A Strike in the Dark?
02.08.2008 - 11:47 AM“A Strike in the Dark” is what Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker calls Israel’s September raid on a facility in Syria that may or may not have been nuclear in nature and may or may not have been in the process of being supplied with nuclear materials from North Korea.
Hersh is skeptical of the idea that there was anything untoward going on: “In three months of reporting for this article,” he writes, “I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria.”
He suggests that reports to the contrary were transmitted directly from Israeli intelligence to senior members of the Bush administration in a way that kept the CIA from vetting them. In other words, it was the same “process, known as ‘stovepiping,” [that] overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.”
In writing his piece, Hersh seems to have interviewed every source in the Washington DC telephone book, and also every source in Damascus, where he traveled to interview Syrian officials. I have no evidence that contradicts his impressive reporting. But I am still skeptical of his skepticism.
For one thing, Hersh is remarkably predictable. No matter what happens in the world, Israel and the United States (especially under the Bush administration) are always made by him to look trigger-happy and sinister. But could events consistently break in one way? Or is this an artifact of Hersh’s well-known biases?
My biases tilt the other way. I haven’t interviewed 734 sources, some of whom may or not exist, or even if they do exist may not be telling the truth. But I recently re-read a 2005 statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that is quite relevant to Israeli fears about the Syrian facility:
We remain concerned about North Korea’s potential for exporting nuclear materials or technology. At the April 2003 trilateral talks in Beijing, North Korea privately threatened to export nuclear weapons. During the third round of Six-Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear issue in June 2004, Pyongyang included a ban on nuclear transfers in its nuclear freeze proposal. In April 2005, North Korea told a US academic that it could transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists if driven into a corner. IAEA inspectors in May 2004 recovered two tons of uranium hexafluoride from Libya that is belied to have originated in North Korea.
Perhaps Israel’s action was “a strike in the dark.” But so what? Even if the intelligence leading Israel to hit the Syrian facility was incomplete or wrong, this was one of those cases where it would not be wise to wait until the evidence comes in the form of a mushroom cloud.
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February 8th, 2008 at 12:35 PM
Among the “highlights” of his career, Hersh had to pull an entire book, “The Samson Option”, because its sources turned out to be fraudulent. His writings are predicatble, as well as completely biased. Yet other media outlets still respond to his stories as if they have any value. Generally, when you subordinate every journalistic impulse to a preordained political goal, you wind up with tendentious nonsense. There is a lot of that going around lately.
February 8th, 2008 at 2:53 PM
Hersh at his best. Here is just a sampling of how he manipulates perception:
1. In discussing whether the Syrian building was nuclear-related, he opens the bidding with the generic topic — whether it is nuclear-related — but then switches almost immediately to officials talking about whether Syria is known to have a nuclear WEAPONS program. The valid assessment that Syria doesn’t have an ongoing nuclear WEAPONS program is not a point supporting the proposition that the Syrian building had no relation to ANY nuclear program. But Hersh tacitly uses it as one, positioning it early in the article and so ensuring that even casual readers will receive that primary impression.
2. Hersh writes of the “stovepiping” of intelligence as if it is a sinister practice, when in fact it is simply how certain types of highly sensitive intelligence are handled, to limit their distribution. CIA is always in the loop — just fewer people at CIA. Moreover, it is very common for foreign political and military leaders to share their countries’ intelligence directly with their US counterparts, without having first submitted the intel to the CIA for review. Happens all the time, and it’s their prerogative. To intel officials whose noses are put out of joint over that, my advice is: Get over it. If your political boss trusts you, he’ll ask for your opinion anyway.
3. Toward the end, Hersh describes the sequence of events at Kumchang-ri, where in 1998, DIA suspected North Korea of building a nuclear facility (prohibited by the 1994 accord). He includes this as an example of how analysts have been wrong about potential nuclear installations. DIA’s analysis was a source of dispute in the IC, always a red flag to Mr. Hersh. He informs us, however, with a straight face, that “After months of negotiations… the North Koreans agreed, under diplomatic pressure, to grant access to Kumchang-ri … Inspectors found little besides a series of empty tunnels.” Well, yes: after months of negotiations, I could pass off Cheyenne Mountain as a series of empty tunnels.
If not finding what we told our enemies we were looking for constitutes “proof” that we were wrong, then none of our intelligence will ever be correct again. We have nothing but an endless string of inexplicable intelligence failures to look forward to.
One note: I do detect some good spadework by Hersh on the topic of the cargo ship Al Hamed. This does not mean his conclusion is the most likely one, only that he did hit the right sources, and he does discuss the right issues in relation to it. However, Israel’s intelligence on ships docking in Syria is always superb, and the disjunction between the Al Hamed discussed by Hersh, and the Al Hamed that reportedly made a delivery to Syria, was most probably investigated further by US intel.
It is ridiculously easy to paint a new name on a ship. If you are making deliveries to a nation’s government, that government will be fully cognizant in advance of any discrepancies in your purported identification — those discrepancies will not matter. It’s entirely possible for Hersh to have done his homework on this subject, and still not have unearthed everything related to it. The most likely explanation is that another ship transited the Suez Canal as itself, and then called in Syria as a ship named “Al Hamed.” To locate this ship, the starting point is not the name under which it arrived in Syria (how Israeli intel would have observed it, and possibly been aware of it on its way from North Korea), but the transit histories that can be developed on ANY ships that moved from North Korea to the Suez Canal during that timeframe. It’s also possible that the ship doubled Africa and went through the Strait of Gibraltar, where there is no official control of the commercial traffic. Some variant of these maneuvers is quite common in the history of maritime deliveries of suspect cargo.
Hersh’s piece is worth reading, but keep those grains of salt handy, and trust your instincts.
February 8th, 2008 at 4:03 PM
I am curious about what his “sources” told him about Syria’s reaction to the incident. If there was truly nothing going on wouldn’t Syria have screamed bloody murder and invited every journalist in the free world to view the atrocity? Instead it buried the facility in the sand (literally) and acted guilty as sin. Did any of his myriad sources explain this strange discrepancy between the “nothing to see here thesis” and the Syrian response? And sorry to say, that our IC was not aware of a nuclear program in Iran, having done such a bang up job in the past, is less than meaningless.
February 8th, 2008 at 4:04 PM
Last sentence should be Syria, not Iran, but frankly what’s the difference.
February 8th, 2008 at 4:22 PM
I don’t think Israel’s leadership class would assault a regime it has been distinctly ambivalent about for many years (and scrupulously avoided antagonizing in Lebanon) unless it had extremely plausible reasons for doing so.
February 8th, 2008 at 5:48 PM
“If there was truly nothing going on wouldn’t Syria have screamed bloody murder and invited every journalist in the free world to view the atrocity?”
Yup, that is most certainly the case. Syria would have not hesitated in showing the world that the Israeli “imperialists” attacked his innocent country. It instead is behaving similar to Roger Clemens.
February 8th, 2008 at 5:56 PM
Another aspect of this attack is that it succeeded.
And the facts that 1) the target was deep in Syria and 2) the Syrians did not pick up the jets on their newly installed air defense system must have shocked the Iranians who have the same multi-million dollar Russian system defending their terrority.
February 8th, 2008 at 6:34 PM
I am continually baffled by the attention that Mr. Hersh and his articles recieve! I was close to a case he investigated two decades ago and never spoke to anyone who spoke to him, even years later. At one seminar that was off-the-record, he walked out rather than answer questions from a savy crowd. We know know who “Deep Throat” was but Mr. Hersh’s sources are still a mystery. Vessels can change their names but short and long range radar “signatures” do not and are collected. Whatever Israel did, it most probably was the right thing do do.
February 8th, 2008 at 8:35 PM
A strike in the dark? Sounds like a personal problem to me. Because Hersh obviously tailors any conclusion to its premise, I have to wonder why Hersh is demonizing Israel in indefensible Syria’s defense. (O.K., I admit I don’t have to wonder.) I guess “current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials” in an American government infamous for intelligence failures are more reliable than the sons of pigs and apes in Israel’s intelligence apparatus. Everybody knows the Mossad is incompetent. (Insert rolling of eyes here.)
Hersh is a self loathing @$$hole, pure and simple.
February 8th, 2008 at 11:50 PM
Hersh began his career with My Lai, a tragedy that was in no way representative of US forces in Vietnam. Later in the ’70s he encovered much of the ‘family jewels’ operations that would
have not seemed unusual when carried out by Mi-6, DGSE, BfV or other European agencies.
Right before the onset of Ahmadinejad’s first apprenticeship (the Iranian hostage crisis, he
‘found’ this former Agency analyst, Jesse Leaf, who stated that the U.S. had taught the Iranians to torture, using Nazi interrogation techniques. In the 80s, he provided the excuse
for the Shootdown of KAL 007. The Samson option relying on poor sources like the Israeli Walter Mitty, Ben Menashe, spread anti-semitic dross in the early 90s that hasn’t been purged yet.In the 90s besides excusing the Saddam hit on Bush sr in 1993 he actually served some use bringing Scott Ritter’s criticisms of the shortfalls in the UN inspection system (he also pointed out the corrupt reverse colonial client relationship of former KGB, Foreign Minister Primakov, vis a vis Iraq. His “guns of August” article against the El Shifa plant in Khartroum, mostly sourced to lobbyists for the Sudanese govt like Bearden, in retrospect was a bad move.
His denigration of our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been with few exceptions very ill advised.
THe whole idea of any nuclear facility only a hundred miles from aUS border post in Al Quaim, doesn’t make me feel good, If you know what I mean