Haim Ramon : Opinion Three Israeli Nuclear Failures and a Fourth on the Way
In
December 2003, Libya’s then-leader Col. Muammar Gadhafi announced a
decision to abandon his country’s nuclear program. The news was a bolt
from the blue to Israel’s intelligence agencies: Israel had no idea
Libya had been actively engaged in developing its military nuclear
capability at many sites, reaching quite an advanced stage. The U.S. and
British intelligence services hadn’t shared their information on the
program with their Israeli counterparts, even concealing the steps they
were taking to dismantle the Libyan nuclear industry.
If
a hostile Arab country like Libya – headed by an unpredictable tyrant
like Gadhafi – can develop nuclear capability without our intelligence
services noticing or suspecting anything, it is a serious intelligence
failure. In my eyes, this was the greatest failure since the lead-up to
the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and it required all the intelligence
agencies to conduct a serious examination of how it happened.
The Libyan failure is the first Israeli failure involving unconventional weapons in an Arab country.
The
second failure concerned Military Intelligence assessments regarding
the second Gulf War. On April 8, 2003, the Military Intelligence chief
appeared before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and
said: “I believe there’s a very high probability that Iraq has
unconventional weapons.” Military Intelligence also said the Iraqis had
between 50 and 100 missiles.
Even toward the end of the main fighting, after
the Iraqi army had been totally defeated by the armies of the United
States and its allies, Military Intelligence refrained from recommending
that the government call off the national state of preparedness and
liberate Israel’s citizens from their ever-present gas masks. There was
still a fear that Israel would be attacked from northwestern Iraq, which
had yet to be captured by Western forces.
This
decision illustrated Military Intelligence’s deep belief that the Iraqi
regime had weapons of mass destruction and surface-to-surface missiles.
During
the period prior to the second Gulf War, in my role as chairman (until
February 2003) of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and
thereafter as a member of said committee, I publicly contradicted that
conclusion. I based my assumption on the fact that despite the
tremendous efforts invested by the world’s finest intelligence
organizations – including Israeli intelligence – absolutely no evidence
of the existence of long-range surface-to-surface missiles and their
launchers had been seen or identified. Nor was there any proof of the
existence of WMDs.
As a result, I believed Iraq did not have the
capability to attack the State of Israel: Either it had no missiles,
launchers or WMDs, or if it did possess such means, they were dismantled
and hidden, and, in effect, out of operation.
I
argued that the trauma of the Yom Kippur War was deeply etched into the
minds and thinking of Israeli intelligence. Haunted by the failure to
give advance warning in 1973, the intelligence bodies subsequently
tended to interpret findings severely and adopted the policy of covering
their asses.
The
intelligence recommendation to order that gas mask kits be opened (at a
cost of over 100 million shekels, or $28.5 million) was the result of
excessive caution and an attempt to avoid a risk whose probability was
negligible. The recommendation to inoculate Israeli citizens against
smallpox – even though the vast majority of Western troops participating
in the Iraqi war were not inoculated against it – was another
illustration of how the intelligence community made a mountain out of a
molehill.
At
the end of the fighting, my replacement heading the foreign affairs
committee, MK Yuval Steinitz, decided to establish a committee to
examine the intelligence services in the 2003 war. In the report, which
was submitted in March 2004, the committee discussed the failures of
Military Intelligence assessments.
In light of the intelligence failures concerning
unconventional weapons, both in Libya and Iraq, the committee decided
there would be a discussion conducted every six months with the heads of
the Mossad and Military Intelligence. This would examine the
possibility that there were nuclear weapons in the hands of Arab
countries in general, and Syria in particular.
In
the session held at the end of 2004, the committee members, headed by
Steinitz (a former philosophy professor), raised the possibility that
Syria had nuclear weapons. The reply of the head of Military
Intelligence was: “As head of Military Intelligence and as a
professional, I can state that your assessment is impossible.” The
chairman replied: “Sir, as a philosopher I learned when to cast doubt –
and I cast doubt on your intelligence assessment.”
This
reflects the third failure of Military Intelligence and the Mossad
regarding the existence of nuclear weapons in Arab countries. Today, we
know that Syria began building its nuclear reactor in the early 2000s.
There
is no disputing the fact that, until mid-2006, neither Military
Intelligence nor the Mossad had any idea that such a reactor was being
built by the Syrians, with the help of North Korea, near Deir al-Zour.
And there’s no disputing the fact that this was a failure that could
have had deadly consequences for Israel. Luckily, in mid-2006, Military
Intelligence raised the possibility that there was a Syrian nuclear
reactor; in March 2007, the Mossad provided substantial proof of such a
reactor; and in September 2007, the Israeli government, headed by
then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, decided to destroy it and the Israel Air Force successfully carried out the mission.
In
the three events I have mentioned, Israeli intelligence failed and did
not provide reliable information about unconventional weapons programs
in Arab states.
I
am not here to hold them to account for the past, but to warn about the
future. I am referring, of course, to the Iranian nuclear program. In
2008, at the end of a discussion by ministers in Olmert’s government
dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue, I turned to the head of the
Mossad at the time – the late Meir Dagan – and asked him: “Meir, look at
the map of Iran, a million square kilometers. Do you have any doubts
and suspicions the Iranians are concealing some of their nuclear sites,
and especially centrifuge sites, and which we have no idea about?” His
honest answer was: “It’s quite possible.”
As we know, in 2011-2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak
were planning a military strike against nuclear facilities in Iran. The
attack plan was based on the assumption we had reliable intelligence on
all of the Iranian nuclear sites. That was a completely erroneous
assumption.
In
light of past experience, they should have taken into account the fact
that the Iranians have nuclear facilities whose location that neither we
nor the West have any idea about. Had we carried out the attack and
destroyed the known sites, we can assume the Iranians would have been
able to rehabilitate their nuclear capability very quickly – by means of
those same sites we didn’t know about – and been able to develop
nuclear weapons within a short time.
Therefore,
the only way to act against Iranian armament is by diplomatic means –
such as those that led to the present nuclear agreement, despite its
shortcomings. This is the path that should be followed by the
international community in the future, drawing lessons from the current
agreement.
Haim Ramon served as deputy prime minister, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and as a cabinet member.
Commenti
Posta un commento