Ron Rosenbaum - How the End Begins

So from that point of departure, I am joined by [Senior Intelligence Official 2] [Michael Hayden, head of the CIA] who will provide details on the intelligence and what we knew and so on. We will show you a video of the evidence, so give you a chance to ask questions about that. And then [a senior administration official], seated to my right will be available for responding to any policy questions you might have. So with that, I’ll turn it over to [Senior Intelligence Official 2].

SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL2: The format I’ve got, I’ll talk a bit; I’ve got some slides that will show up behind me that shows some data. And then, we’ll run the video….

As [Senior Intelligence Official 1] said, information we acquired since 2001 has indicated cooperation between North Korean nuclear entities and high-level Syrian officials. And we went to the 2001 data, and I know this is true in your business, when you learn something, it doesn’t just illuminate the future; it illuminates the past.

[I was reminded of something that the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton had once told me with an air of mysterious knowingness: “The past telescopes into the future.” [260] ]

And when we acquired information in 2001 and then were able to look backward on information that had been collected but not quite understood, it’s clear to us that this cooperation between North Korean nuclear-related personalities and entities and high-level Syrian officials began probably as early as 1997 which, and now this is an estimate now, all right, not court-of-law evidence, puts it into the Hafez al Assad regime in terms of the original decision to begin this cooperation.

Now, as early as 2003, we judged that the interactions probably were nuclear-related, again, because of who it was we were seeing in these interactions. But we had no details on the nature or location of the cooperative projects. We assessed the cooperation involved work at sites probably within Syria. But again, we didn’t know exactly where. So we had this body of evidence, kind of, almost like a cloud of, boy, there’s something going on here but we can’t get a whole lot of precision about it.

We received indications in ’05 that the Syrians and North Koreans were involved in a project in the Dayr az Zawr region of eastern Syria, but again, no specific information on the nature or the exact location of the work. But you can see, as evidence mounts, more confident there is cooperation, more confident it involves nuclear-related people. And now, we’ve got a fairly good sense as to where the center point of the cooperation might be.

[The emphasis on the North Korean partnership here is significant in the light of the Obama administration’s April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, which singles out North Korea and Iran as exceptions to its policy of not threatening non-nuclear states with nuclear attack. [261] ]

Imagery searches [satellite mapping] of the region revealed a large unidentified building under construction in a remote area near the Euphrates River near a point that we call al Kibar. And there you see the photo. The first time we saw it was after this evidence look out there remember ’05, ’06 timeframe. Take a look there. We identified the facility. And once again, sometimes the present illuminates not just the future but can illuminate the past. We looked back on historical imagery that found that the only high-quality imagery we had was of a building that looked pretty much like this. It was externally complete. [This is the “Enigmatic Box.”]

And it’s hard to figure out looking at that building what its purpose is. [The enigmatic nature of the Enigmatic Box!] And it certainly didn’t have any observable, externally observable characteristics that would say, oh, yeah, you got yourself a nuclear reactor here. Things like a massive electrical-supply system, massive ventilation, and most importantly a cooling system. We acquired information, though, in the spring of ’07 that enabled us to conclude that this non-descript-looking building in al Wadi, near the Euphrates River in eastern Syria [to avoid confusion, al Wadi is a geologic formation, a dry stream bed; al Kibar was the closest inhabited town] was indeed a covert nuclear reactor….

Now, we carefully compared these photos [of the interior of the reactor], which are obviously handheld and we’ve got a certain volume of them measured in the dozens, these handheld photos with the overhead photos. And I’m here to assure you that all the windows, doors, holes in the wall, and so on, matched up; i.e., these handheld photos are of that building we showed you in the overhead photo. [In other words the photographic details of the interior of the building confirmed that it was the same building photographed by surveillance satellites. Note how careful they are to avoid the trap Colin Powell fell into when he showed misleading CIA photographic evidence at his pre-invasion U.N. presentation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which turned out to be false.] And that’s very important because the handheld photos reveal construction activity at the site in a period of time prior to the external completion of the building. Does that make sense? Okay, good.

The reactor inside that building was clearly not configured to produce electricity. We saw no way and there are no power lines coming out of it, none of all the switching facilities that you would need, and frankly was less well-suited for research. I mean, obviously, we’re holding up hypotheses here, right? Less well-suited for research than some existing nuclear facilities that we and the Syrians know about and have been made public in Syria. [In other words it was not a reactor meant for the peaceful uses of atomic energy.]

Now, we assess that North Korea has assisted Syria with this reactor because, one, it uses North Korean–type technology. The building resembles North Korea’s Yongbyon plutonium power reactor. That’s Yongbyon on the left. That’s that non-descript building in the eastern Syrian Desert before the curtain walls and false roof [the boxing that made it enigmatic by hiding its actual shape] were put on the top of it to hide its shape, which, without those curtain walls and false roofs seem to carry the telltale signatures similar to the facility at Yongbyon.

Internal photographs of the reactor vessel under construction show that it’s a gas-cooled graphite-moderated reactor similar in technology and configuration to the Yongbyon reactor. [These photos are the decisive and rather astonishing intelligence coup that made all the difference.] And you can see that more clearly in this photo that compares the control rods and the refueling-tube arrangements of both reactors. That’s internal imagery of al Kibar on the left and Yongbyon on the right….

Our information also indicates involvement of nuclear-related North Koreans in a project somewhere in the area.

And we also have evidence of cargo being transferred from North Korea, most likely to this reactor site in 2006. [The same year—probably not coincidentally—North Korea exploded its first nuclear bomb.] The reactor was destroyed in an Israeli air strike early in the morning of 6 September 2007 as it was nearing completion but before it had been operated and before it was charged with uranium fuel.

Shortly after the attack, the Syrians began, this is mid-September now, a massive effort to destroy the ruined reactor building and to remove all potentially incriminating nuclear-related equipment and structures. Much of the work was done at night or was hidden by tarps in an attempt to conceal it from our overhead observation.