The word ‘rumor’ can refer to “a soft low indistinct sound” or “a statement or report current without known authority for its truth”. Here’s an interesting story from the Epoch Times — and it may be just a story — about how the West and Israel are trying to split Syria away from Israel in order to head off some kind of nuclear plot in the Middle East.
London—MI6 has established that secret backroom meetings at the Mediterranean Nations summit in Paris early in July could lead to a dramatic shift of power in the Middle East. … At the end of one meeting, Alon Liel, a former director of Israel’s foreign ministry, confirmed Israel had been engaged in “low-key second-track discussions for many months” with Syria. …
Both the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni–herself a former Mossad officer–sat alongside their Syrian counterparts, President Assad and his foreign minister, Walid al-Muallim.
Publicly, Olmert acknowledged that the time was “fast approaching for direct talks”.
What prompted this dramatic change between two old enemies was that at the backroom meetings the intelligence chiefs learned for the first time precise details of the raid in September last year on Syria’s factory processing weapons grade plutonium.
The hitherto untold story of that raid is as dramatic as any of Israel’s previous daring and successful military strikes.
The account is full of tantalizing and hard-to-confirm detail which usually indicates an attempt to convey an impression by appealing to our imaginations. But what do they want us to imagine? Two lines of speculation will probably emerge. The first is that the story is there to give the impression of some secret justification for a possible Israeli peace deal with the Arabs, something we know is being pushed. The second possibility is that there really was a WMD program in the region, or threads of it, whose bits and pieces are now resurfacing now that GWB, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, is discredited. But if there really was a Wolf, what better time to return to the sheepfold than upon the accession of the One?
I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over this dramatic account of mystery and danger in the Middle East, but I think it is worth keeping an eye open for developments the region which are likely to be interesting in reality, story or no story.
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33 Comments
1. Mike Sylwester:Wretchard:
“Here’s an interesting story from the Epoch Times — and it may be just a story — about how the West and Israel are trying to split Syria away from Israel …”
Don’t you mean from Iran?
Nov 19, 2008 - 2:56 pm 2. Gordon:Good story in Epoch Times, even with the occasional lurid prose (banshee wail, flesh-crushing G-force). Two small errors: a wind coming in from the sea would be a westerly, not easterly, and it’s the F-15I, not F-151.
Bravo for the Israelis!
Nov 19, 2008 - 3:17 pm 3. ADE:Miliband meets Assad, Israel ramps up Gaza blockade, US attacks Syria (Oct 9th), and then king clown al-Zawahri denounces The Messiah.
Something is stirring in the ME.
Positioning for the The Messiah’s first test, perhaps?
ADE
Nov 19, 2008 - 3:47 pm 4. whiskey:Fox News is reporting the IAEA has concluded that Syria had a forbidden nuclear reactor, kept hidden until the Israelis bombed it.
I’m sure Livni and Olmert would like a deal, as would “the One” but how is it enforced, and sold to the Israeli public? It’s not as if Assad has a lot of trust, or is dealing from a position of weakness.
Things will go nowhere until the Iranian first strike from Lebanon and Syria, with nukes. The few surviving Israelis will of course retaliate, but the Arab world can afford massive casualties while wiping out all of Israel. I’m sure that’s the Iranian plan.
Nov 19, 2008 - 4:18 pm 5. RWE:A novel I read some time back featured a Soviet-led coup over Saddat as an element in the Yom Kipper War. Egypt’s defeat in the war led to the coup being stopped. The interesting thing about this story was that many elements of it were true, such as the fact that the Soviets retained direct control over the Scud missiles deployed in Egypt, and the Soviets were summarily dismissed from the country right after the war.
Saddat reportedly said that when things started to go badly for Egypt that the Soviets conferred and then told the Egyptians to retreat as far as possible and wait for the winter snows to bog down the IDF advance – but having detected a coup sounds like a more plausible explanation for the Egyptian disaffection with their “allies.”
Similarly, you have to wonder if the IDF airstrike changed the equation relative to who the Syrian government decided were their friends. It may have blown the cover off an internal plot headed by Iran.
Or perhaps it was a genuine “Bridges of Toko Ri” moment for Baby Doc Assad – as in “That tears it! If they can do this they can clean our clocks every time!”
Nov 19, 2008 - 4:21 pm 6. RWE:“The few surviving Israelis will of course retaliate, but the Arab world can afford massive casualties while wiping out all of Israel. I’m sure that’s the Iranian plan.”
The Iranians are not Arabs but Persians. And the two traditionally do not get along, aside from the Sunni/Shia thing. So having Israel blow away all the Arabs would no doubt be an attractive aspect to Iran.
Nov 19, 2008 - 4:23 pm 7. hdgreene:At the time of the US raid into Syria I speculated that the Syrians had given us the location of the “high value” target to prove its good faith in negotiations. After all they’ve got facts on the ground they have to deal with in Iraq. But if Syria can’t make fools of MI6 (who really want to believe them) then Syria just ain’t trying.
It will be interesting to see how the Syrians treat with the Obama Administration — especially if they think they can roll him. Will they wait for the US to leave Iraq and then stir up trouble? Or stir up trouble and then say it was Syria that drove the US out of Iraq?
Nov 19, 2008 - 4:39 pm 8. Sima Qian:Two reasons to doubt the account. Getting details like the F-15I (not “F-151″) wrong suggests that the writer is not a writer of any stripe on military affairs, let alone a veteran one, which makes me doubt his sources. Second, he’s writing for the Epoch Times, a Falun Gong mouthpiece and not the most reliable of media organs.
Nov 19, 2008 - 5:52 pm 9. Eggplant:A quarrel I have with this story is it describes the Syrian facility as a location to fabricate nuclear bomb pits from plutonium pellets (a high tech machine shop where all the tools are operated from inside glove boxes). However the satellite photographs show what looks like a nuclear reactor containment vessel near a river that would have been used for reactor core cooling. I suspect this story is something along the lines of “Debka File”, i.e. someone knowledgeable about Middle Eastern politics and military technology took a few facts and then stretches them into a fascinating but fictitious cloak-and-dagger yarn.
Nov 19, 2008 - 6:30 pm 10. Bob Murphy:8. Sima Qian:
Nov 19, 2008 - 6:31 pm 11. Eggplant:That F-151/F-15I problem could well have been caused by a sub-editor at The Epoch rather than the writer.
I’m a technical writer. Happens to me all the time. I have to housebreak each and every sub-editor that gets his mitts on my copy.
On the other hand the writer is no journalist. I had him pegged as a novelist within 3 paras.
All that flowery hyperbole is an annoying distraction to anyone trying to get the facts of the matter and should be to any writer trying to get to the facts of the matter.
The story reads like a bodice-ripper.
I should also mention that I’ve seen an actual facility where they work with plutonium, i.e. the one at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. It looks like a high tech Stalag-13 with a net over it to keep out helicopters.
Nov 19, 2008 - 6:39 pm 12. Bruce:Another nit that casts some doubt on the author’s level of access: the F-15I is a two-seater, something the author is apparently unaware. He repeated refers to only “the five pilots.”
Nov 19, 2008 - 6:40 pm 13. steveH:Everyone ignores the GIBs and Wizzos. It’s a burden they must bear there in the back seat.
Nov 19, 2008 - 7:25 pm 14. Lifeofthemind:@Eggplant,
Nov 19, 2008 - 10:14 pm 15. Lifeofthemind:I love Debka, I also read the Cadfell series and the Lord Peter Wimsy series and will watch any film by John Ford.
@RWE,
Nov 19, 2008 - 10:20 pm 16. Barry Meislin:You have a point. In the ME all politicians except the Israelis has to take it as a given that every Colonel is at least contemplating redecorating the executive office carpet with the current inhabitant’s brains. The Soviets did stage a coup in Afghanistan. Who is to say that they wouldn’t have tried one in Egypt? Assad may hate the Israelis but he can trust them farther than he can trust his friends.
So, President-for-Life, Sir, Headest-of-All-Honchos, Most Dentist-in-Chief, Liberator-of-Palestine (and Lebanon), and Leader-of-All-Resistance-Everywhere-and-Forever, should we keep feeding them ze bullshit??
But of course. Slowly, though. They love it so….
Nov 20, 2008 - 12:30 am 17. Antipodal:Food for thought
Nov 20, 2008 - 4:14 am 18. anton:The Israelis are rumored to have raided a Syrian WMD site
The Iraqi’s at the onset of OEF were rumored to have trucked their WMD to Syria.
If the Israeli’s did in fact destroy something, what was that something?
Antipodal@17
Nov 20, 2008 - 7:05 am 19. Pseudo-Polymath » Blog Archive » Thursday Highlights:My thoughts exactly. When I first heard of the raid I asked myself, Where would a country as broke as Syria is get the makings of a nuclear facility? and the stuff to put into it? It’s not like they coould run down to WalMart and pick up a few dozen scientists and a couple of bags of uranium. AQ Khan is out of business (allegedly) and Syria would probably be a little skittish about contacting him anyways. The location of the target faclity was close to the Iraqi border and close enough to the lines of communication coming out Iraq to make that a possibility.
[...] Rumor. [...]
Nov 20, 2008 - 7:09 am 20. Stones Cry Out - If they keep silent… » Things Heard: e41v4:[...] Rumor. [...]
Nov 20, 2008 - 7:10 am 21. Lifeofthemind:What’s with the blog pimping? Can we have some standards in here?
Nov 20, 2008 - 7:21 am 22. Richard Aubrey:Again, the dog that didn’t bark in the night is the public noise about the stuff involved in the thwarted Amman terror bombing.
Nov 20, 2008 - 10:16 am 23. RWE:Nerve gas is illegal.
But nobody seemed to wonder where the terrs had gotten it.
Google has all kinds of stuff on the issue as it happened, but very little seems to have come to light, including references to anybody looking and not finding, after that.
The part I did not understand is the train blowing up in North Korea. At the time it was reported as a trainlaod of missiles bound for Syria blowing up. I have assumed that it was an example of “our tax dollars at work.” Of course, given that the Scuds use nitric acid as the oxydizer, a mishap is really possible.
But the article seems to indicate that it was nuclear material. And since that stuff does not tend to blow up on its own, the James Bond / Jack Bauer answer once again comes to mind. I think we can be sure it was not F-15I’s.
Nov 20, 2008 - 11:49 am 24. Eggplant:Antipodal asked:
“If the Israeli’s did in fact destroy something, what was that something?”
Here’s my worthless opinion: The North Koreans realized that the jig-was-up with their nuclear weapons research and development program but they wanted to continue in that activity. Meanwhile, the Syrians wanted to be players in the nuclear weapons game but didn’t have the petro-dollars and technical experience. So the Syrians and the North Koreans got in bed together. The Syrians allowed the North Koreans to move their nuclear weapons research and development program to Syrian territory in exchange for the North Koreans providing the Syrians access to their technology (the Syrians could then leverage this new information against what they already had from the Iranians and Saddam). The North Koreans could then publicly close out all nuclear weapons R&D activity on their own territory and falsely claim that they were good guys and nuclear-free. In essence this was an attempt at deception by North Korea through Syria’s connivance.
Nov 20, 2008 - 12:29 pm 25. Bruce:I agree with Eggplant’s analysis, with one additional player. Prior to 2003, the North Koreans were working directly with Saddam Hussein in a joint nuclear weapons development program. The NK was providing technology and scientists, and Hussein was providing money and a safe location inside Iraq. Syria may have been involved as a minor partner at that point. Post 9/11, when it became clear that the US was going to invade Iraq, Hussein made a quick deal to hustle the projects’ equipment and staff across the border into Syria for safe keeping. Hussein believed that he could fight off the US to a standstill or, at worst, we would tire quickly and he would be back in power in a few years.
Once Hussein was captured and hung and the Iraqi government had permanently changed, Iran stepped up and offered to take over Iraq’s place in the joint project, primarily in financing it. The work fit in nicely with Iran’s own ongoing nuke program. Meanwhile North Korea continued to work on parts of the project at home. The US knew about all this, but was keeping it quiet because we already had enough on our plate with Iraq, Afganistan, and talks with North Korea. With Iran involved, and steady technical progress, Israel finally got nervous enough that they decided to go ahead and bomb the facility.
Just my speculation and opinion.
Nov 20, 2008 - 1:09 pm 26. Is This For Real? » The Ethereal Voice:[...] The whole piece has more detail about Israel’s raid on Syra’s nuclear site then I have seen anywhere else. Somebody is either making things up or talking about things they should keep quite about. (H/T The Belmont Club) [...]
Nov 20, 2008 - 4:21 pm 27. RWE:Eggplant: Yes, that sounds about right to me, but remember that N Korea had a Plutonium bomb program, which it supposedly abandoned and then supposedly began a Uranium enrichment program. So they could give away their cake and eat it too.
As for an analysis of the North Korean involvement in the Syrian project, this briefing from April 2008 is pretty definitive: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/syria/2008/syria-080424-dni01.htm
Note though, that this briefing says the reactor was destroyed before it was loaded with uranium fuel, on Monday but the chief of the IAEA confirmed that they had found traces of Uranium at the site, although he could not say what the source of the traces was.
Nov 20, 2008 - 5:26 pm 28. Eggplant:RWE:
You http://www.globalsecurity.org link was very interesting. Thank you for providing it. I quote the following from the globalsecurity interview:
“The Syrians constructed this reactor for the production of plutonium with the assistance of the North Koreans. Our evidence goes back an extended period of time. We have had insights to what was going on since very late ’90s, early 2000, 2001 that something was happening.”
The timing is very interesting. The American invasion of Iraq occurred on 20 March 2003. This Syrian reactor was in mid-construction when the Iraq War started. This raises the $64,000 question: Was this merely a Syrian/North-Korean nuclear program or was it a Syrian/Iraqi/North-Korean nuclear program? If Saddam was involved in this project from the very beginning then what we have here was a secret justification for the Iraq War. However, I should emphasize that this is not clear cut because the Syrians had no love for Saddam (Syria was part of the Desert Storm coalition against Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait).
Nov 20, 2008 - 6:20 pm 29. Eggplant:RWE also said:
“Note though, that this briefing says the reactor was destroyed before it was loaded with uranium fuel, on Monday but the chief of the IAEA confirmed that they had found traces of Uranium at the site”
The Israelis obviously had a guy on-site providing them with intelligence. The best time to destroy a nuclear reactor would be when the unactivated fuel rods were on site but not yet loaded into the reactor. The unloaded fuel rods would not have been activated thus containing almost no fission products. Waiting to destroy the reactor until after its fuel rods were loaded would have been ill advised. Doing so could easily have resulted in a Chernobyl situation with a horrific fall-out plume spreading out over hundreds of kilometers (particularly if the reactor used a graphite moderator as seems to have been the case). However destroying the reactor with the fuel nearby but unloaded effectively killed two birds with one stone.
This action by Israel was brilliantly done and represents another feather in their cap (right next to the one they earned for destroying Saddam’s Osirak Reactor). Too bad they can’t seem to do anything about the Iranians.
Nov 20, 2008 - 6:36 pm 30. RWE:Eggplant: Don’t forget Iran. They have a close association with Syria, although I don’t think anyone has explained just when that began.
The Iraqi link is an interesting possibility. While Syria was part of the Desert Storm Coalition (purely for show, I think) they are also a Battahist state, like Iraq. During the Yom Kipper War Iraq sent jet fighters to help Syria - but did not receive any useful instructions from Syrian command when they got there, sailed into the battle area without setting the correct IFF codes, and lost the entire force to Syrian SAMs within minutes. I think that curbed their enthusiasm.
Also, we have the reports from that Iraqi Air Force General that their WMD program was shipped to Syria under cover of a flood relief effort.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, especially in the Middle East. Most of the Iraqi Air Force that got in the air during Desert Storm flew to hated Iran.
And while I know of no link between Iraq and North Korea, we know definitely that North Korea and Iran have had a close association, with the Koreans selling Scuds to Iran and Iran providing space booster upper stage technology to the Koreans.
Nov 20, 2008 - 6:52 pm 31. RWE:By the way, folks, if you want an easy way to save documents like that briefing on the Syrian reactor you can go to http://www.pdf995.com and download a free program that enables you to convert such webpages as well as documents to a PDF file. Depending on the width of the page, it may not work just right but most of the time it works just fine.
Nov 20, 2008 - 7:00 pm 32. Eggplant:RWE said:
“Also, we have the reports from that Iraqi Air Force General that their WMD program was shipped to Syria under cover of a flood relief effort.”
That story was too convenient. I suspect it was a lie. If the story were true, physical evidence would have appeared by now (maybe it will after Obama assumes office).
Nov 20, 2008 - 7:12 pm 33. james wilson:Nation-states have negotiable interests. Revolutions do not.
Nov 20, 2008 - 9:25 pmIran is the dying remains of a revolution, and so especially dangerous. Syria is nation-state. It may have finally occured to Syria that if and when Iran launches upon Israel, Israel is not going to be holding an investigation on the extent of Syria’s involvement.
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