Chapter Sixteen
Saddam’s Supergun

On March 23, 1918, at the height of World War I, a huge artillery shell exploded in the center of Place de la Republique in Paris. An hour later, another shell hit the center of Paris, killing eight people. The explosions terrified the Parisians, since the city, far away from the front lines, was supposed to be safe. The commander of the Paris district immediately sent several squads to scan the forests around the capital, where a German artillery unit must have been hiding. But the search turned up nothing. The French surmised that the shells had been fired from an airship, even though no Zeppelin had been sighted. Six days later, on Good Friday, another shell exploded in Paris; this time it was a direct hit at the Saint Gervais church in the Fourth arrondisement. The explosion killed ninety-one people and wounded a hundred.

Panic spread throughout the city. Army patrols fanned out from the capital and didn’t find anything. No one had ever heard of a cannon that could hit Paris from such a fantastic distance anyway. The newspapers compared the monster that bombarded them from afar to the huge cannon that writer Jules Verne had described in his book From the Earth to the Moon. Jules Verne’s fictional cannon could fire a whole spaceship to the moon.

The French were in luck. The war ended that same year with the victory of the Allies over imperial Germany. Slowly, information started trickling about the horrible cannon that had spread death and panic in the French capital. Some called it the “Paris gun,” others named it the “Wilhelm gun,” after Wilhelm II, Germany’s emperor. It turned out that it had been developed by the Krupp heavy weapons industry, which had produced three of the mysterious cannons. The cannon had an unheard-of range of 128 kilometers; its shells were three feet long, with a charge of gunpowder that was twelve feet long. The shells soared to a height of 42 kilometers, a record that was broken only by the German V-2 rockets in World War II. Krupp assembled the three superguns in utmost secrecy. The guns were pulled by special trains that moved from one position to the other almost daily. Each was manned by eighty artillery soldiers, who were forbidden to speak to anybody. It was imperative to shroud the monstrous weapons in complete secrecy.

As the war approached its end, the maneuvering capacities of the superguns quickly deteriorated. British aircraft discovered the huge guns, hounded them along the rails, and kept bombing them. The French, too, fired at them from positions close to the front lines. Yet none of the attacks were successful. The only gun that was neutralized was one that exploded while firing; five soldiers were killed. The other two vanished without a trace at the war’s end. What happened to them remains a mystery. They may have been dismantled, or concealed in some deep cave or an abandoned mine.

The superguns turned into a legend, and many thought their secret would never be solved. But in 1965, an elderly German woman arrived in Canada and met a thirty-seven-year-old scientist, Dr. Gerald Bull, who was in charge of the High Altitude Research Program (HARP) at McGill University in Montreal. The woman was a relative of Fritz Rausenberger, the deceased director of design at Krupp Industries. She brought Bull a lost manuscript that she had discovered in the family archives, which described in detail the big gun and the way it was operated.

The manuscript fired up Bull’s imagination. He was reputed to be a genius who had received his Ph.D. at the age of twenty-three, the youngest Ph.D. to graduate from a Canadian university. Bull dreamed of building superguns that would fire shells at targets hundreds of miles away, and even launch satellites to outer space. Using the manuscript, he wrote a book about the Wilhelm guns and the possibilities they offered to the scientists of the future.

But the book was not enough. Bull obtained funding from the U.S. and Canadian governments, as well as from his university. On a testing ground in Barbados, he tested his own huge gun—the longest gun ever built in the world. It was 36 meters long, with a caliber of 424 millimeters. Hundreds of workers, technicians and engineers, many of them local, participated in the building and testing of the formidable firearm.

Bull’s cannon excelled in the test-firing and dispatched heavy loads to record altitudes. He claimed that if, instead of shells, he armed his gun with missiles propelled by solid fuel, he could fire a 200-pound missile to a distance of 4,000 kilometers or to an altitude of 250 kilometers.

Bull’s gun was a great achievement, but the U.S. and Canadian governments decided, for various reasons, to stop funding the project. In 1968, Bull was forced to leave Barbados. His frustration knew no limits. With spite and hatred, he attacked the “bureaucrats” who had aborted his project.

For a while he produced artillery shells, and even exported fifty thousand shells to Israel for use with American-made guns. He was even rewarded with honorary American citizenship. But he had a very short fuse, was not always able to control his mouth, and clashed with most senior officers and officials he met. The humiliation he had felt at the closure of the test range in Barbados kept burning in him, and he was ready to do anything in order to continue building his big guns. It became his obsession, and nothing could stop him.

First he built the GC-45 gun, the most advanced gun of his time that had a range of forty kilometers. Bull sold the gun to anybody who wanted to buy it. In spite of the United Nations embargo on weapons sales to South Africa, Bull sold his guns to its army, which needed them for the war against neighboring Angola. Bull also sold South Africa a license to build the guns on its territory.

Some say the CIA secretly supported Bull’s illegal activity. But as soon as the matter became public, Bull’s CIA friends vanished into thin air, and he remained alone, exposed to the UN’s accusations of having become a cynical, heartless arms trafficker. He was forced to return to the United States, where an unpleasant surprise awaited him: an American court found him guilty of illegal weapons trade, and sentenced him to six months in jail. When he was released and returned to Canada, he was fined $55,000. Angry and bitter, he moved to Belgium, where he founded a new company, in association with the United Gunpowder Works (Poudreries Réunies de Belgique).

But his obsession did not subside. He kept dreaming of building a huge supergun, worthy of Jules Verne’s imagination. Like Goethe’s Faust, he was ready to sell his soul to the devil for realizing his dream. And indeed, he found the devil: Iraq’s megalomaniac dictator, Saddam Hussein.

In the eighties, Iraq was fighting a ruthless war against Iran. Bull sold the Iraqis two hundred GC-45 guns, made in Austria and smuggled via the port of Akaba, in neighboring Jordan. But that was only the beginning.

Saddam Hussein, like Bull, was deeply frustrated after Israel had bombed the Tamuz nuclear reactor and shattered his dream to make Iraq a nuclear power. He was also utterly jealous that Israel was on the verge of launching satellites into space.

Bull offered to build Saddam the biggest and the longest supergun in the world. With this gun, Bull promised, Saddam would be able to launch satellites into space and fire shells to a distance of more than a thousand kilometers. Saddam realized that he would be able to hit the population centers of Israel and gladly accepted Bull’s offier. Bull called his enterprise “Project Babylon.”

Bull drew up the plans for Babylon: a gun 150 meters long, weighing 2,100 tons, with a caliber of 1 meter! But before building his mammoth gun, Bull decided to assemble a smaller prototype, for testing purposes. He called the smaller gun “Baby Babylon,” even though this baby was bigger than all its ancestors. The gun was 45 meters long, and Saddam’s artillery commander was awed by its performance. But this was nothing compared to the real thing that was emerging from the Iraqi desert.

Bull chose to place his giant gun on a bare hill, positioning the components of the longest and the fattest gun in the world on the rising slope. After choosing the location, he ordered the parts of his cannon from various European steel plants. The main component, of course, was the barrel that Bull intended to assemble, using scores of huge steel tubes. He ordered the tubes in England, Spain, Holland, and Switzerland. The orders were camouflaged as “parts of a large oil pipeline.” Because Iraq was subject to draconian international restrictions on importation of strategic materials, once again the orders were filed in the name of neighboring Jordan.

The pipes began arriving. The amazing aspect of the entire operation was that most of the states and the companies involved in the production of the pipes understood perfectly well that the pipes were nothing but parts of a giant lethal weapon; but their cynicism and greed, as well as their indifference to the wars in the Middle East, meant that they had no problem cooperating. The huge pipes were given export licenses, loaded on freighters, and sent on their way. Many of them reached Iraq without any trouble.

Bull’s private army of technicians and engineers started assembling the gun pieces, pointing them west, toward Israel. But Bull was still not satisfied. He built the Iraqis two self-propelled guns, Al-Majnoon and Al-Fao. Al-Majnoon (The Crazy One) was immediately integrated into Iraq’s artillery.

Bull also agreed to improve the Scud missiles in Saddam’s arsenal, and modify their warheads. He extended the Scud’s range and their performances; these missiles would be used against Israel during the first Gulf War.

Here, though, Bull crossed a line. According to Bull’s son’s testimony, Israeli agents warned Bull to stop his dangerous activities. Bull refused to listen. Israel was not alone in its desire to stop the scientist. The CIA and MI6 were also worried; the Iranians, too, had unfinished business with Bull. During the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqis had used the guns built by Gerald Bull against them. Apparently, Bull did not suffer from a lack of enemies; and they were determined to put an end to his projects.

As he ignored the warnings, the foreign agents stepped up their activities. Several times during the winter of 1990, unknown persons broke into Bull’s apartment at the Uccle neighborhood in Brussels. They took nothing, just overturned the furniture and emptied cupboards and chest drawers, leaving clear indications of their visit. That was another warning for Bull: We are here. We can get into your home as we please, and may go even further than that.

Once again, Bull ignored the warnings. The gun parts kept arriving, and were placed, one after the other, on the barren hill in Iraq. It seemed that no action could stop Project Babylon. Except one.

On March 22, 1990, Bull returned to his Brussels apartment. While he was fumbling in his pocket for the apartment keys, a man emerged from the dark corridor, a silenced gun in his hand, and fired five bullets in the back of Bull’s head. The father of the great gun collapsed, and died on the spot.

 

The world press plunged in speculations about the identity of the killers. Some said the assassins had been sent by the CIA, others pointed at MI6, Angola, Iran . . . but most of the observers agreed on Israel. The Belgian police started an investigation but did not find a thing. The murderers of Gerald Bull have yet to be found.

With Bull’s death, work on the big gun immediately stopped. His assistants, engineers, researchers, buyers scattered throughout the world. They were familiar with parts of the project but the master plan was locked in Bull’s head, and only he knew how to proceed. Bull’s death was also the death of Babylon.

Two weeks after Bull’s death, the British authorities emerged from their long slumber. They finally dispatched a customs unit to the port of Teesport, where they seized eight huge Sheffield steel pipes, listed in the export manifest as “oil pipes.” It was a nice try, but too late: the British had missed forty-four other “oil pipes” that were already in service in Iraq. In the following weeks, more components of the giant gun were seized in five other European countries. An official investigation in England tried to establish how respectable companies like Sheffield Forge Masters could ignore Saddam Hussein’s devious goals and supply steel pipes for the big gun.

When the U.S. army conquered Iraq in 2003, they found piles of the huge pipes, slowly gathering rust in Al-Iskanderiya junkyard, about thirty miles south of Baghdad. The rusty pipes were all that was left of the grandiose plans of Dr. Gerald Bull.

 

Gerald Bull’s assassination came at a time of profound change in the Mossad character. The new ramsad, veteran Mossad agent Shabtai Shavit, found a very different service from what the Mossad used to be when he assumed his duties in 1989. A former Sayeret Matkal fighter and head of Caesarea, he seemed the right man for the job. But starting in the early seventies, with the systematic elimination of the leaders of Black September, and much more so in the eighties and nineties, the emphasis in the Mossad activity shifted from intelligence to special operations. The Mossad gradually had to assume most of the operations against the nonmilitary and nonconventional dangers threatening the State of Israel. The formal state organs were unable to efficiently defeat terrorism. The terrorist leaders lived abroad in relative safety, planned their attacks, and dispatched their men against Israeli bodies or citizens throughout the world. Even when Israel knew who they were and what they were doing, they could not arrest them and bring them to justice. The only way left to the Mossad was to find them and kill them. These were brutal, utterly trying actions for those like David Molad, who carried them out; but they achieved their goals when the killing of the terrorist leaders wiped out or immobilized their organizations for many years. The hunt for the Black September leaders was the best example. The Gerald Bull case had similar results. Even though his assassins were never officially identified, his death was also the death of his evil projects. It was the same with Wadie Haddad.

 

It all started with a box of chocolates.

Dr. Wadie Haddad, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was one of the most dangerous enemies of Israel. His most notorious operation had been the hijacking of an Air France plane on its way from Tel Aviv to Paris on June 27, 1976. Several terrorists, Arabs, Germans, and South Americans, forced the pilot to land in Entebbe, the capital of Uganda, and demanded the exchange of the Jewish and Israeli hostages for the world’s most dangerous terrorists. In a heroic rescue operation, Israeli commandos flew thousands of miles, landed in Entebbe, killed the terrorists, and liberated the hostages. After Entebbe, Haddad realized that his life was in danger and moved his headquarters to Baghdad, where he felt safe. From Iraq, he continued to launch terrorist operations against Israel.

The Mossad was determined to kill the arch-terrorist. But how? A painstaking operation was launched, with the goal of discovering everything about Haddad, mostly his weaknesses and vices.

A year after the Entebbe rescue, the Mossad agents found out that Haddad adored chocolate, especially fine, Belgian chocolate. The information on Haddad’s secret vice came from a reliable Palestinian, who had infiltrated Haddad’s Popular Front.

The ramsad, Yitzhak Hofi, presented the information to Israel’s new prime minister, Menachem Begin, who immediately approved the operation. Mossad agents then recruited one of Haddad’s trusted aides, who was on a mission in Europe; on his return, he brought his boss a big box of mouthwatering Godiva chocolates. Mossad experts injected a deadly biological poison into the chocolates filled with sweet cream. They assumed that Haddad, who craved Godiva, would gobble all the chocolates himself and would not even think of sharing them with anybody.

The agent brought the gift-wrapped box to Haddad, who, once alone, wolfed down the chocolates, each and every one of them. In a few weeks, the plump Haddad started losing his appetite and losing weight. The blood tests performed by his doctors indicated a severe immune deficiency. Nobody in Baghdad understood what was happening to the leader of the Popular Front.

Haddad’s health worsened. He became weak, skeletal, and was confined to his bed. As his state became critical, he was urgently transferred to an East German clinic. Like most countries of the Soviet bloc, East Germany offered generous support, training, weapons, and refuge to the Palestinian terrorists. But their otherwise top-notch expertise did not help this time. The East German doctors could not save Haddad, and on March 30, 1978, he died “of unknown causes.” The forty-eight-year-old terrorist leader left his sister millions of dollars he had personally hoarded while leading his patriotic war for Palestine.

The German doctors’ diagnosis was that Haddad had died of a terminal disease that had attacked his immune system. Nobody suspected the Mossad. Some of Haddad’s closest aides accused the Iraqi authorities of poisoning him because he had embarrassed the regime. Only after many years were Israeli writers allowed to publish the truth about the Mossad’s involvement in Haddad’s untimely death. When Yasser Arafat died thirty years later, his aides accused Israel of causing his death. This accusation was never proven, despite the thorough examination and tests run by Arafat’s French doctors.

With Haddad’s death, his lethal organization collapsed. The attacks by Haddad’s group against Israel ceased almost completely, and the long battle with one of Israel’s vilest enemies was definitely over.

After Bull and Haddad, it was Shaqaqi’s turn.

 

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent the commander of the Imperial Navy, a famous and admired admiral, to conquer the Mediterranean island of Malta. The admiral set sail and wandered for many months in the Mediterranean.

But he did not find Malta.

The admiral returned to Istanbul, reported to the sultan, and announced: “Malta Yok!” (In Turkish, There is no Malta.)

But in our times, there were some who found Malta, and not only found the island but also found a man there who arrived in disguise, under an assumed identity, traveling in total secrecy. This was Dr. Fathi Shaqaqi, the head of the Islamic Jihad.

On October 26, 1995, in the late morning, Fathi Shaqaqi came out of the Diplomat Hotel in the town of Selma, in Malta. He was on his way to do some shopping before returning to Damascus, where he had been living for the last few years. Shaqaqi was wearing a wig and carrying a Libyan passport in the name of Ibrahim Shawush. He felt quite safe in the serene Maltese town. He did not know that several Mossad agents had been shadowing him since he flew, a week before, from Malta to Libya, to participate in a conference of underground Palestinian organizations.

Nine months before that, on January 22, two suicide bombers, members of Shaqaqi’s Islamic Jihad, killed themselves close to a bus station at the Beit Lid Junction, not far from the city of Netanya. Twenty-one people were killed, most of them soldiers, and sixty-eight were wounded. It was one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in Israeli history. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who rushed to Beit Lid, was deeply shocked by the carnage; his wrath peaked when he read Shaqaqi’s boasts in a Time magazine interview that “This was the biggest military attack ever inside Palestine [outside the Arab-Israeli wars].

“Time: It seems to give you satisfaction?”

“Shaqaqi: It gives satisfaction to our people.”

The furious Rabin ordered ramsad Shabtai Shavit, a career Mossad officer, to kill the head of the Islamic Jihad.

Shavit had been stalking Shaqaqi for a long time.

According to the Der Spiegel weekly, the Mossad proposed to hit Shaqaqi in his Damascus headquarters. But Rabin refused. He was secretly engaged in peace talks with Syria’s president Hafez Al-Assad and did not want to jeopardize the slim chances of ending the conflict with Israel’s northern neighbor. Rabin asked the Mossad to propose alternative plans for the operation. It was a very complicated mission, Shavit explained, because Shaqaqi knew he was in the Mossad’s crosshairs. That was why he rarely left Syria. Nevertheless, Rabin refused to authorize a hit in Damascus and ordered Mossad to carry out the operation outside of Syria’s borders.

But where? For a while, the Mossad leaders were at a loss. But, finally, as luck would have it, Shaqaqi was invited to a conference of Palestinian terrorist organizations in Libya. At first, he replied that he would not come; but then he was told that his archrival, Said Mussa, the head of the hated Abu Mussa organization, intended to participate in the conference. The Mossad experts assumed that Shaqaqi would not cede the floor to his adversary, and would come to the conference, at all costs. And indeed, a secret report from Damascus confirmed: Shaqaqi was going to Libya. In Jerusalem, Rabin gave the go-ahead.

European sources claim that the preparations for the hit started when the Mossad terrorist experts checked the records of Shaqaqi’s former flights to Libya. It turned out that he always chose to fly to Tripoli via Malta. The ramsad decided to operate in Malta, not in Libya. Malta was a more convenient and quiet location. Mossad agents waited at Valletta Airport for Shaqaqi, who was supposed to make a short stopover there on his way to Libya. Shaqaqi almost fooled his followers by landing in Malta only on the third daily flight from Damascus, in an elaborate disguise. He spent a short while in the transit lounge and took the connecting flight to Libya.

On October 26, in the early morning, he came back to Malta and checked into the Diplomat Hotel, where he had stayed previously. He got room 616, and left the hotel immediately. Two Mossad agents riding a blue motorcycle followed him wherever he went. He spent a couple of hours visiting shops and markets. He was on his way back to the hotel when the blue motorcycle stopped beside him. One of the agents, later described as a man with Middle Eastern features, approached and fired six bullets at him from close range, with a silenced gun. Shaqaqi collapsed on the sidewalk while his killer ran to a nearby alley, where his partner was waiting on the motorcycle, engine running. They darted toward the nearby beach and jumped aboard a speedboat that took them to a freighter waiting in the high seas. The boat officially carried cement from Haifa to Italy; but beside the cement it carried another load: Shabtai Shavit himself, who monitored the operation from an improvised command post on board. The getaway route had been well planned. Nobody followed the two agents and they reached the mother ship safe and sound.

After Shaqaqi’s death, his aides at the Islamic Jihad tried to unravel a major mystery: who was the traitor that had leaked the details about his trip to the Mossad? The killers knew everything: the date of his departure for Malta, the flight number, the false identity, the date of his return to Malta and Damascus . . . After a five-month investigation, the Islamic Jihad leaders arrested a Palestinian student, who was a close assistant to Shaqaqi, and accused him of treason. The student broke under interrogation and confessed: he had been recruited by the Mossad while studying in Bulgaria; his handlers instructed him to move to Damascus and join Shaqaqi’s group. During the next four years, he had gained Shaqaqi’s confidence and even became one of the few in the know about Shaqaqi’s activities.

Unlike the Hamas and the Hezbollah, which invested a large part of their resources in social activities, the Islamic Jihad had a sole purpose: terror. It was based on a very small and very compartmentalized number of cells, composed of Palestinians who had no other purpose but to fight Israel. Shaqaqi himself was considered by the Palestinian diaspora to be the ideological father of suicide terrorism. He was the first to find in Islam’s holy teachings a legitimization for suicide bombings and killings.

Shaqaqi’s organization was responsible for a long list of bloody terrorist attacks: sixteen dead in the attack on a 405 bus on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on July 6, 1989; nine dead in the attack on a bus of Israeli tourists close to Cairo, on February 4, 1990; eight dead in the bombing of a bus by Kfar Darom, in Southern Israel on November 20, 2000; three soldiers killed at the suicide attack on the Netzarim roadblock in the Gaza strip on November 11, 1994; and the terrible bombing in Beit Lid, where twenty-one people died on January 22, 1995. He had rightfully earned the death sentence that the Mossad carried out in a Malta street. After Shaqaqi’s death, the Islamic Jihad almost collapsed, and it took years for the organization to recover from the death of its leader.

Israel never assumed responsibility for the assassination. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said: “I did not know about the assassination—but if it is true I shall not be sorry.”

 

A short while afterward, Yitzhak Rabin himself was assassinated, not by a Palestinian terrorist but by a Jewish fanatic.