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The report also said—citing a “prominent US expert on the Middle East” who had interviewed Israeli participants in the raid—that the timing of the attack was related to the arrival of a ship from North Korea with cargo “labeled as cement” in the Syrian port of Tartous. The source added that the planes targeted an “agricultural research center … on the Euphrates River, close to the Turkish border.” Israel had been monitoring the facility in the belief that Syria was “using it to extract uranium from phosphates.”24 This report seemed to dovetail with known cooperation between 1986 and 1992 as well as between 1992 and 1997 by Syria with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which provided Syria with a “micro-plant” facility to enable yellowcake to be extracted from phosphoric acid produced at a plant outside of Homs—that is, extract uranium from Syrian phosphates.25

There were more reports the next day, this time from the British press, that the raid—code-named Operation Orchard—had involved eight planes using five-hundred-pound bombs and that an Israeli commando team had gone into Syria before the attack to set targeting lasers for the jets. Although Israel continued to deny the reports, AFP (Agence France-Presse) reported that the head of Israeli military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, had told an Israeli Knesset committee that Israel had recovered its deterrent capability lost during its problematic showing in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. The same day, John Bolton—the former US ambassador to the UN, who, in 2003, while undersecretary of state for arms control, voiced concerns to Congress over Syria’s suspected WMD programs—said, “It will be very unusual for Israel to conduct such a military operation inside Syria other [than] for a very high-value target.”26

Because Israel remained silent as well, this seemed to confirm something out of the ordinary, but in Damascus there was no way to get to the bottom of the accusations. The Syrian government completely denied the charges, mostly by ignoring them. Eastern Syria is completely controlled by Syrian military intelligence, which closely monitors all people—especially foreigners—coming and going from the Euphrates Valley, heading east to the Iraqi border. So a trip to the alleged site was impossible without permission from the Ministry of Information, which was not being forthcoming, according to Othaina.

Just as the story started to die, another report brought it back to life. Ron Ben-Yishai, an Israeli reporter with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, wrote a story on September 26 about his trip to the area of the “Syria operation.” It included a photo of him in front of a sign for the Deir Ezzor research station of the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD). Never before had an Israeli journalist filed a story from Syria, let alone from an area directly under the control of military intelligence. What made the story stick in my mind was that Yishai was allowed to interview local people, who told him, “There were a few Israeli planes here that made supersonic booms over the city and maybe even dropped something.” What was even stranger was that Yishai interviewed a Syrian journalist, who told him that “all this talk about supposed tensions following an overflight of fighter planes is only meant to intimidate Israel” and who also said that Israel caused the booms in order to “bait Syria into shooting down the planes, and thus giving Israel reason to declare war.”27

Given that Yishai didn’t speak Arabic, he could not have arranged an interview without a “fixer” who reported to Syrian intelligence, and all Syrian journalists speaking with foreigners had to report their conversations to their intelligence minders. I suspected that the Syrian government was going out of its way to cover something up very subtly.

Strangely, however, the nuclear story didn’t have much traction in the international press. One reason seemed to be the low credibility of the Bush administration.