The story behind Israel’s secret strike on Syria’s nuclear reactor


March 21, 2018
Arthur Goodman
Israel finally acknowledges that its mysterious strike on Syria nearly 10 years ago destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor.

U.S. Government photo of destroyed Syrian nuclear reactor

Ben Caspit, in Al Monitor, writes, “Sometime in late 2006, US Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte visited Israel. According to a security source speaking on condition of anonymity, at a meeting with the heads of Israeli intelligence at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, intelligence branch officers presented a small time bomb. On the margins of the discussion, dealing with various security analyses of Israel’s neighbors, Col. Eli Ben-Meir, head of the technological branch of army intelligence, said that according to his assessments the Syrians were working on an “unconventional weapons project.”

The story of the identification and destruction of the reactor was declassified by the Israeli army on March 21, a little more than a decade after the fact. It is yet to be determined whether the episode stands more as a grave security failure on the part of Israel and the United States, supposedly tracking nuclear exports from North Korea, or a dazzling Israeli success, executed with precision, by eliminating the Syrian nuclear threat.” (read more)

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