Darrell Cline

Mossad agents broke into a diplomat’s hotel room in Vienna, cloned his laptop in under an hour, and discovered dozens of color photos showing North Korean scientists inside an unmarked box-shaped building in the Syrian desert—triggering a stealth air raid that wiped out a covert plutonium reactor minutes before midnight. The reason might surprise you. In early 2007, Israeli intelligence was tracking suspicious cargo shipments between Pyongyang and Damascus. While Western agencies assumed Syria was merely modernizing ballistic missiles, Mossad Director Meir Dagan suspected something far more dangerous. In March 2007, an operational window opened in Vienna: Ibrahim Othman, head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission, arrived for an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conference. When Othman left his hotel for a dinner engagement, a specialized Mossad Kidon team breached his suite. Operatives cloned his laptop's hard drive, planted Trojan spyware, and left the room completely undisturbed before his return. When analysts back in Tel Aviv cracked the files, they were stunned: The drive held dozens of high-resolution digital photographs taken inside a remote facility near Al-Kibar, in the Deir ez-Zor desert along the Euphrates River. The images showed a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated nuclear reactor identical in design to North Korea's Yongbyon plutonium reactor. Pictured side-by-side inside the facility were Chon Chiboo, a leading North Korean nuclear official, and senior Syrian engineers. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert immediately dispatched Mossad and defense officials to Washington to brief President George W. Bush. While US intelligence confirmed the facility was indeed a plutonium-production reactor built with North Korean assistance, Washington favored diplomatic pressure via the UN rather than kinetic military action. Olmert refused to wait. Under the Begin Doctrine, an operational reactor in a hostile state could not be tolerated: Once loaded with nuclear fuel rods, an airstrike would blanket the Euphrates Valley and downstream populations in lethal radioactive fallout. The countdown to strike was measured in months. The mission was codenamed Operation Orchard (also referred to as Operation Outside the Box). Before the airstrike, commandos from the elite Sayeret Matkal were covertly inserted by helicopter near Al-Kibar to collect soil samples, photograph perimeter defenses, and verify nuclear signatures. On the night of September 5, 2007, the strike package took flight: Four F-15I Ra'am fighters and four F-16I Sufa jets from the 69, 119, and 253 Squadrons departed Ramat David and Hatzerim airbases. Instead of flying east over Jordan, the aircraft headed west over the Mediterranean, climbed north, and banked east along the Turkish-Syrian border. Israel's electronic warfare and cyber units deployed an airborne algorithmic weapon codenamed Suter: they hacked and fed false-sky data directly into Syria’s modern Russian-built radar network. The screens showed tranquil, empty airspace while eight strike fighters roared beneath radar shadows. Shortly after 11:30 PM, the strike package dropped down onto Al-Kibar: Diving out of the dark sky, the jets unleashed 17 tons of precision-guided ordnance, including AGM-65 Maverick missiles and 500-pound laser-guided penetration bombs. The cubic concrete containment building was completely flattened, collapsing into its subterranean foundations in seconds. At 12:01 AM on September 6, the mission commander radioed the prearranged Hebrew code word back to the subterranean command bunker in Tel Aviv: "Arizona." All eight Israeli aircraft returned to base completely undamaged. What followed was one of the most remarkable diplomatic silences in modern warfare: Neither Israel nor Syria acknowledged what had occurred. Prime Minister Olmert imposed a strict military gag order on Israeli press, preventing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from facing public pressure to retaliate. Desperate to conceal the illicit program from the IAEA, Syrian authorities deployed excavators within weeks, bulldozing the remaining rubble, scraping the topsoil, and erecting an innocuous civilian warehouse over the footprint. The veil broke in April 2008 when the CIA briefed the US Congress with unclassified surveillance footage and photos, confirming North Korea's covert nuclear proliferation. Israel officially lifted its censorship and confirmed the raid in March 2018.