n\nOver the following weeks, the mission was rehearsed down to the exact moment. The best Israeli pilots were recruited and began training over the Mediterranean to replicate the distances and altitudes the mission demanded. An imitation Osirak plant was built using leaked information, giving planners insight into the reactor's weakest points. Iran supplied aerial photography of the target from risky reconnaissance flights. American pilots also trained the Israeli team, flying practice runs with them over the desert in Utah.\n\nAfter months of preparation, everyone was ready, and the green light was given. Operation Opera was in motion.\n\n## Through Hostile Skies\n\nOn June 7, 1981, eight F-16s were prepared for the mission, each carrying Sidewinder missiles and a pair of 2,000-pound unguided bombs. The load left the fighters well above the recommended weight for their airframes. At 3:55 PM, they began taking off, struggling to get airborne, and managed it only just before the end of the runway at Etzion Airbase. Behind them came a squadron of six F-15s, ready to provide fighter cover if needed.\n\nOnce airborne, the jets flew south, crossing briefly into Jordanian airspace and over the Gulf of Aqaba. When Jordanian controllers made contact, the pilots replied in Arabic with a Saudi accent, claiming to be a Saudi patrol that had wandered off course, a story reinforced by their Saudi-style flight formation. The ruse worked, and they pressed on.\n\nBy sheer coincidence, the operation was nearly undone at its very start. Vacationing in the Gulf of Aqaba was King Hussein bin Talal of Jordan, who looked up from his yacht and spotted the Israeli fighters overhead. Seeing their Israeli markings, the heavy weapons they carried, and the direction they flew, he immediately deduced that the Osirak reactor was the target and ordered his government to warn Saddam. Due to a failure somewhere in the communication chain, the message never reached Iraq, and the mission was saved.\n\nUnaware of how narrowly they had avoided catastrophe, the pilots crossed into Saudi airspace. This time they flew in a Jordanian formation, spoke Arabic with a Jordanian accent, and told Saudi controllers they were a Jordanian patrol that had gotten a little lost. Remarkably, this deception also worked, and the formation continued, having now fooled both nations.\n\n## The Final Approach\n\nCruising over the sand dunes of Saudi Arabia, the heavy F-16s had already burned through so much fuel that their external tanks were empty. The pilots jettisoned the depleted tanks to lighten the aircraft, a risky maneuver. They would later recall their uncertainty over whether a falling tank might scrape one of their bombs as it detached from the wing. It went smoothly, and the empty metal casings dropped into the Saudi sand, never to be seen again.\n\nOnce the jets reached Iraqi airspace, the real challenge began. All but two of the F-15s split away from the main group, dispersing to act as a distraction, while the F-16s dropped their altitude all the way down to below 30 meters, or 100 feet. Soaring across the Iraqi desert beneath the radar, they would hold at or below that altitude until reaching the target, maintaining strict radio silence to avoid detection.\n\nAs Osirak drew near, the squadron pulled into a sharp climb, reaching 2,100 meters, about 6,900 feet, before rolling into a 35-degree dive aimed at the reactor. This was the moment they expected to be intercepted. Instead, their timing proved flawless. Just half an hour earlier, the Iraqi guards manning the anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles had left their posts to eat dinner. By another stroke of luck, the technicians had, for some reason, switched off the radar. There were no enemy fighters in the air, and the reactor was a sitting duck.\n\n## Two Minutes Over Baghdad\n\nAs the jets descended toward the target, the lead pilot, Ze'ev Raz, realized he had misjudged his angle of attack and would miss the dome over the reactor. The absence of enemy resistance gave him room to correct. As the second jet took the lead, Raz pulled into a loop, dropping back in line and lining up again on the mark.\n\nPair by pair, the unguided bombs were released in five-second intervals, plummeting toward the reactor below. As the first bombs struck, the Iraqis sprinted to their positions and opened up with anti-aircraft guns, but it was far too late. Each F-16 dropped both of its bombs, and it is estimated that at least half of the 16 struck the center of the reactor, causing irreparable, critical damage, while the rest hit various sections of the facility.\n\nHaving evaded the anti-aircraft fire, the squadron reformed, climbed to high altitude, and started home, this time taking the shortest, most direct route to Israel. A few surface-to-air missiles were fired at the departing jets, but none found their targets, and the pilots left Iraqi airspace unscathed. The entire attack had lasted less than two minutes, and Iraq never managed to scramble a single fighter of its own.\n\n## Heroes and Scapegoats\n\nSaddam was so enraged by the failure of his armed forces that he ordered the execution of Colonel Fahri Hussein, who had overseen Iraq's Western Air Defense Zone. Not only was the colonel executed, but so were all officers under his command above the rank of major. In addition to those death sentences, 23 Iraqi pilots were imprisoned for failing to get airborne during the attack.\n\nThe Israeli pilots, by contrast, returned home to be celebrated as heroes. Government officials presented personal letters of gratitude for their roles in the mission, and the airmen went on to distinguished careers. Ilan Ramon, the youngest of the crew at just 24 during Operation Opera, would later become Israel's first astronaut, only to lose his life in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster.\n\n## At What Cost?\n\nTo say that news of the airstrike shocked the world would be an understatement. The US government was completely caught off guard, with no idea that Operation Opera had been in the works. It would later be described as a serious intelligence failure not to have detected such a major operation, and a special investigative team was tasked with making sure nothing similar happened again. Speaking of Israel's prime minister, President Ronald Reagan later remarked, \"He should have told us & the French, we could have done something to remove the threat.\"\n\nThe French, for their part, were also angry, especially because one of the ten people killed at the facility was a young French technician. France insisted the plant had been purely scientific in nature, a view shared by the United Kingdom, which believed Iraq was nowhere near the capability to produce atomic weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency stated that its latest inspections had revealed nothing but compliance, with no sign of ulterior motives at the plant.\n\nThe UN Security Council responded immediately with a unanimous vote condemning the attack, followed by the UN General Assembly, which called on Israel to pay reparations for the damage caused to Iraq.\n\n## A Brilliant Success, or a Catastrophic Mistake?\n\nIsrael held to its position, claiming it had set back Iraq's nuclear program by an entire decade and had acted in self-defense. That view seemed vindicated when Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait ten years later, sparking the Persian Gulf War and drawing in the United States and its allies. The Gulf War was an exceptionally bloody conflict, yet, viewed through the lens of Operation Opera, it could have been far worse. As the political science professor Louis René Beres put it, \"had it not been for the brilliant raid at Osiraq, Saddam's forces might have been equipped with atomic warheads in 1991.\"\n\nBy this reading, Operation Opera was a brilliant success that thwarted Saddam's nuclear ambitions, a mission that, despite being condemned around the world for its aggression, was a necessity for regional and global stability. But there is an opposing view: that the raid did nothing but accelerate Iraq's nuclear program.\n\nIsrael had wagered that the airstrike would fall below the threshold of starting a war with Iraq, since Saddam was likely too consumed by his war with Iran to open a second front. It was a good bet, and Iraq did not retaliate. But Israel badly underestimated Saddam's determination to pursue nuclear weapons and pushed him further into his anti-Israel stance. Just after the attack, Saddam is reported to have said, \"Once Iraq walks out victorious, there will not be any Israel.\"\n\n## A Program Reborn in Secrecy\n\nMuch of this emerged in a 2003 interview with an Iraqi nuclear scientist named Khidir Hamza, who fled to the United States in the 1990s. He stated that after the airstrike, Saddam increased the program's nuclear personnel from 400 to 7,000 and invested an additional 10 billion dollars. The whole effort was driven into deep secrecy, enriching uranium became the top priority, and Israel was now the number one target. Hamza claimed that had the proposed facilities been completed as planned, Iraq could have produced as many as six atomic warheads per year.\n\nThose facilities were never finished. Progress was set back further by a second and third bombing of Osirak by the United States during the Gulf War. So, counterintuitive as it may seem, it is possible that Israel's reactor raid triggered the very program it set out to destroy. The historian Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer captured the argument in an article: \"The destruction of the Osiraq reactor did not delay the development of a nuclear weapons option because it was never intended to be part of such an effort. On the contrary, it brought about a far more determined and focused effort to acquire nuclear weapons.\"\n\nThe controversy shines an uncomfortable spotlight on the military doctrine of preventive attacks. If such strikes only increase the danger over the long term, is military action really the best option? It is, in many ways, a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma. Perhaps Israel should have waited for more verifiable intelligence rather than acting without international support. Either way, the episode seriously damaged Israel's international reputation.\n\nWe may never know the true repercussions of Operation Opera. Perhaps it saved the region from a rapidly advancing Iraqi nuclear program. Perhaps it merely drove an already dangerous dictator to his volatile limits, intensifying decades of instability across the Middle East. What is beyond dispute is the preparation and skill that pulled off one of the most complex and daring airstrikes ever attempted.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What was Operation Opera and how was it carried out?\n\nOperation Opera, also known as Operation Babylon, was Israel's June 7, 1981 airstrike that destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad. Eight F-16 fighters, each carrying two 2,000-pound unguided bombs and Sidewinder missiles, flew low across Jordan and Saudi Arabia by deceiving air controllers in Arabic, arrived to find the reactor's defenses unmanned and its radar switched off, and destroyed the facility in an attack lasting less than two minutes.\n\n### What covert actions did Israel take before the airstrike?\n\nIsrael first tried diplomacy, lobbying the UN and France to block the reactor deal. When that failed, Mossad ran a shadow campaign: Israeli agents in France blew up a warehouse holding the first reactor shipment in April 1979, delaying it by six months. In 1980, Mossad agents assassinated Yahya al-Meshad — the Egyptian scientist running Iraq's nuclear program — in his Paris hotel room, slitting his throat. The only potential witness, a prostitute known as Marie Express, was killed in a hit-and-run accident a week later.\n\n### How did the Israeli pilots navigate through hostile airspace undetected?\n\nThe F-16s flew extremely low — below 30 meters at times — to evade radar, and the pilots spoke only Arabic over the radio with regional accents, mimicking Saudi and then Jordanian flight formations to fool each country's air controllers in turn. They jettisoned empty external fuel tanks over Saudi Arabia to lighten the aircraft. By sheer coincidence, Jordan's King Hussein spotted the jets from his yacht in the Gulf of Aqaba and ordered a warning to Saddam, but the message never arrived.\n\n### How did the international community respond to the strike?\n\nThe UN Security Council unanimously condemned the attack, and the UN General Assembly called on Israel to pay reparations. The United States was caught completely off guard — it later described the failure to detect the operation as a serious intelligence lapse — and President Reagan said Israel's prime minister should have told Washington and France so they could have addressed the threat another way. France and the United Kingdom insisted the reactor had been purely civilian in nature, and one of the ten people killed was a young French technician.\n\n### Did Operation Opera stop Iraq's nuclear program, or did it accelerate it?\n\nThe question remains bitterly disputed. Israel claimed it set the program back a decade, a view bolstered by the fact that Iraq had no nuclear weapon when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. But former Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidir Hamza, who fled to the United States in the 1990s, argued the strike drove Saddam into a far larger and more secretive effort — increasing nuclear personnel from 400 to 7,000 and pouring in an additional 10 billion dollars. Historian Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer similarly concluded that the reactor was never intended for weapons use, and the raid produced precisely the determined weapons program it aimed to prevent.\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/operation-opera-israel-osirak-reactor-raid.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/operation-opera-israel-osirak-reactor-raid datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/ijvPgNQobV4/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 7ee886c1db2e1ff43bc504307593ea3bffc933d3b93af2f91bba81eed83e9e2d tokens: 5811 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/operation-opera-israel-osirak-reactor-raid.md.summary.md --- It is remembered as one of the most daring airstrikes in modern history, and it was carried out with near surgical precision. Dubbed Operation Opera, and sometimes Operation Babylon, Israel's bombing of Iraq's nuclear facility in 1981 was intended to eliminate the possibility of Saddam Hussein developing nuclear weapons. To the Israeli government, it was a last resort against what it judged to be a potential global threat. The mission spanned far more than the two minutes it took eight F-16s to flatten the reactor. It reached back years, into a shadow campaign of bombings and assassinations meant to slow the project before a single jet ever took off. And it depended, at the decisive moment, on a chain of coincidences and outright luck that no planner could have engineered. What follows is an account of the full operation: the diplomatic failures and covert killings that preceded it, the meticulous planning and flawless execution of the airstrike, and the strokes of fortune that allowed a handful of Israeli pilots to fly across two hostile nations, destroy a reactor outside Baghdad, and return home unscathed. It is also a story without a tidy moral, because decades later the question of whether Operation Opera made the world safer or more dangerous remains fiercely contested. ## Key Takeaways - Operation Opera, also called Operation Babylon, was Israel's June 7, 1981 airstrike that destroyed Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad in an attack lasting less than two minutes. - Iraq acquired the 40-megawatt Osiris-class reactor and 72 kilograms of enriched uranium from France in 1975 for roughly 300 million dollars, despite having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. - Before the airstrike, Israel waged a covert campaign that included the 1979 destruction of a reactor shipment in France and the 1980 assassination in Paris of Egyptian scientist Yahya al-Meshad, who ran Iraq's nuclear program. - Iran struck Osirak first, in 1980, with two F-4 Phantoms under Operation Scorch Sword, damaging surrounding buildings but not the reactor core. - Eight Israeli F-16s, escorted by six F-15s, flew low across Jordan and Saudi Arabia, deceiving air controllers in Arabic, and arrived to find the reactor's defenses unmanned and its radar switched off. - The strike provoked unanimous condemnation from the UN Security Council, anger from France and the United States, and lasting damage to Israel's international reputation. - Its legacy is disputed: some credit it with stopping Saddam's nuclear ambitions, while others, including former Iraqi scientist Khidir Hamza, argue it drove Iraq toward a far larger and more secretive weapons effort. ## Power of the Atom The story begins in the early 1970s, when Iraq was under the de facto control of Saddam Hussein. Saddam had ambitious plans for the nation under his rule and intended for Iraq to one day become the dominant regional power, stronger than Egypt, stronger than Iran, and, most importantly, stronger than Israel. The development of nuclear weapons offered the surest path to that standing. There was a complication. If Iraq launched an overt nuclear weapons program, it would almost certainly be detected by the United States and the Soviet Union, who would likely move to shut it down. The only viable route, then, was to pursue the atom under the cover of scientific research and civilian energy production. So in the 1970s, Saddam began shopping abroad for a nuclear reactor. Iraq had long before purchased a small reactor from the Soviet Union, capable of producing only 2 megawatts. Now, flush with cash, Saddam wanted something far larger. The USSR denied his request, and he was outbid on a couple of other purchases. Finally, in 1975, France agreed to sell Iraq a 40-megawatt Osiris-class research reactor, which the French named Osirak, along with 72 kilograms of enriched uranium, all for around 300 million dollars. ## Israel's Growing Alarm By the time the deal was signed, Israel was already deeply wary of Iraq's intentions. Iraq had put its name to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in effect promising never to invest in nuclear arms, and had agreed with France that the reactor would serve no military purpose. Yet Israeli intelligence reports claimed Saddam was still seeking to weaponize the atom. The task of stopping him only grew harder once Saddam reluctantly agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to examine the plant and install monitoring cameras. Even with those safeguards, weaponization was not impossible. One theory held that Iraq intended to eventually reconfigure the reactor to produce plutonium. Another held that the long-term aim was to build a domestic copy of the foreign reactor once Iraq had its hands on the original, a clone that would carry no international ties and face no inspections. To Israel, all of this was a terrifying prospect, and it openly opposed the purchase. In one public statement, the Israeli government declared that "from sources whose reliability is beyond any doubt, we learned that this reactor, despite its camouflage, is designed to produce atomic bombs." Israel tried to persuade the United Nations to block the sale and lobbied France directly to cancel the deal. Both efforts failed. When diplomacy could not stop the transaction, the problem passed to Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, which was prepared to thwart the reactor by decidedly less diplomatic means. ## A Campaign in the Shadows The first covert mission came in April 1979. Allegedly, Israeli agents operating in France located a warehouse holding the first of many shipments bound for Iraq and blew it up. A previously unknown organization calling itself the French Ecological Group claimed responsibility for the explosion. No one had heard of the group before, and it has not been heard from since, making the true author of the operation fairly evident. The bombing destroyed enough material to delay the shipment by roughly six months, a useful setback but not the permanent solution Israel wanted. A year later, the campaign escalated. In 1980, the Egyptian nuclear scientist Yahya al-Meshad, who oversaw Iraq's nuclear program, rejected a shipment of French uranium on the grounds that it failed to meet the proper specifications. France apologized for the inconvenience and invited Meshad to fly in and personally inspect the next shipment before it was sent on to Iraq. He agreed, and spent time in Paris testing fuel rods and certifying their quality. Once his work was done, Meshad bought a ticket home, but he never reached the plane. Returning to his hotel room for a final night in Paris, he was assassinated by Israeli agents, who slit his throat and left his body on the bed, where a maid found it the next morning. The only potential witness to the killing, a prostitute known as Marie Express, was killed in a hit-and-run accident a week later. That same year, Israel was suspected of being behind several more bombings and acts of sabotage aimed at slowing construction. Despite these efforts, the project moved forward, and it was soon discovered that the reactor could become operational within months. With other options seemingly exhausted, the Israeli cabinet voted ten to six in favor of forcibly disabling the reactor. The reasoning was urgent: bombing a reactor that was already operational risked spreading radioactivity into Baghdad. They had to act before it was too late. ## Mission Impossible As Israel's senior commanders began drawing up plans to strike Osirak, the strategic picture turned upside down. In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, igniting a horrific and deadly war that would last eight more years. Suddenly Iran and Israel shared a common enemy, and the two began cooperating to destroy the reactor. Just after the war began, Iran made the first move against the plant, sending two F-4 Phantoms in an operation codenamed Scorch Sword. The jets reached the site, located just south of Baghdad, and inflicted extensive damage on the control rooms and research laboratories surrounding the reactor, but failed to damage the core. After the raid, the skies between Iran and Iraq became too heavily guarded for an Iranian follow-up. It was now Israel's turn, and for the Israeli pilots the task would be far more difficult. The biggest obstacle was distance. To reach the reactor, the fighters would have to take off from an airbase in southern Israel, cross the southern tip of Jordan, an enemy nation, fly across Saudi Arabia, another enemy nation, and then enter Iraq. Once in Iraqi airspace, they would still need to traverse most of the country before reaching the reactor and dropping their payload. ## Planning the Impossible The sheer distance meant the F-16s, recently acquired from the United States, would have to carry external fuel tanks, making them heavier and less maneuverable. Because the route ran deep through enemy territory, the pilots would need to fly extremely low to evade radar, speak only Arabic over the radio, and mimic the flight formations of other air forces. At the target, they would have to execute the bombing runs with absolute precision, evade anti-aircraft fire and interceptors, and somehow make it home. The whole undertaking was, in spirit, closer to the desperate plan to destroy the Death Star in Star Wars than to a routine sortie, and there was little guarantee the pilots would survive. Over the following weeks, the mission was rehearsed down to the exact moment. The best Israeli pilots were recruited and began training over the Mediterranean to replicate the distances and altitudes the mission demanded. An imitation Osirak plant was built using leaked information, giving planners insight into the reactor's weakest points. Iran supplied aerial photography of the target from risky reconnaissance flights. American pilots also trained the Israeli team, flying practice runs with them over the desert in Utah. After months of preparation, everyone was ready, and the green light was given. Operation Opera was in motion. ## Through Hostile Skies On June 7, 1981, eight F-16s were prepared for the mission, each carrying Sidewinder missiles and a pair of 2,000-pound unguided bombs. The load left the fighters well above the recommended weight for their airframes. At 3:55 PM, they began taking off, struggling to get airborne, and managed it only just before the end of the runway at Etzion Airbase. Behind them came a squadron of six F-15s, ready to provide fighter cover if needed. Once airborne, the jets flew south, crossing briefly into Jordanian airspace and over the Gulf of Aqaba. When Jordanian controllers made contact, the pilots replied in Arabic with a Saudi accent, claiming to be a Saudi patrol that had wandered off course, a story reinforced by their Saudi-style flight formation. The ruse worked, and they pressed on. By sheer coincidence, the operation was nearly undone at its very start. Vacationing in the Gulf of Aqaba was King Hussein bin Talal of Jordan, who looked up from his yacht and spotted the Israeli fighters overhead. Seeing their Israeli markings, the heavy weapons they carried, and the direction they flew, he immediately deduced that the Osirak reactor was the target and ordered his government to warn Saddam. Due to a failure somewhere in the communication chain, the message never reached Iraq, and the mission was saved. Unaware of how narrowly they had avoided catastrophe, the pilots crossed into Saudi airspace. This time they flew in a Jordanian formation, spoke Arabic with a Jordanian accent, and told Saudi controllers they were a Jordanian patrol that had gotten a little lost. Remarkably, this deception also worked, and the formation continued, having now fooled both nations. ## The Final Approach Cruising over the sand dunes of Saudi Arabia, the heavy F-16s had already burned through so much fuel that their external tanks were empty. The pilots jettisoned the depleted tanks to lighten the aircraft, a risky maneuver. They would later recall their uncertainty over whether a falling tank might scrape one of their bombs as it detached from the wing. It went smoothly, and the empty metal casings dropped into the Saudi sand, never to be seen again. Once the jets reached Iraqi airspace, the real challenge began. All but two of the F-15s split away from the main group, dispersing to act as a distraction, while the F-16s dropped their altitude all the way down to below 30 meters, or 100 feet. Soaring across the Iraqi desert beneath the radar, they would hold at or below that altitude until reaching the target, maintaining strict radio silence to avoid detection. As Osirak drew near, the squadron pulled into a sharp climb, reaching 2,100 meters, about 6,900 feet, before rolling into a 35-degree dive aimed at the reactor. This was the moment they expected to be intercepted. Instead, their timing proved flawless. Just half an hour earlier, the Iraqi guards manning the anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles had left their posts to eat dinner. By another stroke of luck, the technicians had, for some reason, switched off the radar. There were no enemy fighters in the air, and the reactor was a sitting duck. ## Two Minutes Over Baghdad As the jets descended toward the target, the lead pilot, Ze'ev Raz, realized he had misjudged his angle of attack and would miss the dome over the reactor. The absence of enemy resistance gave him room to correct. As the second jet took the lead, Raz pulled into a loop, dropping back in line and lining up again on the mark. Pair by pair, the unguided bombs were released in five-second intervals, plummeting toward the reactor below. As the first bombs struck, the Iraqis sprinted to their positions and opened up with anti-aircraft guns, but it was far too late. Each F-16 dropped both of its bombs, and it is estimated that at least half of the 16 struck the center of the reactor, causing irreparable, critical damage, while the rest hit various sections of the facility. Having evaded the anti-aircraft fire, the squadron reformed, climbed to high altitude, and started home, this time taking the shortest, most direct route to Israel. A few surface-to-air missiles were fired at the departing jets, but none found their targets, and the pilots left Iraqi airspace unscathed. The entire attack had lasted less than two minutes, and Iraq never managed to scramble a single fighter of its own. ## Heroes and Scapegoats Saddam was so enraged by the failure of his armed forces that he ordered the execution of Colonel Fahri Hussein, who had overseen Iraq's Western Air Defense Zone. Not only was the colonel executed, but so were all officers under his command above the rank of major. In addition to those death sentences, 23 Iraqi pilots were imprisoned for failing to get airborne during the attack. The Israeli pilots, by contrast, returned home to be celebrated as heroes. Government officials presented personal letters of gratitude for their roles in the mission, and the airmen went on to distinguished careers. Ilan Ramon, the youngest of the crew at just 24 during Operation Opera, would later become Israel's first astronaut, only to lose his life in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster. ## At What Cost? To say that news of the airstrike shocked the world would be an understatement. The US government was completely caught off guard, with no idea that Operation Opera had been in the works. It would later be described as a serious intelligence failure not to have detected such a major operation, and a special investigative team was tasked with making sure nothing similar happened again. Speaking of Israel's prime minister, President Ronald Reagan later remarked, "He should have told us & the French, we could have done something to remove the threat." The French, for their part, were also angry, especially because one of the ten people killed at the facility was a young French technician. France insisted the plant had been purely scientific in nature, a view shared by the United Kingdom, which believed Iraq was nowhere near the capability to produce atomic weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency stated that its latest inspections had revealed nothing but compliance, with no sign of ulterior motives at the plant. The UN Security Council responded immediately with a unanimous vote condemning the attack, followed by the UN General Assembly, which called on Israel to pay reparations for the damage caused to Iraq. ## A Brilliant Success, or a Catastrophic Mistake? Israel held to its position, claiming it had set back Iraq's nuclear program by an entire decade and had acted in self-defense. That view seemed vindicated when Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait ten years later, sparking the Persian Gulf War and drawing in the United States and its allies. The Gulf War was an exceptionally bloody conflict, yet, viewed through the lens of Operation Opera, it could have been far worse. As the political science professor Louis René Beres put it, "had it not been for the brilliant raid at Osiraq, Saddam's forces might have been equipped with atomic warheads in 1991." By this reading, Operation Opera was a brilliant success that thwarted Saddam's nuclear ambitions, a mission that, despite being condemned around the world for its aggression, was a necessity for regional and global stability. But there is an opposing view: that the raid did nothing but accelerate Iraq's nuclear program. Israel had wagered that the airstrike would fall below the threshold of starting a war with Iraq, since Saddam was likely too consumed by his war with Iran to open a second front. It was a good bet, and Iraq did not retaliate. But Israel badly underestimated Saddam's determination to pursue nuclear weapons and pushed him further into his anti-Israel stance. Just after the attack, Saddam is reported to have said, "Once Iraq walks out victorious, there will not be any Israel." ## A Program Reborn in Secrecy Much of this emerged in a 2003 interview with an Iraqi nuclear scientist named Khidir Hamza, who fled to the United States in the 1990s. He stated that after the airstrike, Saddam increased the program's nuclear personnel from 400 to 7,000 and invested an additional 10 billion dollars. The whole effort was driven into deep secrecy, enriching uranium became the top priority, and Israel was now the number one target. Hamza claimed that had the proposed facilities been completed as planned, Iraq could have produced as many as six atomic warheads per year. Those facilities were never finished. Progress was set back further by a second and third bombing of Osirak by the United States during the Gulf War. So, counterintuitive as it may seem, it is possible that Israel's reactor raid triggered the very program it set out to destroy. The historian Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer captured the argument in an article: "The destruction of the Osiraq reactor did not delay the development of a nuclear weapons option because it was never intended to be part of such an effort. On the contrary, it brought about a far more determined and focused effort to acquire nuclear weapons." The controversy shines an uncomfortable spotlight on the military doctrine of preventive attacks. If such strikes only increase the danger over the long term, is military action really the best option? It is, in many ways, a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma. Perhaps Israel should have waited for more verifiable intelligence rather than acting without international support. Either way, the episode seriously damaged Israel's international reputation. We may never know the true repercussions of Operation Opera. Perhaps it saved the region from a rapidly advancing Iraqi nuclear program. Perhaps it merely drove an already dangerous dictator to his volatile limits, intensifying decades of instability across the Middle East. What is beyond dispute is the preparation and skill that pulled off one of the most complex and daring airstrikes ever attempted. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was Operation Opera and how was it carried out? Operation Opera, also known as Operation Babylon, was Israel's June 7, 1981 airstrike that destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad. Eight F-16 fighters, each carrying two 2,000-pound unguided bombs and Sidewinder missiles, flew low across Jordan and Saudi Arabia by deceiving air controllers in Arabic, arrived to find the reactor's defenses unmanned and its radar switched off, and destroyed the facility in an attack lasting less than two minutes. ### What covert actions did Israel take before the airstrike? Israel first tried diplomacy, lobbying the UN and France to block the reactor deal. When that failed, Mossad ran a shadow campaign: Israeli agents in France blew up a warehouse holding the first reactor shipment in April 1979, delaying it by six months. In 1980, Mossad agents assassinated Yahya al-Meshad — the Egyptian scientist running Iraq's nuclear program — in his Paris hotel room, slitting his throat. The only potential witness, a prostitute known as Marie Express, was killed in a hit-and-run accident a week later. ### How did the Israeli pilots navigate through hostile airspace undetected? The F-16s flew extremely low — below 30 meters at times — to evade radar, and the pilots spoke only Arabic over the radio with regional accents, mimicking Saudi and then Jordanian flight formations to fool each country's air controllers in turn. They jettisoned empty external fuel tanks over Saudi Arabia to lighten the aircraft. By sheer coincidence, Jordan's King Hussein spotted the jets from his yacht in the Gulf of Aqaba and ordered a warning to Saddam, but the message never arrived. ### How did the international community respond to the strike? The UN Security Council unanimously condemned the attack, and the UN General Assembly called on Israel to pay reparations. The United States was caught completely off guard — it later described the failure to detect the operation as a serious intelligence lapse — and President Reagan said Israel's prime minister should have told Washington and France so they could have addressed the threat another way. France and the United Kingdom insisted the reactor had been purely civilian in nature, and one of the ten people killed was a young French technician. ### Did Operation Opera stop Iraq's nuclear program, or did it accelerate it? The question remains bitterly disputed. Israel claimed it set the program back a decade, a view bolstered by the fact that Iraq had no nuclear weapon when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. But former Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidir Hamza, who fled to the United States in the 1990s, argued the strike drove Saddam into a far larger and more secretive effort — increasing nuclear personnel from 400 to 7,000 and pouring in an additional 10 billion dollars. Historian Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer similarly concluded that the reactor was never intended for weapons use, and the raid produced precisely the determined weapons program it aimed to prevent. <!-- youtube:ijvPgNQobV4 -->