A building in the Syrian desert, an Israeli airstrike, and years of argument over what it was, worked out post by post from 2007 on.
So, I’ve been keeping my powder dry on this story by Sanger and Mazzetti claiming that Israel struck “a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel …”…
Is the Box-on-the-Euphrates in a remote place? Details like that might seem insignificant, but they are not. Often, it seems to me, intelligence judgments are supported by informal bits of “color” or what you might call the gouge — circumstantial…
Robin Wright at the Washington Post and David Sanger at the New York Times are reporting that CIA Director Michael Hayden and other intelligence officials will brief the House and Senate Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees on the…
I just love my job. I am like a kid in a candy store with all these photos of Al Kibar. A couple of things don’t add up just yet. Not saying they won’t eventually, but I am trying to…
ISIS have released an impressive and comprehensive report detailing the deception techniques used by the Syrians for the Box on the Euphrates (Andreas has already beaten me to blog it—you obviously haven’t got enough work to do, mate!). It answers…
A friend observes that the Box-on-the-Euphrates may have been modeled to appear, at first glance, like a ruined Byzantine fortress. The other three images are of a Byzantine fortress in Zippori (Sepphoris) National Park, Israel. Same friend sends along some…
I haven’t been blogging much recently but I hope to make up for that today with some remarkable material on Syria that Jeffrey and I were given in the last 24 hours. A source summarized for us some of the…
One of the unique features of the AlKibar (Dair Alzour) probable-reactor site is that it is located near a (somewhat offbeat) tourist attraction. I even joked that a visit “seems like a good use of my grant money.” I didn’t…
Something about the whole Syria nuclear reactor story has never seemed quite right to me. When anonymous US officials began to hint that the facility struck by Israel was in some way nuclear, I wondered how solid that intelligence was.…
Reporters are calling around town inquiring about this site, which is located at 36°30’33.99″N, 40°46’34.75″E near the town of Al Hasaka in Syria (sometimes transliterated as Hasakah or Hasekeh). The facility is said to be of some interest to the…
Update | 10:24 pm 25 February 2013 Our reader friend sends along a fourth, high resolution video in which the narrator explains that the missiles on stationary launchers were to fired from inside the building, through openings in the roof.…
Haaretz dropped an incredible article with new details about the 2007 Israeli air strike on the nascent Syrian nuclear reactor at Al Kibar. So we thought it would be a good opportunity to interrupt Jeffrey’s working vacation to talk about…
