Above: These satellite images, taken August 5, 2007 (Top) and October 24, 2007 (Bottom), show a suspected nuclear facility in Syria.
REUTERS/DigitalGlobe/Handout
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The Bush administration presented intelligence to U.S. lawmakers on Thursday that it believes shows North Korea helped Syria to build a suspected nuclear facility destroyed by Israel last year.
The closed-door briefings conducted by CIA Director Michael Hayden and other intelligence officials breaks U.S. official silence on the matter and could complicate American diplomacy with North Korea and in the Middle East.
While some lawmakers last year got classified information about the September 6 Israeli air strike, they voiced bitterness that the administration had only shared the intelligence more widely nearly eight months after the incident.
A U.S. official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss classified matters, said that among the intelligence the United States has was an image of what appeared to be people of Korean descent at the facility.
However, the official stressed that this image was only part of a wider array of information gathered from multiple sources on the suspected cooperation between Syria and North Korea.
Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar Ja'afari told reporters on Wednesday that "there was no Syria-North Korea cooperation whatsoever in Syria. We deny these rumors."
Israeli officials have feared that broad disclosure of the air strike and information that prompted it could trigger a backlash from Syria.
It is also possible that the briefings could make it harder for Washington to make progress in a multilateral effort to get North Korea to make a "complete and correct" declaration of all its nuclear programs as a step toward abandoning them.
Pyongyang missed a December 31 deadline to make the declaration and some lawmakers are skeptical that a tentative agreement on how it may address concerns about any uranium enrichment program and nuclear proliferation will yield full disclosure.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House of Representatives intelligence committee, bluntly told the reporters after a briefing on the issue that the administration had lost the trust of many lawmakers.
"A trusting environment between the administration and Congress does not exist," said the Michigan congressman, one of a handful of lawmakers briefed on the intelligence last year.
He also said the administration's decision not to brief a wider array of lawmakers until Thursday would make it much harder for Bush to win congressional support for any agreements he may strike with North Korea through the six-party negotiations on ending Pyongyang's nuclear programs.
"By waiting so long to brief the intelligence committee and other committees on the Hill, the administration has made it much more difficult ... for them to go through the Congress and get these agreements approved because they have really damaged the relationship between Congress and the administration," he said.
Source: Reuters
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