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Iranian Defector Reportedly Tipped Off U.S. on Syria Nuke Plant

[AP/Fox News] A retired general in Iran's Revolutionary Guards, former deputy defense minister Ali Reza Asghari, who defected to the U.S. in February 2007, revealed that Iran was financing North Korean moves to make Syria into a nuclear weapons power, leading to the Israeli air strike on Sept. 6, 2007, that destroyed Syria's nearly completed Al Kabir reactor, the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported Thursday. The article was written by Hans Ruehle, former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense Ministry. "No one in the American intelligence scene had heard anything of it. And the Israelis who were immediately informed also were completely unaware," he said. Israel sent a 12-man commando unit in two helicopters to the site in August 2007 to take photographs and soil samples. "The analysis was conclusive that it was a North Korean-type reactor," a gas graphite model, Ruehle said. Other sources have suggested that the reactor might have been large enough to make about one nuclear weapon's worth of plutonium a year. Israel estimates that Iran paid North Korea between $1 billion and $2 billion for the project, Ruehle said.
2009-03-20 06:00:00
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