A Strike in the Dark
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
Monday 11 February 2008
What did Israel bomb in Syria?
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 cooperation 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
Gotja, 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 cooperation 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 coordinates, 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 cooperating 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 pre-mptive raid on Syria was also meant as
a warning about-and a model for-a pre-mptive 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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