Syria’s ambassador to the US said on Friday that the CIA fabricated pictures allegedly taken inside a secret Syrian nuclear reactor and predicted that in coming weeks the US story about the site would “implode from within.”
“The photos presented to me yesterday were ludicrous, laughable,’’ ambassador Imad Moustapha told reporters at his Washington residence.
He refused to say what the building in the remote eastern desert of Syria was used for before Israeli jets bombed it in September last year.
Senior US intelligence officials said on Thursday they believe it was a secret nuclear reactor meant to produce plutonium, which can be used to make high-yield nuclear weapons. They alleged that North Korea aided in the design, construction and outfitting of the building.
Syria bulldozed the building’s ruins a month after it was bombed and constructed a new, larger building in its place, leaving little or no evidence of what had been on the site.
Moustapha would not explain the purpose of the new building. But he said the lack of military checkpoints, air defenses or barbed wire fences around either building should show that it was not a sensitive facility.
So far, Syria has not allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect the area.
Syria’s ambassador to the UN, Bashar Ja’afari, pledged on Friday to cooperate with the IAEA and suggested that “the main target of the American CIA allegations against Syria is to justify the Israeli attack against the Syrian side.”
In a message to employees, CIA Director Michael Hayden praised the agency’s “outstanding” work, calling it “a case study in rigorous analytic tradecraft, skillful human and technical collection.”
But some outside nuclear experts were questioning some of the CIA’s analysis, though not disputing its conclusions.
David Albright, president of the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security, analyzed commercial satellite imagery of the bombed facility last fall and surmised then it was a nuclear reactor.
He questioned the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the reactor was within months or weeks of completion.
“It’s not clear-cut it was ready to turn on,” Albright said.
He also took issue with Washington’s assertion that the reactor was solely intended to support a nuclear weapons program. Officials said on Thursday the reactor was ill-suited for electrical generation, lacking distribution wires or substations, and did not bear the hallmarks of a research reactor.
They concluded the plutonium was therefore meant for weapons but acknowledged they had no direct evidence of that.
Almost all reactors produce plutonium, even those dedicated to peaceful purposes, Albright said.
“Civilian uses are possible and cannot be dismissed out of hand,” he said. “I think the CIA and the White House have not shown that the only possibility for this reactor is that it was to make plutonium for nuclear weapons.”
“It very well could be true,” he said, “but it is far less than ironclad, absent other information.”
The CIA said the Syrian reactor was modeled on a small North Korean reactor built at Yongbyon. That facility produced a small amount of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Albright said that facility also was a research effort to determine whether the North Koreans could scale up the model to produce electricity efficiently.
RSS