A former high-ranking Iranian military official was responsible for tipping off Western nations to Syria's alleged effort to build a nuclear reactor, a former German defense official wrote yesterday. His account offers many new details about events leading up to Israel's destruction of the facility in September 2007 (see GSN, March 6).
(Mar. 20) -
Members of former Iranian Deputy Defense Minister Ali Reza Asghari's family gather at the Turkish Embassy in Tehran after he disappeared in Turkey in 2007. A former German official wrote this week that Asghari defected and revealed the existence of a Syrian nuclear reactor (Getty Images).
Ali Reza Asghari, a former Iranian deputy defense minister and a retired general from Iran's Revolutionary Guards, "changed sides" to the West in February 2007, says the article in yesterday's Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung, the Associated Press reported. While offering information about Iran's nuclear activities, Asghari also reported that Tehran was funding Syria's construction of a plutonium-production reactor using North Korean design and technical assistance.
"No one in the American intelligence scene had heard anything of it. And the Israelis who were immediately informed also were completely unaware," wrote Hans Ruehle, former planning chief at the German Defense Ministry.
Asghari's disclosure triggered a rapid investigation, and intelligence services reviewed information about North Korean ships delivering building materials to Syria as far back as 2002. Then, shortly before mid-August 2007, a North Korean supply ship was intercepted carrying nuclear fuel rods, Ruehle wrote.
Israel quickly flew a 12-man commando team to the Syrian site in the desert near al-Kibar in August 2007 to take photographs and soil samples, Ruehle reported. The results definitively showed the site to be a North Korean-type reactor.
A few weeks later, seven Israeli F-15 fighter aircraft fired 22 rockets at the facility after entering Syrian airspace from the Mediterranean coast, Ruehle reported.
"The Syrians were completely surprised. By the time their air defense systems were ready, the Israeli planes were well out of range. The mission was successful, the reactor destroyed," Ruehle said.
A U.S. counterproliferation official questioned parts of Ruehle's account.
"There is strong reason to believe that only two countries were involved in building the Syrian covert nuclear reactor at al-Kibar -- Syria and North Korea," the official told the Associated Press (Alexander Higgins, Associated Press/Google News, March 19).