U.N. atom watchdog faces tough search mission in Syria

By Mark Heinrich

VIENNA (Reuters) - U.N. inspectors go to Syria on Sunday to probe allegations of covert nuclear work at a site where Israeli warplanes destroyed a desert complex at the heart of Western suspicions.

But ferreting out the truth may be hard nine months after the attack.

The International Atomic Energy Agency added Syria to its proliferation watch list in April after the United States passed on intelligence imagery said to show a nascent reactor that could have yielded plutonium for atom bombs.

Washington said Syria, an ally of Iran whose shadowy uranium enrichment program has been under IAEA investigation for five years, almost completed the plant with North Korean know-how.

Satellite pictures show the site was razed after the Israeli bombing in a possible cover-up, nuclear analysts say.

But the IAEA's chief says there is no evidence Syria had the skills or fuel to run a major nuclear complex, and that a U.S. failure to alert inspectors before Israel's air strike last year would make it hard to verify what the target actually was.

"We will do everything in our power to clear things up. I take these accusations very seriously," Mohamed ElBaradei, referring to the June 22-24 mission headed by his deputy, said in a German media interview on June 7.

"But it is doubtful that we will find anything there now, assuming there was anything there in the first place."

Follow-up IAEA missions will be necessary to get to the bottom of the mystery, Western diplomats say.

Washington took issue with ElBaradei's suggestion Syria, whose only declared nuclear facility is an old research reactor under IAEA monitoring, looked unable to develop atomic power.

"The reality here is that there's some pretty strong evidence out there about what Syria was doing...It's important that the IAEA be allowed to fully investigate that facility and any other one that they might find of interest to them," State Department spokesman Tom Casey said on Tuesday.

Syria has denied concealing anything from the U.N. nuclear watchdog in possible violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Damascus has said the U.S. photos were fabricated or doctored and that Israel's target in remote northeast Syria near the Iraq border was a military building under construction.

LIMITED COOPERATION?

Syria told a meeting of the IAEA's 35-nation governing board in Vienna two weeks ago it would cooperate with the inquiry and grant access to the al-Kibar site struck by Israeli warplanes.