BEIRUT — The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency surprised diplomats and arms control experts Monday by announcing that inspectors would visit Syria for two days to try to clear up the mystery of an alleged nuclear site destroyed in an Israeli airstrike last year.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told his board of governors in Vienna that an inspection team would travel to Syria on June 22 to investigate the site. ElBaradei also voiced frustration about his organization’s probe of Iran’s nuclear program, which that nation insists is meant for peaceful electricity generation and Western officials believe masks a drive to produce weapons of mass destruction.
ElBaradei said it was “regrettable” that his agency had not made “the progress we had hoped for” regarding documents suggesting Iran was working on missile designs, uranium experiments and explosives testing consistent with a nuclear weapons program. He also strongly criticized the country’s leadership.
“Iran has not yet agreed to implement all the transparency measures required to clarify this cluster of allegations and questions,” he told the atomic agency’s governing board.
Israeli warplanes struck the disputed Syrian site in September in what many analysts considered a warning to Iran about its willingness to use force to prevent regional rivals from obtaining the capability to produce nuclear weapons. Israel is believed to have an arsenal of more than 300 nuclear warheads.
Officials in Damascus, the Syrian capital, have contended that Israel targeted nothing more than an unused military building.
Satellite photographs suggested that the site had been bulldozed, raising suspicions about the Syrian explanation. In April, U.S. intelligence officials presented lawmakers with photographic evidence alleging that the site was an uncompleted plutonium factory being built with the help of North Korean engineers.
Syria’s decision to allow international inspections astounded diplomats and analysts.
“What’s the point?” said Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. “What do (the Syrians) get out of it? They don’t get anything out of it as far as I can see.”
