Intense policy discussions on a short menu of options followed. A purely diplomatic approach never got much traction. Naming and shaming wouldn’t be effective, nor would condemnatory language out of the UN (assuming we could get it). Assad could stonewall inspectors until the facility went hot and any démarche would tip our hand that we knew of the facility without being decisive. We could end up looking pathetic.
We took a hard look at special operations. A small team could enter, approach the site, destroy critical equipment, and then depart. There was no obvious guard force, and the reactor was in isolated desert pretty far from towns or military facilities. Destroying the reactor this way would be low-key and somewhat anonymous and might not prompt Damascus to respond militarily. The issue was whether or not a small team could carry enough with it to effect sufficient destruction on steel, rebar, and concrete. An alternative branch of this planning called for destroying the pump house at the water intake in the Euphrates. That was more easily accomplished, but would slow the Syrians down more than stop them. It would also tip our hand. And for either scenario there was always the danger of detection.
Then there was an air strike. We knew the precise location of the facility and its specific makeup. Selecting aim points and weapons would be easy enough. Stealthy B-2s from the States could do the job, as could land-based air in the region or carrier-based air from the Mediterranean or the Gulf. Air defenses were respectable, but not prohibitive, and there was absolutely no evidence that they had been beefed up in the area. All good—and doable—but such a raid would reinforce a regional image of a United States facilely opting yet again for preemptive war.
The more we talked, the more we discussed what we called a hybrid option: publicize the existence of the facility and demand that Assad prove us wrong via inspections, all against a timeline and an ultimatum that left no doubt of eventual action. That showed restraint and respect for international institutions, but had the weakness of giving Assad time to prepare his defenses and, with seven thousand US citizens in Syria, time to take hostages too.
A lot of this depended on our assessment of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. We knew that he was never meant for this job. His older brother Bassel had been the heir apparent to Hafez, the ruthless but savvy father. Hafez had fought his way to power from humble beginnings in an Alawite village near Latakia to become president in 1971. He brought Syria stability by ruling with an iron hand for the next three decades.
Bassel followed in his father’s footsteps. He had a military background, headed up the Presidential Guard, and seems to have been highly regarded. He also had a love of fast cars that proved his undoing, as he died in 1994 racing at eighty miles an hour on a foggy night to the airport.
Bashar had never been close to his father or much associated with governance. He completed medical school in Syria and then did postgraduate work in ophthalmology in London. Now, with Bassel in the grave, his father began a crash course grooming Bashar for the presidency.
The dynamics of the Assad family often reminded me of Mario Puzo’s fictitious American mobster clan, the Corleones. Certainly the Assads and the closely affiliated Makhloufs, families linked by marriage, seemed to be partners in crime and ruthlessness as much as governance. And, like the Corleones, whose obvious heir Sonny was killed, the Assads unexpectedly lost their chosen, Bassel, as well. Don Corleone had the good fortune to have the far more talented Michael to fall back on. In many ways, Hafez had to settle for Fredo. One wonders if the elder Assad launched the al-Kibar project before his death in 2000 precisely because he recognized his son’s weaknesses.
Our view of Bashar was pretty dismal; we had tried to work with him to stem the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, without much success. The Syrians seemed to be turning a blind eye to it while doing just enough to keep us at bay. Then again, a lot of the movement could be attributed to local corruption, lack of control, policy differences within the leadership, and flat-out government weakness. Not really a recipe for solid decision making now.
We had long described Bashar as a “serial miscalculator.” In the crisis we were about to create, we feared he would refuse any off-ramp we might offer him no matter how logical it was or how much we sweetened it. He wasn’t a confident or firm decision maker, and when pushed into a corner, he often became unpredictable. He feared humiliation, so he would likely want to look tough, and there wouldn’t be many in his inner circle calling for calm. When he considered his own survival, he knew that he was most threatened when he looked weak. After his embarrassing withdrawal under pressure from Lebanon in 2005, another such display might be fatal for him—literally.
A lot of our analysts judged that he would not—could not—let the destruction of al-Kibar pass without responding. At a minimum they warned of “spontaneous” demonstrations that could threaten the embassy and individual Americans; calls to patriotism would likely elicit a positive response, as we speculated that many Syrians would feel pride at the attempt to go nuclear. Assad could also make life more difficult and dangerous for US troops in Iraq. He might even up the ante with the Israelis on the occupied Golan Heights, since he was mistakenly reading the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as exposing Israeli weakness.
The analysts added that the Iranians could see the destruction of al-Kibar as a test of their resolve as well, the first step in a theater-wide rollback of nuclear ambitions, and they would try to steel the spine of their Syrian client.
Our decisive policy meeting took place in June at the White House, but not in the West Wing. We met on the second floor of the residence in the Yellow Oval Room to keep the session off the president’s public schedule. All the members of the national security team were there: secretary of defense, secretary of state, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, national security advisor, director of National Intelligence, and more.
We settled into the overstuffed chairs and couches as White House waiters topped off our ice tea and exited. The president turned it over to Steve Hadley, who asked for the latest intelligence.
“Mr. President,” I began, “we’ve got four key findings for you. One, that’s a nuclear reactor. Two, it’s clear that the North Koreans and Syrians have been cooperating on nuclear questions for about a decade. Three, the North Koreans built this thing. And four, this is part of a nuclear weapons program.”
Before anyone could react, I cautioned them to wait. The national estimate on the Iraqi nuclear program had been wrong, but beyond wrong it had also given a false sense of confidence. We had since learned to share not just what we believed, but also our doubts.
I resumed: “It’s a nuclear reactor. High confidence. Can’t be anything else. Take it to the bank.
“The Syrians and Koreans have been cooperating on nuclear developments for a long time. Lots of travel, back and forth. We know the people. High confidence.
“The North Koreans built this. Of course they did. It’s a copy of Yongbyon, and the Koreans are the only ones who have built this kind of reactor since the British gave up on the design in the 1960s. But we haven’t had eyes on. We haven’t seen Koreans there except one group in one of the handheld photos. So we’re giving this to you with medium confidence.
“This is part of a Syrian weapons program. Of course it is. There are no other obvious uses for it and a weapons program is the only thing that would justify such a high-stakes gamble.
“But Mr. President, I can’t find the other parts of a weapons program. No reprocessing facility. No weaponization effort that we can see. So I can only give this to you with low confidence.”
In the silence that followed, Condi said something about wishing she had had some qualifying caveats like this a few years earlier.
Then the president observed that his preemption policy demanded a threat be imminent before we would act. Our estimate of low confidence in a weapons program made that very difficult to justify, and therefore, the president declared, “We will
not strike the facility.”
Intelligence usually sets the right- and left-hand boundaries of policy discussion; it defines the limits of options. It is rarely as determinative as it was that day. It was like intelligence and policy were connected by a 1:1 gear ratio.
We stayed there quite a while discussing the point. Only the vice president offered a dissenting view. He believed that we needed to send a strong message not only to Syria and North Korea, but also to Iran. An American strike would do just that and would be relatively easy to accomplish, since al-Kibar was isolated and distant from any civilian centers. But I sensed that there was little appetite in the room to suddenly bomb a country without warning or announced justification and feed regional fears of a permanent America bent toward preemptive war.
In the end, the president decided our approach would be to go public about the reactor as part of an overall package to unsettle Assad and make a series of demands on him. We preserved the option of force, but in the president’s mind the real issue was Assad and overall Syrian policy, not just the reactor. Handled well, the coming crisis could give us unexpected leverage on a host of issues: Syrian support to Hamas and Hezbollah; the foreign fighter pipeline into Iraq; Damascus’s continued meddling in Lebanon; Syria’s alignment with Iran.
Syria had been a regular theme in White House policy discussions, largely along the lines of peeling the Syrians off from their Iranian sponsors or, as Steve Hadley often put it, “flipping Assad.” In geopolitical theory it made some sense, since Damascus was by far the weaker partner to Tehran. But real progress was something else. Assad acted like he thought that this was all about him—regime change, in other words—and he even allowed his intelligence chief and brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat (with whom we were trying to cooperate on the foreign fighter flow to Iraq), to pass a message to us that what Damascus saw from the United States was pressure, unrelenting pressure and only pressure. Not a formula to entice a defection.
We really weren’t trying to overthrow Assad, but CIA was expected to analyze what would likely follow him. In any orderly succession (read internal power struggle), we expected the follow-on regime to remain Alawite-dominated with a strong security service and military flavor, perhaps even with Bashar staying on as some sort of figurehead. We also judged that a botched attempt against Alawite rule could quickly descend into chaos. That path would strengthen the hand of the Muslim Brotherhood and Kurdish separatists, since they were the best-organized opposition in the country. The only way that the weak and divided liberal opponents to the regime would play a role required a slow demise of the government, giving them time to get their act together.
I have since wondered how much of that analysis saw the light of day when Syria began its descent into hell in March 2011, when regime security forces arrested about a dozen youths in Daraa for painting anti-Assad graffiti.
In 2007, though, our problem was a nuclear reactor, and the first steps in the president’s plan—going public about al-Kibar and then waiting for IAEA inspectors to verify its nature—could not be done without the concurrence of the country with whom we had first discovered it. After all, a lot of this was based on their data. It didn’t take long for them to make it clear that they could not wait for a long-term diplomatic gambit, even one sponsored by the United States and one that seemed to promise eventual American action. They would not agree.
And so we waited. While we did, if we weren’t going to strike, we had to be careful to not even encourage anyone else to do so. We had to step back a little. The uninformed often think that intelligence agencies are lawless. Some are, but those in mature democracies, especially this one, are not. And we cannot enable someone to do something (even in their own national interest) that we are not authorized to do ourselves. We had no authority to bomb. We couldn’t help anyone else do it, either.
So we could continue intelligence cooperation to understand the situation and gauge when the plant might go hot. But we wouldn’t share anything that would directly contribute to targeting the facility—things like advice on weaponeering, or aim points or imagery so precise that it could help in what was called target mensuration—the precise calculations required to be sure that a weapon will create the desired effects. It was sometimes a fine line, but it was a real one.
But the clock was ticking. The facility was externally complete, the cooling system was being readied, and we had no idea when uranium would be introduced. A strike after activation was problematic; if that happened, the attacker would be blamed for every thyroid problem in the Middle East for the next half century.
On the night of September 6 the reactor at al-Kibar was destroyed. Later, when quizzed about any American role, Steve Hadley accurately noted, “No green light was asked for. No green light was given.”
The strike force had no apparent problems with Syrian air defenses and, based on post-strike imagery, pretty much had their way with the target. The false walls and roof were blown away, revealing the damage done by delayed-fuse weapons on the steel and concrete sarcophagus that would have held the core. It was a nuclear reactor, all right.
Now the trick was keeping a lid on any Syrian (over)reaction. I talked often by phone with that tough, tireless liaison chief who originally brought the pictures into my office in April. He and his staff were inclined to think that a successful strike could be pulled off without a Syrian response if everyone would just keep quiet about it and not attempt to humiliate Assad. Not many Syrians, not even high-ranking officials, would have known about the site, they reasoned. Bashar may want to let this one pass without issue rather than putting himself on the X again as he did during the 2005 withdrawal from Lebanon. We needed to give him space to “climb back off the ledge.”
I wasn’t as optimistic, but certainly agreed that there was no upside to thumping our chest about this, so we were as secretive after the strike as we were before.
Press stories began to emerge almost immediately, but reporters were finding it hard to describe exactly what had happened and why. I experienced more than a little schadenfreude on the seventh floor at Langley as the press struggled to connect the dots. “Not as easy as it looks, is it?” I said one morning to no one in particular as I surveyed my daily press clips.
The Syrians certainly weren’t filling in any blank spaces for journalists with their misleading talk of repulsing a strike on some nondescript desert garrison. They also quietly destroyed what was left of the reactor hall, paved it over, and topped the location with what looked like a metal warehouse.
Of course, keeping this under wraps before, during, and after the strike had a congressional component to it. The law requires Congress be kept fully and currently informed of all “significant intelligence activities,” and this certainly fit that description.
But we kept the Hill group small—just the leadership of the two intelligence committees. To avoid curious Hill staff we had our first session that spring in the DNI spaces at Bolling Air Force Base, just across the Anacostia River from Congress’s own secure facilities. It was all pretty straightforward. We weren’t asking them to do or approve anything.
But as fall 2007 rolled toward winter, the four members who had been briefed were getting pretty impatient. They knew what the facility was and that it had been destroyed, and congressional leadership always has a hard time explaining to other members why they acquiesced in limiting who got briefed when things finally go public. With the recent furor over limited briefings on surveillance and detention and with a presidential election in the offing, there was little residual tolerance on the Hill. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House side, was often livid (and vocal) about the limitations.
Over time, after the strike, the agency began to slide to the congressional side on this one. Bashar had pretty much crawled back in off the ledge and was very unlikely to strike back now. Besides, as part of the permanent government, CIA saw little upside in alienating the leaders
of its oversight committees. We were going to be here a lot longer than the administration.
But there was another, powerfully compelling reason. The administration was in the final stretch of negotiating a nuclear deal with the North Koreans. Ambassador Chris Hill was using his deep experience with the Koreans to get something on paper before the end of the administration. I had negotiated with the North Koreans at Panmunjom and in Geneva; they were maddening. I can only imagine how difficult Chris’s work must have been.
But he was now negotiating a deal with a country that had just been caught red-handed in the single greatest act of nuclear proliferation in history. And they hadn’t been called on it!
The president had committed to keeping this secret at the request of our ally, but by our reckoning we were well past the time when we had to do that to keep Assad in the box. We were now in a period where we needed to make it more public to avoid a North Korean nuclear deal being sold to a Congress and a public ignorant of this very pertinent and very recent episode.
We pressed hard at deputies and principals meetings of the NSC to brief multiple committees on the Hill—Intelligence, Defense, Foreign Affairs—while also recommending simultaneously rolling out a lot of the story publicly. That was a natural complement to briefing Congress. The story would be out after briefing so many committees no matter what we did, so it made sense for the administration to get it out there unfiltered.
It was the right thing to do. And we were hardly opposed to putting an intelligence success story—even a limited one—out there for a change. Agency veterans well remembered George Tenet sitting behind Colin Powell at the United Nations during the secretary of state’s 2003 speech condemning Iraq for its weapons of mass destruction. Some were discomfited by the very image of the nation’s intelligence chief in such a high-profile, politically charged image. Now, however, most were happy enough to publicly put one in the win column.
Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror Page 29