In My Time - Dick Cheney [246]
I am aware of no greater example of selfless service than America’s special operations forces. Someday when the full history of this period can be written, all Americans will know the contributions they made to defend our freedom and our way of life.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Setback
In the fall of 2006, as violence in Iraq was still escalating, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test, setting off an explosion at the Punggye test site some two hundred forty miles northeast of Pyongyang. When the blast was detected, it was Sunday evening, October 8, in Washington, D.C. The next morning President Bush went before the cameras in the Diplomatic Reception Room to condemn the test and issue a warning:
The North Korean regime remains one of the world’s leading proliferators of missile technology, including transfers to Iran and Syria. The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequences of such action.
Six months later we received intelligence that a threat of this nature had materialized. I learned about it in detail one afternoon in mid-April 2007, in National Security Advisor Steve Hadley’s office. I was seated in one of Steve’s large blue wing chairs and he was to my left. Two Israeli officials were on the sofa to my right. Meir Dagan, director of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, pulled materials from his briefcase and spread them on the coffee table in front of us. For the next hour, Dagan showed us photos of a building in the Syrian desert at a place called al-Kibar. It was a nuclear reactor.
Additional photographs, which the intelligence community would later make public, showed key parts of the reactor as it was being built, vertical tube openings in the top for control rods and refueling, a reinforced concrete reactor vessel with a steel lining. Satellite imagery showed pipes that would supply water from the Euphrates for the cooling process. The Syrians had tried to hide what they were doing, locating the plant in a wadi, or valley, so it couldn’t be seen from the ground, constructing unnecessary walls and false roofs so that its purpose wouldn’t be clear from the air. But Israeli intelligence knew what it was: a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated nuclear reactor.
Important clues about the reactor’s intended purpose came from what the photographs didn’t show. There were no power lines coming out of it, none of the switching facilities that would be present if its purpose were to produce electricity. It was not near any power grid.
What the Israelis, and later our own intelligence agencies, did see was a striking resemblance to the North Korean reactor located at Yongbyon, sixty miles north of Pyongyang, which the North Koreans used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. The Syrian reactor was similar in size and capacity. Side-by-side photographs showed the vertical tubes in the Syrian reactor arranged in ways strikingly similar to those in Yongbyon. The fact that the North Koreans were the only ones who had built such a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor in the past thirty-five years pointed to them as the source for what the Syrians were building in the desert.
According to a briefing by senior U.S. intelligence officials, “sustained nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Syria” likely began “as early as 1997.” There had been multiple visits by senior North Koreans from Yongbyon to Syria before construction began at al-Kibar in 2001, and, according to the intelligence community, subsequent contacts as well. In a briefing provided for the press on April 24, 2008, senior U.S. intelligence officials explained:
In 2002, North Korean officials were procuring equipment for an undisclosed site in Syria. North Korea, that same year, sought a gas-cooled reactor component we believe was intended for the Syrian site. A North Korean nuclear organization and Syrian officials involved in the covert