HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028095.jpg

with terror attacks, a major military response was highly unlikely. Saddam’s successors were never going to be Zionists. But we were persuaded that his uniquely central role meant the threat to Israel would be dramatically reduced. I’m much less sure whether the elder President Bush, whose election defeat to Bill Clinton came just two days before our final exercise in the Negev, would have agreed with the attack. After the victory in the Gulf War, Bush had deliberately stopped short of sending American forces on to Baghdad. He was also vice-president, under Reagan, when Israel had bombed Saddam’s nuclear reactor — an attack publicly condemned by Washington. I did ask him some years ago whether the Gulf War might have been handled differently if Israel hadn’t taken out Saddam’s nuclear program a decade earlier. “What if he’d had a couple of crude nuclear devices,” I said. President Bush smiled in response. He said he didn’t deal with “hypotheticals.” Yet any idea of an Israeli attack on Saddam became instantly irrelevant once foreign media reports had disclosed the reason for our ill-fated military exercise in the Negev. Inside Israel, the focus, and the controversy, shifted to the accident itself. The foreign media reports of the operation we were planning proved remarkably accurate. Some of the details still remain classified, but we were going to use one of our new “stand-off” weapons systems: a camera-guided missile that could be fired from a considerable distance away and, in coordination with one of the Sayeret Matkal soldiers nearer in, maneuvered in for the strike. After months of planning and intelligence work, we were confident that we’d found a way to get the sayeret unit into Iraq, target Saddam at an event we knew he would be attending, isolate and kill him with minimal danger of any other casualties, and get our unit out safely again. The Negev exercise was a run-through of the entire operation. It lasted nearly 48 hours. And it culminated in a simulation of the missile attack on Saddam. I was there as an observer along with Amnon Lipkin, my deputy chief-of- staff; as well as the head of military intelligence, the head of operations and Amiram Levin. We assembled at dawn for the simulation of the missile attack. We watched from a few hundred yards away as a group of young Israeli soldiers walked into a wide area in front of us: posing as Saddam” and his entourage. We - and they — knew that this was just the first part of the exercise. In a Land Rover more than five miles away, a member of the sayeret strike unit would be confirming coordinates and, in rapid succession, “firing” two of the precision missiles. But this was just to confirm that the targeting system had worked 247 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028095