In My Time (75 page)

The North Korean regime remains one of the world’s leading proliferators of missile technology, including transfers to Iran and Syria. The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequences of such action.

Six months later we received intelligence that a threat of this nature had materialized. I learned about it in detail one afternoon in mid-April
2007, in National Security Advisor Steve Hadley’s office. I was seated in one of Steve’s large blue wing chairs and he was to my left. Two Israeli officials were on the sofa to my right. Meir Dagan, director of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, pulled materials from his briefcase and spread them on the coffee table in front of us. For the next hour, Dagan showed us photos of a building in the Syrian desert at a place called al-Kibar. It was a nuclear reactor.

Additional photographs, which the intelligence community would later make public, showed key parts of the reactor as it was being built, vertical tube openings in the top for control rods and refueling, a reinforced concrete reactor vessel with a steel lining. Satellite imagery showed pipes that would supply water from the Euphrates for the cooling process. The Syrians had tried to hide what they were doing, locating the plant in a wadi, or valley, so it couldn’t be seen from the ground, constructing unnecessary walls and false roofs so that its purpose wouldn’t be clear from the air. But Israeli intelligence knew what it was: a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated nuclear reactor.

Important clues about the reactor’s intended purpose came from what the photographs didn’t show. There were no power lines coming out of it, none of the switching facilities that would be present if its purpose were to produce electricity. It was not near any power grid.

What the Israelis, and later our own intelligence agencies, did see was a striking resemblance to the North Korean reactor located at Yongbyon, sixty miles north of Pyongyang, which the North Koreans used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. The Syrian reactor was similar in size and capacity. Side-by-side photographs showed the vertical tubes in the Syrian reactor arranged in ways strikingly similar to those in Yongbyon. The fact that the North Koreans were the only ones who had built such a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor in the past thirty-five years pointed to them as the source for what the Syrians were building in the desert.

According to a briefing by senior U.S. intelligence officials, “sustained nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Syria” likely began “as early as 1997.” There had been multiple visits by senior North
Koreans from Yongbyon to Syria before construction began at al-Kibar in 2001, and, according to the intelligence community, subsequent contacts as well. In a briefing provided for the press on April 24, 2008, senior U.S. intelligence officials explained:

In 2002, North Korean officials were procuring equipment for an undisclosed site in Syria. North Korea, that same year, sought a gas-cooled reactor component we believe was intended for the Syrian site. A North Korean nuclear organization and Syrian officials involved in the covert nuclear program reportedly were involved in a cargo transfer from North Korea to probably al-Kibar in 2006.

Over the last several years I had seen intelligence reports of officials with ties to North Korea’s nuclear program making repeated visits to Damascus, and I had asked questions. Are the North Koreans and the Syrians cooperating on nuclear technology? We know the North Koreans are assisting the Syrians in the area of ballistic missile technology. How do we know that they aren’t also providing nuclear assistance? We believed that the North Koreans provided uranium hexafluoride, the basic feedstock from which enriched uranium can be created, to the Libyans. Why wouldn’t they do the same for the Syrians?

The answers I got back were inconclusive. I kept hearing that there was “no evidence” of nuclear cooperation. Listening to Dagan tell the story of the reactor at al-Kibar on that April afternoon in the West Wing, I realized that not only was there evidence, but it was actually very solid.

In addition to
information
about the facility, there were also photographs of some of the people involved. One, taken in Syria, showed the man in charge of North Korea’s nuclear reactor fuel manufacturing plant at Yongbyon standing next to the leader of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. A second photo showed the same North Korean official in his country’s delegation at the six-party talks—the talks we initiated in 2003 as a multilateral effort to get the North Koreans to give up their nuclear program. It was pretty remarkable—even for the North Koreans—for a member of their negotiating team to be spending
time, when he wasn’t at the negotiating table, proliferating nuclear technology to Syria.

The discovery of the reactor sparked an in-depth policy debate inside the White House about what our response should be. The Israelis were requesting that we launch an air strike to destroy the plant, an idea I supported. I believed an American military strike on the reactor would send an important message not only to the Syrians and North Koreans, but also to the Iranians, with whom we were attempting to reach a diplomatic agreement to end their nuclear program. An American strike to destroy the Syrian reactor would demonstrate that we were serious when we warned—as we had for years—against the proliferation of nuclear technology to terrorist states. The Syrian plant was isolated from any civilian population center, and it was a clear and distinct target standing out in the eastern desert. We certainly had the capacity to take it out with ease, and doing so would go a long way toward reminding our adversaries that we would not, as the president had said, “permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” I believed that our diplomacy would have a far greater chance of being effective if the North Koreans and Iranians understood that they faced the possibility of military action if the diplomacy failed.

Most of our discussions about the al-Kibar reactor took place in the weekly small group meetings that Steve Hadley had begun hosting in his office during the second term. The sessions were similar to the weekly breakfasts Brent Scowcroft had hosted when he was President George H. W. Bush’s national security advisor with Secretary of State Jim Baker and me. The Hadley sessions were larger, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of national intelligence, and the head of the CIA present, as well as Secretaries Rice and Gates, Hadley, and me. We met without staff and had some of the best policy discussions of our time in office. We exchanged ideas and debated without worrying that our deliberations would leak, as they sometimes did when there were more people in the room.

In a session in Hadley’s office in the spring of 2007, as we discussed
options for a response to the discovery of the Syrian reactor, those who opposed any military action expressed the view that a U.S. or Israeli strike could launch a wider regional war. There was also concern that the Syrians might take retaliatory action against American troops in Iraq. My view was that these concerns were not well founded. I believed the dangers of allowing the North Korean–Syrian nuclear project to go forward were far greater than the prospect of a wider conflict. The worst outcome would be one in which no action was taken and the Syrians were allowed to become a nuclear power.

Much of our conversation focused on the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. That experience made some key policymakers very reluctant to consider robust options for dealing with the Syrian plant. I found that regrettable. In this instance there was no question based on the information we were getting from the Israelis and now from our own intelligence services that what we were looking at in the Syrian desert was a clandestine nuclear reactor, built by two terrorist-sponsoring states.

I thought back to the history of World War II. U.S. intelligence had failed to predict the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. A few months later, when Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, received intelligence that the Japanese fleet was headed for Midway, he did not hesitate to act. He could have questioned the accuracy of the intelligence or ignored it, based on the error at Pearl Harbor, but he didn’t. He sent what was left of the American Pacific Fleet to intercept the Japanese, sank four of their frontline carriers, and turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. Had Admiral Nimitz refused to act on intelligence warnings in the aftermath of the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor, the outcome of the war in the Pacific may well have been different. I was afraid we were doing just that in this case. Although the evidence about the Syrian nuclear reactor was solid, the intelligence community’s failure on Iraq was still affecting our decision making.

At our weekly private lunch on June 14, 2007, the president and I talked about the danger of nuclear proliferation. I noted that it was still our biggest long-term security challenge. It was clearly the ultimate
threat to the homeland. Since taking office we had made significant progress on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons technology to rogue states or terrorist organizations. We had removed Saddam Hussein and the threat he posed. Libya had handed over its program, encouraged in large part by watching what happened to Saddam. We had taken down the A. Q. Khan network, which had been a source of centrifuges, uranium feedstock, and weapons design for Libya, North Korea, and Iran. But North Korea’s robust program continued. Estimates were that they now possessed enough plutonium for six to twelve warheads, and they had conducted their first nuclear test on our watch. They had admitted having a program to enrich uranium, a second path to obtaining the material needed for a nuclear weapon, and we believed that they had provided a key ingredient in the enrichment process—uranium hexafluoride—to Libya. We now also knew they were proliferating nuclear technology to the Syrians.

The picture on Iran was no better. They had a robust program under way based on uranium enrichment centrifuge technology. Estimates were they could have three thousand centrifuges in operation by the end of 2007.

Syria and Iran, both working to develop nuclear capability, were two of the world’s leading state sponsors of terror. Syria was facilitating the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, where they killed U.S. soldiers. Iran was providing funding and weapons for exactly the same purpose, as well as providing weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were both involved in supporting Hezbollah in its efforts to threaten Israel and destabilize the Lebanese government. They constituted a major threat to America’s interests in the Middle East.

I told the president we needed a more effective and aggressive strategy to counter these threats, and I believed that an important first step would be to destroy the reactor in the Syrian desert. He was well aware of the dangers we faced and decided he wanted to hear more from all of his advisors as he considered the next steps on Syria. We gathered in the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the White House residence at 6:50 p.m. on Sunday, June 17, 2007.

The first question was, how good was the intelligence? Mike McConnell, the very professional director of national intelligence, said, “It’s about as good as it gets.” He noted the intelligence community had “high confidence” this was a nuclear reactor.

We discussed two possible paths of response. One was diplomatic. We would make news of the reactor public, go to the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, and try to build international consensus to force the Syrians to shut the reactor down. I was skeptical. The UN and IAEA record on forcing rogue states to give up their nuclear programs was not impressive, and I had no reason to believe this approach would work here. The other option, which I favored, was military. Either we or the Israelis take the Syrian plant out.

Two days later Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was in town for meetings. I participated in his lunch with the president, and the prime minister asked to see me separately as well. He was staying in Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, and I joined him there for dinner on June 19, 2007. After dinner we kicked our staff members out and had a lengthy one-on-one meeting. He was very focused both on the threat from Iran and on the Syrian nuclear facility. The existence of a secret nuclear reactor in Syria posed an existential threat to Israel, and the proliferation involved in its construction was a direct threat to America’s national security. Olmert urged that the United States take military action to destroy the facility and made clear Israel would act if we did not.

At another session later that month with most of the National Security Council present, I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor. Not only would it make the region and the world safer, but it would also demonstrate our seriousness with respect to non-proliferation. It would enhance our credibility in that part of the world, taking us back to where we were in 2003, after we had taken down the Taliban, taken down Saddam’s regime, and gotten Qaddafi to turn over his nuclear program. But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, “Does anyone here agree with the vice president?” Not a single hand went up around the room. I had done all I could, and I’m
not sure the president’s mind would have been changed if the others had agreed with me. He had decided to recommend to the Israelis that we take the diplomatic path. How, he asked, were the Israelis likely to respond to that decision? Secretary Rice told him she believed that the Israelis would accept the offer of diplomacy. She thought Prime Minister Olmert would go along with the idea of taking the information to the United Nations and working for multilateral action to shut down the facility.

I told the president that the Israelis would destroy the reactor at al-Kibar if we did not. Ehud Olmert, whom I had known for years, meant what he said about taking action. I also remembered 1981, when the Israelis had ignored world opinion and launched an air strike to destroy a nuclear reactor Saddam Hussein was building at Osirak in Iraq.