Intel gathering

Syria Strike Revealed 

The Intelligence Failure: It Took Years for Israel to Discover Syria's Reactor

The excitement of the Israeli political and security leadership after the successful operation to bomb the Syrian reactor quickly obscured a critical question: How did Bashar Assad’s secret nuclear project escape the notice of Israel’s intelligence community, which boasted for years about its ability to track even the slightest shifts in military deployments by its northern neighbor?

Neither the Olmert government nor the intelligence community seriously addressed this question by means of an in-depth investigation. The failure to detect the Libyan nuclear program (see main article) in 2003 led to extensive criticism and a classified investigation by the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, which became a source of much tension between committee chair MK Yuval Steinitz (Likud) and the heads of the various intelligence branches. In the case of the Syrian reactor, however, the tremendous lapse seems to have somehow been forgotten – apart from mention in some internal reviews in the intelligence organizations that were never fully addressed or resolved in an intra-organizational framework.