Israeli Air Force F-15 on takeoff
Amos Harel and Aluf Benn:
This is the story of a single night more than a decade ago, and a daring, hair-raising operation executed by the Israeli air force, army and intelligence community that destroyed an atomic plant in northeastern Syria. Yet no less, it is also a story of a big intelligence failure – the worst since the Yom Kippur War, according to a number of top intelligence people – in which Israel somehow managed for years not to notice a reactor being built right under its nose, in a neighboring country on whose surveillance Israel was spending vast amounts of money.
The operation was the finest hour of a prime minister who just a year earlier had led Israel into a failed war in Lebanon and who less than two years later would be compelled to resign before going on to serve a prison term for crimes of corruption. And it was also the start of the intense hostility between that prime minister and his defense minister, which took root during that summer of 2007, and of the impassioned war over who among the top brass in the military organizations deserved the credit.
It is especially surprising that this is also the story of a secret that was maintained for a long time here in Israel despite the considerable personal interests of a number of those who are now involved in its publication. Only now, more than a decade later, has the military censor allowed the Israeli media to report the history of this affair – and even that, still with restrictions.
and this was a critical moment,
The next breakthrough, in fact the turning point of the whole affair, occurred in Vienna in early March 2007. Israel has never officially acknowledged or accepted responsibility for it, and the following is based on an investigative report published by American journalist David Makovsky in The New Yorker in 2012. According to the report, Ibrahim Othman, head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission, had come to Austria to participate in the deliberations of the International Atomic Energy Agency. A cell of Mossad agents from the Keshet unit broke into the apartment where Othman was staying and within less than an hour “vacuumed up” the information that was on the Syrian official’s personal computer, which had remained in the apartment while he was taking part in the conference.
Reactor Core of Syrian Plutonium Nuclear Plant – Image from Ibrahim Othman’s Laptop Computer
After mulling everything over, and at the advice of former Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, Olmert decided to share the sensitive new information about Syria with the Americans. He hoped that perhaps the George W. Bush administration would take it upon itself to destroy the reactor. Defense Minister Amir Peretz briefed his American counterpart Robert Gates, who was in Israel on a routine visit. Gates was “pretty much in shock.” The prime minister’s two close advisers, Yoram Turbovich and Shalom Turgeman, flew to Washington to brief top administration people. In Washington the Israeli delegation met with Vice President Dick Cheney and top people in the CIA and the National Security Council.
the reaction was entirely predictable,
Gradually, it became clear that there were three competing approaches within the administration, and that the president was trying to choose among them. Cheney, as usual the rapacious hawk, wanted the United States to attack and destroy the reactor as a public and deterrent message, a warning against the development of additional secret nuclear programs in other countries. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was recommending a diplomatic move to thwart the reactor by means of applying pressure on Assad. Gates and some of Bush’s advisers believed that an attack should be left in Israel’s hands. They were concerned about the possibility of a blunder that could develop from mistaken intelligence information, as had happened to the Americans in the affair of the weapons of mass destruction (that were not found) on the eve of the Iraq War in 2003.
“Suddenly a moment comes when all the theoretical discussions become the here and now, and it could be that this will lead to a war,” she relates. “The odds were low but they did exist. There was unease because the home front was not aware of what might be waiting for it. And that is after the missiles we had absorbed in the Lebanon War and even before we had an interception system like Iron Dome. It occurred to me that we could wake up the next morning and the horizon would be full of [incoming] missiles. However, there were no doubts about the decision itself. We went through the whole process until the correct decision was made. I was very much in agreement with the decision to attack, even though it was with a heavy heart.”
RTWDT.
RELATED STORY:
A Washington-based think tank said Wednesday it was impossible to confirm a 2015 article by the German weekly Der Spiegel claiming that Syria was developing another nuclear reactor to replace the one Israel destroyed in 2007. However, it urged the international atomic watchdog to investigate the site in which Syria – possibly aided by Iran and North Korea – was allegedly trying to set up a new nuclear base to cover for the one Israel destroyed.
The results of the investigation by the Institute for Science and International Security were published hours after Israel took responsibility for the 2007 attack at Deir el-Zour in northeast Syria.
According to Der Spiegel, a new underground facility was launched in the center of a mountain into which a tunnel network had been dug. Located in a remote, rugged region near Qusayr in western Syria, the facility was said to be connected to a power plant and a water source for cooling.
For the record, the Institute for Science and International Security is a Left-leaning organization funded heavily by the leftist Ploughshares Fund.
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