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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| CIA began tracking NORK's Syria reactor in April 2007 |
| 2008-09-27 |
| North Korea covertly supplied Syria with nuclear reactor technology and a facility that was bombed by Israel, CIA Director Michael Hayden last week confirmed. Israeli planes bombed the North Korean structure at Al-Kibar alongside the Euphrates River last September. However, Damascus refused to acknowledge the facility was a nuclear reactor. "We have nothing to say about it." Following the raid, “The Syrians immediately cleared away the rubble and every trace of the building, stonewalling the IAEA when asked to explain," Hayden told a forum in Los Angeles. Which is easy to do to a "Their cover-up only underlined the intense secrecy of this project and the danger it had posed to a volatile region.” The CIA formed a “group of officers who started working overtime on this issue in April 2007 and kept at it for months,” he said. “Virtually every form of intelligence -- imagery, signals, human source, you name it -- informed their assessments, so that they were never completely dependent on any single channel," he said. Hayden said a report from a foreign partner initially identified the structure as a nuclear reactor similar to one in North Korea. U.S. officials have said Israel supplied the information, including photographs. "But even without that piece of the puzzle ... we had previously identified the facility on imagery as a suspicious target," Hayden said. "When pipes for a massive cooling system were laid out to the Euphrates River in the spring of 2007, there would have been little doubt this was a nuclear reactor." Hey, it's a water treatment plant. Yeah, but the discharge goes back into the river. Well, that's it. A reactor. Just playin' the devil's advocate and seeing if you guys were on yer toes, heh. Hayden denied Pyongyang sought to use the reactor as a replacement for Yongbyon. “We took that hypothesis and worked very hard on it, but the mainstream theory held sway," he said. It was just the Norks and Syria's version of globalization economics. |
| Posted by:Alaska Paul |
| #1 Well done, CIA! /yes, it feels good to be able to say that. I hope there are lots of other little projects they're working on that we'll find out about afterward. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-09-27 22:06 |