Syria and North Korea teamed up to build a nuclear reactor designed to look like an ancient fort in the Syrian desert. How would the world look if Israel hadn’t taken action?
World In the middle of April 2007, a short, bald and burly man with a limp and a cane walked into the West Wing of the White House. He carried a small briefcase with folders chaotically jutting out.
Dagan took a seat on the couch. Cheney settled into a large blue wing chair to his right. Not one for small talk, Dagan got straight to the point. The Americans were speechless. Cheney, Hadley and Abrams just watched and listened as Dagan explained in detail what the pictures showed. In one, two men posed in front of the concrete structure. One of the men, of Asian ethnicity, was wearing a blue tracksuit. The man he was standing next to, Dagan said, was Ibrahim Othman, head of Syria’s Atomic Energy Commission.
Cheney, who for years had tried to get U.S. intelligence agencies to probe a possible link between North Korea and Syria, sat quietly. He had already warned, back in 2001, of the possibility that militant groups or rogue states would reproduce and sell nuclear technology on the black market and that North Korea would be at the top of the list of countries selling.A few months before the White House meeting with Dagan, U.S.
While the Mossad photos were impressive, many were a few years old. Daily satellite imagery of the site was not enough to know what exactly was happening there. Israel wanted to know if the fuel rods had been installed, an important indicator for determining how close the reactor was to becoming operational.
The lab results showed positive soil samples. Now, there were no doubts. This was definitely a nuclear reactor. The reactor was on its way to becoming hot. If there was going to be an attack, it had to be soon. Israeli Air Force Commander Shkedi, pictured in March 2007, instructed the pilots about the gravity of their stealth mission. DAVID FURST/AFP/Getty
To infiltrate Syrian airspace without detection, the planes flew extremely low—below 200 feet—and the pilots and navigators maintained strict silence. The Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, lived on the 31st floor of an apartment building in Tel Aviv. It amazed him that the aircraft flew lower than his own apartment, almost the entire way to the reactor.
The Bor broke out in a round of applause and hugs, but it was all still a bit premature. Shkedi could not yet relax; the pilots still had to get back home safely. In the last briefing before the mission, he told the pilots that they needed to do everything possible to avoid a direct confrontation with Syrian fighter jets. If, for example, a Syrian MiG tried to engage the IAF F-15s and got shot down, Assad might feel compelled to respond. He wouldn’t be able to enter the “deniability zone.
But then there was the fact that, besides a few officials from Assad’s innermost circle, almost no one in the Syrian government knew about the reactor’s existence. As a result, the IDF’s Northern Command was on standby. If war broke out, the infantry and armored brigades deployed along the border would have to hold the front line until backup could arrive.
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