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A Strike in the Dark
What Did Israel Bomb in Syria?
By Seymour M. Hersh
05/02/08 "New
Yorker" -- -- Sometime after midnight on September
6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters
crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing
mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles
north of the Iraq border. The seemingly unprovoked bombing,
which came after months of heightened tension between Israel and
Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides
along the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act
of war. But in the immediate aftermath nothing was heard from
the government of Israel. In contrast, in 1981, when the Israeli
Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, near Baghdad,
the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing reconnaissance
photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely
interviewed.
Within hours of the attack, Syria denounced Israel for invading
its airspace, but its public statements were incomplete and
contradictory—thus adding to the mystery. A Syrian military
spokesman said only that Israeli planes had dropped some
munitions in an unpopulated area after being challenged by
Syrian air defenses, “which forced them to flee.” Four days
later, Walid Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, said during a
state visit to Turkey that the Israeli aircraft had used live
ammunition in the attack, but insisted that there were no
casualties or property damage. It was not until October 1st that
Syrian President Bashar Assad, in an interview with the BBC,
acknowledged that the Israeli warplanes had hit their target,
which he described as an “unused military building.” Assad added
that Syria reserved the right to retaliate, but his comments
were muted.
Despite official silence in Tel Aviv (and in Washington), in the
days after the bombing the American and European media were
flooded with reports, primarily based on information from
anonymous government sources, claiming that Israel had destroyed
a nascent nuclear reactor that was secretly being assembled in
Syria, with the help of North Korea. Beginning construction of a
nuclear reactor in secret would be a violation of Syria’s
obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and
could potentially yield material for a nuclear weapon.
The evidence was circumstantial but seemingly damning. The first
reports of Syrian and North Korean nuclear coöperation came on
September 12th in the Times and elsewhere. By the end of
October, the various media accounts generally agreed on four
points: the Israeli intelligence community had learned of a
North Korean connection to a construction site in an
agricultural area in eastern Syria; three days before the
bombing, a “North Korean ship,” identified as the Al Hamed, had
arrived at the Syrian port of Tartus, on the Mediterranean;
satellite imagery strongly suggested that the building under
construction was designed to hold a nuclear reactor when
completed; as such, Syria had crossed what the Israelis regarded
as the “red line” on the path to building a bomb, and had to be
stopped. There were also reports—by ABC News and others—that
some of the Israeli intelligence had been shared in advance with
the United States, which had raised no objection to the bombing.
The Israeli government still declined to make any statement
about the incident. Military censorship on dispatches about the
raid was imposed for several weeks, and the Israeli press
resorted to recycling the disclosures in the foreign press. In
the first days after the attack, there had been many critical
stories in the Israeli press speculating about the bombing, and
the possibility that it could lead to a conflict with Syria.
Larry Derfner, a columnist writing in the Jerusalem Post,
described the raid as “the sort of thing that starts wars.” But,
once reports about the nuclear issue and other details
circulated, the domestic criticism subsided.
At a news conference on September 20th, President George W. Bush
was asked about the incident four times but said, “I’m not going
to comment on the matter.” The lack of official statements
became part of the story. “The silence from all parties has been
deafening,” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, “but
the message to Iran”—which the Administration had long suspected
of pursuing a nuclear weapon—“is clear: America and Israel can
identify nuclear targets and penetrate air defenses to destroy
them.”
It was evident that officials in Israel and the United States,
although unwilling to be quoted, were eager for the news media
to write about the bombing. Early on, a former officer in the
Israel Defense Forces with close contacts in Israeli
intelligence approached me, with a version of the standard
story, including colorful but, as it turned out, unconfirmable
details: Israeli intelligence tracking the ship from the moment
it left a North Korean port; Syrian soldiers wearing protective
gear as they off-loaded the cargo; Israeli intelligence
monitoring trucks from the docks to the target site. On October
3rd, the London Spectator, citing much of the same information,
published an overheated account of the September 6th raid,
claiming that it “may have saved the world from a devastating
threat,” and that “a very senior British ministerial source” had
warned, “If people had known how close we came to World War
Three that day there’d have been mass panic.”
However, in three months of reporting for this article, I was
repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic,
and congressional officials that they were not aware of any
solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria. It
is possible that Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior
members of the Bush Administration, without it being vetted by
intelligence agencies. (This process, known as “stovepiping,”
overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.) But
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for
monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
said, “Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite
imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear
facility.”
Joseph Cirincione, the director for nuclear policy at the Center
for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told me,
“Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial
ability to support a nuclear-weapons program. I’ve been
following this issue for fifteen years, and every once in a
while a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing.
There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat from Syria. This is
all political.” Cirincione castigated the press corps for its
handling of the story. “I think some of our best journalists
were used,” he said.
A similar message emerged at briefings given to select members
of Congress within weeks of the attack. The briefings, conducted
by intelligence agencies, focussed on what Washington knew about
the September 6th raid. One concern was whether North Korea had
done anything that might cause the U.S. to back away from
ongoing six-nation talks about its nuclear program. A legislator
who took part in one such briefing said afterward, according to
a member of his staff, that he had heard nothing that caused him
“to have any doubts” about the North Korean
negotiations—“nothing that should cause a pause.” The
legislator’s conclusion, the staff member said, was “There’s
nothing that proves any perfidy involving the North Koreans.”
Morton Abramowitz, a former Assistant Secretary of State for
intelligence and research, told me that he was astonished by the
lack of response. “Anytime you bomb another state, that’s a big
deal,” he said. “But where’s the outcry, particularly from the
concerned states and the U.N.? Something’s amiss.”
Israel could, of course, have damning evidence that it refuses
to disclose. But there are serious and unexamined contradictions
in the various published accounts of the September 6th bombing.
The main piece of evidence to emerge publicly that Syria was
building a reactor arrived on October 23rd, when David Albright,
of the Institute for Science and International Security, a
highly respected nonprofit research group, released a satellite
image of the target. The photograph had been taken by a
commercial satellite company, DigitalGlobe, of Longmont,
Colorado, on August 10th, four weeks before the bombing, and
showed a square building and a nearby water-pumping station. In
an analysis released at the same time, Albright, a physicist who
served as a weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that the
building, as viewed from space, had roughly the same length and
width as a reactor building at Yongbyon, North Korea’s main
nuclear facility. “The tall building in the image may house a
reactor under construction and the pump station along the river
may have been intended to supply cooling water to the reactor,”
Albright said. He concluded his analysis by posing a series of
rhetorical questions that assumed that the target was a nuclear
facility:
How far along was the reactor construction project when it was
bombed? What was the extent of nuclear assistance from North
Korea? Which reactor components did Syria obtain from North
Korea or elsewhere, and where are they now?
He was later quoted in the Washington Post saying, “I’m pretty
convinced that Syria was trying to build a nuclear reactor.”
When I asked Albright how he had pinpointed the target, he told
me that he and a colleague, Paul Brannan, “did a lot of hard
work”—culling press reports and poring over DigitalGlobe
imagery—“before coming up with the site.” Albright then shared
his findings with Robin Wright and other journalists at the
Post, who, after checking with Administration officials, told
him that the building was, indeed, the one targeted by the
Israelis. “We did not release the information until we got
direct confirmation from the Washington Post,” he told me. The
Post’s sources in the Administration, he understood, had access
to far more detailed images obtained by U.S. intelligence
satellites. The Post ran a story, without printing the imagery,
on October 19th, reporting that “U.S. and foreign officials
familiar with the aftermath of the attack” had concluded that
the site had the “signature,” or characteristics, of a reactor
“similar in structure to North Korea’s facilities”—a conclusion
with which Albright then agreed. In other words, the Albright
and the Post reports, which appeared to independently reinforce
each other, stemmed in part from the same sources.
Albright told me that before going public he had met privately
with Israeli officials. “I wanted to be sure in my own mind that
the Israelis thought it was a reactor, and I was,” he said.
“They never explicitly said it was nuclear, but they ruled out
the possibility that it was a missile, chemical-warfare, or
radar site. By a process of elimination, I was left with
nuclear.”
Two days after his first report, Albright released a satellite
image of the bombed site, taken by DigitalGlobe on October 24th,
seven weeks after the bombing. The new image showed that the
target area had been levelled and the ground scraped. Albright
said that it hinted of a coverup—cleansing the bombing site
could make it difficult for weapons inspectors to determine its
precise nature. “It looks like Syria is trying to hide something
and destroy the evidence of some activity,” he told the Times.
“But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what
it was doing.” This assessment was widely shared in the press.
(In mid-January, the Times reported that recent imagery from
DigitalGlobe showed that a storage facility, or something
similar, had been constructed, in an obvious rush, at the
bombing site.)
Proliferation experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency
and others in the arms-control community disputed Albright’s
interpretation of the images. “People here were baffled by this,
and thought that Albright had stuck his neck out,” a diplomat in
Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is headquartered, told me. “The
I.A.E.A. has been consistently telling journalists that it is
skeptical about the Syrian nuclear story, but the reporters are
so convinced.”
A second diplomat in Vienna acidly commented on the images: “A
square building is a square building.” The diplomat, who is
familiar with the use of satellite imagery for nuclear
verification, added that the I.A.E.A. “does not have enough
information to conclude anything about the exact nature of the
facility. They see a building with some geometry near a river
that could be identified as nuclear-related. But they cannot
credibly conclude that is so. As far as information coming from
open sources beyond imagery, it’s a struggle to extract
information from all of the noise that comes from political
agendas.”
Much of what one would expect to see around a secret nuclear
site was lacking at the target, a former State Department
intelligence expert who now deals with proliferation issues for
the Congress said. “There is no security around the building,”
he said. “No barracks for the Army or the workers. No associated
complex.” Jeffrey Lewis, who heads the non-proliferation program
at the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, told
me that, even if the width and the length of the building were
similar to the Korean site, its height was simply not sufficient
to contain a Yongbyon-size reactor and also have enough room to
extract the control rods, an essential step in the operation of
the reactor; nor was there evidence in the published imagery of
major underground construction. “All you could see was a box,”
Lewis said. “You couldn’t see enough to know how big it will be
or what it will do. It’s just a box.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who has access to
current intelligence, said, “We don’t have any proof of a
reactor—no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no
satellite intelligence.” Some well-informed defense consultants
and former intelligence officials asked why, if there was
compelling evidence of nuclear cheating involving North Korea, a
member of the President’s axis of evil, and Syria, which the
U.S. considers a state sponsor of terrorism, the Bush
Administration would not insist on making it public.
When I went to Israel in late December, the government was still
maintaining secrecy about the raid, but some current and former
officials and military officers were willing to speak without
attribution. Most were adamant that Israel’s intelligence had
been accurate. “Don’t you write that there was nothing there!” a
senior Israeli official, who is in a position to know the
details of the raid on Syria, said, shaking a finger at me. “The
thing in Syria was real.”
Retired Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, who served as deputy
national-security adviser under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, told
me that Israel wouldn’t have acted if it hadn’t been convinced
that there was a threat. “It may have been a perception of a
conviction, but there was something there,” Brom said. “It was
the beginning of a nuclear project.” However, by the date of our
talk, Brom told me, “The question of whether it was there or not
is not that relevant anymore.”
Albright, when I spoke to him in December, was far more
circumspect than he had been in October. “We never said ‘we
know’ it was a reactor, based on the image,” Albright said. “We
wanted to make sure that the image was consistent with a
reactor, and, from my point of view, it was. But that doesn’t
confirm it’s a reactor.”
The journey of the Al Hamed, a small coastal trader, became a
centerpiece in accounts of the September 6th bombing. On
September 15th, the Washington Post reported that “a prominent
U.S. expert on the Middle East” said that the attack “appears to
have been linked to the arrival . . . of a ship carrying
material from North Korea labeled as cement.” The article went
on to cite the expert’s belief that “the emerging consensus in
Israel was that it delivered nuclear equipment.” Other press
reports identified the Al Hamed as a “suspicious North Korean”
ship.
But there is evidence that the Al Hamed could not have been
carrying sensitive cargo—or any cargo—from North Korea.
International shipping is carefully monitored by Lloyd’s Marine
Intelligence Unit, which relies on a network of agents as well
as on port logs and other records. In addition, most merchant
ships are now required to operate a transponder device called an
A.I.S., for automatic identification system. This device, which
was on board the Al Hamed, works in a manner similar to a
transponder on a commercial aircraft—beaming a constant, very
high-frequency position report. (The U.S. Navy monitors
international sea traffic with the aid of dedicated satellites,
at a secret facility in suburban Washington.)
According to Marine Intelligence Unit records, the Al Hamed,
which was built in 1965, had been operating for years in the
eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, with no indication of
any recent visits to North Korea. The records show that the Al
Hamed arrived at Tartus on September 3rd—the ship’s fifth visit
to Syria in five months. (It was one of eight ships that arrived
that day; although it is possible that one of the others was
carrying illicit materials, only the Al Hamed has been named in
the media.) The ship’s registry was constantly changing. The Al
Hamed flew the South Korean flag before switching to North Korea
in November of 2005, and then to Comoros. (Ships often fly flags
of convenience, registering with different countries, in many
cases to avoid taxes or onerous regulations.) At the time of the
bombing, according to Lloyd’s, it was flying a Comoran flag and
was owned by four Syrian nationals. In earlier years, under
other owners, the ship seems to have operated under Russian,
Estonian, Turkish, and Honduran flags. Lloyd’s records show that
the ship had apparently not passed through the Suez Canal—the
main route from the Mediterranean to the Far East—since at least
1998.
Among the groups that keep track of international shipping is
Greenpeace. Martini Gotjé, who monitors illegal fishing for the
organization and was among the first to raise questions about
the Al Hamed, told me, “I’ve been at sea for forty-one years,
and I can tell you, as a captain, that the Al Hamed was
nothing—in rotten shape. You wouldn’t be able to load heavy
cargo on it, as the floorboards wouldn’t be that strong.”
If the Israelis’ target in Syria was not a nuclear site, why
didn’t the Syrians respond more forcefully? Syria complained at
the United Nations but did little to press the issue. And, if
the site wasn’t a partially built reactor, what was it?
During two trips to Damascus after the Israeli raid, I
interviewed many senior government and intelligence officials.
None of President Assad’s close advisers told me the same story,
though some of the stories were more revealing—and more
plausible—than others. In general, Syrian officials seemed more
eager to analyze Israel’s motives than to discuss what had been
attacked. “I hesitate to answer any journalist’s questions about
it,” Faruq al-Shara, the Syrian Vice-President, told me. “Israel
bombed to restore its credibility, and their objective is for us
to keep talking about it. And by answering your questions I
serve their objective. Why should I volunteer to do that?” Shara
denied that his nation has a nuclear-weapons program. “The
volume of articles about the bombing is incredible, and it’s not
important that it’s a lie,” he said.
One top foreign-ministry official in Damascus told me that the
target “was an old military building that had been abandoned by
the Syrian military” years ago. But a senior Syrian intelligence
general gave me a different account. “What they targeted was a
building used for fertilizer and water pumps,” he said—part of a
government effort to revitalize farming. “There is a large
city”— Dayr az Zawr—“fifty kilometres away. Why would Syria put
nuclear material near a city?” I interviewed the intelligence
general again on my second visit to Damascus, and he reiterated
that the targeted building was “at no time a military facility.”
As to why Syria had not had a more aggressive response, if the
target was so benign, the general said, “It was not fear—that’s
all I’ll say.” As I left, I asked the general why Syria had not
invited representatives of the International Atomic Energy
Agency to visit the bombing site and declare that no nuclear
activity was taking place there. “They did not ask to come,” he
said, and “Syria had no reason to ask them to come.”
An I.A.E.A. official dismissed that assertion when we spoke in
Vienna a few days later. “The I.A.E.A. asked the Syrians to
allow the agency to visit the site to verify its nature,” the
I.A.E.A. official said. “Syria’s reply was that it was a
military, not a nuclear, installation, and there would be no
reason for the I.A.E.A. to go there. It would be in their and
everyone’s interest to have the I.A.E.A. visit the site. If it
was nuclear, it would leave fingerprints.”
In a subsequent interview, Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador
to Washington, defended Syria’s decision not to invite the
I.A.E.A. inspectors. “We will not get into the game of inviting
foreign experts to visit every site that Israel claims is a
nuclear facility,” Moustapha told me. “If we bring them in and
they say there is nothing there, then Israel will say it made a
mistake and bomb another site two weeks later. And if we then
don’t let the I.A.E.A. in, Israel will say, ‘You see?’ This is
nonsense. Why should we have to do this?”
Even if the site was not a nuclear installation, it is possible
that the Syrians feared that an I.A.E.A. inquiry would uncover
the presence of North Koreans there. In Syria, I was able to get
some confirmation that North Koreans were at the target. A
senior officer in Damascus with firsthand knowledge of the
incident agreed to see me alone, at his home; my other
interviews in Damascus took place in government offices.
According to his account, North Koreans were present at the
site, but only as paid construction workers. The senior officer
said that the targeted building, when completed, would most
likely have been used as a chemical-warfare facility. (Syria is
not a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention and has been
believed, for decades, to have a substantial chemical-weapons
arsenal.)
The building contract with North Korea was a routine business
deal, the senior officer said—from design to construction.
(North Korea may, of course, have sent skilled technicians
capable of doing less routine work.) Syria and North Korea have
a long-standing partnership on military matters. “The contract
between Syria and North Korea was old, from 2002, and it was
running late,” the senior officer told me. “It was initially to
be finished in 2005, and the Israelis might have expected it was
further along.”
The North Korean laborers had been coming and going for “maybe
six months” before the September bombing, the senior officer
said, and his government concluded that the Israelis had picked
up North Korean telephone chatter at the site. (This fit the
timeline that Israeli officials had given me.) “The Israelis may
have their own spies and watched the laborers being driven to
the area,” the senior officer said. “The Koreans were not there
at night, but slept in their quarters and were driven to the
site in the morning. The building was in an isolated area, and
the Israelis may have concluded that even if there was a slight
chance”—of it being a nuclear facility—“we’ll take that risk.”
On the days before the bombing, the Koreans had been working on
the second floor, and were using a tarp on top of the building
to shield the site from rain and sun. “It was just the North
Korean way of working,” the Syrian senior officer said, adding
that the possibility that the Israelis could not see what was
underneath the tarp might have added to their determination.
The attack was especially dramatic, the Syrian senior officer
said, because the Israelis used bright magnesium illumination
flares to light up the target before the bombing. Night suddenly
turned into day, he told me. “When the people in the area saw
the lights and the bombing, they thought there would be a
commando raid,” the senior officer said. The building was
destroyed, and his government eventually concluded that there
were no Israeli ground forces in the area. But if Israelis had
been on the ground seeking contaminated soil samples, the senior
officer said, “they found only cement.”
A senior Syrian official confirmed that a group of North Koreans
had been at work at the site, but he denied that the structure
was related to chemical warfare. Syria had concluded, he said,
that chemical warfare had little deterrent value against Israel,
given its nuclear capability. The facility that was attacked,
the official said, was to be one of a string of
missile-manufacturing plants scattered throughout Syria—“all low
tech. Not strategic.” (North Korea has been a major exporter of
missile technology and expertise to Syria for decades.) He
added, “We’ve gone asymmetrical, and have been improving our
capability to build low-tech missiles that will enable us to
inflict as much damage as possible without confronting the
Israeli Army. We now can hit all of Israel, and not just the
north.”
Whatever was under construction, with North Korean help, it
apparently had little to do with agriculture—or with nuclear
reactors—but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its
military relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was
enough to silence the Syrian government after the September 6th
bombing.
It is unclear to what extent the Bush Administration was
involved in the Israeli attack. The most detailed report of
coöperation was made in mid-October by ABC News. Citing a senior
U.S. official, the network reported that Israel had shared
intelligence with the United States and received satellite help
and targeting information in response. At one point, it was
reported, the Bush Administration considered attacking Syria
itself, but rejected that option. The implication was that the
Israeli intelligence about the nuclear threat had been vetted by
the U.S., and had been found to be convincing.
Yet officials I spoke to in Israel heatedly denied the notion
that they had extensive help from Washington in planning the
attack. When I told the senior Israeli official that I found
little support in Washington for Israel’s claim that it had
bombed a nuclear facility in Syria, he responded with an
expletive, and then said, angrily, “Nobody helped us. We did it
on our own.” He added, “What I’m saying is that nobody
discovered it for us.” (The White House declined to comment on
this story.)
There is evidence to support this view. The satellite operated
by DigitalGlobe, the Colorado firm that supplied Albright’s
images, is for hire; anyone can order the satellite to
photograph specific coördinates, a process that can cost
anywhere from several hundred to hundreds of thousands of
dollars. The company displays the results of these requests on
its Web page, but not the identity of the customer. On five
occasions between August 5th and August 27th of last year—before
the Israeli bombing—DigitalGlobe was paid to take a tight image
of the targeted building in Syria.
Clearly, whoever ordered the images likely had some involvement
in plans for the attack. DigitalGlobe does about sixty per cent
of its business with the U.S. government, but those contracts
are for unclassified work, such as mapping. The government’s own
military and intelligence satellite system, with an unmatched
ability to achieve what analysts call “highly granular images,”
could have supplied superior versions of the target sites.
Israel has at least two military satellite systems, but,
according to Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst,
DigitalGlobe’s satellite has advantages for reconnaissance,
making Israel a logical customer. (“Customer anonymity is
crucial to us,” Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe,
said. “I don’t know who placed the order and couldn’t disclose
it if I did.”) It is also possible that Israel or the United
States ordered the imagery in order to have something
unclassified to pass to the press if needed. If the Bush
Administration had been aggressively coöperating with Israel
before the attack, why would Israel have to turn to a commercial
firm?
Last fall, aerospace industry and military sources told Aviation
Week & Space Technology, an authoritative trade journal, that
the United States had provided Israel with advice about
“potential target vulnerabilities” before the September 6th
attack, and monitored the radar as the mission took place. The
magazine reported that the Israeli fighters, prior to bombing
the target on the Euphrates, struck a Syrian radar facility near
the Turkish border, knocking the radar out of commission and
permitting them to complete their mission without interference.
The former U.S. senior intelligence official told me that, as he
understood it, America’s involvement in the Israeli raid dated
back months earlier, and was linked to the Administration’s
planning for a possible air war against Iran. Last summer, the
Defense Intelligence Agency came to believe that Syria was
installing a new Russian-supplied radar-and-air-defense system
that was similar to the radar complexes in Iran. Entering Syrian
airspace would trigger those defenses and expose them to Israeli
and American exploitation, yielding valuable information about
their capabilities. Vice-President Dick Cheney supported the
idea of overflights, the former senior intelligence official
said, because “it would stick it to Syria and show that we’re
serious about Iran.” (The Vice-President’s office declined to
comment.) The former senior intelligence official said that
Israeli military jets have flown over Syria repeatedly, without
retaliation from Syria. At the time, the former senior
intelligence official said, the focus was on radar and air
defenses, and not on any real or suspected nuclear facility.
Israel’s claims about the target, which emerged later, caught
many in the military and intelligence community—if not in the
White House—by surprise.
The senior Israeli official, asked whether the attack was rooted
in his country’s interest in Syria’s radar installations, told
me, “Bullshit.” Whatever the Administration’s initial agenda,
Israel seems to have been after something more.
The story of the Israeli bombing of Syria, with its mixture of
satellite intelligence, intercepts, newspaper leaks, and shared
assumptions, reminded some American diplomats and intelligence
officials of an incident, ten years ago, involving North Korea.
In mid-1998, American reconnaissance satellites photographed
imagery of a major underground construction project at
Kumchang-ri, twenty-five miles northwest of Yongbyon. “We were
briefed that, without a doubt, this was a nuclear-related
facility, and there was signals intelligence linking the
construction brigade at Kumchang-ri to the nuclear complex at
Yongbyon,” the former State Department intelligence expert
recalled.
Charles Kartman, who was President Bill Clinton’s special envoy
for peace talks with Korea, told me that the intelligence was
considered a slam dunk by analysts in the Defense Intelligence
Agency, even though other agencies disagreed. “We had a debate
going on inside the community, but the D.I.A. unilaterally took
it to Capitol Hill,” Kartman said, forcing the issue and leading
to a front-page Times story.
After months of negotiations, Kartman recalled, the North
Koreans agreed, under diplomatic pressure, to grant access to
Kumchang-ri. In return, they received aid, including assistance
with a new potato-production program. Inspectors found little
besides a series of empty tunnels. Robert Carlin, an expert on
North Korea who retired in 2005 after serving more than thirty
years with the C.I.A. and the State Department’s intelligence
bureau, told me that the Kumchang-ri incident highlighted “an
endemic weakness” in the American intelligence community.
“People think they know the ending and then they go back and
find the evidence that fits their story,” he said. “And then you
get groupthink—and people reinforce each other.”
It seems that, as with Kumchang-ri, there was a genuine, if not
unanimous, belief by Israeli intelligence that the Syrians were
constructing something that could have serious national-security
consequences. But why would the Israelis take the risk of
provoking a military response, and perhaps a war, if there was,
as it seems, no smoking gun? Mohamed ElBaradei, expressing his
frustration, said, “If a country has any information about a
nuclear activity in another country, it should inform the
I.A.E.A.—not bomb first and ask questions later.”
One answer, suggested by David Albright, is that Israel did not
trust the international arms-control community. “I can
understand the Israeli point of view, given the history with
Iran and Algeria,” Albright said. “Both nations had
nuclear-weapons programs and, after being caught cheating,
declared their reactors to be civil reactors, for peacetime use.
The international groups, like the U.N. and the I.A.E.A, never
shut them down.” Also, Israel may have calculated that risk of a
counterattack was low: President Assad would undoubtedly
conclude that the attack had the support of the Bush
Administration and, therefore, that any response by Syria would
also engage the U.S. (My conversations with officials in Syria
bore out this assumption.)
In Tel Aviv, the senior Israeli official pointedly told me,
“Syria still thinks Hezbollah won the war in Lebanon”—referring
to the summer, 2006, fight between Israel and the Shiite
organization headed by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. “Nasrallah knows
how much that war cost—one-third of his fighters were killed,
infrastructure was bombed, and ninety-five per cent of his
strategic weapons were wiped out,” the Israeli official said.
“But Assad has a Nasrallah complex and thinks Hezbollah won.
And, ‘If he did it, I can do it.’ This led to an adventurous
mood in Damascus. Today, they are more sober.”
That notion was echoed by the ambassador of an Israeli ally who
is posted in Tel Aviv. “The truth is not important,” the
ambassador told me. “Israel was able to restore its credibility
as a deterrent. That is the whole thing. No one will know what
the real story is.”
There is evidence that the preëmptive raid on Syria was also
meant as a warning about—and a model for—a preëmptive attack on
Iran. When I visited Israel this winter, Iran was the overriding
concern among political and defense officials I spoke to—not
Syria. There was palpable anger toward Washington, in the wake
of a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded, on behalf of
the American intelligence community, that Iran is not now
constructing a nuclear weapon. Many in Israel view Iran’s
nuclear ambitions as an existential threat; they believe that
military action against Iran may be inevitable, and worry that
America may not be there when needed. The N.I.E. was published
in November, after a yearlong standoff involving Cheney’s
office, which resisted the report’s findings. At the time of the
raid, reports about the forthcoming N.I.E. and its general
conclusion had already appeared.
Retired Major General Giora Eiland, who served as the
national-security adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told
me, “The Israeli military takes it as an assumption that one day
we will need to have a military campaign against Iran, to slow
and eliminate the nuclear option.” He added, “Whether the
political situation will allow this is another question.”
In the weeks after the N.I.E.’s release, Bush insisted that the
Iranian nuclear-weapons threat was as acute as ever, a theme he
amplified during his nine-day Middle East trip after the New
Year. “A lot of people heard that N.I.E. out here and said that
George Bush and the Americans don’t take the Iranian threat
seriously,” he told Greta Van Susteren, of Fox News. “And so
this trip has been successful from the perspective of saying . .
. we will keep the pressure on.”
Shortly after the bombing, a Chinese envoy and one of the Bush
Administration’s senior national-security officials met in
Washington. The Chinese envoy had just returned from a visit to
Tehran, a person familiar with the discussion told me, and he
wanted the White House to know that there were moderates there
who were interested in talks. The national-security official
rejected that possibility and told the envoy, as the person
familiar with the discussion recalled, “‘You are aware of the
recent Israeli statements about Syria. The Israelis are
extremely serious about Iran and its nuclear program, and I
believe that, if the United States government is unsuccessful in
its diplomatic dealings with Iran, the Israelis will take it out
militarily.’ He then told the envoy that he wanted him to convey
this to his government—that the Israelis were serious.
“He was telling the Chinese leadership that they’d better warn
Iran that we can’t hold back Israel, and that the Iranians
should look at Syria and see what’s coming next if diplomacy
fails,” the person familiar with the discussion said. “His
message was that the Syrian attack was in part aimed at Iran.”
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