Photos Show Cleansing of Suspect Syrian SiteBy WILLIAM J. BROAD and MARK MAZZETTI | October 26, 2007
New commercial satellite photos show that a Syrian site that Israel bombed last month no longer bears any obvious traces of what analysts said appeared to have been a partly built nuclear reactor.
Two photos, taken Wednesday from space by rival companies, show the site near the Euphrates River to have been wiped clean since August, when imagery showed a tall square building there measuring about 150 feet on a side.
The Syrians reported an attack by Israel in early September, which the Israelis have not confirmed. Senior Syrian officials continue to deny that a nuclear reactor was under construction, insisting that what Israel hit was a largely empty military warehouse.
But the images, federal and private analysts said Thursday, suggest that the Syrian authorities rushed to dismantle the facility after the strike, saying its removal could be interpreted as a tacit admission of guilt.
“It’s a magic act — here today, gone tomorrow,” said a senior intelligence official. “It doesn’t lower suspicions; it raises them. This was not the long-term decommissioning of a building, which can take a year. It was speedy. It’s incredible that they could have gone to that effort to make something go away.”
Any attempt by Syrian authorities to clean up the site could make it harder for international weapons inspectors to determine the exact nature of the activity there. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna have said they are analyzing the satellite images and ultimately want to inspect the site in person.
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that this week released a report on the Syrian site, said Thursday that the building’s removal was inherently suspicious.
“It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” Mr. Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector, said in an interview. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.”
American officials still refuse to publicly confirm that the satellite photos show the site that Israel bombed. But the senior intelligence official said it was indeed the same location.
Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman, declined to comment on the satellite pictures.
A reactor of the size of what analysts believe Syria was building would have been able to make enough plutonium to fuel about one nuclear weapon a year. But removing the plutonium from spent fuel rods would require a reprocessing facility for which analysts have reported no evidence.
Satellite images of the Syrian site were released by DigitalGlobe, in Longmont, Colo., and SPOT Image Corporation, in Chantilly, Va. They show a smooth, unfurrowed area where the large building once stood.
“It’s clearly very suspicious,” said Joseph Cirincione, an expert on nuclear proliferation at the Center for American Progress in Washington. “The Syrians were up to something that they clearly didn’t want the world to know about.”
Mr. Cirincione said the photographic evidence “tilts toward a nuclear program,” but did not prove that Damascus was building a reactor. Besides, he said, even if Syria was developing a nuclear program, it was still years away from being operational and thus not an imminent threat.
The desolate Syrian site is situated on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River some 90 miles north of the Iraqi border and seven miles north of the desert village of At Tibnah. An airfield lies nearby.
The new images, in addition to revealing the removal of the tall building, show still standing a secondary structure and what could be a pumping station on the Euphrates. Analysts suspect the pumping station was for cooling the reactor.
The building was said by analysts to have been modeled on a design used by the North Koreans, whose building is a few feet larger that the Syrian building that vanished.
Mr. Albright called the Syrian site “consistent with being a North Korean reactor design.”
In an interview last week with The Dallas Morning News, Imad Moustapha, the Syrian ambassador to the United States, denied that his country was trying to build a reactor.
“There is no Syrian nuclear program whatsoever,” he said. “It’s an absolutely blatant lie.”
Later in the interview he added, “We understand that if Syria even contemplated nuclear technology, then the gates of hell would open on us.”
Even some outside experts who were skeptical that Syria might be developing a nuclear program expressed surprise at the striking difference in the satellite photos taken some two months apart.
A spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, which monitors nuclear sites around the globe and has begun discussions with Syrian authorities, said the agency had no comment on the new images.
Other countries — including Iraq after the Persian Gulf war and Iran in 2003 and 2004 — have bulldozed buildings suspected of clandestine nuclear activity.
The Institute for Science and International Security, Mr. Albright’s group, released a report analyzing the new DigitalGlobe image. The building, it said, had been “completely removed and the ground scraped.”
The comparison of August and October images, it said, “effectively confirms that this site was indeed the target of the Israeli raid” in September.
The report said tractors or bulldozers could be seen where the suspected reactor building once stood, as well as scrape marks on the ground. It added that the dismantling and removal of the building “at such a rapid pace dramatically complicates any inspection of the facilities.”
The report said Syria had an obligation to inform the International Atomic Energy Agency of its decision to construct any new nuclear facility. It added that weapons experts were now debating whether Syria would have violated its safeguards agreement with the agency if it started clandestine work on a nuclear reactor.
Syria signed an agreement with the agency in 1992 and is obligated, the report said, under that accord to report on its nuclear plans and developments to the Vienna agency, which is an arm of the United Nations.
“An important question,” the report said, “is whether Syria may be in violation of its agreements.”
If the atomic energy agency found Syria in violation of its responsibilities, it could refer the matter to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions, as has recently occurred in the case of Iran and its suspected nuclear weapons program.
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