[NYTr] Israeli nuclear suspicions linked to raid in Syria

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Int'l Herald Tribune - Sep 17, 2007
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=7543676

Israeli nuclear suspicions linked to raid in Syria

By Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper

WASHINGTON: The Sept. 6 attack by Israeli warplanes inside Syria struck
what Israeli intelligence believes was a nuclear-related facility that
North Korea was helping to equip, according to current and former
American and Israeli officials.

Details about the Israeli assessment emerged as China abruptly canceled
planned diplomatic talks in Beijing that were to set a schedule to
disband nuclear facilities in North Korea. The Bush administration has
declined to comment on the Israeli raid, but American officials were
expected to confront the North Koreans about their suspected nuclear
support for Syria during those talks.

The American and Israeli officials said the Israeli government notified
the Bush administration about the planned attack just before the raid.
It is not clear whether administration officials expressed support for
the action or counseled against it.

The raid has aroused intense speculation in Washington and Jerusalem,
but details remain extraordinarily murky. Officials said access to new
intelligence about suspected North Korean support to Syria has been
confined to a very small group of officials in Washington and Jerusalem.

The details of the Israeli intelligence remain highly classified, and
the accounts about Israel's thinking were provided by current and
former officials who are generally sympathetic to Israel's point of
view. It is not clear whether American intelligence agencies agree with
the Israeli assessment about the facility targeted in the raid, and
some officials expressed doubt that Syria has either the money or the
scientific talent to initiate a serious nuclear program.

But current and former American and Israeli officials who have received
briefings from Israeli sources said Monday that the raid was an attempt
by Israel to destroy a site that Israel believed to be associated with
a rudimentary Syrian nuclear program.

The allegations come at a particularly delicate time, with the United
States and several Asian countries testing whether North Korea is
serious about dismantling its nuclear production facilities and
providing a full accounting of all its nuclear facilities, fuel and
weapons.

Israel is also wary of complicating continuing peace talks involving
other countries in the Middle East about the future of a Palestinian
state. In particular, the Bush administration has not decided yet
whether Syria will be invited to a Middle East peace conference that is
to be held in Washington in November. A tense Israel-Syria standoff
would further complicate that decision, Israeli and American officials
said.

The Sept. 6 strike was carried out several days after a ship with North
Korean cargo tracked by Israeli intelligence docked in a Syrian port,
according to the current and former officials. The cargo was
transferred to the site that Israel later attacked, the officials said.
It is unclear exactly what the shipment contained. A former top
American official said the Israelis had monitored the site for some
time before the ship arrived. The ship's arrival in Syria before the
raid was first reported Saturday by The Washington Post.

It is also unclear why China decided at the 11th hour to postpone the
planned talks, but Beijing's decision seemed to put off a possible
confrontation between the United States and North Korea that could have
scuttled the diplomatic talks with North Korea.

Christopher Hill, the top American negotiator for the talks, had
already packed his bags and was preparing to depart for Beijing when he
was notified of China's decision to delay the negotiations, American
officials said.

North Korea has a long relationship with Syria, mostly involving the
sale of weapons, particularly technology for relatively primitive
missiles. But it has never been caught exporting nuclear-related
material to either Syria or Iran, another of its customers for missile
technology.

On Sunday on Fox News, Defense Secretary Robert Gates declined to
confirm either whether Israel had attacked targets in Syria or whether
North Korea was providing nuclear-related assistance to that Arab
country. But he warned, "If such an activity were taking place, it
would be a matter of great concern because the president has put down a
very strong marker with the North Koreans about further proliferation
efforts, and obviously any effort by the Syrians to pursue weapons of
mass destruction would be a concern."

A senior North Korean diplomat dismissed the accusations, the South
Korean news agency Yonhap said Sunday. "They often say things that are
groundless," Kim Myong-gil, North Korea's deputy United Nations mission
chief, told Yonhap.

Whether North Korean actions could ultimately cause a breakdown in
disarmament talks may well depend on what, if anything, the United
States concludes about the nature of any illicit relationship between
Syria and the North.

The most benign of the theories is that the cargo had no use in a
nuclear program. Another theory is that any equipment shipped from
North Korea to Syria was designed to help Syria mine uranium and
transform it into enriched uranium. That could mean that Syria is
involved in only the early stages of any nuclear activity, and it could
argue that the mining operation is for something other than weapons.

But any shipment of nuclear fuel to Syria by North Korea would be much
more significant, though that is considered less likely and very risky
for North Korea at this time.

"It would almost defy credibility that the North Koreans would be
willing to risk so much to engage in a nuclear weapons-related
proliferation," said Evans Revere, the president of the Korea Society
in New York and a former senior American diplomat in Seoul.