In My Time - Dick Cheney [247]
Over the last several years I had seen intelligence reports of officials with ties to North Korea’s nuclear program making repeated visits to Damascus, and I had asked questions. Are the North Koreans and the Syrians cooperating on nuclear technology? We know the North Koreans are assisting the Syrians in the area of ballistic missile technology. How do we know that they aren’t also providing nuclear assistance? We believed that the North Koreans provided uranium hexafluoride, the basic feedstock from which enriched uranium can be created, to the Libyans. Why wouldn’t they do the same for the Syrians?
The answers I got back were inconclusive. I kept hearing that there was “no evidence” of nuclear cooperation. Listening to Dagan tell the story of the reactor at al-Kibar on that April afternoon in the West Wing, I realized that not only was there evidence, but it was actually very solid.
In addition to information about the facility, there were also photographs of some of the people involved. One, taken in Syria, showed the man in charge of North Korea’s nuclear reactor fuel manufacturing plant at Yongbyon standing next to the leader of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. A second photo showed the same North Korean official in his country’s delegation at the six-party talks—the talks we initiated in 2003 as a multilateral effort to get the North Koreans to give up their nuclear program. It was pretty remarkable—even for the North Koreans—for a member of their negotiating team to be spending time, when he wasn’t at the negotiating table, proliferating nuclear technology to Syria.
The discovery of the reactor sparked an in-depth policy debate inside the White House about what our response should be. The Israelis were requesting that we launch an air strike to destroy the plant, an idea I supported. I believed an American military strike on the reactor would send an important message not only to the Syrians and North Koreans, but also to the Iranians, with whom we were attempting to reach a diplomatic agreement to end their nuclear program. An American strike to destroy the Syrian reactor would demonstrate that we were serious when we warned—as we had for years—against the proliferation of nuclear technology to terrorist states. The Syrian plant was isolated from any civilian population center, and it was a clear and distinct target standing out in the eastern desert. We certainly had the capacity to take it out with ease, and doing so would go a long way toward reminding our adversaries that we would not, as the president had said, “permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” I believed that our diplomacy would have a far greater chance of being effective if the North Koreans and Iranians understood that they faced the possibility of military action if the diplomacy failed.
Most of our discussions about the al-Kibar reactor took place in the weekly small group meetings that Steve Hadley had begun hosting in his office during the second term. The sessions were similar to the weekly breakfasts Brent Scowcroft had hosted when he was President George H. W. Bush’s national security advisor with Secretary of State Jim Baker and me. The Hadley sessions were larger, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of national intelligence, and the head of the CIA present, as well as Secretaries Rice and Gates, Hadley, and me. We met without staff and had some of the best policy discussions of our time in office. We exchanged ideas and debated without worrying that our deliberations would leak, as they sometimes did when there were more people in the room.
In a session in Hadley’s office in the spring of 2007, as we discussed options for a response to the discovery of the Syrian reactor, those who opposed any military action expressed the view that a U.S. or Israeli strike could launch a wider regional war. There was also concern that the Syrians might