A little before one o'clock in the morning on 6 September 2007, a single word came over the radio in an Israeli Air Force command post: "Arizona". It meant that a building in the desert of eastern Syria, a building the Israelis called "the Cube", no longer existed. Inside it, according to Israeli and American intelligence, Syria had been quietly building a nuclear reactor with North Korean help.
Israel said nothing. Syria said almost nothing. For more than ten years one of the most consequential air strikes of the century officially did not happen, until the Israeli Air Force finally released the files, the photographs and the cockpit video in March 2018.
Quick Facts
- Date: Night of 5-6 September 2007
- Target: Al-Kibar reactor, Deir ez-Zor region, Syria
- Official Israeli name: Outside the Box ("Operation Orchard" in the press)
- Aircraft: Eight jets: F-15I Ra'am of 69 Squadron, F-16I Sufa of 119 and 253 Squadrons
- Ordnance: About 17 tons of precision-guided bombs
- Reactor design: Gas-cooled, graphite-moderated, modelled on North Korea's Yongbyon
- Success codeword: "Arizona"
- Officially acknowledged: 21 March 2018
The Cube on the Euphrates
The building stood at al-Kibar, in the Deir ez-Zor region, roughly 450 km northeast of Damascus. US intelligence later briefed Congress that it housed a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor modelled on North Korea's Yongbyon plant, a design suited to producing plutonium. According to reports citing Der Spiegel, Israeli intelligence obtained photographs of the interior from a Syrian official's laptop, including one that reportedly showed a senior North Korean nuclear official with the head of Syria's atomic energy commission.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert first asked Washington to destroy the site. President George W. Bush preferred diplomacy, and wrote later in his memoir Decision Points that Olmert told him the US strategy was "very disturbing to me". Israel decided to act alone.
Eight jets and four hours
According to the details Israel released in 2018, the strike force took off at about 22:30 on 5 September: F-15I Ra'am jets of 69 Squadron, "The Hammers", and F-16I Sufa jets of 119 and 253 Squadrons, eight aircraft in all. Early wire reports gave different mixes, but four of each type is the most widely reported breakdown. Both types are two-seaters, a pilot and a weapons systems officer.
They dropped about 17 tons of precision-guided munitions, a figure first published by David Makovsky in The New Yorker in 2012. The War Zone describes a mix of laser-guided and GPS-guided weapons including penetrators. Shortly before 1 a.m. the crews sent "Arizona", and roughly four hours after takeoff, according to AP, they were home. Jettisoned drop tanks later turned up in Turkey, suggesting part of the route ran along or through Turkish airspace.
How did they get through?
That question has never been answered officially. Aviation Week reported in November 2007 that a radar site at Tall al-Abuad was first hit with electronic attack and then with precision weapons. Analysts have suggested a network-intrusion capability similar to the American "Suter" system, and IEEE Spectrum reported, citing unnamed European sources, that a "kill switch" had been hidden in Syrian radar electronics. Israel has never confirmed any of these accounts.
What Israel did confirm was the intent behind the secrecy. The air force chief at the time, Eliezer Shkedi, ordered that the operation should not be connected to Israel, at least not at first, to lower the risk of a war. Syria denied the site was nuclear; President Bashar al-Assad called it an incomplete and empty military complex. The International Atomic Energy Agency concluded in 2011 that the building was "very likely" a reactor that Syria should have declared.
The IDF's own 2018 film, in which then Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot discusses the attack.
The decade of silence
On 21 March 2018, ten and a half years later, the IDF released declassified documents, photographs and strike footage. The message was aimed as much at Iran as at Syria.
The reference was to Operation Opera, the 1981 strike on Iraq's Osirak reactor. Al-Kibar was its sequel, quieter and in some ways more remarkable: a reactor destroyed before it ran, a war that never started and a raid that its own country kept secret for more than a decade.
Al Jazeera English on the footage Israel released in 2018.
Sources: Times of Israel, The War Zone, AP via PBS NewsHour, NPR, Al Jazeera, Jerusalem Post, CCDCOE Cyber Law Toolkit, Wikipedia
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