Israel last month admitted that it was responsible for bombing a building in Syria in 2007 that it says was a nuclear reactor under construction but there are strong doubts about what the building was for, argues Ted Snider.
In September 2007, in the dark of night, warplanes crossed the Syrian border and bombed a covert nuclear reactor. Recently, Israel took responsibility for the bombing mission that obliterated the Syrian reactor.
The Israeli announcement was unnecessary if
it was intended to be an admission of responsibility. The origin of the
bombers had never been a mystery. As early as 2008, Seymour Hersh
began his report on the bombing with the line “Sometime after midnight
on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force
fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing
mission.” Even the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report on
the bombing said that the building had been “destroyed by Israel in
September 2007.”
That the nuclear reactor was bombed by
Israeli planes is clear. That the building the Israeli planes bombed was
a nuclear reactor is far less clear.
The Nontechnical Questions
If Syria was building a nuclear weapons program, they were doing it entirely without the knowledge of the CIA. CIA Director Michael Hayden
told President Bush that the CIA knew nothing about the Syrian reactor.
That the CIA missed a secret nuclear program is not impossible to
believe or even entirely unprecedented. What is more unbelievable is
that they missed it when it was right out in the open. The Syrians made
no attempt to conceal their biggest secret. The highly sophisticated
U.S. satellites missed what a commercial satellite easily picked up.
It is hard to make sense of that. In fact,
it is hard to make sense of a lot of nontechnical features of the
Israeli story. Even to the layman with no technical knowledge of
enrichment or nuclear reactors, a number of features made no sense.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh picked up on these nontechnical
anomalies in his early investigative reporting of the strike, “A Strike
in the Dark.” A former State Department intelligence expert told Hersh
that many of the features that one would see around a nuclear reactor
were missing from the site. There was not even any security around it.
Former senior IAEA inspector Robert Kelley (image on
the right) expanded on this anomaly in a personal correspondence. He
said there was “no security whatever: no fences, no guards, no perimeter
road, no security on the river pump house, water lines run under a
public highway.” A nearby agricultural desert water station pump house
had more security, he told me. He called the lack of security “a pretty
big deal.” So did Syria’s then ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha:
“An allegedly strategic site in Syria without a single military checkpoint around it, without barbed wire around it, without anti-aircraft missiles around it, without any sort of security surrounding it, thrown in the middle of the desert without electricity, plans to generate electricity for it, with out major supply plans around it? And yet, it is supposed to be a strategic installation? And people don’t even think of it. Yesterday, in the White House presidential statement, it was stated to the letter that that was a secret location. And yet, every commercial satellite service available on earth was able to provide photos and images of this so-called secret Syrian site for the past five, six years.”
There were other details that didn’t fit
the Israeli narrative either. The nuclear reactor was supposed to be
based on a North Korean design, and North Korea was cast as a key player
in the construction of the clandestine nuclear reactor. A North Korean
ship called the Al Hamed attracted a lot of the
spotlight. It was claimed to have brought the Syrians nuclear equipment
from North Korea. But, the problem was that, in his investigation, Hersh
found that neither maritime intelligence nor the ship’s transponder
gave any indication that the Al Hamad had recently docked in North Korea.
At least two people I spoke to were also
struck by the absence of people and the lack of activity at the site.
You need a program, one person told me. You need bureaucratic support.
Building a nuclear reactor is a huge project. Kelley says
“there were very few workers as in there are no buses and just a few motorcycles. That is a pretty big clue this is not a big deal. About to start up a super critical facility? No workers?”
Pursuing a different line of nontechnical
questioning, one person I spoke to asked why, when war broke out in
Syria, and America threw everything bad it had at Assad and Syria, from
chemical weapons to barrel bombs, why did it never return to the illegal
nuclear weapons program if it had real evidence that it had had one?
But, perhaps the most telling thing is not
that the CIA missed what was out in the open for commercial satellites
to pick up, not that they didn’t “have any proof of a reactor – no
signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence,”
as a former senior US intelligence official who had access to the
current intelligence told Hersh. What is, perhaps, more telling is that
when they were provided with the intelligence, despite signing on to the
Israeli narrative, they actually assessed only “low confidence” that the targeted site was part of a Syrian nuclear weapons program. And they weren’t the only ones. Mohamed ElBaradei,
then director-general of the IAEA, said that their “experts who have
carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this
building was a nuclear facility.”
The IAEA Verdict
Despite the inconsistencies and the low
confidence, by May 2011, the IAEA had rendered a verdict, repeated in
their September 2014 report, that
“based on all the information available to the Agency and its technical evaluation of that information, it was very likely that the building destroyed at the Dair Alzour site was a nuclear reactor which should have been declared to the Agency.”
The Background section of the report
informs that the information they had been provided with alleges that
the bombed building was “a nuclear reactor that was not yet operational
and into which no nuclear material had been introduced.”
But if the IAEA verdict is correct, why did
Israel cross into Syrian air space and bomb the building in what was
almost certainly an act of war? Joseph Cirincione,
president of Ploughshares Fund and a leading expert on nuclear weapons,
told me that he has no reason to doubt the IAEA’s verdict. But, he said,
their verdict was only that it was “an unfueled nuclear reactor under
construction,” and that, he said, is “only an initial step” “towards
Syria developing a nuclear weapons capability.” Cirincione told me that
“there was no imminent risk; no justification of an illegal Israeli
attack” because Syria was still “a very long way from assembling the
technical, industrial and financial capabilities needed to support a
nuclear weapons program.” He said that, at this point in Syria’s
development of a nuclear weapons program, the “matter should have been
brought to the United Nations, not the Israeli Defense Force.”
The Technical Questions
But there were also reasons to doubt the
IAEA’s verdict. More problematic for the Israeli-American-IAEA story
than the nontechnical questions were a host of technical questions.
There were three topics of technical questions.
The Photographs
Satellite photos of the supposed Syrian nuclear site before and after the Israeli airstrike.
The first was the photographs provided by
Israel’s Mossad. There were two problems with the photographic evidence.
The first was that Hayden never asked the Israelis how they got the
photographs even though the CIA Director knew that at least one of the
photographs had been photo-shopped to make the case more convincing, as
investigative journalist Gareth Porter reports.
The second was that the CIA was provided a bunch of photographs from
inside a potential nuclear reactor and a bunch of photographs of the
outside of the targeted building in Syria, but “nothing that links the
two,” as former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter has pointed out. The former were potentially of a nuclear reactor, but were the latter?
The Bombed Building
The second set of technical problems
involves the building itself. The first is that the building is the
wrong size. The weight of the claim that the Syrian building was a
nuclear reactor rests on the Israeli-CIA insistence that the building
looks like the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon upon which they claim it
was modeled. It is a type of reactor known as a gas-cooled
graphite-moderated (GCGM) reactor. If it looks enough like that nuclear
reactor, it could be a nuclear reactor; if it doesn’t, it wasn’t. But it
doesn’t: the Syrian building didn’t fit the blueprint. Hersh pointed
out this crucial inconsistency early. He says that nonproliferation
expert Jeffrey Lewis told him that “even if the width and the length of
the building were similar to the Korean site, its height was simply not
sufficient to contain a Yongbyon-size reactor.”
Gareth Porter’s later investigation confirmed the contradiction. Porter relied on Yousry Abushady,
the top IAEA specialist on North Korean reactors. Abushady knew GCGM
reactors better than anyone at the IAEA, and “the evidence he saw in the
video convinced him,” Porter reports, “that no such reactor could have
been under construction” in Syria. And the first reason, again,
according to Abushady was “that the building was too short to hold a
reactor like the one in Yongbyon, North Korea.” According to Abushady
the building bombed in Syria was only “a little more than a third as
tall” as the supposed North Korean archetype.
But there were other problems. The North
Korean reactor required at least twenty supporting buildings, but the
Syrian site had few or none even though Israeli intelligence insisted
that it was only a few months from being ready to operate. The reactor
was supposed to be a gas-cooled reactor, but there was nothing in place
to cool the gas: there was no cooling tower. Porter reports that Robert
Kelley also pointed to a lack of facility for treating the water in the
imaging. That means the water arriving in the reactor would be full of
“debris and silt.” Kelley has said elsewhere that “the IAEA’s analysis
of the water linesthat purportedly would in the future have supplied
cooling water to the bombed building ignored a number of relevant
features.” Kelley told me there was no support for fuel fabrication of
reprocessing. There was also no building for a spent fuel pond. But,
Abushady says that every GCGM reactor ever built has a separate building
to house the spent fuel pond. Building after building is missing from
the imaging, but the nuclear reactor was supposed to be on the verge of
going operational.
The Environment
But the most serious problem is the third:
the environmental inconsistencies: there were three damning
environmental inconsistencies: the first had to do with barite, the
second with uranium and the third with graphite.
The IAEA says that Syria purchased “large
quantities” of barite, which can be used, amongst other uses, to
“improve radiation shielding properties of concrete.” Since the IAEA did
not believe that Syria sought the barite for use in rooms in hospitals
that use radiation, it said that it “cannot exclude the possibility”
that the barite was intended for use in the nuclear reactor. But Ritter
says that the imagery of the site makes it clear that the “shield” would
already have been in place. That means that the barite would already be
there. In fact, he says, nearly 2,000 tons of it would be there. So,
when the building was bombed, barite would have been scattered all over
the site. But sensitive environmental sampling revealed none. Robert
Kelley says that “none of the concrete samples analyzed . . . contain any barite”: a fact that he says that
the IAEA analysis conveniently “failed to report”. Ritter concludes
that “The lack of Barite, especially when logic dictates its presence if
the [Syrian] facility was in fact nuclear related, is a strong
indicator that there was no nuclear function, especially that associated
with the operation of a nuclear reactor. . . .”
The second crucial ingredient missing was
uranium. If the bombed Syrian building was a nuclear reactor, there
should have been uranium in the environmental samples the IAEA took. But
there wasn’t. Mohamed ElBaradei said that “so far, we have found no
indication of any nuclear material.” Every sample that was actually
taken from the ground in the area of the Syrian building tested negative
for uranium and plutonium.
Gareth Porter says that
“Tariq Rauf who headed the IAEA’s Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office until 2011, has pointed out that one of the IAEA protocols applicable to these environmental samples is that “the results from all three or four labs to have analyzed the sample must match to give a positive or negative finding on the presence and isotopics or uranium and/or plutonium.”
And they did: they all gave a negative finding. There was no uranium at the Syrian site.
Strangely, though, Porter reports, uranium
was found in an additional sample that was taken in violation of IAEA
protocol. That anomalous result was used as evidence that a nuclear
reactor had sat on that land. But, that sample was problematic. Why did
it disagree with the protocol compliant samples the IAEA had taken?
Every sample taken from the ground around
the bombed building had tested negative for uranium. But, the positive
sample wasn’t taken from the ground around the building. It was taken
from a “toilet” or, according to David Albright of the Institute for
Science and International Security, from “a changing room in a building
associated with the reactor.” But why did the sample from inside the
changeroom analyze positive for uranium?
The Syrians say the uranium came from the
bombs the Israelis dropped on the site. The IAEA has rejected this
explanation as having a low probability. But, Ritter says that the
penetration bombs likely used by Israel could well have had uranium in
them. He says that bombs dropped by the US in Kosovo led to the
detection of uranium. Kelley agrees. He says that the IAEA assumed that
the uranium in the bombs would have to be depleted uranium, and, since
the uranium they found was not depleted, they said the uranium they
found could not have been introduced by Israeli bombs.
“But,” Kelley has argued, “that assumption and the conclusion that followed it are incorrect. They fail to take account of the fact that natural uranium, of which Israel has an abundance based on what is known about its nuclear program, can be used as a strong nose in an earth-penetrating bomb (of the kind that was used at Dair Alzour) with precisely the same effectiveness as depleted uranium.”
Kelley goes on to say that the uranium that
would be detected from such earth-penetrating bombs “would be similar
to those found” in Syria. Kelley told me that the scientific reasoning
the IAEA used was “kindergarten nonsense.” Intriguingly, Ritter says
that “through its admitted morphology studies” on the uranium collected,
the IAEA could answer questions about the source of the uranium. He
says that
“The fact that the IAEA is withholding the specific properties of the anthropogenic nuclear particles . . . suggests that this issue is being used more for political purposes than scientific.”
Kelley, who was still with the IAEA at this
time, told me that the IAEA handling of the uranium question was
“embarrassing.” Stories had surfaced that there may have been traces of
uranium found in Lebanon from Israeli earth-penetrating bombs.
When “Israel began dropping earth penetrators in Gaza,” Kelley says he “went to IAEA management and suggested we get samples.”
But, he told me that the IAEA refused.
“So an opportunity to compare samples from three sites, Lebanon, [Syria] and Gaza passed.”
And with it passed the opportunity to resolve the Syrian claim that uranium could have been left by Israeli bombs.
Ritter also says the uranium could have been “brought in by the IAEA
inspectors, . . . suggesting the presence . . . of cross-contaminated
equipment.” That might explain why uranium was found only inside the one
site and not outside on the ground all around. And, that, Robert Kelley
says, is exactly what probably happened.In a comment he made on a previous article of mine, Kelley said
“the IAEA samples were almost certainly cross-contaminated.”He told Gareth Porter a lot more. Kelley told Porter that a “very likely explanation” is that the uranium found in the change room was the result of “cross contamination” from the IAEA inspector’s clothing. According to Kelley, the Syrian case would not be exceptional: this type of cross contamination had occurred a number of times before, including in Iraq.
But the barite and the uranium were not even the biggest problem. The biggest environmental inconsistency came not from testing for barite or uranium but for graphite. After all, the Syrian site was supposed to be a gas-cooled graphite-moderated reactor. If it was, then when the building exploded, it should have sent graphite everywhere, according to former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Ritter says there would have been thousands of pounds of graphite in the facility already. But, he says,
“there’s no evidence in the destruction. . . . If it had been bombed and there was graphite introduced, you would have a signature all over the area of destroyed graphite blocks. There would be graphite lying around, etc. This was not the case.”According to Porter, this inconsistency is what bothered Abushady the most too. He says the bombing of the reactor “would have spread particles of nuclear-grade graphite all over the site.” But none of the samples taken by the IAEA showed even a trace of graphite: graphite that would have to be there and that “would have been impossible to clean it up,” as nuclear expert Behrd Nakhai told Porter. Abushady says that
“these results are the basis to confirm . . . that the site cannot [have been] actually a nuclear reactor.”It is presumably because of the lack of uranium and graphite in the sampling that the IAEA said that “based on all the information available to the Agency and its technical evaluation of that information, it was very likely that the building destroyed . . . was a nuclear reactor” but that it was a reactor that “was not yet operational and into which no nuclear material had been introduced.”
But there are two seemingly damning problems that seem to finally refute the Israeli-American-IAEA charge against Syria. The claim, presumably, is that there was no graphite in the environmental sampling because the nuclear reactor was not yet operational. But Scott Ritter told me in a recent correspondence that
“The graphite is an integral part of the reactor that would need to be in place prior to any nuclear material being inserted. According to the Israeli-provided images, the construction stage was pre-concrete pour, meaning graphite columns would logically be in place. Even if the graphite hadn’t been installed, it should have been present at the site awaiting installation given the alleged advance state of construction. Of course, the Israeli provided images could have been falsified, in which case no graphite would have been present. . . .”Graphite bricks and tiles would have been part of the core structure of the building if it was a nuclear reactor. Ritter says there would have been about 30,000 bricks containing around 325 tons of graphite. If a building incorporating such bricks blew up, there would be graphite everywhere. There wasn’t. So, the nonoperational solution wilts.
So does the “into which no nuclear material had been introduced” solution. Saying that no nuclear material had yet been introduced was presumably supposed to make sense of the failure to find uranium in the environmental analyses. But rather than throwing a problematic result back at the Syrians, it only placed the problem right back in the Israeli-American-IAEA narrative. What is not given enough attention – and maybe even none – is that if no nuclear material had been introduced to the Syrian site, there should have been no uranium found in the additional sample taken outside of protocol from the inside of the change room of the associated building. If there was uranium brought into the change room before the Syrians had brought uranium into the site, then that means it was brought in by the inspectors who found it or from some other non-Syrian source. The anomalous uranium must have been the result of cross contamination.
And that, it seems, leaves little evidence of a nuclear reactor in the middle of the Syrian desert. No uranium, no barite and not even any of the graphite that a graphite-moderated reactor would have to be made of. Only a square building that doesn’t even look like the building whose resemblance is supposed to prove that the Israelis bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor in the dark of night in September 2007.
*
Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.
The original source of this article is Antiwar.com
Copyright © Ted Snider, Antiwar.com, 2018
