Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (30 page)

“The North Koreans built this. Of course they did. It’s a copy of Yongbyon, and the Koreans are the only ones who have built this kind of reactor since the British gave up on the design in the 1960s. But we haven’t had eyes on. We haven’t seen Koreans there except one group in one of the handheld photos. So we’re giving this to you with medium confidence.

“This is part of a Syrian weapons program. Of course it is. There are no other obvious uses for it and a weapons program is the only thing that would justify such a high-stakes gamble.

“But Mr. President, I can’t find the other parts of a weapons program. No reprocessing facility. No weaponization effort that we can see. So I can only give this to you with low confidence.”

In the silence that followed, Condi said something about wishing she had had some qualifying caveats like this a few years earlier.

Then the president observed that his preemption policy demanded a threat be imminent before we would act. Our estimate of low confidence in a weapons program made that very difficult to justify, and therefore, the president declared, “We will
not
strike the facility.”

Intelligence usually sets the right- and left-hand boundaries of policy discussion; it defines the limits of options. It is rarely as determinative as it was that day. It was like intelligence and policy were connected by a 1:1 gear ratio.

We stayed there quite a while discussing the point. Only the vice president offered a dissenting view. He believed that we needed to send a strong message not only to Syria and North Korea, but also to Iran. An
American strike would do just that and would be relatively easy to accomplish, since al-Kibar was isolated and distant from any civilian centers. But I sensed that there was little appetite in the room to suddenly bomb a country without warning or announced justification and feed regional fears of a permanent America bent toward preemptive war.

In the end, the president decided our approach would be to go public about the reactor as part of an overall package to unsettle Assad and make a series of demands on him. We preserved the option of force, but in the president’s mind the real issue was Assad and overall Syrian policy, not just the reactor. Handled well, the coming crisis could give us unexpected leverage on a host of issues: Syrian support to Hamas and Hezbollah; the foreign fighter pipeline into Iraq; Damascus’s continued meddling in Lebanon; Syria’s alignment with Iran.

Syria had been a regular theme in White House policy discussions, largely along the lines of peeling the Syrians off from their Iranian sponsors or, as Steve Hadley often put it, “flipping Assad.” In geopolitical theory it made some sense, since Damascus was by far the weaker partner to Tehran. But real progress was something else. Assad acted like he thought that this was all about
him
—regime change, in other words—and he even allowed his intelligence chief and brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat (with whom we were trying to cooperate on the foreign fighter flow to Iraq), to pass a message to us that what Damascus saw from the United States was pressure, unrelenting pressure and only pressure. Not a formula to entice a defection.

We really weren’t trying to overthrow Assad, but CIA was expected to analyze what would likely follow him. In any orderly succession (read internal power struggle), we expected the follow-on regime to remain Alawite-dominated with a strong security service and military flavor, perhaps even with Bashar staying on as some sort of figurehead. We also judged that a botched attempt against Alawite rule could quickly descend into chaos. That path would strengthen the hand of the Muslim Brotherhood and Kurdish separatists, since they were the best-organized opposition in the country. The only way that the weak and divided liberal
opponents to the regime would play a role required a slow demise of the government, giving them time to get their act together.

I have since wondered how much of that analysis saw the light of day when Syria began its descent into hell in March 2011, when regime security forces arrested about a dozen youths in Daraa for painting anti-Assad graffiti.

In 2007, though, our problem was a nuclear reactor, and the first steps in the president’s plan—going public about al-Kibar and then waiting for IAEA inspectors to verify its nature—could not be done without the concurrence of the country with whom we had first discovered it. After all, a lot of this was based on their data. It didn’t take long for them to make it clear that they could not wait for a long-term diplomatic gambit, even one sponsored by the United States and one that seemed to promise eventual American action. They would not agree.

And so we waited. While we did, if we weren’t going to strike, we had to be careful to not even encourage anyone else to do so. We had to step back a little. The uninformed often think that intelligence agencies are lawless. Some are, but those in mature democracies, especially this one, are not. And we cannot enable someone to do something (even in their own national interest) that we are not authorized to do ourselves. We had no authority to bomb. We couldn’t help anyone else do it, either.

So we could continue intelligence cooperation to understand the situation and gauge when the plant might go hot. But we wouldn’t share anything that would directly contribute to targeting the facility—things like advice on weaponeering, or aim points or imagery so precise that it could help in what was called target mensuration—the precise calculations required to be sure that a weapon will create the desired effects. It was sometimes a fine line, but it was a real one.

But the clock was ticking. The facility was externally complete, the cooling system was being readied, and we had no idea when uranium would be introduced. A strike after activation was problematic; if that happened, the attacker would be blamed for every thyroid problem in the Middle East for the next half century.

On the night of September 6 the reactor at al-Kibar was destroyed. Later, when quizzed about any American role, Steve Hadley accurately noted, “No green light was asked for. No green light was given.”

The strike force had no apparent problems with Syrian air defenses and, based on post-strike imagery, pretty much had their way with the target. The false walls and roof were blown away, revealing the damage done by delayed-fuse weapons on the steel and concrete sarcophagus that would have held the core. It was a nuclear reactor, all right.

Now the trick was keeping a lid on any Syrian (over)reaction. I talked often by phone with that tough, tireless liaison chief who originally brought the pictures into my office in April. He and his staff were inclined to think that a successful strike could be pulled off
without
a Syrian response if everyone would just keep quiet about it and not attempt to humiliate Assad. Not many Syrians, not even high-ranking officials, would have known about the site, they reasoned. Bashar may want to let this one pass without issue rather than putting himself on the
X
again as he did during the 2005 withdrawal from Lebanon. We needed to give him space to “climb back off the ledge.”

I wasn’t as optimistic, but certainly agreed that there was no upside to thumping our chest about this, so we were as secretive after the strike as we were before.

Press stories began to emerge almost immediately, but reporters were finding it hard to describe exactly what had happened and why. I experienced more than a little schadenfreude on the seventh floor at Langley as the press struggled to connect the dots. “Not as easy as it looks, is it?” I said one morning to no one in particular as I surveyed my daily press clips.

The Syrians certainly weren’t filling in any blank spaces for journalists with their misleading talk of repulsing a strike on some nondescript desert garrison. They also quietly destroyed what was left of the reactor hall, paved it over, and topped the location with what looked like a metal warehouse.

Of course, keeping this under wraps before, during, and after the
strike had a congressional component to it. The law requires Congress be kept fully and currently informed of all “significant intelligence activities,” and this certainly fit that description.

But we kept the Hill group small—just the leadership of the two intelligence committees. To avoid curious Hill staff we had our first session that spring in the DNI spaces at Bolling Air Force Base, just across the Anacostia River from Congress’s own secure facilities. It was all pretty straightforward. We weren’t asking them to do or approve anything.

But as fall 2007 rolled toward winter, the four members who had been briefed were getting pretty impatient.
They
knew what the facility was and that it had been destroyed, and congressional leadership always has a hard time explaining to other members why they acquiesced in limiting who got briefed when things finally go public. With the recent furor over limited briefings on surveillance and detention and with a presidential election in the offing, there was little residual tolerance on the Hill. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House side, was often livid (and vocal) about the limitations.

Over time, after the strike, the agency began to slide to the congressional side on this one. Bashar had pretty much crawled back in off the ledge and was very unlikely to strike back now. Besides, as part of the permanent government, CIA saw little upside in alienating the leaders of its oversight committees. We were going to be here a lot longer than the administration.

But there was another, powerfully compelling reason. The administration was in the final stretch of negotiating a nuclear deal with the North Koreans. Ambassador Chris Hill was using his deep experience with the Koreans to get something on paper before the end of the administration. I had negotiated with the North Koreans at Panmunjom and in Geneva; they were maddening. I can only imagine how difficult Chris’s work must have been.

But he was now negotiating a deal with a country that had just been caught red-handed in the single greatest act of nuclear proliferation in history. And they hadn’t been called on it!

The president had committed to keeping this secret at the request of our ally, but by our reckoning we were well past the time when we had to do that to keep Assad in the box. We were now in a period where we needed to make it more public to avoid a North Korean nuclear deal being sold to a Congress and a public ignorant of this very pertinent and very recent episode.

We pressed hard at deputies and principals meetings of the NSC to brief multiple committees on the Hill—Intelligence, Defense, Foreign Affairs—while also recommending simultaneously rolling out a lot of the story publicly. That was a natural complement to briefing Congress. The story would be out after briefing so many committees no matter what we did, so it made sense for the administration to get it out there unfiltered.

It was the right thing to do. And we were hardly opposed to putting an intelligence
success
story—even a limited one—out there for a change. Agency veterans well remembered George Tenet sitting behind Colin Powell at the United Nations during the secretary of state’s 2003 speech condemning Iraq for its weapons of mass destruction. Some were discomfited by the very image of the nation’s intelligence chief in such a high-profile, politically charged image. Now, however, most were happy enough to publicly put one in the win column.

Steve Hadley finally took our side, but he had a condition. He wanted a movie. “Only with a movie,” he reasoned, “can we show that we got this one right.”

So we took the unusual step of crafting a video showing both the handheld photos and our own satellite shots. We added references to other sources of intelligence and laid out the logic trail that got us to “high confidence” that this was a reactor.

The movie didn’t threaten for best documentary or best special effects that year, but one CIA analyst correctly observed, “I don’t know how you could have more effectively conveyed the story in eleven minutes. . . . It took the life out of intel failure accusations.”

In late April, a year after this all started, we briefed six Hill
committees and then backgrounded the press at Langley. It had taken so long to get to Congress that we got little credit for the belated transparency. Pete Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the Intelligence Committee in the House, was so angry that he threatened to crash the press briefing scheduled for later that afternoon. My office told his staff that his entry onto the campus wasn’t guaranteed, since he had not been invited to the press backgrounder. Thankfully, he stayed away.

New York Times
chief Washington correspondent David Sanger was at the backgrounder. No slouch at these kinds of things, he later commented that it was “a remarkable briefing.” Following the video, Steve Hadley, Mike McConnell, and I were leaning pretty far forward describing both the intelligence we had and the sequence of events.

So we chalked this one up as an intelligence success, after a fashion. Lord knows we were just in time and, even then, had needed help from our friends. Our analysis that it was a reactor proved correct, but our analysis of likely Syrian actions was not. And this certainly wasn’t a HUMINT success. In fact, human intelligence had been sorely lacking.

Part of that could be chalked up to the reality that only a very small circle of Syrian officials had been witting, making the pool of potential HUMINT sources pretty shallow.
*
Still, American HUMINT had not tipped us off.

The whole episode also put into stark relief the problem of thinking about the unthinkable or, as one top analyst put it, “How do you chase down the weird stuff?” especially when you can’t afford to chase all the weird stuff. The Assads, father and son, took this incredibly high risk, and it didn’t even get them close to a nuclear weapon. Their gamble went beyond our understanding of them, perhaps fed by their pervasive sense of insecurity or a determination to get strategic parity with Israel or a desire to be the preeminent Arab state.

Interestingly, Korean engineers paid a return visit to the al-Kibar site after it had been destroyed. That raised speculation that this could have been a Korean facility in Syria with plutonium being shipped back to Pyongyang, perhaps in return for a weapon later. Probably not, but since it did show that Pyongyang had few, if any, redlines, we began to scour the globe for places where they might try to reprise the al-Kibar gamble.