The mighty Euphrates river is the
subject of the prophecies in the Bible’s Book of Revelation, where it is
written that the river will be the scene of the battle of Armageddon: “The
sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was
dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East.” Today, time seems to
stand still along the river. The turquoise waters of the Euphrates flow slowly
through the northern Syrian provincial city Deir el-Zor, whose name translates
as ‘monastery in the forest’. Farmers till the fields, and vendors sell camel’s
hair blankets, cardamom and coriander in the city's bazaars. Occasionally,
archaeologists visit the region to excavate the remains of ancient cities in
the surrounding area, a place where many people have left their mark—the
Parthians and the Sassanids, the Romans and the Jews, the Ottomans and the
French, who were assigned the mandate for Syria by the League of Nations and
who only withdrew their troops in 1946. Deir el-Zor is the last outpost before
the vast, empty desert, a lifeless place of jagged mountains and inaccessible
valleys that begins not far from the town center. But on a night two years ago,
something dramatic happened in this sleepy place. It's an event that local
residents discuss in whispers in teahouses along the river, when the water
pipes glow and they are confident that no officials are listening—the subject
is taboo in the state-controlled media, and they know that drawing too much
attention to themselves in this authoritarian state could be hazardous to their
health. Some in Deir el-Zor talk of a bright flash which lit up the night in
the distant desert. Others report seeing a gigantic column of smoke over the
Euphrates, like a threatening finger. Some talk of omens, while others relate
conspiracy theories. The pious older guests at Jisr al-Kabir, a popular
restaurant near the city’s landmark suspension bridge, believe it was a sign
from heaven. All the rumours have long since muddied the waters as to what
people may or may not have seen. But even the supposedly advanced Western
world, with its state-of-the-art surveillance technology and interconnectedness
through the mass media, has little more solid information than the people in
this Syrian desert town. What happened in the night of September 6, 2007 in the
desert, 130km (81 miles) from the Iraqi border, 30 km from Deir el-Zor, was
until now one of the great mysteries of our times. At 2:55pm on that day, the
Damascus-based Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that Israeli combat aircraft
coming from the Mediterranean had violated Syrian airspace at about one o'clock
in the morning. “Air-defence units confronted them and forced them to leave
after they dropped some ammunition in deserted areas without causing any human or
material damage,” a Syrian military spokesman said, according to the news
agency. There was no explanation whatsoever for why such a dramatic event was
concealed for half-a-day. At 6:46pm, Israeli government radio quoted a military
spokesman as saying: “This incident never occurred.” At 8:46pm, a spokesperson
for the US State Department said during a daily press briefing that he had only
heard “second-hand reports” which “contradict” each other. To this day, Syria
and Israel, two countries that have technically been at war since the founding
of the Jewish state in 1948, have largely adhered to a bizarre policy of
downplaying what was clearly an act of war. Gradually it became clear that the
IDF-AF pilots did not drop some random ammunition over empty no-man’s land on
that night in 2007, but had in fact deliberately targetted and destroyed a
secret Syrian complex. Was it a nuclear plant, which scientists were on the
verge of completing? Were North Korean, perhaps even Iranian experts, also
working in this secret Syrian facility? When and how did the Israelis learn
about the project, and why did they take such a great risk to conduct their
clandestine operation? Was the destruction of the Al Kibar complex meant as a
final warning to the Iranians, a trial run of sorts intended to show them what
the Israelis plan to do if Teheran continues with its suspected nuclear weapons
programme?
Tel Aviv, late 2001: An inconspicuous
block of houses located among eucalyptus trees is home to the headquarters of
the legendary Israeli foreign intelligence agency, the MOSSAD. A memorial to
agents who died in special covert operations behind enemy lines stands in the
small garden. There are already more than 400 names engraved on the gray
marble, with room for many more. In the main building, intelligence analysts
are trying to assemble a picture of the new Syrian President. In July 2000,
Bashar Al Assad succeeded his deceased father, former President Hafez Assad.
The Israelis believed that the younger Assad, a politically inexperienced
ophthalmologist who had lived in London for many years and who was only 34 when
he took office, would be a weak leader. Unlike his father, an unscrupulous
political realist nicknamed ‘The Lion’ who had almost struck a deal with the
Israelis over the Golan Heights in the last few months of his life, Bashar
Assad was considered relatively unpredictable. According to Israeli agents in
Damascus, the younger Assad was trying to consolidate his power by espousing
radical and controversial positions. He supplied massive amounts of weapons to
the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, for their ‘struggle for independence’
from the ‘Zionist regime’. He received high-ranking delegations from North
Korea. The MOSSAD was convinced that the subject of these secret talks was a
further upgrading of Syria’s military capabilities. Pyongyang had already
helped Damascus in the past in the development of medium-range ballistic missiles
and chemical weapons like Sarin and Mustard Gas. But when Israel’s Military Intelligence
Directorate (AMAN) informed their MOSSAD counterparts that a Syrian nuclear
programme was apparently under discussion, the intelligence professionals were
dismissive. Nuclear weapons for Damascus, a nuclear plant literally on Israel’s
doorstep? For the experts, it seemed much too implausible. Besides, the senior
Assad had rebuffed Dr Abdul Qadeer ‘Bhopali’ Khan, the Pakistani ‘father of the
atom bomb’, when Khan tried to sell him centrifuges for uranium enrichment on
the black market in the early 1990s. The Israelis also knew all too well how
complex the road to the nuclear bomb is, after having spent a lengthy period of
time in the 1960s to covertly procure uranium and then develop nuclear weapons
at their secret laboratories in the town of Dimona in the Negev desert. They
took extreme measures to prevent then-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from
following their example: On a June night in 1981, IDF-AF F-15As and F-16As, in
violation of international law, entered Iraqi airspace and destroyed the Osirak
nuclear reactor (Tammuz-1) near Baghdad under Operation Opera. The
Israelis took a pinprick approach to dealing with the ‘little’ Assad. In 2003,
the IDF-AF conducted multiple air strikes against positions on the Syrian
border, and in October Israeli F-15Is flew a low-altitude mission over Assad’s
residence in Damascus. It was an arrogant show of power that even had many at
the MOSSAD shaking their heads, wondering how Assad would respond to such
humiliating treatment. At that time, the nuclear plant on Euphrates had likely
entered its first key phase. In the spring of 2004, the American National
Security Agency (NSA) detected a suspiciously high number of telephone calls
between Syria and North Korea, with a noticeably busy line of communications
between the North Korean capital Pyongyang and a place in the northern Syrian
desert called Al Kibar. The NSA dossier was sent to the Israeli military’s ‘8200
Unit’, which is responsible for radio-electronic reconnaissance (comprising
both ELINT and SIGINT) and has its antennae set up in the hills near Tel Aviv.
Al-Kibar was ‘flagged’, as they say in intelligence jargon. In late 2006, AMAN
decided to ask the British for their opinion. But almost at the same time as
the delegation from Tel Aviv was arriving in London, a senior Syrian government
official (Ibrahim Othman, the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission) checked
into a hotel in the exclusive London neighborhood of Kensington. He was under
MOSSAD surveillance and turned out to be incredibly careless, leaving his
computer in his hotel room when he went out. Israeli agents took the opportunity
to install a so-called ‘Trojan horse’ programme, which can be used to secretly and
remotely steal data, onto the Syrian’s laptop. The hard-drive contained
construction plans, letters and hundreds of photos. The photos, which were
particularly revealing, showed the Al Kibar complex at various stages in its
development. At the beginning—probably in 2002, although the material was
undated—the construction site looked like a treehouse on stilts, complete with
suspicious-looking pipes leading to a pumping station at the Euphrates. Later
photos showed concrete piers and roofs, which apparently had only one function:
to modify the building so that it would look unsuspicious from above. In the
end, the whole thing looked as if a shoebox had been placed over something in
an attempt to conceal it. But photos from the interior revealed that what was
going on at the site was in fact probably work on fissile material. One of the
photos showed an Asian in blue tracksuit trousers, standing next to an Arab.
The MOSSAD quickly identified the two men as Chon Chibu and Ibrahim Othman.
Chon is one of the leading members of the North Korean nuclear programme, and
experts believe that he is the chief engineer behind the Yongbyon plutonium
reactor. Othman is the director of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. By now,
both AMAN and the MOSSAD were on high alert. After being briefed, then-Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert asked: “Will the reactor be up and running soon, and is there
is a need to take action?: Hard to say, the experts said. The Prime Minister
asked for more detailed information, preferably from first-hand.
Istanbul, a CIA safe house for
high-profile defectors, February 2007. An Iranian General had decided to
switch sides. He was a big fish, of the sort rarely caught in the nets of the
CIA and MOSSAD. Ali-Reza Asgari, 63, a handsome man with a moustache, was the
head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (PASDARAN) in Lebanon in the 1980s and
became Iran’s Deputy Defence Minister in the mid-1990s. Though well-liked under
the relatively liberal then-President Mohammad Khatami, Asgari fell out of favour
after the election victory of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Because he
had branded several men close to Ahmadinejad as corrupt, there was suddenly
more at stake for Asgari than his career: His life was in danger. Sources in
the intelligence community claim that Asgari’s defection to the West was
meticulously planned over a period of months. However, Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, a
former Iranian Media Attaché in Beirut who fled to Berlin in 2003 and who had
known Asgari personally for many years, has since revealed that the General
contacted him twice to ask for help in his escape—first from Iran in the second
half of 2006 and later from Damascus. In Ebrahimi’s version of events, Asgari
succeeded in crossing the border into Turkey at night with the help of a
smuggler. Ebrahimi says he only notified the CIA and turned his friend over to
the Americans after Asgari had reached Istanbul. But from that point on, the
versions of the story coincide again. The Americans and Israelis soon
discovered that the Teheran insider was an intelligence goldmine. For the
Israelis, the most alarming part of Asgari’s story was what he had to say about
Iran’s nuclear programmes. According to Asgari, Teheran was building a second,
secret plant in addition to the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, which was
already known to the West. Besides, he said, Iran was apparently funding a
top-secret nuclear project in Syria, launched in cooperation with the North
Koreans. But Asgari claimed he did not know any further details about the plan.
After a few days, the General’s handlers flew him from Istanbul, considered
relatively unsafe, to the highly secure Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt. “I
brought my computer along. My entire life is in there,” Asgari told his friend
Ebrahimi, who identified him for the Americans. Asgari contacted Ebrahimi
another two times, once from Washington and then from ‘somewhere in Texas’. The
defector wanted his friend to let his wife know that he was safe and in good
hands. The Iranian authorities had announced that Asgari had been “kidnapped by
the MOSSAD and probably killed”. But then nothing further was heard from
Asgari. US authorities had apparently created a new identity for their
high-level Iranian source. Ali-Reza Asgari had ceased to exist. Olmert was kept
apprised of the latest developments. In March 2007, three senior experts from
the political, military and intelligence communities were summoned to his
residence on Gaza Street in Jerusalem, where Olmert swore them to absolute
secrecy. The trio was to advise him on matters relating to the Syrian nuclear
programme. Olmert wanted results, knowing that he would have to gain the
support of the US before launching a surgical strike. At the very least, he
needed tacit US consent if he planned to send IDF-AF combat aircraft into
regions that were only a few dozen kilometres from military bases in Turkey, a
NATO member-state. In August, Maj Gen Yaakov Amidror, the trio’s spokesman,
delivered a devastating report to Olmert. While the MOSSAD had tended to be
reserved in its assessment of Al Kibar, the three men were now more than
convinced that the site posed an existential threat to Israel and that there
was evidence of intense cooperation between Syria and North Korea. There also
appeared to be proof of connections to Iran. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, who
experts believed was the head of Iran’s secret ‘Project 111’ for outfitting
Iranian ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, had visited Damascus in 2005.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad travelled to Syria in 2006, where he is
believed to have promised the Syrians more than US$1 billion in assistance and
urged them to accelerate their efforts. According to this version of the story,
Al Kibar was to be a back-up plant for the heavy-water reactor under
construction near the Iranian city of Arak, designed to provide plutonium to
build a bomb if Iran did not succeed in constructing a weapon using enriched
uranium. “Assad apparently thought that, with his weapon, he could have a nuclear
option for an Armageddon,” says Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, the former Director of AMAN.
Olmert approved a highly risky undertaking: a fact-finding mission by the IDF’s
‘Sayaret Matkal’ special operations forces, on foreign soil. On an overcast
night in August 2007, says intelligence expert Ronen Bergman, Sayaret Matkal
personnel travelling in helicopters at low altitude crossed the border into
Syria, where they unloaded their testing equipment in the desert near Deir
el-Zor and took soil samples in the general vicinity of the Al Kibar plant. The
group had to abort its daring mission prematurely when it was discovered by a
patrol. The Israelis still lacked the definitive proof they needed. However,
those in Tel Aviv who favoured quick action argued that the results of the
samples “provided evidence of the existence of a nuclear programme”. One of
them was the head of the trio of experts, Yaakov Amidror. Amidror, a deeply
religious man strongly influenced by his fear of a new Holocaust, also found
evidence suggesting that construction on the Syrian plant was to be
accelerated. He told Olmert about a ship called the Gregorio, which was
coming from North Korea and which was seized in Cyprus in September 2006. It
was found to have suspicious-looking pipes bound for Syria on board. And in
early September 2007, the freighter Al-Ahmad, also coming from
Pyongyang, arrived at the Syrian port of Tartous—with a cargo of uranium materials,
according to the MOSSAD’s information. At that time, no one was claiming that
Al Kibar represented an immediate threat to Israel’s security. Nevertheless,
Olmert wanted to attack, despite the tense conditions in the region, the Iraq
crisis and the conflict in the Gaza Strip. Olmert notified then-US National
Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and gave his own military staff the authority
to bomb the Syrian plant. The countdown for Operation Orchard had
begun.
Ramat David Air Base, September
5, 2007.
Israel’s Ramat David air base is located south of the port city of Haifa. It is
also near Megiddo, which according to the Bible will be the site of Armageddon,
the final battle between good and evil. The order that the IDF-AF pilots in the
squadron received shortly before 11pm on September 5, 2007 seemed purely
routine: They were to be prepared for an emergency exercise. All 10 available F-15I
aircraft, known affectionately by their pilots as ‘Raam’ (Thunder), took off
into the night sky and headed westward, out into the Mediterranean. It was a
manoeuvre designed to deflect attention from the extraordinary mobilisation
that had been taking place behind the scenes. Three of the 10 F-15Is were
ordered to return home, while the remaining seven continued flying
east-northeast, at low altitude, toward the nearby Turkey-Syria border, where
they used their precision-guided directed-energy weapons (DEW) to eliminate a
radar station. Within an additional 18 flight minutes, they had reached the
area around Deir el-Zor. By then, the F-15I pilots had the coordinates of the
Al Kibar complex programmed into their on-board inertial navigation and mission
computers. The attack was filmed from the air, and as is always the case with
these strikes, the 1,000lb laser-guided bombs were far more destructive than
necessary. For the Israelis, it made little difference whether a few guards
were killed or a larger number of people. Immediately following the brief confirmation
of the surgical air-strike (ARIZONA, which was the relayed the code-word for Target
Destroyed), Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, explained the situation, and asked him to inform President
Assad in Damascus that Israel would not tolerate another nuclear plant—but that
no further hostile action was planned. Israel, Olmert said, did not want to
play up the incident and was still interested in making peace with Damascus. He
added that if Assad chose not to draw attention to the Israeli air-strike, he
would do the same. In this way, a deafening silence about the mysterious event
in the desert began. Nevertheless, the story did not end there, because there
were many who chose to shed light on the incident--and others who were intent
on exacting revenge.
Washington, DC, late October
2007.
The independent Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) is
located less than a mile from the White House. It is more important than some
US federal departments. The office of its founder and President, David
Albright, who holds a degree in physics and was a member of the United Nations’
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) group of experts in Iraq, is in suite
500 of the brick building that houses the ISIS. As relaxed as he seems to his
staff, in his pleated khaki trousers and rolled up shirtsleeves, they know that
it is no accident that Albright has managed to turn the ISIS into one of the
leading think-tanks in Washington DC. Albright’s words carry significant weight
in the world of nuclear scientists. The ISIS spent four weeks analyzing the
initial reports about the mysterious air-strike in Syria, combing over
satellite images covering an area of 25,000 square kilometres (9,650 square
miles) before they discovered the destroyed complex of buildings in the desert.
In April 2008, Albright received an unexpected invitation from the CIA to
attend a meeting. There, then-CIA Director Gen Michael Hayden showed him images
that the Israelis had obtained from the Syrian computer in London (much to the
outrage of officials in Tel Aviv, incidentally, as it provided insights into
MOSSAD sources). The photos enabled Albright, who was familiar with the
dimensions and characteristics of North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor, to compare the
various stages at Al Kibar. “There are no longer any serious doubts that we
were dealing with a nuclear reactor in Syria,” the scientist had then concluded.
Albright believes that the CIA’s strange behaviour had to be understood in the
context of the Iraq disaster. At the time, the administration of then-President
George W. Bush Jr, citing CIA information, constantly repeated the false claim
that Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction. This time
around, US intelligence wanted to prove that the threat was real. But where did
the Syrians get the uranium they needed for their heavy-water reactor, and in
which secret plants was it enriched? In addition to the North Koreans, were the
Iranians also involved? And what did the latest images of this ‘Manhattan
Project’ in the Syrian desert actually depict—the conversion of an existing
plant or a completely new facility?
Vienna, the UN complex on
Wagramer Straße, headquarters of the IAEA’s nuclear detectives. An impressive
collection of national flags hangs in the lobby, like sails waiting for a
tailwind. Of the 192 UN member-states, 150 are also members of the IAEA, and
almost all UN members have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The problem children of the nuclear world, Israel, Pakistan and India, have not
signed the treaty. All three of them possess—or in the case of Israel, are
believed to possess--nuclear weapons. Signatory states like Syria and Iran are
entitled to support in pursuing the peaceful use of nuclear energy. They are
also required to either phase out nuclear weapons and prevent their proliferation
(in the case of the nuclear ‘haves’) or refrain from developing them in the first
place (in the case of the ‘have-nots’). The IAEA, whose job is to verify
compliance with the provisions of the NPT, has 2,200 employees and an annual
budget of roughly $300 million. That may sound impressive, but it is really
just peanuts if the claim repeatedly made by politicians around the world is
true, namely that the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of
blackmailing dictators or terrorists poses the greatest danger to humanity. The
nuclear detectives can admittedly be deployed to use their highly sensitive
testing equipment to obtain a ‘nuclear fingerprint’ in any particular place,
but they also need access to reactors. Libya has caused problems in the past,
while today’s recalcitrants are North Korea and Iran—in other words, the usual
suspects. And now Syria. The news about the desert nuclear plant came as a
great shock to the IAEA. “What the Israelis did was a violation of
international law. If the Israelis and the Americans had information about an
illegal nuclear facility, they should have notified us immediately,” said the
then IAEA Director-General Mohd ElBaradei, who only learned of the dramatic
incident from media reports. “When everything was over, we were supposed to
head out and search for evidence in the rubble—a virtually impossible task”. But
he had underestimated his inspectors. In June 2008, a team of IAEA experts
visited the destroyed Al Kibar plant. The Syrians had given in to pressure from
the weapons inspectors, but they had also done everything possible to dispose
of the evidence first. They removed all the debris from the bombed facility and
paved over the entire site with concrete. They told the inspectors that it had
been a conventional weapons factory, and not a nuclear reactor, which they
would have been required to report to the IAEA. They also insisted that
foreigners had not been involved. The IAEA experts painstakingly collected soil
samples, and used special wipes to remove minute traces of material from
furnishings or pipes still on the site. The samples were sent to the IAEA’s
special laboratories in Seibersdorf, a town near Vienna, where they were
subjected to ultra-sensitive isotope analyses capable of determining whether
samples had come into contact with suspicious uranium. And indeed, the analysis
produced some very alarming findings. In its report, the IAEA describes “a
significant number of anthropogenic natural uranium particles (i.e. produced as
a result of chemical processing)”, which were “of a type not included in Syria’s
declared inventory of nuclear material”. The Syrian authorities claimed that
the uranium was introduced by the Israeli bombing, something that the IAEA said
was of ‘low probability’. In its report released in June 2009, the IAEA
demanded, in no uncertain terms, that Damascus grant it permission for another
series of inspections, this time with access to “three other locations” that
may have been related to Al Kibar. “The characteristics of the complex,
including the cooling water capacities, bear a strong similarity to those of a
nuclear reactor, something which urgently requires clarification,” said one
IAEA expert. In the cautious language of UN officials, this is practically a
guilty verdict. “Syria is not giving us the transparency we require,” ElBaradei
had then said angrily. A picture hanging in his office seemed to reflect his
mood. It is a print of ‘The Scream’ by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch,
which depicts a deeply distraught person. ElBaradei did not believe that he was
too lenient with those suspected of illegally pursuing nuclear weapons programmes,
as the Bush administration repeatedly claimed, particularly in relation to
Iran. The IAEA, he said, will probably receive permission for a new inspection
trip to Syria. Or at least he hoped it will. If and when that happens, a
different host will greet the UN team. The affable Brig Gen Mohammed Suleiman,
an Assad confidant in charge of all manner of sensitive security issues, was
formerly in charge of presiding over the inspections. However he was
assassinated in 2008. He landed in the crosshairs of his pursuers, just like
Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyah. For the Israelis, Mughniyah was the epitome
of terror, the most notorious terrorist mastermind in the Middle East. He was
responsible for the bloody attack on US military headquarters in Beirut in the
1980s and on Jewish institutions in Argentina in the 1990s, attacks in which
hundreds of innocent people had died. He is regarded by some as the inventor of
the suicide attack and was deeply rooted in Iranian power structures. The MOSSAD
had information that Mughniyah was planning to avenge the air-strike on Al
Kibar with an attack on an Israeli Embassy--either in the Azerbaijani capital
Baku, Cairo or the Jordanian capital Amman.
Damascus,
the building complex of the Atomic Energy Commission of Syria in the city’s
Kafar Soussa diplomatic quarter, February 2008. Visitors are not
welcome. ‘Please contact post office box 6091,’ says the guard at the entrance.
There is also an e-mail address (atomic@aec.org.sy). But inquiries sent to both
addresses remain unanswered. No wonder, say experts, who speculate that the
threads of a secret nuclear weapons programme come together in the
inconspicuous AECS complex. It was precisely on the street where the AECS
complex is located that Imad Mughniyah, a.k.a. ‘The Fox’, had parked his Mitsubishi
Pajero on February 12, 2008 while he attended a reception at the nearby Iranian
Embassy. It was a rare appearance by a man who normally avoided being seen in
public. But on that evening Mughniyah knew that he would be among friends,
including Hamas leader Khaled Mashal and Syrian Gen Mohammed Suleiman, whom he had
met many times in Teheran and at Hezbollah centres in Lebanon. Shortly after
10:30pm, Mughniyah drank his last glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Then
he kissed the host, the newly installed Iranian diplomat Ahmed Mousavi, on both
cheeks, as local custom dictates, and left the party. Mughniyah was “probably
the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across,” said
former CIA agent Robert Baer, who had been tracking him for a long time. The
terrorist knew that he was at the very top of the MOSSAD’s hit-list, and he
also knew that the FBI was offering a $5 million reward for information leading
to his arrest. But he felt relatively safe in Syria, as he did in Beirut and
Teheran, which he visited on a regular basis. The explosion completely
destroyed the SUV and ripped apart Mughniyah’s body. He was killed instantly.
But the explosive charge was apparently calculated so carefully that nearby
buildings were barely harmed. The terrorist leader remained the only victim on
that night in Damascus. Whoever committed the act, “the world is a better place
without this man,” the US announced the next day through State Department
spokesman Sean McCormack. Hezbollah, which had no doubts as to who was
responsible for the killing, called Mughniyah a ‘martyr’ and vowed to retaliate
against the ‘Zionists’. The Israeli government neither confirmed nor denied any
involvement in the assassination. But agents at the MOSSAD could hardly contain
their delight. According to information leaked to intelligence expert Uzi
Mahnaimi, Israeli agents had removed the driver’s seat headrest and filled it
with a compound that would detonate on contact. Intelligence expert Ronen
Bergman can even describe the reaction of Israelis who were involved. “It was a
shame about that nice new Pajero,” one of them reportedly said.
Tartous, a medieval stronghold of
the Knights Templar on the Syrian Mediterranean coast, five months later. It was at this
port city, 160km northwest of Damascus, that the mysterious freighter Hamed
had once berthed with its supposed cargo of cement from North Korea. Here, on a
beach 13km north of the medieval city walls, Gen Suleiman had a weekend house,
not far from the Rimal al-Zahabiya luxury beach resort. In the summer, Suleiman
travelled to his weekend house almost every Friday to review files, relax and
swim. On this first August weekend in 2008, President Assad’s eminence grise
must have taken along a particularly large number of documents. A few days
later, he had planned to accompany Assad on a secret visit to Teheran. As
always, Suleiman drove from Damascus to Tartous in an armoured vehicle.
Additional bodyguards were waiting for him at his chalet. They never let him
out of their sight, even escorting him into the water when he went swimming.
After Mughniyah’s murder on a busy Damascus street, security was at the highest
possible level. The General, who interacted with the global community as the
regime’s senior representative on nuclear issues, was considered particularly
at risk. The sea was calm that morning. Yachts were cruising off the coast, and
there was nothing to raise suspicions in Tartous, a popular sailing destination
for Syria’s moneyed aristocracy where boats can be chartered for visits to
nearby Arwad Island and its fish restaurants. An unusually sleek yacht came
within 50 metres of the coast, but it was not close enough to raise any red
flags with the bodyguards when their boss decided to jump into the sea. No one
even heard the gunshots, which were probably fired from precision rifles
equipped with silencers. But they clearly came from offshore, striking Sulaiman
in the head, chest and neck. The General died before his bodyguards could do
anything for him. The yacht carrying the snipers turned away and disappeared
into international waters. The Syrian authorities kept the news of the murder
from the public for days. After that, it issued terse statements about the ‘vicious
crime’. According to the official account, the General was “found shot dead
near Tartous”. There was no mention of a yacht or of the angle from which the
shots were fired. Speculation was rife in Damascus. Diplomats assumed that
Suleiman had become too powerful for his fellow cabinet members, and that his
killing was evidence of an internal Syrian power struggle. According to Western
critics of the Syrian President, Suleiman had become a burden for Assad after
the debacle involving the bombed nuclear plant and the Mughniyah murder, and he
was eliminated on orders from Assad. For experts, however, the most likely
scenario is that the Israelis were behind the highly professional
assassination. Suleiman, who was nicknamed ‘the imported General’ because of
his European appearance, was buried in a private ceremony in his native village
of Draykish two days after his murder. President Assad sent his younger brother
Maher to attend the secret funeral, while he himself embarked on his scheduled
trip to Teheran. It was important for him to put on a show of self-control, no
matter how distressed he may have felt. Can bomb attacks and hit-squads against
real or presumed terrorists bring about progress in the Middle East? Is it true
that Arabs and Israelis only understand the language of violence, as many in
Tel Aviv are now saying? Did the operation against the Al Kibar complex, which
violated international law, bring the Syrian President to his senses, or did it
merely encourage him to harden his position? And what does all this mean for a
possible Iranian nuclear bomb?
Consequences of
Operation Orchard
“The facility that was bombed was not a
nuclear plant, but rather a conventional military installation,” Syrian
President Bashar Assad insisted in mid-January 2009. “We could have struck
back. But should we really allow ourselves to be provoked into a war? Then we
would have walked into an Israeli trap”. What about the traces of uranium? “Perhaps
the Israelis dropped it from the air to make us the target of precisely these
suspicions”. Damascus, he said, is not interested in becoming a nuclear power,
nor does it believe that Teheran is developing the bomb. “Syria is
fundamentally opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. We want a
nuclear-free Middle East, Israel included”. Assad, outraged over Israeli belligerence
in the Gaza Strip, had suspended secret peace talks with the enemy, which had been
brokered by Turkey. But it was also abundantly clear that Assad was eager to
remove himself from the list of global political pariahs and enter into
dialogue with the US and Europe. In the autumn of 2009, relations between
Damascus and the West seemed to be on the mend, probably as the result of US
concessions rather than Israeli bombs. French President Nicolas Sarkozy
received Assad at the Elysée Palace and told him that the normalisation of
relations would depend on the Syrians meeting a provocatively worded condition:
“End nuclear weapons cooperation with Iran”. In the first week of October,
Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad travelled to Washington to meet
with his counterparts there. And Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, with
Washington's explicit blessing, went to Damascus in an attempt to make a shift
to the moderate camp more palatable for Assad. The prospect of billions in aid,
as well as transfers of high technology, was being held out to Assad. The
Syrian President then knew that this was probably his only hope to revive his
ailing economy in the long term. Relations between Damascus and Teheran had
worsened considerably in recent weeks. Western intelligence agencies reported
that the Iranian leadership was demanding that Syria return—in full and without
compensation—substantial shipments of uranium, which it no longer needed now
that its nuclear programme had been destroyed. Assad subsequently considered
taking a sensational political step. He is believed to have suggested to
contacts in Pyongyang that he was considering the disclosure of his ‘national’
nuclear programme, but without divulging any details of cooperation with his
North Korean and Iranian partners. Libyan revolutionary leader Moammar Gadhafi had
reaped considerable benefits from the international community after a similar ‘confession’
about his country’s covert cnuclear programme. The reaction from North Korea
was swift and extremely harsh: Pyongyang sent a senior government
representative to Damascus to inform Syrian authorities that the North Koreans
would terminate all cooperation on chemical weapons if Assad proceeded with his
plan. And this regardless whether he mentioned Pyongyang in this context or
not. Teheran’s reaction is believed to have been even more severe. Saeed
Jalili, the country’s then leading nuclear negotiator and a close associate of
Iran’s supreme religious leader, apparently brought along an urgent message
from the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which Khamenei called Assad’s plan ‘unacceptable’
and threatened that it would spell the end of the two countries’ strategic
alliance and a sharp decline in relations. According to intelligence sources,
Assad backed down. However he was also looking for ways to do business with his
enemies, even Israel’s hard-line Prime Ninister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Nevertheless, Assad is loath to give up his contacts to Hezbollah and Teheran
completely, and he will demand a very high price for the possible recognition
of Israel and for playing the role of mediator with Teheran, namely the return
of the entire Golan Heights.
Did Operation Orchard make an impression
on the Iranians, and did they understand it the way it was probably intended by
the Israelis: as a final warning to Teheran? The Iranians have—literally--entrenched
themselves, and not only since the Israeli attack on Syria. Many of the
centrifuges they use for uranium enrichment are now operating in underground
tunnels. Not even the bunker-busting super-bombs the Pentagon has requested be
made available soon, citing “urgent operational requirements,” are capable of
fully destroying facilities like the one in Natanz. The US--or the Israelis--would
have to conduct air-strikes for several weeks and destroy more than a dozen
known nuclear facilities to set back the Iranian nuclear programme by more than
a few weeks. It would be a far more complex undertaking than the Israelis’ past
attacks on the Osirak reactor in Iraq and Syria's Al Kibar nuclear plant. And
even after such a comprehensive operation, which would expose them to
counterattacks, they could not be entirely sure of having wiped out all key elements
of the Iranian nuclear programme. In September 2008, Teheran surprised the
world with the confession that it had built a previously unreported uranium
enrichment plant near Qom. Operation Orchard achieved only one
thing: If the Iranians had planned to build a ‘spare’ nuclear plant in Syria,
that is, a back-up plutonium factory, their plans were thwarted. But Teheran
has time on its side. The Iranians are already believed to have reached
breakout capacity--in other words, the ability to begin building a nuclear
weapon if they so desire. Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power. And
Syria? There is nothing to suggest that Damascus will or is even able to play
with fire once again. A conventional factory has in fact been built over the
ruins of the Al Kibar plant. There is no access to the plant--for security
reasons, as residents of Deir el-Zor say tersely--at the roadblock near the
great river and the desert village of Tibnah. The turquoise-coloured river
flows slowly, the river that Moses, according to the Bible, promised to the
Israelites as part of their holy land. To this day, many radical Israelis take
the relevant passage in the Bible as seriously as an entry in the land
register: “Every place that your foot shall tread upon shall be yours. From the
desert, and from Libanus, from the great river Euphrates unto the western sea.”
Referring to the same river, the Prophet Muhammad is supposed to have said: “The
Euphrates reveals the treasures within itself. Whoever sees it should not take
anything from it.”
Documentary on OP ORCHARD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GfdH9AzAXE
IDF-AF Footage Of Air-Strikes Released Yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-vhiHbKm4I
Data On Al Kibar Nuclear Facility:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ah6RmcewUM
