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Yuval Steinitz served as Israel’s minister of finance, energy, and intelligence, as well as chair of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. He spoke to an October 24th Middle East Forum Webinar (video) in an interview with Jonathan Spyer, the head of research at the Middle East Forum, about his role in the discovery of Syria’s nuclear project, which led to Israel’s decision to destroy the Syrian reactor in September 2007.
That Saddam Hussein had acquired not only weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s), but also between fifty and one hundred long-range ballistic missiles as well as the ability to deliver these WMDs significantly drove the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Similarly, two months before the U.S. invasion, Israeli Military Intelligence, along with the Mossad intelligence agency, had concluded that Saddam Hussein possessed clandestine chemical weapons as well as the missiles to deliver them to Israel. The Jewish state called up reserve units and distributed nine million gas masks to its citizens, only to discover after the war that there was no evidence to support the presence of WMDs in Iraq.
As the new head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Steinitz established a separate committee which investigated the failures of both Israel’s and the West’s intelligence services regarding Iraq. The committee also examined gaps in the system and lessons learned from these failures. Steinitz’s action was validated weeks later when Israel learned of yet another failure of its intelligence services — Libya’s clandestine nuclear project, unmasked only after Britain’s intelligence service had intercepted a Libyan vessel and found centrifuges to enrich uranium in a search of the ship’s cargo. Steinitz said the Americans and the British clandestinely applied pressure on Libya to dismantle its nuclear project.
Israel’s double intelligence failures provided the impetus for Steinitz’s development of a “new intelligence doctrine” to address intelligence information lapses. The doctrine was formulated by a subcommittee established by Steinitz and specifically assigned to home in on nuclear threats in the region.
Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s intelligence services, along with U.S. and European intelligence services, had focused their attention on Iran’s nuclear development. After North Korean nuclear experts visited Syria years before, Steinitz suspected that Syria was also developing a nuclear capability based on “pieces of data” not taken “seriously” by Israel’s intelligence services, which Steinitz found “problematic.”
In the absence of verifiable actionable intelligence about Syria’s nuclear development, Steinitz, whose background as a philosophy professor taught him “to know how to doubt dogma and concepts,” based his suspicions and buttressed his hunch regarding Syria on “logical reasoning”. Syrian dictator Hafez al Assad’s son, Bashar, made a pronouncement Steinitz found “significant.” The younger al Assad publicly spoke about his plans to gain strategic parity vis a vis Israel. Steinitz said his colleagues presented a counter argument to his repeated concerns, namely that Assad was referring to chemical weapons to balance rumors about Israel’s nuclear capability.
However, Steinitz persisted, knowing that Syria already possessed a chemical weapons stockpile since the 1980s. In announcing that he aimed to develop parity against Israel, it was Bashar’s choice of words that reinforced Steinitz’s mounting suspicions about Syria’s clandestine nuclear project.
Steinitz expressed his concern in a secret memorandum to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and Israel’s intelligence services. He warned that, given Syria’s immediate proximity to the Jewish state, Israel’s failure to act would be a tragedy not seen in Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur War (when an intelligence failure resulted in thousands of dead.)
In April 2004, Israel’s parliament published a portion of the recommendations of the subcommittee in order to educate the Israeli intelligence community on clandestine nuclear projects. The report also received a great deal of press coverage in the U.S. A few months later, a secret report went to Sharon, analyzing the rationale behind Syria’s purported development of a nuclear capability. From their investigations over the years, the IDF and the Mossad concluded there was nothing there, and the U.S. concurred. Steinitz, concerned their services would ignore his assessment, summoned the directors of the two intelligence services, IDF General Aharon Ze’evi Farkash and the Mossads’s Meir Dagan, to answer subcommittee queries, questioning them specifically on clandestine nuclear projects.
Farkash, “a very smart person [and] very professional,” completely dismissed Steinitz’s concerns about clandestine projects in Syria because Steinitz was not a “professional intelligence officer.”
Steinitz said that Farkash, “a very smart person [and] very professional,” completely dismissed Steinitz’s concerns about clandestine projects in Syria because Steinitz was not a “professional intelligence officer.” Steinitz challenged Farkash’s pronouncement, saying that although Steinitz had only been a “simple soldier in the Golani infantry brigade,” he was “a professional philosopher” who doubted Farkash’s “confidence.” Steinitz persisted in his belief that Syria needed to be taken seriously and that it required closer scrutiny. Dagan agreed with Farkash that there was nothing there, but Dagan added that he could not disregard Steinitz’s subcommittee’s insistence that Syria needed a closer look. Two years after this meeting, the Mossad obtained photographs confirming Syria’s nuclear reactor development in Deir ez-Zor. In 2007, the Israel Air Force (IAF) launched an attack that destroyed Syria’s reactor.
Steinitz said it was the first time in Israel that a Knesset committee discovered a threat before the intelligence services did. Steinitz surmised that Israel’s intelligence failures were a result of the historic evolution of military intelligence in Israel. During the 1948 War of Independence, its mission was to monitor the Arab militias and the Arab forces from surrounding countries, as well as the internal Arab population. Over the next two decades, Israel’s secret services were tasked with the mission of assessing Arab armies and terror groups. The effectiveness of Israel’s secret services has been proven because they have been able to intercept and thwart 95 percent of terrorist plots.
With the advent of non-conventional and nuclear weapons, Israeli intelligence had already acquired knowledge of the quantities of Iraq’s tanks and airplanes prior to the U.S. forces’ entry into Iraq in 2003. Steinitz said discovering the extent to which foes circumvent internationally illegal nuclear weapons bans to develop clandestine projects poses a far greater challenge. He said this is “a unique task with difficulties that you have to try to resolve and therefore you need a specific doctrine” dedicated to it.
If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, a nuclear arms race in countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and perhaps the United Arab Emirates will be triggered.
As a result of the Syrian reactor episode, the Mossad immediately instituted changes which prioritized nuclear regional development over all else, although changes within the IDF occurred more slowly. Steinitz said the specific take-away from the Syrian and Libyan episodes is that there is a critical difference between partial and total dismantlement of nuclear programs. Without total dismantlement, countries whose programs are partially frozen or partially dismantled cannot resist the “temptation to resume” since the costly infrastructure of these programs remain.
Steinitz said that if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, the successful U.S. policy outlined in the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that has been in effect since the 1960s will end, and a nuclear arms race in countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and perhaps the United Arab Emirates will be triggered.
Prior to the U.S. Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) developed under the Obama administration, Israel’s position was that Iran’s nuclear capability program and its agenda to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles should be totally dismantled forever. The U.S. countered Israel’s advice to reach a “good” agreement with Iran, saying that the U.S. would accept partial dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear project for ten to fifteen years under the JCPOA. The Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, and Iran “didn’t dare to cross the 20 percent threshold” of uranium enrichment. In the last year, under the Biden administration, the Islamic Republic enriched uranium beyond 60 percent, with ominous implications.
