needed to appear as if The whole operation Israel keeping quiet. It wasn’t just about it never happened.
and got shot down, Assad might feel compelled to respond. He wouldn’t be able to enter the “deniability zone.” It wasn’t just about Israel keeping quiet. The whole operation needed to appear as if it never happened.and shot north. By 2 a.mfour hours after the operation had The pilots kicked their boosters ., less than
begun, all of the planes were back at their bases.DENIABILITY The air in the Bor was tense. But Yadlin was confident that his mwho had come up with the “deniabil-ity zone” concept, were right. Assad would let this slide, just as he had ZONE? en,
decided to drag his country into a done after other Israeli aerial incurwhy to his people. Wmto a msions over the years. If he decided to since the Yom Kippur Wearly hours of Septemgo to war, he would have to explain assive war with Israel, the largest ysterious bomhy, in response ber 6, had he bing in the ar in 1973?-
that Assad had been secretly building dreds of millions of dollars, if not bil-country was being dragged into a war they were almost certain to lose. Wa nuclear reactor—Syrians would wonder why their the Syrian people would later learn hat good would come of it? WWith an already failing economy, at the cost of hun-hen
lions—was he wasting the country’s money on nuclear reactors at a time when his they might turn on him. Why
own people didn’t have enough to eat?lysts knew that there was nothing quite like a war to unite a fragmented and disgruntled people. If Assad decided to retaliate, he would run the risk of defeat, but he would have a compelling argument to make to his people. “I tried building a capability On the other hand, the Aman ana-
world superpower,” he would have that would have turned Syria into a been able to say. The Zionists took it away from us, therefore I went to war.the Syrian government knew about besides a few officials fromthe reactor’s existence. As a result, the innermBut then there was the fact that, ost circle, almost no one in Assad’s
sion to bomb the reactor were told the border would have to hold the before takeoff to expect to land, refuel, standby. If war broke out, the infantry and armored brigades deployed along IDF’s Northern Comfront line until backup could arrive.rearm and then take off again. No one The pilots who had flown the mis-mand was on
knew what Assad would ultimately do.range of scenarios. In the days before The IDF was prepared for a widening any additional operations. “If you message would have said.the bombing, Olmert considered send-ing a covert message to Assad right after the attack. The purpose would be to tell Syria that while Israel had destroyed the reactor, it was not plan-stay quiet, we will also stay quiet,” the In the end, Olmert decided not to
not out of the ordinary. Troops were not being mobilized, the air force was not being scrambled, and the Syrian contact Assad. There was no need, he felt, to help the Syrian president piece together what had just happened.confirmation that Aman’s “deniability zone” had worked. Syrian activity was Within a few hours, Yadlin had
right back to sleep. War was not going Scud missiles were not being loaded onto launchers. Someone, it seemed, had woken up the Syrian president in the middle of the night to tell him that his prized possession had been destroyed, but he practically went to break out that morning. After receiving an update from his
military aide, Olmert asked his staff to immediately connect him to Bush, who was in Australia for a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Coopera-tion forum. know that if there will be a response, you can count on all of Ambeing behind you.”“OK,” Bush said. “I just want you to erica
He was back in the Oval Office, and this time he was ecstatic. the phone. In Australia, he had to be reserved, he said, but what Israel had done was the right move—successfully eliminated a threat it saw as existential. “Ehud, my buddy!” he yelled into A few days later, Bush called again. it had
ƠCopyright © 2019 by the author and re-printed by permission of St. Martin’s Press. From shadow strikeNEWSWEEK.C by OYaakov KatzM 15.