THE ISRAELI F-15S crossed into Syria soon after midnight on September 6, 2007, screaming undetected across the desert, headed for a target deep in the Euphrates Valley. They traversed two-thirds of the country, barely setting off the air defenses that the Syrians had paid Russia millions to construct.
In minutes they swooped over the tiny town of al-Kibar and left a pile of concrete, rebar, and rubble on the eastern banks of the Euphrates River. They had splintered apart a baseball-diamond-sized building that the Syrians had been working on, in deepest secrecy, for more than six years. The jets then disappeared over Turkey, dropping their empty fuel tanks as they circled back to their bases. Operation Orchard, as the Israelis had code-named it, was executed so quickly that the Syrians needed time to figure out what had happened to their prized project in the desert, much less what to say about it.
To no one's surprise, the Syrians’ first instinct was to lie. At first a government spokesman would acknowledge only that some Israeli planes had pierced Syrian airspace and fled. A few days later Bashar al-Assad, Syria's brutal but inexperienced ruler, told an interviewer that the planes had hit some empty buildings on a military base. He waved the whole thing away as a wasted mission, an act of folly rather than of war. But satellite images suggested otherwise: They showed Syrian bulldozers swarming over the site, racing to bury all remaining evidence of what had once stood there. Within seven weeks the site had been scraped clean, and a new building appeared on the footprint of the old, to make it far more difficult for international inspectors to collect evidence of what had been there weeks before.
As questions mounted, the Israelis hinted they had hit something really big, something “nuclear related.” Then, uncharacteristically, they shut up. Spinning tales, some Israeli officials told the British press the attack they launched that night was wrapped in such a blanket of security that the pilots themselves did not know where they were headed until they were aloft. That was nonsense. The mission had been discussed for months and planned down to the last precision-guided weapon. But the story about the pilots was part of an elaborate smokescreen that the Israelis spewed out as Jerusalem and Washington tried, each for its own reasons, to keep secret the intelligence about what had stood on that desert site.
For a while, they succeeded. In a series of secret conversations, Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had agreed that any public discussion of the strike—and the nature of the target—could force Assad into a corner. “There was a sense,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told me months later, that “if you play this wrong there could be a war between Israel and Syria. That was the central worry.”1 But the Americans had another concern, on the other side of the world. The airstrike, it turned out, was about a lot more than destroying the crown jewel of a covert nuclear program in Syria.
It was also about North Korea.
What the Israelis had targeted was a nearly completed nuclear reactor built by North Korean engineers in one of the most stunning examples of proliferation in the nuclear age. For six years American spy satellites had watched the mysterious building rise in the desert and analysts had spun out theories about what it could be—everything from a covert nuclear facility to a water treatment plant. The Syrians had disguised its purpose by building it in plain view with no barbed wire, no military guards. Around 2002, they even erected a benign-looking, square industrial wall and roof over the entire site to hide the telltale shape of a reactor.
The deception worked for years. The Americans were suspicious, but they failed to discover the real purpose of the project. Then, one day in late April 2007, Meir Dagan, chief of the Mossad, Israel's legendary intelligence service, called the White House from Israel and asked for an urgent meeting with President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley.
On a Wednesday morning in early May 2007, he slipped unnoticed through a White House gate and was ushered into Hadley's large corner office of the West Wing, diagonally across from the Oval Office. The curtains were drawn, as always, so that passersby entering the West Wing from the White House driveway—or reporters walking to the briefing room—could not see visitors. But in this case the precaution may not have mattered; Dagan is not widely recognized in Washington.
The Israeli spy chief had brought with him a file folder full of photographs. But Dagan's pictures were different from the overhead satellite images that analysts across Washington had been trying to decipher. Thanks to the work of Israeli agents, Dagan spread out a treasure trove of photos taken from inside the facility, inside the curtain walls that satellites could not penetrate. What they showed solved the mystery of al-Kibar.
Hadley had known Dagan, the son of Holocaust survivors, since Bush's first term. The two men were close to the same age, and each was a quiet, behind-the-scenes insider who sat atop the national security apparatus of his nation. When Hadley had been a young member of the National Security Council staff and a midlevel Defense Department official in the early 1970s, Dagan had been running a special antiterrorist unit in the Gaza Strip that reported directly to Ariel Sharon, the gruff Israeli general. By 2002, Dagan had ascended to head the intelligence organization that was constantly on alert to detect threats to Israel. Hadley, the quiet, orderly lawyer, was already deputy national security adviser, working out of a shoebox-size office right next to national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. He joked that he was the “invisible guy in the boring suit standing by the lady in Vogue.”
Hadley moved into Rice's job, and her office, when she became secretary of state at the beginning of Bush's second term. Now, sitting by Hadley's orderly desk, the burly Israeli intelligence chief talked him through each of the photos, some taken three or four years previously, apparently by a Syrian who had been “turned,” or paid handsomely for his snapshot collection. Hadley recognized instantly the obvious signs that the Syrians were building a nuclear reactor, probably for weapons production. There were no electrical lines leading in or out of the facility, nor any of the other telltale signs of a reactor built for the purpose of generating energy.
Then Dagan pulled out his trump card: a photo of two men standing by a car near the nuclear complex. On the right was the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission, Ibrahim Othman. On the left was a man Dagan identified as Chon Chibu, a North Korean who managed the production of fuel at North Korea's main nuclear weapons site at Yongbyon.
In fact, to the American intelligence analysts who were looking at the same pictures, passed on by their Israeli counterparts, the images seemed familiar. Very familiar. The innards of the reactor building bore a striking resemblance to the reactor at North Korea's main nuclear complex half a world away, where the country harvested the plutonium that built its small nuclear arsenal. Even the windows and doors were in the same places. For twenty years analysts had gotten to know Yongbyon intimately: It was number one on the list of potential bombing targets in North Korea, and more recently it was the same reactor that the Bush administration was trying to cajole, bribe, and corner the North Koreans into closing down.
“A carbon copy,” one official who had reviewed the intelligence told me. “You looked at it and said one thing: ‘Shit, the Koreans have been screwing around more than we knew.’”1* It was the first hard evidence that North Korea—the broke, desperate, isolated kingdom of Kim Jong-Il—had found a way to bring in millions of dollars in hard currency by selling its most valuable skill, the manufacturing of nuclear bomb material.
The North Koreans and the Syrians appear to have been working together on the project for the better part of a decade, perhaps back to the end of the Clinton administration. Yet apart from vague suspicions that the two countries were working on something together, perhaps even something nuclear, the American intelligence community never put it all together.
“This would be a scene from Monty Python if it wasn't true,” observed David Rothkopf, who wrote the definitive history of the National Security Council. “In 2003 you had all these war planners gathered in the Situation Room planning to bomb Saddam for nuclear facilities that didn't exist. They're all staring at maps, but it's of the wrong country. Right next door, two of the most spied-on countries on earth are building a reactor.”
“And did we know about it?” Rothkopf asks, shaking his head. “Now that's what I call an intelligence failure.”
The events in Syria underscored the real nature of the North Korean threat—and it wasn't the threat that the Bush administration fixated on from the time its band of hawks, regime-changers, and neocons took office. Throughout much of Bush's first term, both the president and his aides raised the specter that North Korea could unleash an attack on Seoul or Tokyo and, someday, if it made its missiles a bit more reliable and accurate, on the West Coast of the United States. Their motives were pretty transparent: A North Korea with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles was the poster child for the need for missile defense. Donald Rumsfeld himself had made that case in a lengthy study published two years before he became Bush's defense secretary.2*
It was a pretty far-fetched justification. Kim Jong-Il may be strange, but he isn't stupid, and he knows that any direct attack would result in the obliteration of his lucrative family business: the North Korean state. The real risk was that in his desperate search for hard currency Kim would sell his country's only marketable expertise—how to make bomb fuel—or, worse, that he would sell whatever excess fuel he had lying around. The North Korean threat was about proliferation, not missiles.
Yet until North Korea's nuclear test in October 2006, President Bush never explicitly warned the North Koreans about the consequences for the country if it was ever caught proliferating. What Bush didn't know until nine months later was that Kim Jong-Il had been crossing the proliferation red line for years in Syria, undetected by American intelligence agencies that had been looking at all the right buildings but were unable to figure out what was happening inside. The Syrian case was, as one senior intelligence official told me later, “the Iraq mistake in reverse.” In Iraq, he said, the agency had connected dots that were not there and sent up warnings of a revived nuclear program that no longer existed. In Syria, it failed to put the pieces together until the Israelis arrived with the crucial bits of the puzzle. Adding to the embarrassment, the whole project was happening less than a hundred miles from the Iraqi border.
“We've had lots of suspicions,” Hadley once told me as we flew together on a small plane that took him on one of his low-profile trips to Russia, “but no solid evidence.”
Until now.
As Hadley thumbed his way through the Israeli evidence with Dagan at his side, he knew what was coming next: It was only a matter of time before Olmert, seeking to restore his reputation after being humiliated in the battle for Lebanon the previous summer, would demand that the United States destroy this reactor in the desert, or stand back while Israel took care of the problem itself. There was a famous precedent: the Israeli attack on an Iraqi reactor a quarter-century before. America joined the condemnation of that strike at the time and ended up thanking the Israelis years later.
Hadley immediately sent Dagan across the river to Langley, Virginia, to show his portfolio of pictures to Hayden, the director of the CIA. The next day Hayden used his regular Thursday briefing to describe to Bush the detailed Israeli intelligence. Bush quickly ordered that the CIA coordinate the analysis and that the agency's reports be restricted to a handful of officials. Even before the analysis came back, he had Rice and Hadley engage the Israelis, in hopes of dissuading them from immediately launching an attack that his entire national security team feared could set the region aflame.
Bush administration officials have never acknowledged publicly that they debated whether the United States should take out the North Korean-Syrian project. But in interviews, two senior officials told me that Bush seriously considered ordering an American military strike on the reactor. Not long after Dagan's visit, the Pentagon developed a detailed plan for a lightning strike—similar to the one that Israel ultimately carried out.
“It was discussed, in the Oval, more than once,” said one senior administration official who participated in the drafting of option papers and the subsequent deliberations. “The thinking was that if we did it instead of Israel, there was less of a risk of it turning into a broader Middle East war.”
Bush's top aides declined to discuss how close the United States came to striking Syria. But Hadley told me that in his mind, the reactor did not meet the standards of the “Bush Doctrine” for a preemptive strike. The CIA declared that because so much was missing at al-Kibar—including the equipment needed to convert reactor waste into bomb fuel—the United States could prove only that Syria was developing the capability to build a bomb, not that it was intending to produce one. It was exactly the kind of parsing of the intelligence-facts versus assessments, capabilities versus intentions—that never took place prior to the invasion of Iraq. In this case, post-Iraq caution had kicked in, and the intelligence agencies, aware that they could not survive a second big mistake, made clear to Bush that what they could prove was very different from what they suspected.
Based on the evidence at hand, the official said, “we had low confidence that it's part of a weapons program.” And in the end, Bush decided he could not order another military strike on a state he accused of possessing a program to build weapons of mass destruction. Despite his repeated insistence in recent years that invading Iraq was the right decision, he had learned a bitter lesson.
Instead, he and Rice pressured the Israelis to agree to a different approach—diplomacy with deadlines. “We had an alternative plan,” Condoleezza Rice later told me, “that involved going rapidly to the United Nations, exposing the program, and demanding that it be immediately dismantled.”2 The thinking was that while Iran had the money and the clout to resist such pressure, Syria did not.
To the Israelis, it was a remarkable turnabout. The administration that justified its invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein's weapons programs posed an imminent danger was now arguing for a more patient, diplomatic approach—despite the fact that the Syrian reactor project was far more sophisticated than anything Saddam had under way in 2003. “It was laughable logic,” a senior Israeli official told me later. “Whatever happened to the George Bush who said that after 9/11, we could not let threats fester?”
Olmert was unmoved. Diplomacy at the United Nations, he and his top aides responded, mirrored how the world had been reacting to Iran's nuclear program. The result, he argued, had been nothing short of disastrous: The Iranians had only sped up. Syria would not be allowed to go down the same road, Olmert declared. Moreover, his deputies argued that it was far safer to strike the plant before it was loaded with nuclear fuel. Striking it later risked spreading radioactive material in a dust cloud that could be carried over neighboring countries.
Bush's aides could not argue with that logic—after all, it echoed their own justification for the preemptive strike on Iraq. But they suspected that Olmert, already under investigation for taking campaign donations illegally, may have seen merit in rallying the country around a strike. “They thought this was Osirak all over again,” one senior American official told me later. He was referring to Iraq's first large nuclear reactor, started in the late 1970s when Saddam Hussein had visions of making Iraq into a nuclear power. And it was also the site of one of Israel's finest military moments, a daring raid in 1981 that left the reactor a pile of smoldering pieces, infuriating Saddam and setting back his effort to obtain the plutonium he needed to make a weapon.
Olmert must have remembered well what Osirak did for the reputation of Menachem Begin, the take-no-prisoners prime minister whose reelection resulted partly from the sheer daring of that surprise strike on Saddam's nuclear plant. In Syria, Olmert had a chance to steal a little of Begin's magic. He had taken office only when Ariel Sharon was suddenly disabled by a horrible stroke. He had no military credentials and was still reeling from Israel's botched confrontation with Hezbollah the previous summer. The credibility of Israel's deterrent capability had been damaged by its tepid and ineffective actions in Lebanon. For Olmert, more was at stake than simply stopping a Syrian nuclear program in its infancy. He had to, in the words of one of his top aides, “restore our deterrent capability—and send a message to the mullahs.”
“We had post-Iraq syndrome,” one senior American official told me later, summarizing the furious debate between the two capitals, “and the Israelis had preemption syndrome.”
After arguing with the administration over the summer, Olmert approved a plan for the attack. Though they had debated the issue tirelessly with Rice, Hadley, and Bush himself, in the end the Israelis did what they wanted to do from the start. They were careful not to inform Washington of the precise timing so that both nations could claim, with technical accuracy, that the Americans had not known about the attack in advance. Back in Washington, the president who had once sworn to act decisively against “the world's worst dictators” seeking “the world's worst weapons” fell into a deep public silence after the Israeli strike. At a press conference a few days later, he refused three times to answer questions about the attack.
Hadley, in New York at the end of September for the opening of the United Nations session, visited the editorial board of The New York Times. He was asked if he wanted to go off the record to explain what had been blown up that night in the desert and whether it indicated that the wave of proliferation long feared in the Middle East might finally be upon us. He looked at his questioner, Bill Keller, the Times's executive editor, and paused. Then he looked around at the rest of us—editorial writers, columnists, editors, and reporters gathered in a glass-wrapped room in the Times's new headquarters overlooking midtown Manhattan. He knew that a team of reporters was working on breaking the story of what exactly the Israelis had hit in Syria, and he wasn't about to help.
“Off the record?” Hadley said drolly, breaking into a smile. “The president has spoken on this. Off the record, no comment.”3
BY THE END of its eight years in office, the Bush administration tried to portray its encounters with North Korea as evidence that George Bush had learned the art of patient diplomacy—and had been rewarded with success. That argument was half right. There was a huge change of approach between the first term and the second. But the mistakes that Bush made with North Korea in his first few years in office ended up haunting him for the rest of his term, leaving Obama with a far more complicated nuclear standoff. By the time Bush started backpedaling, it was simply too late: North Korea had accumulated all the weapons fuel it needed, and did not appear about to give it up.
The first term was dominated by Dick Cheney and his cadre of regime-changers, determined to push the government of Kim Jong-Il over a cliff. At every step of the way, teaming up with Rumsfeld, Cheney did all he could to ensure that negotiations with North Koreans were doomed to fail, down to banning negotiators from shaking hands or partaking in toasts with their North Korean counterparts.
Not surprisingly, these calculated insults and the first-term negotiating tactics did not succeed in bringing about a crashing end to Kim's regime. Cutting off banking relationships and using covert action had not worked either. During Bush's second term, humbled a bit by the realities of what was unfolding in Iraq, and recognizing that neither the North Koreans nor their weapons were going away, the administration resorted to the traditional approach for dealing with small hostile states: actual negotiations. Condoleezza Rice, her perspective on diplomacy altered a bit by her new role as secretary of state, brought in a seasoned negotiator, Christopher Hill, who wanted a deal—too much, in the eyes of his critics. Together, he and Rice conspired to cut Cheney out of the picture. When Rumsfeld was fired, his replacement, Bob Gates, generally sided with Rice and strengthened the State Department's approach within the administration.
Not wanting to involve the United States in another military conflict, Gates knew that negotiations had to be pursued. “Bob's view,” one of his top aides said, “was that he was brought into this job to solve three problems—Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq—and he doesn't need a crisis in Asia.”
But Hill recognized that during the first term Bush had dug himself into a hole. On Bush's watch, the North Koreans had built up an impressive arsenal. They had gone from an unconfirmed one or two weapons to eight or twelve; no one knew for sure. They were unlikely to give it all up for any price.
So Hill did the best he could with the hand he was dealt. He got Kim to agree to the shutdown of the Yongbyon reactor, the same reactor the Syrians were trying to replicate, thereby ensuring that the arsenal would not get significantly larger. One day in the summer of 2008, the North Koreans even blew up the cooling tower of their reactor. Hill had choreographed the whole thing, including a near-simultaneous announcement by Bush that he would start the process to take North Korea off the list of countries that support terrorism, thereby clearing the way for more economic interchange with North Korea than at any other time since the armistice that ended the Korean War. In Bush's last months, to no one's surprise, the whole deal constantly appeared on the verge of unraveling.
Nonetheless, Bush's announcement was a stunning reversal for a president who had essentially declared that he would deal with the North Koreans only after they gave up their weapons and closed their gulags. Just how stunning was evident to anyone who ran into Cheney. A few days before the deal was announced, he was asked about the impending agreement at an off-the-record briefing in the Old Executive Office Building, just across the street from the West Wing. He froze, according to four participants who had been engaged in the half-hour-long question-and-answer period.
Then he snapped, “I'm not going to be the one to announce this decision. You need to address your interest in this to the State Department.” Done taking questions, he immediately left the room.4
A few days later I asked Rice about this incident during a conversation in her office. She smiled broadly, and said nothing.
THE MESSAGE the Bush administration hoped to send out by reaching the deal with North Korea was clear: North Korea is run by a bizarre despot, but it is on the road to disarmament. It is a country tamed, if not yet defanged.
The truth was a lot more complicated. Few despots had benefited more from Washington's distraction during the Iraq War than Kim Jong-Il. In early 2003, the North threw out international inspectors and, in full view of U.S. spy satellites, took the last steps needed to convert spent reactor fuel into material for six to eight bombs. That was the critical moment if the Bush administration was ever to intervene, diplomatically or militarily. It did neither.
January through March 2003 were the crucial months when the White House was rolling out a detailed strategy to convince the world that Saddam Hussein had to be confronted, immediately. It could not be bothered with WMD on the other side of the globe. When the Times published front-page stories describing, contemporaneously, the nuclear weapons fuel that was being produced half a world away while Bush was headed to Iraq, Rice and other administration officials complained that we were focused on the wrong story. It was Saddam, living in a more dangerous neighborhood, who posed the far more potent threat. In 2008, when I reviewed this history with a key member of Bush's national security team, he appeared to have forgotten that these two events were playing out simultaneously.
“What month was this?” he asked.
“This was February of ‘03,” I said. There was a long pause, and then he said: “Had a few other things on our mind. …We missed a couple of things.”5
It turned out that missing “a couple of things” had real consequences. North Korea became the nuclear renegade that got away.
Within three years, Kim Jong-Il had conducted North Korea's first nuclear test in an effort to shout to the world that even a broke, backward country could play in the nuclear club. Today it looks as though that test was more akin to a lab experiment than a bomb, which explains why it ended in a fizzle, not a boom.3* But it was enough of an explosion for Kim to send the message that he had sufficient nuclear material to slip to a terrorist group and the technology to show them how to make at least a crude bomb. It was convincing enough to move the administration toward diplomacy. But by that time a problem the White House had ignored for most of the first term, North Korea's expanding nuclear program had grown infinitely more complicated.
After six wasted years, Bush deserves credit for some modest progress. Getting North Korea to dismantle its reactor was something Clinton never accomplished—even if Bush left office with the North Koreans threatening to rebuild it. But Bush's inattention during the first term—or rather his obsession with Saddam's phantom programs rather than Kim's real ones—left his successor to face the hardest part of the Korea problem: persuading a desperately insecure regime to give up its arsenal. To the North Korean leadership, these weapons are the last thing keeping the country from being rolled over by its richer, fast-growing neighbors who have come to view the North the way wealthy New Yorkers view blighted, crime-ridden parts of the city: Wouldn't it be a lot nicer as an office park? “If you were Kim,” asked Art Brown, the former top CIA officer who handled North Korea issues for decades, “would you give up the only thing that has protected your regime from collapse?”
Even the hawks who wanted to push North Korea over the brink, causing its regime to collapse, believe that the White House lost its focus. “If you are looking for the place where Iraq really distracted them, where we really paid the price, it was North Korea,” Robert Joseph, a former undersecretary for arms control and international security and one of the creators of the squeeze-them-until-they-expire approach, told me one day over coffee, months after he had left the State Department in disgust. He had walked out after writing a letter to Condoleezza Rice, his longtime friend, arguing that by negotiating with North Korea and providing them with a million tons of oil and lifting sanctions, she and Bush had flipped 180 degrees, and now were propping up an odious regime. On that point there is little dispute. The administration spent the first term praying for North Korea to implode. When that failed, it spent the second term trying to get back the weapons built during the first term.
It's questionable whether Joseph's strategy of “tailored containment” of North Korea, which Bush partially embraced, would ever have brought the country to its knees. Every American president since Harry Truman has dreamed of watching the North Korean regime collapse on his watch. Every single one left office frustrated and disappointed. When Clinton signed a deal in 1994 that ended the first North Korean nuclear crisis, many in his administration whispered that the North Korean regime would collapse before the United States, Japan, and South Korea had to make good on their part of the bargain: building “proliferation-resistant” nuclear reactors for the country. Clinton's chief negotiator, Robert Gallucci, warned his colleagues not to bet on North Korea's demise.
For all his combative rhetoric and withering criticism of his predecessor's Korea policy, Bush fell into the same trap as the most optimistic of the Clintonites. And when the hated regime declined to collapse, the president who vowed never to “tolerate” a nuclear North Korea had little choice but to cut a deal.
To broker that deal, Bush had to walk back from his insistence that the North Koreans come clean about Syria and about what they did with a pile of equipment they bought from A. Q. Khan that could give them a second pathway to a bomb.
“I'd say the score is Kim Jong-Il eight, and Bush zero,” Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and author of one of the leading studies on nuclear terrorism, told me in April 2008 after the CIA made public the photos of the Syrian raid and evidence. “If you can build a reactor in Syria without being detected for eight years, how hard can it be to sell a little plutonium to Osama bin Laden?”
1* It took five weeks after the Israeli raid to break the story of what the Syrians had built—and even that story elicited no public response from the administration. (David E. Sanger and Mark Mazzetti, “Analysts Find Israel Struck a Syrian Nuclear Project,” The New York Times, October 14, 2007, p. 1.) Within days, commercial satellite photographs of the site began to appear, showing what the buildings looked like before the attack, and the Syrian effort to bulldoze the rubble and hide the evidence. The CIA released some of the Israeli photographs of the inside of the reactor in April 2008.
2* Known popularly as “The Rumsfeld Commission,” the group was formally titled “The Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States.”
3* In their declaration accounting for nuclear materials in the spring of 2008, the North Koreans said they used two kilograms of plutonium to conduct the test. That is too small an amount to make a weapon, and, if accurate, would explain why the explosion was less than a kiloton.