Six months later, deafening silence about North Korea and Syria

Last Sunday, a friend invited me to attend an event at Bethel Israel Synagogue in Alexandria. The subject was “The North Korea-Syria Connection,” although the event seems not to have caught the notice of many Korea watchers or journalists. I was invited by a friend who happens to attend the synagogue. The host was NPR’s Robert Siegel, and the guests were Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times. Kessler consistently toes the State Department establishment line, and I’m not a fan. Mazzetti made a much better impression. His reporting and his comments were of a reporter who cuts it straight down the middle, views everyone skeptically, and applies sound judgment when making inferences.

The real story here is that six months after the strike, nobody knows the story. Siegel, Mazzetti, and Kessler all consider that remarkable, and neither Kessler nor Mazzetti recalls having ever seen a story guarded so closely. Their usual sources won’t talk. Even Kessler called it one of the strangest stories he’d worked on in 25 years because of the “news blackout” the Administration had imposed, and because much of the intelligence community had been bypassed, at least initially. The Israelis, who offered detailed documentation and justification for their attack on Osirak, Iraq in 1982, are also uncharacteristically silent. Siegel said that the Israelis had actually imposed a gag order. That said, Mazzetti apologetically hoped those in attendance wouldn’t “feel ripped off.”

So when will we know what happened? Mazzetti joked that we should expect to hear a lot more two days before the next Israeli election. Not surprisingly to Mazzetti, hawkish thinkers who have seen the intelligence seem very alarmed by it, much more so than dovish ones. Yet overall, even among these very non-hawkish reporters, one could infer from both their very presence at this event and the tone of their comments that this is a very big, untold story, and that the Administration’s extraordinary secrecy is only amplifying everyone’s curiosity about a very remote place in the Syrian desert.

The consensus is that it was probably something nuclear, possibly a partially built reactor. After that, things get very murky, with the most compelling evidence being circumstantial. Would the Israelis have launched an ostensibly unprovoked attack against Syria, a nation with good air defenses and a high state of tension with Israel, unless Israel thought a “red line” had been crossed? Mazzetti also described “amazing” Digital Globe satellite imagery before and after the strike. Before, you could see a boxy building surrounded by activity. Just days afterward, the site was scraped clean — without even a trace of rubble left.

Mazzetti noted speculation that this was a proxy attack for Washington but doesn’t believe it. His best information is that the Israelis presented their evidence to the Bush Administration, which tried to hold the Israelis back. Furthermore, the Israelis aren’t in the habit of waiting for American instructions when they see a threat in their neighborhood.

Kessler, reluctantly I think, supplied a plausible reason for the Administration’s silence. Not only did this strike come during extraordinarily touchy diplomacy with the North Koreans — is there another kind? — it came just two months before Rice’s unsuccessful Annapolis conference with Israeli and Arab leaders. Kessler also revealed that Chris Hill came to his job with no experience negotiating with the North Koreans and a reputation for exceeding instructions, specifically, instructions not to talk to the North Koreans bilaterally. Kessler’s biases were on open display. He said that before February 2007, President Bush had been “in sway to those who appealed to his worst instincts about North Korea,” and had created “a diplomatic process that was designed to fail.” Fine, but by whom?

Kessler also conceded that the diplomatic process with North Korea is stalled today, which he attributed in part to Syria. North Korea’s response to demands for an explanation has been that there’s no sense in dwelling on the past. The audience chuckled at that.

There was some discussion of Seymour Hersh’s lengthy but inconclusive story. Kessler and Mazzetti tried to be kind, but you could sense the limits of their regard for some of his work, in addition to their admiration of him for some of the big stories he’s broken in the past. They were amused that Hersh, with the luxury of so much time to explore the story (not to mention his frequent use of anonymous sources) couldn’t figure out what had happened, either. Mazzetti offered that Hersh’s story gave off more heat than light. Hersh had criticized the Times and Post, suggesting that they were used by the Administration. This amused Mazzetti, who pointed out that Hersh seemed to relate all of Syria’s versions. He did agree with Hersh on one point, however: Mazzetti now thinks the mysterious ship that landed in Tartus might have been a red herring, and he might not have discussed it if he could write his story all over again.

Previous posts on this subject here, here, and here.