Air raid on Syrian nuclear site is a warning to Iran, Israel says
ISRAEL CONFIRMED on Wednesday that it was behind an air strike in Syria 12 years ago that destroyed a suspected nuclear reactor.
The country’s intelligence minister Yisrael Katz, said the raid in the eastern Deir-al-Zour region showed it would not allow “those threatening our existence to have nuclear weapons”.
He added in a tweet: “Syria then and Iran today.”
It was widely believed for many years that Israel had conducted the raid, but a military reporting ban on the subject was only lifted this week.
Eight fighter jets flew into Syria in a midnight mission in September 2007 and destroyed the secret site on the banks of the River Euphrates.
Mr Katz praised then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for ordering the operation.
“When all accounts are settled, destroying the reactor will stand in Olmert’s benefit,” he said.
According to Israel, the nuclear reactor was close to being completed.
Syria denied at the time that the site — which would later fall to the Islamic State group during the subsequent civil war — was a nuclear reactor.
ISRAEL’S STRIKE on the North Koreanbuilt reactor in eastern Syria, half an hour after midnight on September 6, 2007, came after a lengthy intelligence-collecting operation — but it all began on a hunch.
After failing to detect the Libyan nuclear programme that was declared and dismantled in 2003, Israeli authorities began questioning their previous assumptions about which of its Arab enemies may be developing nuclear capabilities as well.
Some intelligence officials suspected Syria was trying acquire nuclear weapons as early as 2004, but it was only two years later that a square-shaped building in the northeast, near the Euphrates river, caught their attention.
The shape of what became known as “the cube” indicated it may be a North Korean designed plutonium reactor.
On March 8, 2007, Mossad chief Meir Dagan informed then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the Israeli intelligence community was convinced Syria was months away from completing a nuclear reactor and that they had not noticed its construction for years.
Israel operates under the Begin Doctrine (so-named after prime minister Menachem Begin, who sent the Israeli air force in 1981 to destroy Iraq’s reactor near Baghdad) and has vowed never to allow one of its enemies to acquire nuclear weapons.
However, although the air force was confident that it could destroy this reactor from the air, there were concerns it may lead to a Syrian retaliation and all-out conflict, a matter of months after the dismal end to the Second Lebanon War.
The challenge was to find a way to remove the reactor without provoking a war.
One option was to ask the US to attack it. But the George W Bush administration was split over the best course of action: some favoured attacking the reactor, while others preferred either Israel do it or to use diplomatic pressure on the Assad regime instead.
In Jerusalem, it was felt that diplomatic pressure ran the risk of pushing the Syrians to complete construction faster and add anti-aircraft batteries around the reactor.
But there was also disagreement within the Israeli leadership. While Prime Minister Olmert and most of the security chiefs favoured a a speedy attack, Defence Minister Ehud Barak wanted to wait.
In a memoir he is scheduled to publish in May, Mr Barak claims that the prime minister was too hasty in approving an incomplete operational plan and that Israel should have made sure first it was prepared for all-out war, if it broke out.
The go-ahead was finally given in early September, partly out of the fear that the news of Syria’s nuclear reactor had leaked to the US media. At 10.30pm on September 5, four F-15Is took off from Hatzerim airbase in the Negev desert and four F-16Is from Ramon base, near Beersheba.
The eight aircraft flew for nearly two hours, most of the way at extremely low altitude to evade radar detection. As they approached the reactor, gaining height, each
plane launched two bombs.
When the last F-16 recorded a direct strike, the codeword “Arizona” was relayed to the command post in Tel Aviv, where Mr Olmert and Mr Barak were gathered with their generals.
Beyond the successful military operation, the strategy of opaqueness — Israel’s refusal to acknowledge whether its aircraft had bombed Syria — worked well, too.
In an attempt to save face, Bashar Assad’s government admitted that Israeli aircraft had entered their airspace, but denied ever having built a nuclear reactor.
They refrained from retaliating and inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors visiting the bomb-site, which had since been levelled over, found radioactive traces in 2008.
Both Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak are now out of politics, the former forced out of office by the latter over corruption allegations a year later. Mr Olmert subsequently went to prison for accepting bribes and fraud.
Both also have memoirs due to be published in the coming weeks in which they attack each other for their conduct leading up to Operation Soft Melody — or Operation
Orchard, as it became widely known.
Mr Barak accuses Mr Olmert of being gung-ho and acting out of inexperience.
By return, Mr Olmert says Mr Barak refused to take responsibility for the fateful decision.
While the argument between them will continue to interest historians
for years to come, it has little political significance as neither is likely to return to office.
But one outcome of their dispute is that Israel’s military censor reconsidered its strategy of opaqueness and authorised the release of information and imagery on Wednesday morning.