buying the component parts to build their own on-site. They got about five hundred tons of basic uranium yellowcake, half of it from Portugal. They bought much of the centrifuge technology from West Germany—”
“I thought Germany had signed a whole range of international agreements limiting the spread of nuclear bomb technology,” protested Paxman.
“Maybe they have. I wouldn’t know about the politics,” said the scientist. “But they got the bits and pieces from all over the place. You need designer lathes, special ultrastrong maraging steel, anticorrosion vessels, special valves, high-temperature furnaces called ‘skull’ furnaces because that’s what they look like, plus vacuum pumps and bellows—this is serious technology we are talking about. Quite a bit, plus the know-how, came from Germany.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Sinclair. “Has Saddam got any isotope separation centrifuges working yet?”
“Yes, one cascade. It’s been functioning for about a year. And another one is coming on stream soon.”
“Do you know where all this stuff is?”
“The centrifuge assembly plant is at a place called Taji—here.” The scientist passed a large aerial photo over to the American and circled a series of industrial buildings.
“The working cascade seems to be underground somewhere not far from the old wrecked French reactor at Tuwaitha, the reactor they called Osirak. I don’t know whether you’ll ever find it with a bomber—it’s certainly underground and camouflaged.”
“And the new cascade?”
“No idea,” said Hipwell. “Could be anywhere.”
“Probably somewhere else,” suggested Terry Martin. “The Iraqis have been practicing duplication and dispersal ever since they put all their eggs in one basket and the Israelis blew the basket away.”
Sinclair grunted.
“How sure are you,” asked Sir Paul, “that Saddam Hussein cannot have his bomb yet?”
“Very,” said the physicist. “It’s a question of time. He hasn’t had long enough. For a basic but usable atomic bomb, he will need thirty to thirty-five kilograms of pure uranium-235. Starting cold a year ago, even assuming the working cascade can function twenty-four hours a day—which it can’t—a spinning program needs at least twelve hours per centrifuge. You need a thousand spins to get from zero percent pure to the required ninety-three percent. That’s five hundred days of spinning. But then there’s cleaning, servicing, maintenance, breakdowns. Even with a thousand centrifuges operating in a cascade now and for the past year, you’d need five years. Bring in another cascade next year—shorten it to three years.”
“So he won’t have his thirty-five kilograms until 1993 at the earliest?” interjected Sinclair.
“No, he can’t.”
“One final question: If he gets the uranium, how much longer to an atomic bomb?”
“Not long. A few weeks. You see, a country undertaking to make its own bomb will have the nuclear engineering side running in parallel.
Bomb engineering is not all that complicated, so long as you know what you are doing. And Jaafar does—he will know how to build one and trigger it. Dammit, we trained him at Harwell. But the point is, on a time-scale alone, Saddam Hussein cannot have enough pure uranium ready yet. Ten kilograms, tops. He’s three years short, minimum.”
Dr. Hipwell was thanked for his weeks of analysis, and the meeting ended.
Sinclair would return to his embassy and write up his copious notes, which would go to the United States in heavy code. There they would be compared with the analyses of the American counterparts—physicists drawn from the laboratories of Sandia, Los Alamos, and principally Lawrence Livermore in California, where for years a secret section called simply Department Z had been monitoring the steady spread of nuclear technology around the world on behalf of the State Department and the Pentagon.
Though Sinclair could not know it, the findings of the British and American teams would confirm each other to a remarkable degree.
Terry Martin and Simon Paxman left the same meeting and wandered across Whitehall in the benign October sunshine.
“Quite a relief,” said Paxman. “Old Hipwell was quite adamant.
Apparently the Americans agree entirely. That bastard is nowhere near his atom bomb yet. One less nightmare to worry about.”
They parted at the corner, Paxman to cross the Thames toward Century House, Martin to cross Trafalgar Square and head up St. Martin’s Lane toward Gower Street.
Establishing what Iraq had, or even probably had, was one thing.
Finding out precisely where it was situated was another. The photography went on and on. The KH-11s and KH-12s drifted across the heavens in endless sequence, photographing what they saw on the Iraqi land beneath them.
By October, another device had entered the skies, a new American reconnaissance plane so secret that Capitol Hill did not know about it.
Code-named Aurora, it flew on the fringes of inner space, reaching speeds of Mach 8, almost five thousand miles per hour, riding its own fireball—the ramjet effect—far beyond Iraqi radar or interceptor missiles. Not even the technology of the dying USSR could spot Aurora, which had replaced the legendary SR-71 Blackbird.
Ironically, while the Blackbird was being eased out of commission, another even more aged “old faithful” was plying its trade above Iraq that autumn. Almost forty years old, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, the U-2 was still flying and still taking pictures. It was back in 1960 that Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over Sverdlovsk, Siberia, and it was the U-2 that had spotted the first Soviet missiles being deployed in Cuba in the summer of 1962, even though it was Oleg Penkovsky who had identified them as offensive and not defensive weapons, thus blowing away Khrushchev’s phony protests and sowing the seeds of his own eventual destruction.
The U-2 of 1990 had been reequipped as a “listener” rather than a “watcher” and redesignated TR-1, though it still did photography.
All this information, from the professors and scientists, analysts and interpreters, the trackers and the watchers, the interviewers and researchers, built up a picture of Iraq through the autumn of 1990, and a frightening picture it became.
From a thousand sources the information finally was channeled into a single and very secret room two floors below the Saudi Air Force headquarters on Old Airport Road. The room, down the street from where the military brass sat in conference and discussed their unauthorized (by the United Nations) plans for the invasion of Iraq, was called simply “the Black Hole.”
It was in the Black Hole that American and British targeters, drawn from all three services and of all ranks from private to general, pinpointed the sites that would have to be destroyed. Finally, they would make up General Chuck Horner’s air-war map. It contained eventually seven hundred targets. Six hundred were military—in the sense of being command centers, bridges, airfields, arsenals, ammunition dumps, missile sites, and troop concentrations. The other hundred were targets concerned with weapons of mass destruction—research facilities, assembly plants, chemical labs, storage depots.
The gas centrifuge manufacturing line at Taji was listed, as was the approximate, assumed, position of the centrifuge cascade underground somewhere in the Tuwaitha complex.
But the water-bottling plant at Tarmiya was not there, nor was Al Qubai. No one knew about them.
A copy of the comprehensive report by Harry Sinclair in London joined other reports emanating from various parts of the United States and abroad. Finally, a synthesis of all these in-depth analyses found its way to a very small and very discreet State Department think tank, known only to a restricted group in Washington as the Political Intelligence and Analysis Group. The PIAG is a sort of analytical hothouse for foreign affairs and produces reports that are absolutely not for public consumption. Indeed, the unit answers only to the Secretary of State, at that time James Baker.
Two days later, Mike Martin lay flat on a roof that gave him a commanding view of the section of Abrak Kheitan where he had set up his rendezvous with Abu Fouad.
At almost exactly the appointed hour, he watched a single car leave the King Faisal Highway leading to the airport and pull into a side street.
The car cruised slowly down the street, away from the bright lights of the highway and the occasional traffic,
