The Strike on Al Kibar

Aaron Stein 0:01

Disclaimer, don't go to Syria. Don't go looking for al-Kibbar. You are listening to the Arms Control Wong podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament. I'm Aaron Stein, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:21

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Walk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, although I am broadcasting today to you from the Tough Beans in Truckee, California.

Aaron 0:36

You know, and I think because of that, you may have some background noise. I think, is this like a family vacation or just you out there and getting some R&R?

Jeffrey 0:45

No, it's a working vacation. I've got a personal project underway that I would be happy to tell listeners about in a couple of weeks. But it's killing me. And it means that Mrs. Lewis does a lot of child care. And so we've decamped up here. Is that the right way to say that? So that she can take the kids skiing while I complete this project.

Nonetheless, I'm still willing to take a break. And record a podcast with you.

Aaron 1:17

That's right. So it's, I mean, this has sort of the flair and atmospherics of some of our earlier emergency podcasts. But this one's not really such an emergency, although it's a topic we've been following for a very long time.

Jeffrey 1:30

Yeah, the Israelis have finally declassified a bunch of information, including the strike video of their strike on the Syrian nuclear reactor at Al Kibar from way back in, what was that, 2006?

Aaron 1:54

2007.

Jeffrey 1:54

2007, that's right. Gosh, it was a long time ago.

Aaron 1:59

It was, you know, but for some reason it feels real fresh because, you know, you have a, on sort of, before we've moved over to just, you know, recording our voices, there's a lot of good archival material on the Arms Control Wong blog about this. And the two authors of the piece, Amos Horrell and Alouf Ben, really went into sort of wonk porn levels of detail about all of the internal assessments and politicking that went on as they considered that strike.

So I think it's a perfect thing to talk about.

Jeffrey 2:31

Yeah, you know, I mean, I think one of the interesting things is that I was really skeptical that this was a reactor in the immediate aftermath of the strike, because You know, it was just, we called it the box on the Euphrates, and I'm delighted to learn that the Israeli analysts called it the cube. Yeah, they called it the cube.

With the same naming convention. But, you know, at the time, and I've always felt a little frustrated that, you know, I was skeptical. But, you know, the reality was the evidence was pretty shaky. And at the time, I recall saying, like, You know, you really have to show pictures of the thing from the inside to know for sure.

And then he did that. I was totally satisfied. And, you know, now I think we have plenty of information to say it was totally a reactor, almost certainly built with North Korean assistance. And the Israelis popped it like a pimple.

Aaron 3:37

Yeah, you know, what I found really interesting about the story was, like, the way that the Israelis got turned on to it, you know, and so just... Just quoting from the Haaretz story, paraphrasing, I should say, is like, they got wind that there may be a clandestine nuclear interest in Syria in the late 1990s. But they only started to pay serious attention to that possibility after they found out about the Libyan program and through the dismantlement and the announcement by the Americans and the Brits.

And so they initially went looking for a centrifuge program and stumbled on the cube. And there was some debates about whether this was a centrifuge facility or a reactor. So more or less similar to your own thought process about this, I would say.

Jeffrey 4:25

Yeah. I mean, it's one of these things where the concerns that I had and the cautions I had, you know, one of the things when you get something wrong is you, you wonder to yourself, like, well, did I, was I methodologically wrong? Right. Cause you know, you can be right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons and It was kind of heartening to see that they went through exactly the same thing, where they were willing to believe that there was a nuclear program, which was a reasonable thing to think.

And if you look, they actually released the cover page for one of the analyses. And it's got a North Korean flag and a Pakistani flag and a question mark.

Aaron 5:06

Right, right, right.

Jeffrey 5:07

And so you can tell that they're abstractly aware that there's a nuclear program. But they aren't sure whether it's a centrifuge program like the one that AQ Khan from Pakistan sold to Libya or whether it's a North Korean reactor. And then eventually they're staring at the box and they conclude that it's probably a reactor. But officials at Mossad are still skeptical and skeptical for good reasons.

Aaron 5:37

Yeah, exactly. But then ultimately, it is when they have to basically get the plumbing installed that they know that this is a reactor, and that's stuff that we can't see, obviously, in real time.

Jeffrey 5:52

You know, it's a building, and it clearly looks like it's a building that's for a nefarious purpose, because it's camouflaged, and it's alone. And they watch them put in the plumbing, and once there's cooling water coming in, And then it's sort of more suspect. But, you know, the part that I really liked is and we knew we'd heard this before, but now we have it confirmed is that Ibrahim Othman, who's the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Agency, goes to Vienna and they freaking break into his apartment and like scrape his computer.

Aaron 6:25

Exactly. And one thing that I love about this is that he's carrying all these pictures on his computer. I mean, like that's not the mother.

Jeffrey 6:33

It's really a shooter images. Of his clandestine nuclear program. This is what's kind of interesting to me, because when it was initially announced that they had struck this reactor, all we had were the satellite photographs, right?

Aaron 6:46

Right, yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 6:48

And my position was those were not enough. And in fact, it appears that the Israelis made the same decision, that they weren't willing to do the strike just on the satellite images. They needed those images. But it actually led to this hilarious interaction because, you know, I got like all roped in with like Cy Hirsch and his merry band of conspiracy theorists who were like carrying water for like...

I mean, I got to like hang out in his like secret office on Connecticut Avenue. And I mean, like it was... I mean, it was strange because, you know, I was driven by methodological skepticism. I needed something more than the... More than the satellite pictures. And he, and we've seen this on the chemical weapon stuff was, you know, motivated by like straight up conspiracy theory, you know?

And, and so he was like in love with the work we were doing because we were being skeptical. And we kept saying like, look, unless you show us pictures of the inside, you're not going to be able to prove this.

Aaron 7:52

Right.

Jeffrey 7:54

And then the U S community declassified the images.

Aaron 7:58

I remember that. I remember exactly where I was when that happened.

Jeffrey 8:02

That's a pretty good presentation.

Aaron 8:04

I actually remember quite clearly where I was at. It dropped in the New York Times, I want to say.

Jeffrey 8:08

Am I remembering that correctly? It was 2006. Then there was a whole video. They released a video. Someone sent me a physical copy of it. I have the disc with Al Kabar written on it in terrible, terrible sans-serif font. But it was, you know, that was the point at which Cy got very annoyed with me because, you know, I like, I had my methodological requirement.

The United States intelligence community satisfied my methodological requirement and I was good. Like, yes, that is a reactor. You know, inside, like, you know, wanted to keep going and it's like, dude, stop. There's an,

Aaron 8:53

You're the North Korea guy. There's a Mad Maxian quality to the way their reactors look. I mean, I don't know what you think about that, but they just look like apocalyptic, even though they're like an old design, if you know what I mean. They're copies of the Japanese reactor at Tokukai. Right. For some reason, when they're installed, they just look Mad Maxian to me.

I'm sorry.

Jeffrey 9:15

It's because you've got this 60s high modernist Japanese design sensibility. Translated into, you know, like, I don't know if it's Stalinist or brutalist architecture, but you have this North Korean version of it, which just looks brutal and foreboding. But the interesting thing was the reactor that the Syrians built or the North Koreans built for the Syrians was camouflaged to look like a Byzantine fortress because there's an archaeological site on the other side of the river.

It was Frank Pabian who first noticed that.

Aaron 9:55

Right, and it's in the Arms Control Blog archives, which I think we should have in the show notes.

Jeffrey 9:59

Oh, yeah. I mean, it leads to probably the greatest blog post of all time, which I had exactly nothing to do with.

Aaron 10:06

Lead us there. Take us there.

Jeffrey 10:08

It might literally be the greatest blog post anyone has ever written.

Aaron 10:12

It's a fantastic blog post. I read that in grad school. Just shout out to the Monterey Institute, now Middlebury Institute.

Jeffrey 10:17

Yeah, so, you know, They were calling it the cube we were calling it the box and we were making jokes and I even made one on the blog about how we should get some grant money and take a trip to the archaeological site which is just on the other side of the river and see if we can get some shots of the reactor so it turns out and I still have to be careful how I tell this story a reader was In Syria.

This is great. And that reader did precisely that, which is to say arranged for a tourist trip to the archaeological site and took photographs of the pump house. It's true. It's all there. Took photographs of the area where the reactor is, but you could see it was shielded by the hills because it was in a canyon. I guess a wadi, so you couldn't actually see it.

And then tried to get his taxi driver to drive across the river where he was stopped by Syrian regime undercover guys hanging out in track suits. And suddenly his taxi driver was like no longer really enthusiastic about About this strip.

Aaron 11:44

Oh, man. Oh, God.

Jeffrey 11:47

Yeah. So. Yeah. So. That was I mean, like, don't do this at home. Don't ever do this again. But like, wow. You know, it was it was really, I think, the first demonstration I had of how small the world was. Do you know who controls that area now? Oh, I know because there's an underground cistern where the pump house brought the water in to sit and they released images.

Aaron 12:20

Right, right, right.

Jeffrey 12:22

Well, actually, I don't know which opposition force it is.

Aaron 12:26

It's in the U.S. zone of control.

Jeffrey 12:28

So it was ISIS and now it's us?

Aaron 12:31

Yeah, it's on the...

Jeffrey 12:34

It was ISIS and now it's our proxies plus the Scary dudes with beards who we send to train them?

Aaron 12:40

Yeah, the archaeological site. It's basically, it sits on the dividing line between regime forces and the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. And so if it's on the western side, we may have it. So maybe somebody on our side got some good photographs of it.

Jeffrey 12:57

Oh, I thought you were angling to get, like, to, like, top your, like, chance to go visit the Qiyam.

Aaron 13:03

Oh, I'm available. I'm available. If somebody wants to fund my trip out there for just general Syria research, I'm available.

Jeffrey 13:12

You can go for me. Just to wrap up that story, I mean, I have to be really careful about telling this because this person was very young at the time. I think I've said it's a he, and that's probably not a surprise that it was a man roaming around Syria alone. But he has a career now, and I know this person.

And he is awesome. And we've done a little work with him in his modern, not youngster stupidly kicking around Syria phase. And he's just incredible. Although, like, this is not the way to break into the field. I need to say that. Please, please, please, please, please, please, listeners, don't go do this. This is like an awesome story once and should probably never be repeated.

Aaron 14:08

Right. Yes, especially now. I was mostly joking. Disclaimer. Don't go to Syria. Don't go looking for al-Kibar because, as we know from the Israeli videos, it's a pile of rubble. You know, what was interesting that came out in that story, too, was that the way they tried to – Hide it, you know, so they go into the fact that not just, you know, at the time when we were looking at the pictures that they didn't put any air defense around it, is that they also camouflaged it by making it look like the Byzantine fort, but also that they stacked rubble around it to make it look like it was disused or at least in the state of, you know, dilapidated and not some Mad Maxian North Korean interpretation of Japanese modernism. Yeah, and you know, I mean, it wasn't done.

Jeffrey 14:57

So, you know, it's a little hard to know what it would have ended up looking like. But I mean, it really, it was, it was, it was just a box, you know, I mean, they really did do a good job of, of camouflaging it. You know, you couldn't see it from the archeological site. You know, it was, I mean, if you examine it closely, you wouldn't confuse it with a fortress.

But you might if you just looked at it quickly. I think one of the most interesting things was that they didn't put fences or anti-aircraft sites there. Part of their camouflage was to let the thing be naturally defended rather than to install all of the standard trappings of defense that people like you and me use to assess locations.

In many ways, it's a wonderful case study if you're doing overhead Work in terms of understanding like what signatures are and, and how, how the other side sometimes suppress those signatures.

Aaron 16:08

Yeah. I mean, and, and, you know, maybe to think of it conceptually as the case study of the counterproliferation case study, and this may be because the, the civil conflict breaks out four years later, but you know, It's often compared to the 1981 strike of the Osirak reactor in Iraq, where, I mean, I think most of us would say that that drove the program underground.

Whereas this one, it seems like this just reconstituted their efforts, at least as far as we know, around chemical weapons.

Jeffrey 16:41

Yeah, I mean, it's possible that... I'm not... I'm inclined to think that it's probably the same that... They probably just shifted their work elsewhere, but then got overwhelmed by the Civil War. I mean, you know, it's the way that I think about military strikes, which is that they're good for delaying. And if you delay and then the regime is going to fall and that's worth doing.

But you're really only delaying and you probably have to have some other plan for what you're going to use that extra time for other than just like sit around and hope you get lucky.

Aaron 17:17

Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a wise thing, particularly with our last episode about, you know, learning about Syria reconstituting their chemical weapons program, at least on an industrial scale.

Jeffrey 17:29

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I do think that's happening. So, you know, it's not all happy stories. But, you know, ultimately, I think the strike was successful. I mean, it set the program back. And they did do it in a way that allowed Assad not to feel like he had to escalate.

Aaron 17:48

Yeah, and the bureaucratic...

Jeffrey 17:50

Successful use of force.

Aaron 17:52

What's funny is that when I'm reading the story now, there's always been this... You know, particularly if you're in Turkey, there's always been this question about the fuel tank drop that fell on the Turkish side of the border rather than on the Syrian side of the border. And inside the Haaretz story is that they have, you know, what I assume to be a relatively accurate map of the flight plan is that they traversed out of Syria along the Turkish-Syrian border.

And I was thinking about in, like, 2018... If you try and keep this a secret, because there were pictures of the fuel tank that was dropped, but in 2018, those pictures would be all over Twitter. You would know it would be so much faster in terms of the control of information that was released. I was thinking 11 years later, How that little mistake would have really tipped all of us off that it was the Israeli.

It would have confirmed that it was the Israelis. Then we would have been far more. Our methodological processes would have been far different.

Jeffrey 19:05

You know, one other thing I should say, which also helps, I think, explain a little bit of the error that we made. I was surprised. During the process, one of the things that caused me to be not convinced it was a reactor was that US officials didn't seem to think it was a reactor. You know, like they wouldn't use the word reactor.

They would use nuclear facility, plutonium facility. They would just never say reactor. And I couldn't figure out why. And we now realize that it's because they totally blew it. Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, if the Israelis hadn't been so focused on this... You know, and there's been some effort by, I think officials come out and say, no, no, no, no.

We knew, we knew from the photos, but you can't really know from the photos. I mean, yeah. So also interestingly, the Bush administration really didn't want to hit them, hit the reactor. Don't invade Iraq. Like you have it backwards.

Aaron 20:03

Right. And what's, what's funny is that the, is, is that what ultimately, you know, I think pushes the Israelis forward is, Was a leak. You know, so they were briefing the U.S. all along and then there was a leak. And there was concern that, you know, the element of surprise would elude them and they had to take action.

Jeffrey 20:26

Yeah, well, I mean, that's not a, that's not an unreasonable thing to be worried about. I mean, like, stuff leaks all the time.

Aaron 20:37

Right. That's true.

Jeffrey 20:39

I mean, like, Newsflash to foreign governments, if you're briefing the United States, that crap is going to leak. I guess they did keep it under control until, but I'm almost certain that if they had waited... The political in fighting would have boiled over into a leak. So.

Aaron 21:04

Right. And so ultimately you get the strike and I mean, I mean, maybe just to wrap up here, I mean, they wanted to leave no doubt about this. And so they, they, as you said, at the start of the show, I mean, in addition to the story, they were tweeting around the strike footage and, you know, and illustrating it just so that everybody knew that, yes, this is what happened.

And, and, and this is the whole story. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey 21:30

So anyway, it's, you know, pretty exciting. I mean, I have to say we now have, I think, a decent amount of information and we have a we have a real solid case. Can you hear the music in the background?

Aaron 21:41

Yeah, I can. Do you at least get a free latte for mentioning what's the place called again? Tough Beans in Truckee, California.

Jeffrey 21:49

No, no. But they let me sit here all day and they serve nice coffee. And it's a really cool place. If you're if you're in Truckee, I totally recommend checking it out. It's, it's it's, it's nice. It's like, it's like a coffee shop meets a diner. It's like super comfortable, very unpretentious. I love it.

Aaron 22:07

And Scott, because of our sort of emergency esque recording is, is not able to speak. So if you enjoy the show and you want to continue the conversation in our Slack channel, why don't you hop on over to our Patreon page, which is patreon.com slash ACW podcast. And for $5 a month, $3 if you're a student, you can gain access to our Slack where we're doing some pretty cool stuff.

We had a satellite imagery purchase for some open source work and lots of talk about this story and others with really like the wonkiest and nerdiest people in the field. And I always have a good time doing it.

Jeffrey 22:49

Hey, and shout out to Luke O'Brien, who has – he and his wife have produced another listener.

Aaron 22:56

That's right. I believe it's Liam O'Brien. And Luke managed to live tweet his own wife's birth, and I think they're still married. So somehow Luke has something over me.

Jeffrey 23:10

And hey, Luke, don't forget to sign that kid up for Patreon.

Aaron 23:13

That's right. That's right. We'll give him a discount. But Jeffrey – Yes. Thank you for joining me from Truckee. Pleasure as always. And thanks everybody for listening.