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On July 18, when a suicide bomber struck a meeting of Syria's security cabinet, killing the defense minister and President Bashar al-Assad's brother-in-law, it was a major victory for Syria's opposition. But it was also a cause for serious alarm at the ...
Can Social Media Disarm Syria’s Chemical Arsenal?
When a bombing knocked out top Assad officials, Western intelligence agencies scrambled to find those left holding the deadly stash. Their tools: Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and more.
If you are a Syrian military officer in charge of some nasty chemical weapons,
you’ve probably been friended or Skyped by the U.S. government. The
message is simple: think twice before using or selling that mustard gas
you are guarding.
On July 18, when a suicide bomber struck a meeting of Syria’s security cabinet,
killing the defense minister and President Bashar al-Assad’s
brother-in-law, it was a major victory for Syria’s opposition. But it
was also a cause for serious alarm at the Pentagon.
In
public, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned what was left of the
regime’s leadership to protect the state’s large stockpile of chemical
weapons. Privately, the U.S. intelligence community began to worry that
the Syrian officials known to have the ability to authorize the use of
that arsenal were now dead or gravely injured.
A
scramble then ensued: who were the midlevel officers in charge of the
Syrian Air Force and Army units that controlled the stocks of sarin and
mustard gas the Assad regime had been compiling for decades? And who was
now running the Scud missiles and bombers that would be deployed to use
these chemical weapons? According to current and retired U.S. and
Western intelligence and defense officials, U.S. analysts began to hunt
for email addresses, Twitter handles, Facebook accounts, phone numbers,
and Skype contacts for those midlevel Syrian officers. The information
was then used to deliver a pointed message: the U.S. government knows
who you are, and there will be consequences if you use or transfer
chemical weapons.
“The
people who were killed and injured in that [July 18] suicide bombing
were the people who we could try to persuade not to use this stuff,”
says one congressional staffer who has been briefed extensively on the
program. “When that happened, we needed to find another way to get to
these guys.”
The
project to reach out to Syria’s midlevel officers is an important part
of the Obama administration’s planning for how to prevent the use and
illicit transfer of Syria’s chemical arsenal. To date, President Obama
has taken a cautious approach to the civil war inside the country,
offering humanitarian aid, but choosing against arming the rebels. On
Thursday, outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told the Senate Armed
Services Committee that they both favored a plan developed by the CIA to arm the rebels, a plan the White House rejected.
Obama
has been publicly warning of grave consequences if the Syrians use
chemical weapons or transfer them to groups like Hezbollah or al Qaeda.
Israel, too, is establishing its own red lines. Last week, Israeli jets
hit a convoy containing SA-17 rockets that was reportedly on the way to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
For
now, it’s unlikely Obama would authorize airstrikes on the known
weapons depots and chemical labs. Instead, the hope is that Syrian
officers can be persuaded to safeguard the material if the regime
collapses.
Though high-level Russians have warned President Assad and other Syrians against using chemical weapons, U.S. officials say they don’t know how effective this approach might be.
Charles
Duelfer, a former CIA officer who served as the deputy chairman of the
U.N. weapons-inspection team for Iraq and later as the head of the U.S.
effort to find those weapons after the 2003 invasion, said there were
two kinds of goals these types of operations can accomplish. “You want
to transmit a message of deterrence,” he says. “It’s not just Bashar at
the top that will be held responsible, it’s others down the food chain,
too. You also want to know where the stuff is.”
The
effort to reach out to midlevel officers is separate from other
initiatives by the Syrian opposition to persuade officers to defect. The
initiative to contact the Syrian officers, according to U.S. and
Western officials, has been aided by Israel’s Unit 8200, the section of
the Israel Defense Forces in charge of signal intelligence, or the
monitoring of electronic communications.
Israel
and the U.S. have utilized similar strategies in the past. Before the
1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there was an intelligence
operation to contact midlevel officers in charge of battalions and
smaller units to persuade them to stand down—with the promise of better
treatment later on. Israel sent text messages to the cellphones of
Gazans in 2008 during Operation Cast Lead, warning of aerial
bombardments.
For
much of 2012, American diplomats also tried to work through Russia to
secure Syria’s stash. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union trained
Syria’s military and internal security services, and those relationships
continued after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Though high-level Russians
have warned President Assad and other Syrians against using chemical
weapons, U.S. officials say they don’t know how effective this approach
might be.
For
the West, part of the problem is that Syria’s chemical-weapons
infrastructure is largely secret. It was not until July of last year
that any Syrian official even acknowledged the nation had such weapons.
On July 23, Jihad Maqdisi, a spokesman for the Syrian foreign ministry,
warned that Syria would deploy its unconventional weapons only if the
country is invaded and would not use the weapons against civilians.
“We’ve
been watching Syria’s biological- and chemical-weapons programs for a
lengthy period of time with concern,” says Paula DeSutter, the former
assistant secretary of state for verification and compliance in the
George W. Bush administration. “Anyone pursuing these types of programs
will do what they can to hide as much information as possible about
their program, locations, and use protocol.”
It
remains unclear what Damascus is up to. In July, U.S. intelligence
satellites began to detect Syrian units moving Scuds closer to the
country’s Turkish border and the border with Israel, current and former
U.S. intelligence officials says. But in the last three months, U.S. and
Western intelligence agencies have watched Syrian forces moving
chemical weapons into fewer locations than before, these officials say.
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Comments
"There's no REAL proof they have these WMD's"
"This is none of our business"
"Who is the United States to police the world?"
"We don't have any right to interfere"
"Let the UN handle this"
I believe that sums it up. Right, libs?