Raid on the Sun by Rodger W. Claire

emptied from the cars and quickly sealed off the building. German shepherd police dogs were led through the hallways, sniffing, straining at their leashes. It was obvious: the Great Uncle had come to visit.
    Deputy director Abdul-Razzaq al-Hashimi watched nervously as security agents entered his offices and ordered him to round up his top scientists. He quickly obliged. The room soon filled with nuclear engineers, physicists, and directors, including eminent scientists Dr. Hussein al-Shahristani, Dr. Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, and Humam al-Ghafour. Khidhir Hamza had flown to New York days earlier to attend a United Nations nuclear energy conference, but he would hear the harrowing details when he returned.
    Saddam Hussein, histrionically, strode into the room without preliminaries. Guards pulled the doors shut behind him.
    “When are you going to deliver the plutonium?” he asked the assembled scientists straight out.
    An awkward silence hung in the room.
    “I
said
,” he repeated, “when are you going to deliver the plutonium?”
    “Plutonium . . . for what?” AE’s director, al-Shahristani, finally replied.
    Saddam looked at him, annoyed. “When will you deliver the plutonium for the
bomb
?”
    “Bomb? We can’t make a bomb . . .” al-Shahristani almost stuttered. “Well, theoretically, we could, I suppose, if we had enough plutonium . . . but there are nuclear nonproliferation treaties . . .”
    “Treaties are a matter for
us
to deal with,” Saddam cut him off. “You, as a scientist, should not be troubled by these things. You should be doing your job and not have these kinds of excuses.”
    Hussein stared at the group of scientists, who all stared at the floor. Finally, he seemed to make up his mind about something, then turned and walked out the door.
    The following day al-Shahristani was not at work. He was not seen again in Tammuz. In fact, as Hamza would learn later, he was jailed, first in Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad and then in Abu Ghraib prison outside the capital. Two days later Jaffar Jaffar was also picked up and jailed. When he returned from New York, Hamza was put temporarily in charge of the nuclear reactor program. Hamza had been let in on Hussein’s ultimate plans for the Nuclear Research Center years earlier in the front room of al-Mallah’s home, but by December 1979, few scientists working at Atomic Energy had any illusions about the real purpose of their work.
    New equipment continued to arrive weekly. The Rome-based nuclear manufacturing firm SNIA Technit, following France’s lead, had sold Iraq a critical chemical reprocessing unit used to extract weapons-grade plutonium from spent uranium fuel rods. Iraq was meeting with West Germany and Brazil about importing uranium ore and purchasing more nuclear reactors. A report by AMAN, the intelligence branch of the IDF, stated that one prospective deal between Iraq and Brazil called for the South American country to build
nineteen
nuclear reactors for Saddam.
             
    Butrus Eben Halim was an unremarkable, henpecked, forty-two-year-old professional with no children and predictable habits. Every morning at the same time, at the same stop, he caught the same bus from Villejuif south of Paris to the train station at Gare Saint-Lazare Metro. The most interesting thing about him was that he was an Iraqi scientist working at the French nuclear reactor at Sarcelles. It was no surprise then that Halim was immediately intrigued by a rakish Englishman named Jack Donovan, who raced around Paris in a red Ferrari with an ever-present blonde in the passenger seat. Halim noticed him driving by the Villejuif bus stop on numerous occasions. So it was natural that one day, when the Englishman pulled up to the curb, asking if Halim had seen a blond woman waiting at the bus stop, the Iraqi would quickly fall to his charms. The two men struck up a conversation, and Donovan offered Halim a ride to the train station. By the time he had dropped Halim