Global SITREP B3-14: The Secret of Al-Kibar

The former Syrian-North Korean nuclear reactor at Al-Kibar, Syria

UPDATE 22 March 2018: Since some details for Operation Orchard have been published in Israeli media in the past couple of days, I thought it prudent to  bring this SITREP forward. No edits have been made to the original text below; it's left in its original form because it contains the truth about what occurred at al-Kibar, Syria 10 years and six months ago. 

Make note of this passage of time, and how the described Israeli technology is certain to have improved over past last decade. Note also the timing of this release of data. It is a message to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a not-so-veiled warning that they're next to endure what Syria endured as detailed below. Tick tock, tick tock.

12 January 2014: It's still a closely guarded state secret in Israel. The best military minds on the planet think they know the secret, but their thoughts are highly educated best guesses backed by chimera-like electromagnetic evidences that are probably really close to the truth, but not quite close enough to win the proverbial cigar. I believe this is the case because if they actually knew the secret, then faux allies like the Obama Administration would have let that black cat out of the bag by now. So, they don't know enough to leak it out and remain credible, and that is a good thing.

Then there are Israel's worst enemies, the world-class when it comes to the denial of reality, the Iranian twelvers. They believe they've discovered the secret of what happened during the overnight hours of 6/7 September 2007 at the under-construction plutonium reactor at Al-Kibar, Syria. Don't laugh, but the Iranian's actually think Israel used earth-penetrating nuclear artillery. This is due to the fact that the Iranians are in abject denial that the IAF had conducted an utterly stealthy strategic air strike on the site. And there's the rub, what the Iranians abjectly deny will come back to decimate them on their home turf and leave their Hezbollah allies in Lebanon all but defenseless should they be so unwise as to start another war with Israel.

So what is the secret of Al Kibar? What was it that ensured that the discussion of the more recent months was about the removal and destruction of Syrian chemical weapons and not Syrian nuclear weapons? What was it that Israel did not quite have to an operational status in the Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, but was used to tremendous effect a year later and has kept IAF strike aircraft not only immune, but virtually invisible to enemy early warning electromagnetic detection? Have I just let the cat out of the bag? Maybe, but as a former electronic intelligence (ELINT) gatherer and analyst, I'm probably just surface skimming with what I'm strongly hinting at here. So, let's skim a little more and a little deeper.

Operation Orchard and the déjà vu of history repeating itself.

Let us recall the reports issued seven years ago and consider the pieces of the puzzle to the secret of Al-Kibar that have been put together since then.  Officially, the operation to strike the North Korean-built plutonium reactor at Al-Kibar is known as Operation Orchard. This reactor was a virtual duplicate of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon. This operation should have a mention or two in former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' new book because Israel had provided the U.S. at the highest level with irrefutable intelligence on the reactor in May of 2007 that its Mossad agents had clandestinely collected from the home of a high level Syrian government official in Vienna, Austria. Ultimately, and after vigorous debate, the U.S. bailed out on a unilateral or even a joint military operation with Israel, mostly at the insistence of SECDEF Gates and SECSTATE Condoleezza Rice (the military genius-not who had prematurely brought an end to the 2006 Hezbollah war).

So, Israel was left to go it alone against Syria that was fully armed with missile-borne chemical weapons and in the process of arming it self with missile-borne nuclear weapons. Sound like a familiar situation? Indeed, history appears ready to repeat itself in a near déjà vu. So, in the ovenight hours of 6/7 September 2007 the IAF struck. The thing is nobody, neither friend or foe, saw them coming - or going.  The Syrians and their vaunted Russian-made air defense systems didn't so much as make a peep. NATO stations in nearby Turkey were also just as in the dark as Syria was. The US knew the attack was coming because Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had very forcefully told US President George W. Bush on July 13, 2007 that Israel would execute the strike in Syria alone. (Again, Hello Ayatollah Khamenei, are you paying attention to history, or not?) And not even the United States with all of our high tech and electronic intelligence collecting capabilities had any advance warning of the strike going into execution mode.

Israel's Secular Holy of Holies: The Electromagnetic Black Hole

When Israel decides to go dark about something, they go a black hole kind of dark. And with Operation Orchard, Israel suddenly and without warning extended that black hole to cover the entire region of the Eastern Mediterranean. The entire Levant, from southern Turkey, all of Lebanon, and all of northern Syria, was consumed in an electromagnetic black hole which turned off power and it turned off ALL of the Syrian air defense grid. And as soon as the mission was complete everything just came back on as if nothing has happened. Perhaps some might recall the reports that radio and television stations suddenly went dark in Beirut as this operation was underway.

This was the was the world's first exposure to Israel's newest and most secret weapon, a chimera-like electromagnetic black hole maker which makes all other electronics in a pre-defined area cease to function except their own. And I believe it has system has been demonstrated on several more occasions over Syria but at a lesser capacity in Syria between January and May of 2013. Most everybody in Lebanon, including Hezbollah, heard the IAF F16-I Sufa's overheard, but nobody saw them electronically and nobody fired so much as a single shot at them in anger. That is such an over whelming battlefield capability and superiority that words fail to adequately define it. What's more we may not have seen this system in whatever full-power mode it may still have in reserve or have been refined to achieve in the nearly seven years that have passed.

Today, in addition to the Iranian denials that Operation Orchard actually took place, even Syria itself has remained silent about it like some puppy that has had its nose rubbed in its own business. Israel has a secret, overwhelming offensive and/or defense weapon system; it's been used to tremendous effect in destroying the Syrian nuclear program, but nobody wants to talk seriously about it or assess it as it deserves to be assessed. Perhaps that's just as well and it is better that Hezbollah, Syria and Iran not know the full extent of what will neuter their military forces when the time comes. I believe Jeremiah 49:34-39 and the other prophecies give us a tantalizing clue as to how this will all go down, but we'll have to see it to believe it.

Addendum: I have decided to include an excerpt from an article that corroborates 100% what I have long suspected about Operation Orchard.

"On Sept. 6, 2007, ten F-15I and F-16 jets attacked a nuclear facility being built in Syria. The success of that mission, dubbed “Operation Orchard“, was largely attributed to effectiveness of the Israeli Electronic Warfare platforms that supported the air strike and made the Syrian radars blind: some sources believe that Operation Orchard saw the baptism of fire of the Suter airborne network system against Syrian radar systems from some ELINT aircraft."

There's more from where this TheAviationist.com excerpt came from: Air strike on Damascus military complex shows Syrian Air Defense can do nothing against Israeli Electronic Warfare.

Read this link, and continue to scroll down to the "New Details..." section and you will come to this pair of statements:

"Some sources say that this attack was the first time the Suter airborne network system was used against Syrian radar systems from one of two ELINT aircraft. A modified version would more than likely be used against Iran if an attack were to take place, along with much more advanced tech. Including malware injected by F-16s, as someone speculates."

 Hopefully, this addendum has cleared up a few things for some folks.

Global SITREP A4-15: The Nuclear Axis of Evil

14 January 2015: On Sunday, 11 January the English-language website DerSpiegel Online International posted an article by Erick Follath which detailed the Syrian nuclear weapons program beginning with the plutonium reactor site (Al-Kibar) destroyed by Israel during Operation Orchard in September 2007 and concluded with claims of collected intelligence evidence from 2009 to the present regarding a continuing nuclear weapons program in Syria along the Lebanese border at a location just 4 km to the west from the area of Zaita Lake and Al-Qusayr, Syria and an even shorter distance from Qasr, Lebanon. The above image is of this area, but to view it in the real-world orientation one must rotate this image clockwise by 90 degrees so that it stands on end and the large light-colored crescent shape is open to the left. 

Israel Matzav published an article on this Al-Qusayr WMD site yesterday indicating it is actually not a Syrian project but an Iranian project. More importantly, Israel Matzav reported this suspected nuclear weapons site was a subject brought up during the U.S. State Department's daily Monday morning briefing. Quoting Israel Matzav:  

"Disturbingly, spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the United States did not plan to raise the issue in the Iranian nuclear talks, claiming that those talks only deal with Iran's nuclear capabilities and not with Syria's." 

Really? Israel Matzav appropriately illustrates the State Department's patently ridiculous leftist Clintonista refrain of "What difference does it make..." as infamously screeched by Mrs. Clinton during the Benghazi hearings. It is no small wonder therefore to understand how it is that the United States Government has never been able to connect the hidden-in-plain-sight dots existent between the North Korean nuclear weapons program (which is well into the process of perfecting a miniaturized and operational nuclear warhead) and the Iranian nuclear weapons program, or between the North Korean and the Syrian nuclear weapons programs. Axis of evil, anyone? The failure of the latter dot connection exercise is probably due to the fact that those rascals in Israel obliterated the Al-Kibar nuclear evidence before our spooky sleuths could fully analyze it. And even if they did, they would more than likely issue a National Defense Intelligence Estimate (NDIE) assessing that the joint Syrian-North Korean-Iranian nuclear weapons program went into hiatus three years ago.

Getting back to the real world, the above image is a zoomed which the at the top image identified as "Underground facility." This image also requires a clockwise 90 degree rotation for a true, real-world north-south orientation.  I have also been quietly watching and waiting since May 2013 for PM Netanyahu to authorize the IAF to strike this site, even though I know full well that means waiting for an Obama "green means go" light that is likely never to be illuminated. To Obama the color green means Islam. 

Anyway, I discovered this same site after a hint of its existence was made by an Israeli report published at the time of the second battle of Al-Qusayr (May '13). The Israeli report spoke of a newly discovered tunnel complex in the hills and mountains along this part of the Lebanese-Syrian frontier. Not only was I able to locate this site by "flying" a Goggle Earth reconnaissance mission, but I located yet another facility inside Syrian territory which is located perhaps a stone's throw from the above site. The only problem here is that the only paved road access to it comes from inside Lebanon. And there's the smoking gun evidence that these are Iranian IRGC run operations in a very remote portion of the Lebanon-Syria border.

Still waitin' for Bibi to "git'r'done."