described Halo in enough detail for a reasonable presentation. But the turning of my drawings and definitions into a flightworthy system, to be acquired by air forces and armies, was way beyond the capability of a single person like me. I contacted two companies, Elbit in Israel and Hughes in Mesa, Arizona, and asked them to develop Halo under their auspices. In the synopsis I sent them, I put forward clearly the two question marks that hovered over my solution. The first was the required optical lens. Halo depended on successful development of a novel lens for the pilot’s goggles. But I had a solid theoretical base—I attached a theoretical analysis I had bought from a specialist; it that ended with a sentence I was to learn was typical: “It seems the said lens is not out of the limits of physics.” And the second bet was on the then-futuristic global positioning system, GPS, a network of communication satellites that in 1984 was just beginning to be built in space. At that time the performance and even the existence of the GPS were questionable. This was certainly a long shot, but no other solution would be in spec for Halo. And I had a third thing to show them: letters from General Parker and the Israeli Air Force commander, Amos Lapidot, both of them informing me that if such a system became available, it would fit their requirements. Amos was even willing to give me a CH-53 helicopter for flight testing of Halo. With all this, both companies said yes and wanted me to develop the system with them.
I chose Elbit and went to work in Haifa, Israel. In parallel with the development of Halo I was entrusted with the company’s aerial systems marketing. I had only three requests for Elbit’s president, Emmanuel Gil, before we signed our contract: loan of one great systems engineer; a one-year time frame, and $2.2 million for development. The estimates of time and money were based on the thin blue booklet I gave him. As to the men, I knew that when I had one really good person, others would follow.
Gil was as good as his word. Haim Kellerman, a young, redheaded engineer, reported to my new office. His former experience was in developing of artificial kidney, and when he first met me he couldn’t tell one end of an aircraft from another. After a week he understood Halo and began to use words I didn’t understand. In a short time other good men joined us—engineers, test pilots, and program managers. Soon Halo became a sea of complicated technical papers that I couldn’t grasp anymore. Meanwhile, GPS had become a reality. The new lens with requisite optical properties was developed also, and a global patent was acquired. This lens became a business unto itself, and serves in various other machines besides Halo.
When I saw that my men knew better than I how helicopters should fly, I backed off to where I was just working with the main concept. I dealt with management and mainly in marketing. Within a year the CH-53 flew a test flight at Tel Nof Air Base. Even before that, I made the first sale to a foreign country, for our first fifty million dollars.
When I left Elbit after four years, components of Halo were already installed in all Israeli military helicopters, and the system was being exported. Soon all U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine helicopters were equipped with spatial orientation components of Elbit’s Halo. Although parts of Halo—mainly the “live map”—still needed to complete development, the system and its various components and derivatives brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to Elbit. I was very proud of the success of my brainchild Halo. My concept took wing, and suddenly world avionic producers could propose to their clients integrated, computerized systems for helicopters.
Halo strengthened my belief in the formula I found for my life: all possibilities came from inside, all from within.
23
Tammuz
TWENTY YEARS AFTER I HAD ENDED my active duty service, and my active participation in the air force (except as a flight instructor in the reserves) ceased, it all came back for one amazing evening. For long time I had been living my life without any connection to aviation, and lo, at the end of May 2001, some fifty of our friends from that time got together in Ali’s and my new home.
This was on the twentieth anniversary of Operation Opera, the 1981 attack on the nuclear reactor Osirak— which the Iraqis called Tammuz—near Baghdad, Iraq.
THEY CAME IN THE EARLY evening. Our home has only four rooms, but they are bright and spacious with very large windows, and daylight flooded in, together with the smells of our spring garden.
When the conversation started it went right to the time we were pulling out of the bombing pass, when Zeevik Raz—the flight leader—sent the word “Charlie” on the radio. Aviem Sela, flying relay, got the word and passed it to David Ivry, sitting at the air force control center in Tel Aviv. The meaning of the word was “Mission accomplished; all safe.”
All of us, men and women, were meeting as a group after many years. We were delighted to see each other again and to talk openly. We wanted to relive, for just a few hours, that stormy period in Ramat-David in the early 1980s. All of us were twenty years older now, more stooped and wrinkled, and we all wore civilian clothes. No one in uniform or any active politician had been invited to our meeting.
Everybody had prepared himself well for this reunion. Men and women wrote notes and intended to read them. Some brought objects they had hidden for years and never showed to anybody, and many intended to discuss for the first time things they never had revealed. On the large table along the wall, objects piled up: documents, used maps, logbooks, albums, notes, and strange money, as well as other objects. Everything carried with it some personal connection. On the walls hung photographs, paintings, original maps, and drawings that “were there.” During the break, when dinner would be served on the veranda and lawn, we all would go through these artifacts and study them.
Everybody had cleared his schedule for the whole evening. But evening passed, night came, and then early morning. We all parted reluctantly at about three o’clock the next morning.
MAJOR GENERAL (RET.) David Ivry, who had been commander of the air force in 1981, spoke. He and his wife, Ofra, had come from Washington, D.C., where he was serving as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. In his calm, restrained way, David reminded us of the global and historical importance of the destruction of the Iraqi atomic reactor.
“General Ivry,” Dick Cheney, the American secretary of defense at the time, had written to him, “If you hadn’t attacked that reactor in 1981, the Gulf War of 1991 would have looked totally different.”
As Israelis, we knew the significance for ourselves: in 1991 Israel was hit by some forty Iraqi Scud missiles, all of them aimed at our cities, and most of them fell on Tel Aviv. We all heard the explosions, we all wore gas masks and sat in sealed rooms with doors and windows taped with plastic sheeting. Bad as this was, we could remain relatively sanguine. There was no nuclear threat: our F-16 fighters had taken out the Iraqi nuclear reactor ten years before.
In his natural and humble way, Ivry segued into a personal account of how he had first met this small but magnificent fighter aircraft. It happened in the second half of the seventies, when he was visiting the United States. The F-16 prototype was being tested at that time at Edwards Air Force Base. While there, Ivry was shown this fighter of the future. After flying it, and being impressed with its aerial combat features, the IAF commander had no more doubts. And when he was surprised with a proposal to acquire seventy-five of these, three whole squadrons —this was a batch of F-16s that had been produced for Iran but that had no buyer after the fall of the shah—Ivry said, “I’ll take ’em.” Smiles all around the room.
But Ivry saw beyond the performance of the F-16 in aerial combat. He told us how he had spoken to the two officers he had earmarked to head the first two squadrons, Lt. Cols. Zeev Raz and Amir Nahumi, and ordered them to research one subject: how to attack a ground target at the longest distance possible, by surprise.
“I saw doubt and bafflement in their faces,” he told us. The F-16 was a marvelous air-to-air machine. This was not the directive they expected to receive from him.
“I calmed them down,” Ivry said. “There’ll be MiGs, too, plenty of them.”
He was already thinking about the Iraqi nuclear plant.
THE IRAQI EFFORT TO ACQUIRE nuclear weaponry began in 1959. Following an agreement with the Soviet
