Fool Me Once…
05.13.2008 - 11:10 AMOn September 6, 2007, Israel destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor at al Kibar. Writing about the raid in the New Yorker on February 11, 2008, Seymour Hersh cast doubt on the contention that it was in fact a nuclear facility:
in three months of reporting for this article, 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. It is possible that Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior members of the Bush Administration, without it being vetted by intelligence agencies. (This process, known as “stovepiping,” overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.) But Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said, “Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.”
One of Hersh’s sources was Barack Obama’s non-proliferation adviser, Joseph Cirincione, who told Hersh flatly that
Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial ability to support a nuclear-weapons program. I’ve been following this issue for fifteen years, and every once in a while a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing.
In the face of unequivocal evidence, Cirincione has acknowledged his error, saying “no one bats 1000.” That of course is true. And the difficulty of assessing what Syria was up to was certainly compounded by Syrian deception. David Albright’s outfit, the Institute for Science and International Security, has put out an important study (complete with photographs) of the “extraordinary camouflage” methods the Syrians employed to disguise the facility.
In assessing the track record of an expert like Cirincione, let’s also keep in mind that tight secrecy, camouflage, and deception in nuclear affairs are nothing new. On the eve of the first Gulf war, thanks to secrecy, the United States was almost completely in the dark about the far-reaching scope of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program.
In the run-up to the second Gulf war, the problem was reversed. The intelligence community persuaded itself that Saddam had an active nuclear program when in fact he had none.
One would expect experts to draw appropriate lessons from both experiences. First among them is that humility and a measure of self-doubt are important when trying to penetrate other countries’ secrets.
Such qualities were conspicuously absent in Cirincione’s analysis of al Kibar: “There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat from Syria. This is all political,” is what he categorically told Hersh.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
| »Back to Connecting the Dots | »Back to Commentary |
May 13th, 2008 at 11:43 AM
I noted at the time that in his article Hersh wrote:
It is unclear to what extent the Bush Administration was involved in the Israeli attack. The most detailed report of coöperation was made in mid-October by ABC News. Citing a senior U.S. official, the network reported that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States and received satellite help and targeting information in response. At one point, it was reported, the Bush Administration considered attacking Syria itself, but rejected that option. The implication was that the Israeli intelligence about the nuclear threat had been vetted by the U.S., and had been found to be convincing.
Yet officials I spoke to in Israel heatedly denied the notion that they had extensive help from Washington in planning the attack. When I told the senior Israeli official that I found little support in Washington for Israel’s claim that it had bombed a nuclear facility in Syria, he responded with an expletive, and then said, angrily, “Nobody helped us. We did it on our own.” He added, “What I’m saying is that nobody discovered it for us.” (The White House declined to comment on this story.)
but that the ABC news report that he cited also mentioned this:
A senior U.S. official told ABC News the Israelis first discovered a suspected Syrian nuclear facility early in the summer, and the Mossad Israel’s intelligence agency managed to either co-opt one of the facility’s workers or to insert a spy posing as an employee.As a result, the Israelis obtained many detailed pictures of the facility from the ground.
The official said the suspected nuclear facility was approximately 100 miles from the Iraqi border, deep in the desert along the Euphrates River. It was a place, the official said, “where no one would ever go unless you had a reason to go there.”
But the hardest evidence of all was the photographs.
The official described the pictures as showing a big cylindrical structure, with very thick walls all well-reinforced. The photos show rebar hanging out of the cement used to reinforce the structure, which was still under construction.
There was also a secondary structure and a pump station, with trucks around it. But there was no fissionable material found because the facility was not yet operating.
The official said there was a larger structure just north of a small pump station; a nuclear reactor would need a constant source of water to keep it cool.
The official said the facility was a North Korean design in its construction, the technology present and the ability to put it all together.
It was North Korean “expertise,” said the official, meaning the Syrians must have had “human” help from North Korea.
So the same article that Hersh cited to show that the U.S. shared intelligence with Israel also reported that Israel had obtained hard evidence that the structure was a reactor, phontographs of the building. Hersh totally ignored the report about the photographs and cherry picked the part of the story that supported his narrative.
I have no idea if the story about the photos is true, but it’s the real bombshell in the ABC report and Hersh just ignored it. He didn’t debunk it. He just didn’t mention it, presumably because it contradicted the central thesis of his scoop: that Israel had no idea what it destroyed.
Hersh’s failure to acknowledge the photo story is a major hole in his reportage.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:51 PM
That’s a superb catch, soccer dad. I don’t recall reading the ABC report at the time, but clearly ABC did some good journalistic work, and Hersh simply decided not to highlight or try to deal analytically with the information in that report.
The US IC is well capable of the same analysis presented in Albright’s ISIS piece. This is the kind of analysis that IC and DOE analysts have done for years. We need not fear that our own IC, at the analyst level, was clueless about the Syrian reactor being built, even with the deception measures being used.
Hersh’s own narrative reveals the outlines of a probable dynamic, however, which is that the senior IC leadership preferred not to see a Syrian reactor being built, and/or preferred that its construction not have actionable implications for the US. That Hersh’s normal sources — which would be those same seniors in the IC, or persons close to them — could not give him better information than statements that they were “unaware of an on-going nuclear weapons program,” suggests that they disagreed with at least the Israelis, and probably their own analysts, on the IMMEDIACY of the problem, but had no alternative narrative to retail. (Note that denying knowledge of an “on-going nuclear weapons program” is not technically denying that a reactor is being built. A beautifully spun method of not being “wrong,” but also seeming to cast doubt on whether a reactor was being built, or at least whether it should have been attacked.)
The Israelis choosing to present their intelligence directly to policymakers, rather than through the IC leadership, is another clue that IC leaders were resisting the assessment of the Syrian construction project as something actionable. The Israelis are perfectly well aware which individuals in the IC leadership oppose Bush’s policies. But they also know that Bush would approve of destroying the reactor before it could be finished, particularly if the Israelis were prepared to do it. If the US IC had had compelling intelligence that counteracted Israel’s, we would certainly know about that. It’s clear that we didn’t. Most probably, the experienced analysts in the US IC — the relevant non-proliferation and country analysts at NGA, DIA, and CIA — would have concurred with the Israelis’ conclusions.
David Albright remains brilliantly consistent, presenting solid factual analysis, and concluding that its policy implications are that there should be more reliance on IAEA and negotiation, rather than all this business with military attacks, which “most people don’t advocate.”
May 13th, 2008 at 2:16 PM
Thanks, J.E.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:09 PM
In view of all of the reports of the US-Israeli collaboration, etc. regarding this facility, one should not lose sight of the role of the “nuclear watchdog agency”. Before taking DG El-Baradei’s comments seriously, one has to look at their success rate in uncovering violations of the NPT (including the record of Hans Blix when he was the IAEA DG). Also, the IAEA does not have access to all satellite reconissance. The Washington Post (Sunday)provided a pretty good analysis of the role of North Korean procurement efforts on behalf of Syria. Thre are many “Khans” out there and analysis of these procurement operations provides additional intelligence as to what the Syrians and North Koreans were up to.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:54 PM
Remember the current state of analysis is that if you are enriching uranium and producing plutonium but are not taking the comparatively easy final step of weaponizing it, it constitutes no nuclear threat. So Hersh and Cirincione were right, at least in the alternative universe that has emerged among those in chrage of the IC’s analytical integrity, and those warmongering Israelis simply overreacted rather than trust Syria’s demonstrable good faith.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:41 AM
[…] jbrokaw on 2008.05.14 Well, lookee here … a report detailing the ways that the Syrians were camouflaging that nuclear reactor that North Korea was helping them […]
May 15th, 2008 at 2:03 PM
Schoenberg writes:
I recollect a conviction before March 2003 that Saddam had WMDs in the form of a chem/bio warfare capablity. There was evidence for that and a solid argument. Namely, that the invoices of what had been sold to him, and the record of what he had expended in war and what the inspectors had destroyed, left a significant supply of dangerous materials unaccounted for. That, in combination with Iraq’s state of the art chemical labs and unaccounted for supply of SCUDS made it likely it still had a dangerous WMD capability.
But the fear that Iraq retained an active nuclear program had no similar argument in support and had been dropped.
May 15th, 2008 at 3:40 PM
nacl — Correct, assuming we define “retaining an active nuclear program” as having, say construction and acquisition ongoing.
The bottom line, simplest answer on what we thought in 2003 is that we did not think Saddam had an active nuclear program. This doesn’t mean Saddam had a clean nuclear bill of health. He still retained some partially enriched uranium, which we found after the war; he retained nuclear scientists on the government payroll; he had sent the head of his nuclear program to Niger in 1999 for “trade negotiations” (although the “document” purporting to record an actual sale, at a later date, was determined to be a forgery); and he had, of course, imported the dual-use aluminum tubes. We assessed that although no uranium enrichment or weaponization was imminent, Saddam retained not only an interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, but a determination into which he continuted to put money and effort.
That pre-war assessment has turned out to be pretty much on target. In addition to validating its major elements, what we found after the war included blueprints and construction plans for a uranium enrichment centrifuge, acquired during the sanctions period (i.e., after 1991).
May 15th, 2008 at 5:20 PM
Ms. Dyer states: “That pre-war assessment has turned out to be pretty much on target. ”
I’ve long thought that–pretty much in the manner that she characterizes the subject in her preceding paragraph–due to reading the source document reports from the post-invasion investigations and surveys. Yet the media narrative–that the American public was lied to–remains firm, and firm in the minds of most Americans.
The Big Lie retains its potency to pollute rational discourse to toxic levels.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:41 PM
Forbes — perhaps the worst problem is that even Americans who don’t think they were lied to still think the US intelligence community was wrong; i.e., that its pre-war analysis was badly in error.
Having been in the intelligence department at CENTCOM from 1999 to 2001, and then deployed for the Iraqi Freedom operation in 2003, as our carrier strike group’s senior intelligence officer, I had access to what had been the bottom-line community assessments on Saddam’s WMD programs since the early 1980s. What I can say definitively about them is that they did NOT say Saddam had stockpiles of anything, with the probable exception of some remaining former-Soviet battlefield chemical munitions. The IC was well aware that Saddam’s development programs were all onesie-twosies, with the highest threat of any “volume” coming from dual-use chemical (and potential biotoxin) plants, which could be converted quickly to produce weaponizable toxins, but which were not either known or firmly estimated to be producing in that manner, during the relevant assessment periods. (You can find all this in publicly-available journalistic reporting; I won’t reveal classified information here, but also won’t endorse public reporting that I think to be wrong.)
It remains unclear to me by what exact path the IC’s assessment translated, through its political retailers, into the doomsday proclamations we heard in Colin Powell’s UN speech (which is the main one I can find that evokes mushroom clouds and “stockpiles.” The president never spoke in those terms, in any speech or press conference I have found. He always expressed his concern in the strict terms any member of the IC could have validated: the possibility that Saddam, who had ongoing WMD programs, could supply terrorists with materials sufficient for one or more of their unconventional attacks. That amount need not have been large).
The documentation that Powell got extensive coaching from the IC for his speech, and Powell’s own well-established practice of using intelligence carefully, cause me to assume that it wasn’t his error that produced the weirdly exaggerated description of Saddam’s threat, in that Feb 2003 speech to the UN. CIA official Tyler Drumheller is a person with whom I share few, if any, political ideas, but he exactly expressed my feelings about that UN speech when he said he could hardly believe it, because it was such an exaggeration. I remember seeing it on CNN, sitting in my tiny office on USS Nimitz when our strike group was underway off the coast of California, and exchanging glances with the junior officers who worked for me. What, we wondered, did Powell’s briefers know that we didn’t?
At least, the Powell speech was an exaggeration of what we thought was IMMINENT. Saddam’s programs, projected to a logical, eventual outcome, could certainly have amounted to the colossal May Day parade Powell seemed to be outlining. It wasn’t untruth to recount what they might amoung to some day — but the purpose for seeming to exaggerate the imminence of that consummation has never been clear to me. I have postulated before that it was a sort of automatic policy-framing reaction from the State Department, which collectively did not think the present threat merited regime-changing Saddam, unless it WAS as imminent as Powell’s speech seemed to imply. In other words, rather than getting their minds around the president’s exact reason for regime-changing Saddam — a reason that didn’t make sense to their worldview — and supporting that reason in department policy, they almost unconsciously felt it necessary to massage the reason-for-regime-change, until it made sense to them.
I’m reading Doug Feith’s book right now, but have not yet come to the part in which he discusses his perspective on the WMD intelligence. I had acquaintances in the Pentagon in early 2003 who expressed sometimes elliptical concern about WMD intel becoming an interagency political football. I suspect at least part of the problem was generated by people within the CIA who had the same perspective on national policy as veteran State Department officials, and handled intelligence with an eye not to producing ground truth, but to gaming policy implications.
Whatever the exact origin of the miscue(s), what this whole WMD intel brouhaha has obscured is the true reason we invaded Iraq. We did not invade because we expected to find “stockpiles.” We invaded to prevent Saddam from accumulating them — but even more, to prevent Saddam from supplying terrorists with WMD at less-than-stockpile levels. This is what the president said repeatedly, and it is what the military orders for the operation said.
Diverting the public dialogue to a putative “intelligence failure” has actually prevented us from hashing out the pros and cons of PREEMPTION, on which we have yet to have a substantive national debate. That, I view as a problem.