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The Silent Strike: How Israel Bombed a Syrian Nuclear Installation and Kept It Secret

(New Yorker) David Makovsky - In March 2007, agents from the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, made a daring raid into the Vienna home of Ibrahim Othman, the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. The Mossad operatives recovered three dozen color photographs taken from inside a top-secret Syrian plutonium nuclear reactor. The photographs showed North Korean workers and the reactor, from the inside, had many of the same engineering elements as the North Korean reactor in Yongbyon. After the discovery of the Syrian site, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert informed the White House. The Bush Administration felt that it didn't have enough evidence to justify a pre-emptive strike, and so the Israelis began preparations for an attack on their own. On September 5, 2007, four F-15s and four F-16s took off and used standard electronic scrambling tools to blind Syria's air-defense system before dropping 17 tons of explosives on their target. However, the situation in Iran differs fundamentally from the Syrian case. Experts have pointed to the risk of civilian casualties and prolonged retaliation.
2012-09-10 00:00:00
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