White House Presents North Korea-Syria Intelligence

The United States presented intelligence which shows North Korea helping Syria build a suspected nuclear facility destroyed by Israel.

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."

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.