The Mossad director, Meir Dagan, was on his way to a routine chat with the prime minister, on Ehud Olmert's once-a-week day in Tel Aviv. When Israel's leader had a secret talk scheduled, his office calendar showed two Hebrew letters, peh and aleph, an abbreviation for pgisha ishit, "personal meeting." Usually, the term referred to conversations with the chiefs of the Mossad, Shin Bet security service, Military Intelligence and the Israel Atomic Energy Commission.
On this spring day in 2007, Dagan was intending to brief Olmert on various intelligence matters, with nothing unusual on the agenda. Halfway from the Mossad's headquarters at Glilot, near Herzliya, to the prime minister's modest, two-story office in the Kirya [defense establishment] compound, in central Tel Aviv, however, Dagan received a phone call.
His chief intelligence officer had news, but worded it cautiously. "That thing we are working on? It's certain."
Dagan immediately understood, and he told the chief analyst to rush to the Kirya to join the meeting with Olmert. The two senior Mossad men laid out for the prime minister what Israeli spy satellites - and now spies on the ground - had been able to verify was taking place in a remote part of eastern Syria, about 300 miles northeast of Damascus. The Syrians were close to completing construction of a nuclear reactor.
The Mossad's "unconventional weapons" researchers assessed that the reactor was closely modeled on a North Korean design, was being built with the help of advisers from that country, and that the goal was to produce plutonium as the fissile material for bombs. The site was called Al-Kibar, according to Syrian officials in phone calls intercepted by MI's Unit 8200. The Mossad had also gotten its hands on photos, apparently taken by Syrians, showing the inside of the building, and of a visit by a senior North Korean nuclear official.
Olmert had become prime minister only in January of the previous year, when Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke and could no longer serve in the position. Hearing about Syria's secret project, he turned grimly serious. "What are we going to do about it?" he asked reflexively.
Within minutes, it was clear that the question had been rhetorical. The two Mossad men and the prime minister all knew that Israel would have to demolish the Syrian reactor.
On Christmas Eve 2003, the world woke up to dramatic news: Colonel Muammar Gadhafi's Libya was giving up its weapons of mass destruction, which included a nascent nuclear program and a large arsenal of chemical weapons. The announcement took Israel's intelligence services completely by surprise, and the heads of those services did not like surprises.
What really grabbed the Israeli agencies about the Libya story was the revelation that Gadhafi's nuclear program had been born out of the efforts and expertise of the Pakistani merchant of atomic knowhow, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
At the time, Dagan and his chief intelligence officer wondered to themselves: Since they missed the whole Libyan deal, what else had they missed? After the new year, the Mossad's research department was ordered to go back into its archives and examine every piece of humint and sigint information it had accumulated, in the past decade, about Khan's activities as a nuclear traveling salesman.
Intelligence agencies often gather more data than they can read and analyze, and individual intercepts and data points are not always immediately pieced together into a coherent mosaic. The Mossad realized that - in addition to Libya - Khan had traveled to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria. Further evaluation led to the conclusion that the Saudis and Egyptians, being in the American camp, would be less likely to undertake a nuclear program.
Syria could be a different case. It was anti-American, making overtures to Iran, and supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon more than ever. The then-new Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad, was inexperienced, and might miscalculate, in his ambition to outdo his late father, Hafez.
The more Mossad researchers dug, the more they found, until they unearthed evidence that was alarming. They noticed that Syria, at the start of the 21st century, had had clandestine contacts with North Korea that were difficult to explain. This realization took place three years after they start of those contacts, and the Mossad would later be irritated by accusations that it had been deaf and blind for seven years. It was really "only" three years.
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