Remember that September 6 raid in Syria?
The Financial Times has an interesting story on the Israeli raid of September 6 last year:
For months, the White House has maintained a shroud of secrecy around the September 6 Israeli strike on the facility, which Syria codenamed “al-Kibar”. The Central Intelligence Agency will on Thursday brief about 200 members of Congress on the mysterious incident. The US official told the Financial Times that North Korea started discussing ways to help Syria build a nuclear reactor in 1997. He said US intelligence believed construction work began in 2003.
The presentations to Congress would provide an ”eye popping, comprehensive briefing that will demonstrate how close Syria came to having a nuclear weapons making capability,” the official added. The CIA will show politicians a video that brings together a compilation of still images, including satellite imagery, ground imagery, and photographs taken inside the facility.
One photograph shows a North Korean nuclear scientist named Chon Chibu standing beside a person believed to be his Syrian counterpart. Mr Chon has worked at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor, which produced the material for the bomb North Korea tested in 2006, and has dealt with US officials in the past. The US official said the date of the meeting was unclear, but said the vintage of a car that appears in the background suggests it was sometime after 2005.
The official said North Korea appeared to have provided the designs for the Syrian reactor, which he said was a “dead ringer” for Yongbyon…North Korea is also believed to have probably provided engineering and construction staff for the project…While US and Israeli intelligence suggests Syria was very close to completing the physical reactor, they have no evidence that Syria had obtained plutonium to feed into the reactor.
The last point is odd. It was reported last year that Israel obtained nuclear fuel prior to the raid and presented it to the US as evidence of what was happening in Syria. Questions: what role does or did Iran have in the Syrian project? What is the meaning of the talk of a Syria and Israel peace deal in the light of these disclosures?
April 25th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Which makes Iraq’s 2001-2003 missile negotiations with North Korea all the more interesting:
“For two years before the American invasion of Iraq, Mr. Hussein’s sons, generals and front companies were engaged in lengthy negotiations with North Korea, according to computer files discovered by international inspectors and the accounts of Bush administration officials. The officials now say they believe that those negotiations — mostly conducted in neighboring Syria, apparently with the knowledge of the Syrian government — were not merely to buy a few North Korean missiles. Instead, the goal was to obtain a full production line to manufacture, under an Iraqi flag, the North Korean missile system, which would be capable of hitting American allies and bases around the region, according to the Bush administration officials.” [NYT, 12/1/2003]