Operation Bramble Bush

Operation Bramble Bush (Hebrew: מבצע שיח אטד) was an Israeli plan to assassinate Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, in 1992. It was described in full in December 2003 by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, but news reports had circulated about the plot since January 1999. The plan was conceived as retaliation for Iraqi Scud missile attacks during the Gulf War. Another motivation was the postwar revelation by UN inspectors that Iraq had been a few years away from potential nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons capability as well as the missile capability to hit Israel, and the fear that Hussein would continue trying to develop such capabilities. The plan was called off after five commandos were accidentally killed during the final rehearsal for the operation; the accident is known in Israel as the Tze'elim Bet disaster (אסון צאלים ב').

Plan

IDF Chief of Staff Ehud Barak persuaded Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and then his successor Yitzhak Rabin to approve an operation to assassinate Saddam Hussein. In January 1992, he formed a team headed by Amiram Levin to examine ways Saddam could be assassinated. Various schemes were considered, among them crashing an Israeli plane or satellite in Iraq and then blowing it up when Hussein came to inspect it, creating a European straw company to sell him a new modern television studio from which he could broadcast his speeches and blowing it up as he broadcast, and detonating a booby-trapped monument as he stood before it at a memorial ceremony.

When Saddam's uncle, Khairallah Talfah, was discovered to be terminally ill, the Israelis decided to ambush the funeral party at the family's plot at the cemetery in Tikrit, as it was the only place outside of well-guarded Baghdad where it would surely be Saddam himself and not a body double. The Israelis closely followed Talfah's treatment in Jordan.