by CKR
The Institute for Science and International Security has issued a report on the al Kibar site in Syria. It does a number of things well, but its scope is limited to analysis of overhead photos and photos of the building. Perhaps a report on the reactor photos is in the works.
The authors, David Albright and Paul Brennan, use the site as a case study of how hard it can be to detect nuclear installations, particularly if the builders go to some lengths to conceal them. This, of course, assumes that the site was indeed a reactor installation.
Let me first say what the report does not (and cannot) address. The provenance of the ground-level photos of the building was not disclosed in the CIA video, nor was the associated intelligence that whoever took the photos provided. The report also does not address directly whether North Korea was involved in the building of the reactor. Evidence for this claim was thin in the CIA video, which presented only a photo of two men standing together, one in a running suit and one in a business suit. For any of us who have attended international conferences, there are undoubtedly hundreds of such photos out there. The CIA is said to have much more information than was released. Albright and Brennan cite “U.S. government experts knowledgeable about intelligence assessments about the Al Kibar reactor” as some of their sources.
The provenance of the photos probably legitimately involves concerns about sources and methods. Presumably a spy was inserted into the construction operations, or someone within those operations was turned. Presumably that person has been removed from that position, or it might be too dangerous to publish the photos at all. However, since limited numbers of people must have come to and gone from the operations, some danger to that person remains. An explanation of the provenance would likely expose his identity.
However, given the propensity of the Bush administration to overstate its case with regard to intelligence, questions will remain until the provenance of the photos is known; otherwise there is no way to know whether the photos of the building are from the same site as the overhead photos, nor whether the inside photos are inside of that building.
Albright and Brennan try to decipher how some of the distinguishing marks of the Yongbyon reactor, the shape of the building, cooling towers and gas stacks, might have been disguised or redesigned.
The single ground-level photograph of the building before 2003 released by the CIA is used to show how a building might have been erected around a building looking very much like the building housing the Yongbyon reactor. A better ability to scale these photos and link more features between them would have been helpful. The rectangular “portico” seems to correspond in the photos. Andrew Foland calculates a height of 25.5 meters for the later building, which gives a height for the portico as about 9.8 meters by my measurement. There seems to be no correspondence between windows on the earlier and later photos.
Those dimensions make the building much larger than it appears to my eye. Dimensional markers, like a person or vehicle, would be desirable in the ground-level photos.
It appears that some portion of the building and its contents was built into the ground or the ground level was built up. If overhead photos are available during the early stages of construction, the excavations should be evident. Albright and Brennan use a single photo from the CIA video (Figure 11), showing bulldozers using fill from the adjacent mesa to cover the hole remaining after the building’s destruction. They state that “According to U.S. government experts, the depth of the hole was several tens of meters.” Volumes can be calculated by measuring the mesa before and after the earthmoving; my group did such calculations to estimate the costs of remediating a surface disposal site.
They address the lack of physical protection of the site (fences and antiaircraft installations) and surmise, as did the CIA, that Syria decided to forgo such protection because it could call attention to the installation in the overhead photos. An alternate explanation (provided by my colleague MC) is that it was not the government of Syria that was responsible for the installation, but a subnational group. The concealment motive would be operative in that case, and perhaps the desire to save on expenses.
Albright and Brennan suggest that earthen walls were constructed to hide the building from ground observation. Figures 16 and 17 do not correspond, however. The walls called out in Figure 16 are to the east of the building, on top of the mesas. The wall in Figure 17 is in the wadi extending west from the building to the Euphrates River and cannot be seen in Figure 16. The wall in the wadi is in one of the photos transformed to oblique from overhead, probably not the overhead of Figure 16, as I noted earlier. This photo may be later than the photo of Figure 16, perhaps later than Jeffrey Lewis’s observation that the building might be visible to tourists, which could have provoked the construction of that wall.
The rest of the discussion is sketchy, as it must be with the limited numbers of photos available. The discussion of the water supply is perhaps the most convincing. There is no reason that the CIA could not have explained how they located the underground water storage tank. It could have been determined by the infrared techniques my group used to find disposal pits; such techniques have been widely available for some time, and any classified improvements could have been masked. I am wondering about the feature in that area that casts the linear shadow. It could have been access to the storage tank. Again, photos during construction would help.
Constructing a pipeline to return heated water to the river seems to be overkill. Used water could have been dumped into the wadi. Either option would give an infrared signature once the reactor was operating, although returning the water to the river would probably give less of a signature.
Albright and Brennan are, to some degree, working backwards. They have taken the CIA conclusion that the building housed a reactor and are looking for signs of the electricity and water supply that a reactor needs. They show that the building could have housed a reactor, but they do not consider alternatives for the features they find.
The fact that such questions remain about the al Kibar site indicates, as Albright and Brennan note, the difficulty of finding such installations as they are built. The CIA claims to have released only a small portion of their intelligence, which may provide more definitive evidence. Overhead photos will never substitute for on-the-ground inspections or the presence of a spy.