Syrian radar disabled remotely?

We are trying to find more on a story we just became aware of: the Israeli air-strike by a group of F-16s on 6-Sept-2007 on the nuclear material development facility in Raqqa in north-central Syria was aided by a “mysterious” de-activation of Syrian air-defense radar. This assertion apparently comes from an Aviation Week & Space Technology article which may be available on-line via a third-party.

This article seems to suggest that the Israelis managed to have some of the critical integrated chips in the Syrian air defense control system “de-activated” remotely via “back door” access or secret de-activation programming features. An article in the IEEE Spectrum journal describes a variety of ways this could be accomplished and how this introduces a new era in “cyber-war.”

At first glance, it is extremely difficult to believe that a special chip or group of chips could have been designed, created and delivered to the right system project, then activated among a multiple-party chain-of-control at the right hour of a super-secret military operation.

Compromising emanations

I came upon this story via slashdot: which got it from Wired; it explains how Bell engineers and eventually US spying agencies discovered,

“Any machine that processes information — be it a photocopier, an electric typewriter or a laptop — have parts inside that emit electromagnetic and acoustic energy that radiates out, as if they were tiny radio stations.”

This is why the Soviets built us a new embassy sprinkled with eavesdropping doohickies and why US Navy divers placed sensors on underwater cables running between Soviet military installations in the Far East.  While many people knew all these devices emitted bothersome EM waves (cell phones on airplanes), few understood that these signals would reveal the data being transmitted as well.