Revealed: Israel’s
Attack Against the Syrian Nuclear Reactor. 2007.
Israel revealed details of the
attack that destroyed the Syrian nuclear reactor that has been kept under wraps
since the raid in 2007. It is a dramatic story of military intelligence, espionage,
the tensions over the political decision to launch an attack, and the execution
of the plan.
This is the first time that
Israel admitted responsibility for the raid and it was revealed with newly
declassified material.
Israel came across this covert
site after Omar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator, confessed to have been building a
nuclear reactor in his country back in 2003. This put Israeli military intelligence in a spin. If Gaddafi had begun to build a dangerous nuclear facility perhap other rogue regimes were also in the process of going nuclear.
They began to research if other Middle East regimes were also developing a
nuclear capability. They began to shadow Abdul Kadir Khan, the father of the
Pakistani nuclear program, who had been hawking his wares around the world. The
Israeli Mossad had strong evidence that he helped Iran launch its nuclear
program.
They tracked Khan’s movements to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but alarms went
off when they discovered he was in contact with the Syrians.
Israel began to suspect that an
agricultural research station located in the Syrian desert, some 400 kilometers
from the capital in Damascus, was a North Korean built nuclear facility, but they didn’t
know for sure if the project was to enrich uranium or to produce plutonium for
military purposes. They needed to be 100% certain that it was for military purposes.
Mossad agents on the ground in Syria reported suspicious
truck movements into the desert area of the so-called agricultural research station.
Israel asked the CIA if they had any information. The reply was negative.
The
Mossad began to monitor Syrian communications and followed Ibrahim Othman, the
Syrian delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency, to IATA board
meetings in Vienna. They broke into his apartment and found a treasure trove of
vital information which was sent to the Israeli laboratories for analysis.
Among the portfolio were
photographs of Othman with North Korean scientists inside the facility which clearly
showed it to be a reactor producing plutonium.
The startling information was rushed
to Prime Minister Olmert who immediately asked President George Bush if he
intended to take action against this now dangerous covert nuclear facility. The
answer was negative.
Olmert instructed Gadi Ashkenazi, the IDF Chief of Staff
to prepare a plan to destroy the facility.
Politically and tactically, there
was a heated dispute in Israel between the Prime Minister who wanted to take
immediate action and Ehud Barak, the Defense Minister, who wanted to hold up an
attack. There were impending elections and the feeling was that Barak wanted to
delay the attack until he had been elected prime minister so that he could take
the credit for a successful outcome of a military strike.
Time was pressing. Intelligence
showed that the reactor would become “hot” within a matter of months. This
would make a raid untenable due to the radioactive fallout that would result
from the devastating destruction of the nuclear plant.
Orders were given to
send sufficient planes with ordinance that would totally destroy the facility
making it impossible for the Syrians to reconstruct it.
The code name of the operation
was “Arizona’ as eight warplanes took off from the Hazerim and Ramon air bases
in Israel an hour before midnight on September 5 2007. Flying low and with
radio silence they flew over enemy territory avoiding radar detection until
they reached their target in the dead of night and dropped they payloads with
accuracy destroying the reactor within three minutes.
There were no ceremonies or
fanfares on the pilot’s return. All
involved knew of the major and historical significance of the operation but it
had to remain covert for diplomatic reasons.
Assad complained that Israel had
attacked Syria in the night to which Olmert publicly asked Assad to explain
what Israel was supposed to have attacked. Assad knew his bluff had been
called. Israel, until now, never publicly admitted its involvement in the
destruction of this Syrian nuclear reactor. It did, however, inform its western
allies, the United States, UK, France, Germany, and Egypt and Jordan. Olmert
also called Putin to inform him of Israel’s action.
All remained diplomatically
silent.
Barry Shaw is the Senior
Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
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