Seymour Hersh Quotes

The mission planners, anxious to avoid international protest, had gone to extremes to mask the operation: it was hoped that Iraq and the rest of the world would be unable to fix blame for the bombing on the unmarked \ Israeli Air Force planes. The attack had been carried out, as planned, in two minutes, and the likelihood of any detection was slight. But Menachem Begin, buoyed by the success, stunned his colleagues on June 8 by unilaterally announcing the Israeli coup.... On the next day, as Israel was besieged with protests, the prime minister defended the operation and vowed that Israel was ready to strike again, if necessary, to prevent an enemy from developing the atomic bomb. p. 9

There was controversy inside Israel, too, over the bombing, which had been debated at the highest levels of the Israeli government since late 1979. Yitzhak Hofi, the director of Mossad, and Major General Yehoshua Saguy, chief of military intelligence, both opposed the attack, primarily because there was no evidence that Iraq was as yet capable of building a bomb.

The Israeli bombing triggered worldwide protest, and a few days later the White House announced the suspension of a scheduled delivery of four more F-i6s, a continuation of the 1975 sale. Two months later, with little fanfare, the administration's real policy emerged: the suspension was lifted and the aircraft were delivered without incident.

That afternoon the State Department issued a statement, said to have been cleared by the President and Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr., formally condemning the bombing, "which cannot but seriously add to the already tense situation in the area." Nonetheless, recalled Allen, "Reagan was delighted . . . very satisfied" by the attack on the reactor at Osirak. "It showed that the Israelis had claws, a sense of strategy, and were able to take care of problems before they developed. Anyway, what did Israel hurt?" Haig similarly was forbearing in private.

The next morning, according to Allen, there was a meeting of Reagan's high command at which Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger proposed canceling the F-16 aircraft sale. Others at the meeting, including Vice President George Bush and Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, agreed that some sanctions against Israel were essential. Reagan glanced at Allen at one point and with a gesture made it clear he had no intention of taking any such step: "He rolled his eyes at me," Allen said.

An aide in the White House situation room, which is staffed around the clock, telephoned to report that the Israelis had informed Washington that they had successfully bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, twelve miles southeast of Baghdad. Allen immediately telephoned Reagan... The President, he was told, had just boarded his helicopter for the trip back to the White House. "Get him off," Allen ordered. It was, after all, the new administration's first Middle East crisis.... "Mr. President, the Israelis just took out a nuclear reactor in Iraq with F-i6s." Israel, aided by long-term, low-interest American credits, had been authorized in 1975 to begin the purchase of seventy-five F-16s "for defensive purposes only." p. 8

It was a Sunday afternoon in early June 1981, and Richard V. Allen, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, was taking it easy, sipping iced tea on the sundeck of his suburban Virginia home and shuffling through a week's worth of unread cables, many of them highly classified.

Israel, as the British may have suspected, did have a secret agenda in its constant maneuvering for KH-11 access, but that agenda only became clear to a few top Reagan administration policymakers in the fall of 1981. The unraveling began with a bombing raid in Iraq.

The KH-11 was at the time known to be the most significant advance in outer- space reconnaissance. The key element of the sixty-four-foot-long satellite was a down- ward-looking mirror in front of the camera that rotated from side to side, like a periscope, enabling the satellite to track a single location as it moved across the atmosphere. p. 5

The Carter administration followed Ford's precedent by tightly restricting access to the high-quality imagery: even Great Britain, America's closest ally in the intelligence world, was limited to seeing photographs on a

America's most important military secret in 1979 was in orbit, whirling effortlessly around the world every ninety- six minutes, taking uncanny and invaluable reconnaissance photographs of all that lay hundreds of miles below. The satellite, known as KH-11, was an astonishing leap in technology: its images were capable of being digitally relayed to ground stations where they were picked up — in "real time" — for instant analysis by the intelligence community. There would be no more Pearl Harbors.

The C.I.A. was never satisfied with the F.B.I. and, can't blame them," the former official said. "We did hit or miss jobs... "We just went through the motions on our investigation. It was just a brushoff.

In 1970, Mr. Hoover reportedly ordered his bureau to break off all but formal liaison contact with the C.I.A, forcing lower level C.I.A. and F.B.I, officials to make clandestine, arrangements to exchange information. By the late sixties, one former F.B.I. official said, all but token cooperation between the, two agencies on counterintelligence and counterespionage had ended.

A number of former F.B.I. officials said in interviews' that the C.LA.'s alleged decision, to mount domestic brew sins, wiretaps and similarly illegal counterintelligence operations undoubtedly reflected, in part, the long‐standing mistrust between the two agencies.

The former C.I.A. official said that he could not reconcile Mr. Angleton's decision to permit the studies, which reported no evidence of foreign involvement, while being involved in an elaborate and secret domestic security operation to root out alleged foreign activities in the antiwar movement