The story behind Israel's secret strike on Syria's nuclear reactor
Israel for the first time acknowledges how nearly a decade ago it located and destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor built with the assistance of North Korea.
Sometime in late 2006, US Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte visited Israel. According to a security source speaking on condition of anonymity, at a meeting with the heads of Israeli intelligence at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, intelligence branch officers presented a small time bomb. On the margins of the discussion, dealing with various security analyses of Israel’s neighbors, Col. Eli Ben-Meir, head of the technological branch of army intelligence, said that according to his assessments the Syrians were working on an “unconventional weapons project.”
Amnon Sofrin, head of Mossad's intelligence branch, fumed. He had not authorized army intelligence officials to bring up the topic, because Mossad had concluded that there was no nuclear activity in Syria. Regardless, Ben-Meir had opened his presentation to Negroponte with three slides on nuclear activity in Syria. His assertions were explosive and controversial. Not only Mossad, but the Americans as well, headed by Negroponte, rejected the army intelligence assessment as unrealistic.
Ben-Meir had illustrated his presentation with dark clouds and called the situation “a nuclear cloud.” Negroponte expressed his disagreement with him: I’m an expert on everything involving North Korea, he said, and it can’t be that the North Koreans are creating a nuclear reactor in Syria under our radar. That’s not possible.
At that stage, Ben-Meir was viewed as foolish, as hallucinating. Hard and unequivocal evidence for his extraordinary assertion that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was secretly building a plutogenic nuclear reactor in the heart of the Syrian Desert was yet to be found. Ben-Meir knew that he was right, but he was unable to prove it. He also knew that North Korea was behind the secret project, which threatened to change the face of the Middle East within a year.
