What's past is prologue: Israel's covert campaign against Iran's nuclear program
two Mossad agents were captured in a Swiss hotel, where they were holding the family of a Swiss missile scientist, threatening to kill the wife and kids unless the scientist returned from Egypt. Israel went to extremes to achieve its goal. For example, it employed Otto Skorzeni, a decorated officer of the special commando units of the Nazi Waffen SS, to obtain information about Germans doing work in Egypt. Skorzeni, who led the Fallschirmjäger unit which rescued Benito Mussolini from Italian anti-Fascist fighters on 12 September 1943, was entnazifiziert (denazified) in absentia in 1952 by the West German government. Still, before agreeing to cooperate with the Mossad, Skorzeni insisted on a written agreement hat he would not be kidnapped and brought to trial in Israel as was the case with Adolph Eichmann, who was captured by Mossad operatives in Argentina on 11 May 1960.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Mossad advised Iraqi scientists involved in Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapon program to change their professional interests. Several Iraqi scientists who did not prove amenable to such advise were killed. Mossad agents also blew up the core of an Iraqi reactor while in port in France, waiting to be shipped to Iraq. The Mossad also disrupted other nuclear weapons-related shipments from European ports to Iraq.
On 22 March 1992, Israeli agents killed Gerald Bull outside his apartment in Brussels, Belgium. Bull, a Canadian engineer, was helping the Iraqis develop a long-range gun capable of firing projectiles a long distance with great accuracy. His Extended Range, Full Bore [ERFB] GC-45 could routinely place rounds into 10 meter circles at ranges up to 30 km, extending this to 38 km with but little loss in accuracy. This was just the beginning. Bull became convinced that a gun could launch objects into space — and do so more cheaply than missiles. He designed a 45 meters, 350 mm caliber gun for testing purposes, and then started work on the “real” machine — a gun that was 150 meters long, weighed 2,100 tons, with a bore of one meter (39 inches). It was to be capable of placing a 2,000 kilogram projectile into orbit. The Iraqis told Bull they would finance his gun project only if he would also help with development of their longer ranged Scud-based missile project. Bull agreed. The Israelis were afraid that the Iraqis would use the long-range weapons Bull was designing to launch chemical or biological weapons at Israel. Several attempts to persuade Bull to cease and desist
