WASHINGTON - U.S. lawmakers on Thursday were presented with intelligence by The Bush administration which 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.Among the intelligence the United States has was an image of what appeared to be people of Korean descent at the facility, disclosed by a U.S. official, who asked not to be named. This image was only part of a wider array of information gathered from different sources according to that official.
While some lawmakers last year got classified information about the September 6 Israeli air strike, they showed bitterness that the administration had only shared the intelligence more widely nearly eight months after the incident.
Bashar Ja’afari, Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations 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.
This new briefing will make it harder 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 31st 2007 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.
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