Category: Middle East & Africa

By Gordon Thomas
Special to The Epoch Times

Nov 14, 2008

London—MI6 has established that secret backroom meetings at the Mediterranean Nations summit in Paris early in July could lead to a dramatic shift of power in the Middle East.

At the meetings attended by Syrian, Spanish, Italian and Israeli intelligence chiefs, it emerged that plans for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities will fail to destroy them because no Western intelligence service–including Mossad– knows where every facility is located.

Gaps in the intelligence on the precise location and vulnerability of the Iranian nuclear complexes emerged during the outside-of-conference meetings between the intelligence chiefs.

At the end of one meeting, Alon Liel, a former director of Israel’s foreign ministry, confirmed Israel had been engaged in “low-key second-track discussions for many months” with Syria.

Key to the progress of those talks was whether Syria was ready to break its close ties with Iran in return for the U.S. giving Damascus financial and military backing.

Liel made it clear that any deal with Syria would require its ending support for military groups such as the Palestinian Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah–both backed by Iran.

It was also made clear that any deal with Syria would probably not come until there was a new president in the White House.

An indication of how far the backroom meetings had progressed came from the Turkish foreign minister, Ali Babacan, who said there had been “real progress in formal talks between Tel Aviv and Damascus”.

Both the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni–herself a former Mossad officer–sat alongside their Syrian counterparts, President Assad and his foreign minister, Walid al-Muallim.

Publicly, Olmert acknowledged that the time was “fast approaching for direct talks”.

What prompted this dramatic change between two old enemies was that at the backroom meetings the intelligence chiefs learned for the first time precise details of the raid in September last year on Syria’s factory processing weapons grade plutonium.

The hitherto untold story of that raid is as dramatic as any of Israel’s previous daring and successful military strikes.

Israeli agent

It began on September 3, 2007, when the early morning sun caught the rust-stained hull of a 1,700-ton cargo ship as it slowly steamed into the busy Mediterranean port of Tartous in Syria.  From its mast flew the flag of South Korea and the stern plate identified the al-Hamed as being registered in Inchon, one of the country’s major ports.

Watching the ship manoeuvring into its berth from a distance was a man with the swarthy skin of a Kurd or one of the Marsh Arabs of Iraq.  He was fluent in both their languages as well as some of the dialects of Afghanistan.  He was, in fact, a Turkish-born Jew who had eschewed the life of a carpet seller in the family business in Istanbul to go to Israel, serve in its army as a translator and finally achieve his life’s ambition to work in Mossad.

Fifteen years later, he was recognised as one of its most brilliant operatives.  In that time, he had operated in a dozen countries under as many aliases, using his linguistic skills and chameleon-like characteristics to observe and be absorbed into whichever community he had been sent.

Now, for the moment, he was code-named Kamal with a perfectly faked Iranian passport in his pocket.  Mossad’s chief, Meir Dagan, had stressed to him the importance of his mission: to confirm the role of al-Hamed in the dangerous relationship which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad had formed with North Korea.

Kamal had known before he left Tel Aviv that the ship had sailed from Nampo, a North Korean port in the high security area south of the capital, Pyongyang.  A NSA satellite image had shown it steaming out into the Yellow Sea on a journey which had taken it across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the Atlantic and through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean and finally into Tartous harbour.

At some stage of its voyage, it had re-flagged itself at sea and the crew had painted on the stern plate the port of registration as Inchon.  The newness of their work was still apparent against the drab grey of the rest of the hull.

Through a contact in the Tartous harbourmaster’s office, he had managed to check the al Hamed’s manifest and all day had watched trucks being loaded with the cement it listed.  Then, as the sun began to set, military trucks arrived at the dockside and from the ship’s hold, cranes lifted crates covered in heavy tarpaulin which soldiers guided into the trucks.  Using a high resolution camera no bigger than the palm of his hand, Kamal photographed the transfer.  When he had finished, he pressed a button on the camera to transmit the images to a receiving station inside the Israeli border with Lebanon.  In an hour, they were in Mossad headquarters.

Kamal knew then his trip had achieved all Meir Dagan had hoped.  Though he could not see inside the crates, the spy intuitively knew the steel-cased containers were holding weapons-grade plutonium, the element which had fuelled the American atomic attack that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.  In his mission briefing, Kamal had been told by Professor Uzi Even, who had helped to create Israel’s own nuclear facility at Dimona, that the plutonium would, in its raw form, be easily transported as nuggets in lead protective drums, and the shaping and casting of the material would be done in Syria.

Now, on that warm September day almost fifty-two years after Nagasaki had been destroyed, sufficient plutonium had been delivered to Syria to devastate an entire country, its neighbour, Israel.

Intelligence briefing

Shortly before noon on September 4, 2007, a number of cars drove past the concert hall of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv and entered the heavily guarded headquarters of Major General Eliezer Shkedy, the country’s air force commander.  As a fighter pilot he had won a deserved reputation for daredevil tactics coupled with a cool analytical mind.  His speciality had been flying dangerously close to the ground, manoeuvring past peaks and rocky outcrops, then hurtling skywards to ten thousand feet, nearing the speed of sound, before diving on the target, his weapons system switched on, his eyes flitting between the coordinates projected on his hood screen to the bombsight and the target.  Weapons released, he would turn radically, the screech from the strain on the airframe like a banshee wail, and he would once more hurtle skywards.  From dive attack to his second climb would take him only seconds.

For the past week Shkedy had prepared for an unprecedented operation which would require those tactics to be carried out by pilots he had hand-picked because their flying skills matched his own.  But they would be flying not the F-16 fighter plane he had once commanded, but Israel’s latest jet, the F-151.  Flying at almost twice the speed of sound and capable of delivering a 500-pound bunker-busting bomb, it was the most formidable fighter plane in the Israeli air force.

For weeks the pilots had practised the flesh-flattening G-force of right-angle turns, diving and evading, to hit a small circle, the IP, aiming point, carrying out bombing runs at an angled dive of thirty degrees.  They had practised all this in the pitch black of night in the Negev Desert.  At first many of the dummy bombs had fallen wide of the IP, but soon they were landing inside, a number scoring the required bullseye.

Shkedy called them “my Top Guns”– though they were far removed from the Hollywood version of Top Gun pilots.  His fliers were sober-sided, led quiet lives, rarely partied and had trained day and night for when they would finally be given the order to fly tactical strikes against Iran.  Those attacks, they had been told, would take place at dawn or dusk.  But all they knew so far about the mission they were spending weeks training for, was that it would take place in the dead of night.  No one had yet told them when or where and they were content it should remain so.  Curiosity was not one of their traits.

While F-151 twin afterburners glowed over the desolate night landscape and the pilots dropped their dummy bombs which exploded white phosphorous smoke on the ground’s IP to determine the accuracy of the drops, in Shkedy’s Tel Aviv complex his staff studied the approach to the target and discussed the precautions each F-151 must take from the moment its pilot pressed the red button on the control stick to release his bomb.

The time they would spend over the actual target, TOT, would have to be between two and four seconds.  In that period with its bomb released, an F-151 would sink dangerously towards the ground, giving the pilot a second to fire his afterburner to climb and avoid the “frag pattern”, the deadly metal fragments of spent explosive which would follow the detonation.  A bomb’s shrapnel would rise to three thousand feet in seven seconds and unless the aircraft was clear of the target area, it could be blown up and other pilots already at various stages of their bomb runs would fly into a curtain of lethal fragments which could destroy them.  To avoid this, each pilot would have to endure body-crushing pressure of eight Gs while negotiating a radical ninety-degree turn away from the IP after bombing and climb to thirty thousand feet from the target zone to avoid ground missiles.

To calculate the precise distance from take-off to target and the exact angle for the attack, the planners pored over computer graphs, satellite images and physics tables to check and re-check figures.  The targeters calculated that because the bombs would pierce the target roof before exploding inside, the roof would momentarily serve as a shield, reducing the frag pattern by between thirty and forty percent.  To help further protect the lead aircraft over the target, it would have its laser-guided bomb fitted with a delay fuse, providing a precious two-seconds lead time before the detonation.

Given the distance to the target, it was clear the F-151s would each have to carry two external fuel tanks, one under each wing.  Filled with five hundred gallons of fuel, each tank added three thousand pounds to the aircraft weight.  That required further complex calculations to be made: the exact point at which the bombing dive would start and the altitude at which the ordnance would be dropped.

In late August, while the al-Hamed was entering the Straits of Gibraltar, General Shkedy flew to the base of 69th Squadron in the Negev; the squadron was the Air Force’s frontline air assault force trained to attack Iran.  Waiting for Shkedy in the airfield briefing room were the five pilots whom he had selected to carry out the raid.  With an average age of twenty-six, many came from families who were Holocaust survivors, like Shkedy himself.

For him the pilots had a kind of nobility to their youth; behind their relaxed and open manner was a steelness.  Once before he had flown to speak to them at the start of their special training and had begun by saying they had been selected for an air-to-ground mission, military speak for bombing a ground target.  He had looked into their faces, glad to see they showed no emotion.  No one had looked at the huge wall map of the Middle East.  Nevertheless he anticipated each would be creating in his mind the potential mission profile: a low level flight to the target, then a high level return very possibly into headwinds.  In the Middle East the winds are always easterly, blowing in from the Mediterranean.  It could be Iran.  But they had not asked him then and they did not do so on that late August morning when Shkedy once more met them in the briefing room.

Standing before a plasma screen, he used a zapper to illuminate it.  For the first time the pilots saw the target; a complex deep inside Syria almost one hundred miles northeast of Damascus.  He explained there was “good and sufficient intelligence” to destroy the complex which the Syrians were using to build nuclear bombs.  He waited for the flicker of response then continued.

Under the cover of being an agricultural research centre, the complex was already engaged in extracting uranium from phosphates.  Soon it would have weapons-enriched plutonium coming from North Korea.  He told them the Israeli satellite Ofek-7, which had been launched only two months before, had been geo-positioned to watch the activities at the complex near the small Syrian city of Dayr az-Zawr.  He indicated its position on the screen.  No bombs must fall on civilians.

Shkedy then turned to the route in and out of the target area.  The aircraft would fly up along the Syrian coast and enter its airspace at the last moment north at the port town of Samadogi and then follow the border with Turkey.  At the point where the River Euphrates began its long journey south into Iraq, the attack force would swing south to the Syrian desert town of ar-Raqqah beyond which they would begin the bombing run.  The way out would be a high-altitude straight run between the Syrian towns of Hims and Hamah to the Mediterranean.

Over the coast of Lebanon they would turn south and return to base.  The total mission time would be 80 minutes.  In the event of an emergency, navy rescue launches would be positioned off the Syrian coast.

He ended the briefing by saying the attack would be in the early hours of the morning and would take place “soon”.  For a moment longer the air force commander looked at the small group of pilots.  Perhaps sensing their one concern, he added that every step would be taken to ensure Syria’s vaunted air defences would be jammed.  He did not say how and no one asked.  It was a mark of the trust and respect they had for General Eliezer Shkedy.

Massive explosion

The genesis for the operation was a massive explosion on a North Korean freight train heading for the port of Nampo on April 22, 2004.  Mossad agents had learned that in a compartment adjoining a sealed wagon were a dozen Syrian nuclear technicians who had worked in the Iranian nuclear programme at Natanz, near Tehran, and had arrived in North Korea to collect the fissionable material stored in the wagon.

Their bodies were flown home in lead-encased coffins aboard a Syrian military plane.  By then a wide area around the crash site had been cordoned off and scores of North Korean soldiers in anti-contamination suits had spent days recovering wreckage and spraying the entire area.  Mossad analysts suspected they were recovering some of the estimated fifty-five kilos of weapons-grade plutonium North Korea possessed.  Since the crash–its cause never established–the intelligence service had tracked Syrian military officers and scientists on a dozen trips to Pyongyang where they met with high-ranking officials in the regime.  The most recent meeting was shortly before the al-Hamed had left Nampo.

It was Kamal’s report and photographic evidence of the arrival and unloading of the ship that was the focus of the meeting in General Shkedy’s headquarters on September 4, 2007.  The air force commander’s briefing room was dominated by large plasma screens on two walls.  One contained a blow-up of the ship and the covered crates being off-loaded and driven away.  A second screen showed the town of Dayr az-Zawr.  A third screen displayed a satellite image of a large square building surrounded by several smaller ones and a security fence.  The area was identified by the word: “Target”.

Sunburst

Sat around the conference table with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were the other key players in the operation, codenamed “Sunburst”.  For Olmert it was further proof of his powers of survival.  A year ago he had been close to being driven out of office after the debacle of the war in Lebanon when he was vilified as the most incompetent leader Israel had ever had.

He had fought back, appointing Ehud Barak as his new defence minister and Tzipi Livni as foreign minister.  Both now flanked him at the table giving Olmert the political support he needed for Sunburst.  Beside them sat Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister and now leader of the Likud Party, having taken over from the stricken Aerial Sharon.  Like Barak, Netanyahu was experienced in the complexities of “black” operations.  Barak had been a leader in Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s elite commando force who bore the same motto as Britain’s SAS: “Who Dares Wins”.  Netanyahu had approved several Mossad missions while in office.

The lynchpin of Sunburst was Meir Dagan.  Early in the summer, he had presented Olmert with evidence of what he called “the nuclear connection” between Syria and North Korea that had reached a dangerous level.  Syria already possessed sixty Scud-C missiles, which it had bought from North Korea, and on August 14, when the freighter al-Hamed was already bound for Syria, North Korea’s foreign trade minister, Rim Kyong Man, was in Damascus to sign a protocol on “co-operation and trade in science and technology”.  Afterwards the minister had flown to Tehran, furthering the triangular relationship between North Korea, Syria and Iran.

Mossad’s analysts had concluded that Syria was not only a conduit for the transport to Iran of an estimated £50 million ($74million) of missiles, but also could serve as “a hideout” for North Korea’s own nuclear weapons, particularly its plutonium, while the regime continued to promise it would give up its nuclear programme in exchange for the massive security guarantees and financial aid the West had promised.

Until recently, Meir Dagan had remained uncertain whether this was the case.  Now, the latest intelligence from his agents in the country showed that Syria was determined to create its own nuclear weapons.

The meeting had been called to discuss the matter.  Dagan began by saying the crates unloaded from the al-Hamed had been tracked by Israel’s satellite to the complex.  Dagan continued the meeting with his usual succinct analysis.  The building was now almost certainly to be where the crates had been delivered.  Inside its main structure was the machinery to cast the warheads for housing the weaponised plutonium.  Scientists at Dimona had concluded that a small quantity of polonium and beryllium would be used to create the chain reaction for the plutonium, after the pellets were machined in “glove boxes”, sealed containers accessed only by special laboratory gloves to protect the technicians at the site.  Dagan had concluded with a final warning: the longer Israel waited to destroy the site, the closer the technicians in the building would come to creating their weapons.

Within minutes the decision was taken to eliminate the complex.

In the late evening of September 5, 2007, Israeli commandos from the Sayeret Matkal dressed in Syrian army uniform, crossed into Syria over its northern border with Iraq.  They were equipped with a laser guidance system designed to guide aircraft on to the target.  With them were specialists from the Israeli Defence Force. In their backpacks was equipment linked to IDF electronic counter-measure jamming technology designed to disrupt Syria’s formidable air defences.  When they were forty miles from the target the men hid and waited.

At their airfield in the Negev, the five mission pilots sat down to a large dinner; even though they were not hungry, they knew they would need all the nutrients for the sheer physical energy and mental skills they would expend in the coming hours.  Afterwards they went to the briefing room where Shkedy was waiting with other senior officers.  The briefing officer once more ran through the mission procedure: radio frequencies, radio silence protocols and individual call signs.

Take-off time would be at 23.59 with twenty seconds separating each plane.  There would be a dogleg out to sea at 500 knots, over eight miles a minute, then, with Haifa to their right, they would drop to sea level and head up the coast of Lebanon, past Beirut and continue into Syrian airspace.  From there it was on to the IP.

When the officer had ended, Shkedy walked to the front of the room and paused to look at each pilot.

“You all know the importance of your target.  It must be destroyed at all costs.  This is the most important mission any of you have taken or probably will ever take.  Every step has been taken to protect you.  But if anything does happen, we will do everything to rescue you.  That I promise you.  But I am confident that surprise is on our side.  You will be in and out before the Syrians realise what has happened”, said General Shkedy.

No one in the room doubted him.  They all knew the mission was a pivotal point in the protection of Israel.  The silence was broken by Shkedy’s final words: “God be with you!”  Then he stepped forward and shook the hand of each pilot.

The mission

By eleven-forty-five in the evening, the ordnance technicians had checked the bombs, ensuring each was securely positioned in its release clip beneath the wings of each F-151.  After his check, the technician removed the metal safety pin from each bomb.

A minute later, the runway crew had reported the strip was clear of small stones or any other obstruction that could be sucked into the engine and destroy it.

From the twin tailpipes of the first aircraft, followed by the others, came the scalding heat from the afterburners.

In each cockpit the pilots had gone through the same drill: activating the computerised checks of the navigation, mechanical, communications and finally the firing systems.

Each pilot wore two suits: his flight suit and, over it, the G-suit, a torso harness, survival gear and a helmet.  Clipped to each harness was a small gadget that would send a homing-signal if he was forced to abandon the mission.

At one minute to midnight the first F-151, with a roar and a plume of exhaust marking its progress, sped down the runway.  Shortly after midnight the last of the planes had retracted its wheels.  ‘Sunburst’ had begun.

The mission was a total success. Satellite images showed the complete destruction of the complex and, next day, Syrian bulldozers covering the blitzed area with earth to avoid the spread of radiation.  It would be ten days before the country’s vice-president, Farouk al-Sharaa, would only say: “Our military and political echelon is looking into the matter”.  In Tel Aviv Ehud Olmert, not quite able to conceal his smile, said: “You will understand we naturally cannot always show the public our cards”.

But to play them, in the early hours of the morning of September 6, 2007, those pilots had carried out one of the most daring air strikes ever.

In January 2008, three days after President Bush had left Israel, where he had been privately briefed on the mission, the Israeli Defence Force released a satellite image that showed Syria had commenced rebuilding the destroyed site.

Gordon Thomas is the author of a new edition of Gideon’s Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service, The Mossad, by JR Books of London and available on Amazon Books.

Source: en.epochtimes.com, 14 November 2008