The False Intelligence Behind the “Manufactured Crisis” over Iran’s Nuclear Activities
by alethoBy Gareth Porter | Going to Tehran | March 31, 2014
The
world’s news media have long accepted without question the charge that
Iran had for many years used its civilian nuclear program as a cover for
a nuclear weapons program. That narrative has rested on intelligence
documents and reports that were accepted as credible by the
International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA in turn has been treated in
the news media as a non-political authority without any axe to grind.
But, as I document in detail in Manufactured Crisis,
the intelligence documents at the heart of this narrative were
fabrications created by the state with most obvious interest in
promoting such a narrative—Israel. The origin of the false intelligence
was the ambition of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and
their Israeli ally to carry out regime change in Iran, which they
believed would require the use of force, though not with large-scale
ground troop as in Iraq. They also believed that the only way to justify
such a war would be to build a case that Iran was threatening to obtain
nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
Against
the backdrop of a political strategy for Iran, on which Undersecretary
of State John Bolton was coordinating with Israel in 2003-04, a large
cache of documents from a Iranian nuclear weapons research program came
into the possession of Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, late in
the summer of 2004. They included computer modeling of a series of
efforts to integrate what appeared to be a nuclear weapon into the
Shahab-3 Iranian missile, and experiments with high explosives that
could be used to detonate a nuclear weapon. Someone leaked to David
Sanger of the New York Times that those documents had come from
the laptop computer of an Iranian scientist involved in the alleged
program who later feared that he had been discovered and managed to get
the computer out through his wife. U.S. officials told senior IAEA
officials that they feared the “third party” that had brought out the
documents was now dead, according to former Director-General Mohamed
ElBaradei.
But
that was a crudely constructed cover story to hide the real source of
the documents. In fact, the German intelligence agency, BND got those
documents from a member of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), the Iranian
terrorist organization that had become a client of Israel. The MEK
member was a sometime source for the agency, but senior BND officials
regarded the source as “doubtful,” according to former senior German
official Karsten Voigt, who told me the whole story of his November 2004
conversation with his BND contacts on the record a year ago.
The
senior BND officials had contacted Voigt, who was then coordinator of
North-American relations for the foreign office, immediately after
Secretary of State Colin Powell had made comments to reporters about
“information” that Iran was “working hard” to combine a ballistic
missile with “a weapon.” The BND officials were alarmed that the Bush
administration was intending to make a case for war against Iran based
on those doubtful documents.
The
sequence of events presented a remarkable series of parallels with the
Bush administration’s exploitation of the BND source codenamed
“Curveball” to make the case for war against Iraq less than two years
earlier. That Iraqi refugee in Germany—who turned out to be the brother
of a senior official of Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Council—had told
tales of Iraqi mobile bioweapons labs to the BND, which had passed them
on to the CIA. But BND officers had eventually begun to doubt his
stories. When George Tenet had asked BND chief August Hanning in
December 2002 whether the United States could use the information
publicly, Hanning had written a personal note to warn him that the
United States should not rely on the information without further
confirmation. Colin Powell had nevertheless used the very information
about which Hanning had warned as the centerpiece of the case for war in
Iraq. Now Powell was going public with another claim about WMD
intelligence from another dubious source to make what sounded like the
beginning of a case for war against another adversary of the United
States.
Voigt
believed the senior BND officials wanted him to issue another warning
to the United States not to rely on these documents, and a few days
later, he did give such a warning in public, in a coded fashion. In an
article in the Wall Street Journal Voigt was reported to have
said the information to which Powell had referred had come from “an
Iranian dissident group” and that the United States and Europe should
not “let their Iran policy be influenced by single-source headlines.”
The
BND officials were not the only ones who had questions about those
documents. Some U.S. intelligence analysts wondered why the purported
nuclear weapons research project documents only included material about
alleged high explosives experiments, a missile reentry vehicle and the
design of another uranium conversion facility totally different from the
one Iran had adopted after years of research, development and testing.
Why, they wondered was there nothing about weapons design? And why was
the work on the missile reentry vehicle amateurish – or, as David
Albright put it to this writer in a September 2008 interview, “so
primitive”? Why was the design for a bench-scale conversion process
marred by such fundamental flaws that the IAEA’s Olli Heinonen had to
acknowledge in a February 2008 briefing that it had “technical
inconsistencies.”
The
documents also exhibited anomalies that were direct indicators of
fraud. The most dramatic was the fact that the studies modeling the
missile reentry vehicle were based on the initial Shahab-3 missile,
which the Iranian missile program is known to have begun to replace with
an improved model as early as 2000 – two years before those modeling
studies were said to have been started in mid-2002. The redesign of the
reentry vehicle, which was a key to improved design, would have been far
advanced by then, according to Michael Elleman of International
Institute for Strategic Studies, who was the main author of an
authoritative study of the Iranian ballistic missile program. The shape
of the new reentry vehicle, first revealed to the world when the new
missile was flight tested in August 2004, bore no resemblance to the old
one portrayed in the documents. The authors of the documents had
obviously been unaware of that complete redesign of the reentry vehicle,
meaning that they could not have part of an Iranian Defense
Ministry-sponsored program.
The
creators of the collection of documents were clever enough to build
them around an authentic document that could be verified as real and
thereby lend credibility to a collection that otherwise lacked any
evidence of authenticity. But the document was not from inside the
Iranian government but a letter from a high tech company to an Iranian
engineering firm. It would have been relatively easy for Mossad, which
carries out constant surveillance of high tech companies, to acquire
that document. The document was then used to provide evidence of
connections between different parts of the alleged project that was
otherwise absent: anonymous handwriting on it referred to the reentry
vehicle study. Those touches reveal creators who were eager to maximize
the political effect of the document and apparently not worried that
they would be too obvious.
The
daring of the venture as well as the fact that the actual document
around which it was built would have been a routine discovery for Mossad
leave little room for doubt about the Israeli origins of the
collection.
The
plan had been to have the IAEA focus entirely on what ElBaradei was
calling the “alleged studies” once the “Work Program” negotiated with
Iran on the various other issues the Agency had raised since 2004 was
completed. But then came the National Intelligence Estimate of November
2007, which concluded that Iran had stopped the work on nuclear weapons
that the intelligence community had been certain it had been doing for
years in 2003. That estimate all but eliminated the case for the use of
force, so it created a serious problem for Israel.
The
Israelis responded quickly, however, coming up with an entirely new
series of intelligence documents and reports in 2008 and 2009 showing
that Iranian nuclear weapons research and development program was far
more advanced than previously believed. Those documents were transmitted
to the IAEA directly by Israel, according to ElBaradei’s memoirs, but
the IAEA never disclosed that highly salient fact.
The
first document arrived as early as April 2008, and the IAEA’s
Safeguards Department immediately mentioned it in the May 2008 IAEA
report. It was a Farsi-language report on experiments with high
explosives that was obviously intended to suggest the initiation of a
hemispherical charge for an implosion nuclear weapon.
The
very next IAEA report in September 2008 announced that the experiment
“may have involved the assistance of foreign expertise.” That was
obviously a reference to a scholarly paper on a methodology for
measuring intervals between explosions using fiber optic cables
co-authored in 1992 by Ukrainian scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko, who had
worked in Iran from 1999 to 2005. The IAEA thus swallowed the
implausible Israeli claim that a spy had obtained a top secret Iranian
document on nuclear weapon-related experiments that just happened to
involve the same methodology about which Danilenko had published.
The
far more plausible sequence of events was that Mossad had discovered
Danilenko’s work in Iran in a routine investigation of foreign personnel
in the country and soon found out that he had worked at the Soviet
nuclear weapons complex at Chelyabinsk and had published on a method for
measuring explosive internals. Those discoveries would have inspired
the idea of secret Iran document describing high explosives experiments
that would include a measurement technique that would implicate
Danilenko—who would be portrayed as a Soviet nuclear weapons
specialist—in the alleged Iran nuclear weapons program.
Further
supporting that explanation for the appearance of the document is the
fact that the most sensational intelligence claim in the November 2011
IAEA report involves yet another Danilenko publication. The IAEA said
it had “information” that Iran had built a high explosives containment
chamber in 2000 “in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments”, which it
defines as tests to “simulate the first stages of a nuclear explosion”,
at its Parchin military facility. And it cited a publication by the
same “foreign expert”—i.e., Danilenko—as allowing it to “confirm the
date of construction of the cylinder and some of its design features
(such as its dimensions).”
That
Danilenko publication, however, was actually on the design of an
explosives chamber for the production of nanodiamonds. The drawing of
the chamber accompanying the article, moreover, displays features, such
as air and water systems for cooling the tank immediately before and
after the explosion, that would have made it unusable for the purpose of
testing nuclear weapons designs. Despite having worked in a Soviet
nuclear weapons complex for many years, Danilenko had worked from the
beginning of his career on explosive synthesis of nanodiamonds, which
involved no knowledge of nuclear weapons or of methods for testing them.
(The first American to discover nanodiamonds synthesis, Dr. Ray
Grenier, who had also worked for many years in Los Alamos National
Laboratory, the top U.S. nuclear weapons complex, told me that he
himself had never worked on anything directly connected with nuclear
weapons, and that all of his work on nanodiamonds synthesis had been
unclassified.)
The
IAEA never produced any confirming evidence for the tale of the bomb
test chamber at Parchin provided by Israel. Former IAEA chief inspector
in Iraq Robert Kelley, who had also been project leader for nuclear
intelligence at Los Alamos national laboratory and head of the U.S.
Department of Energy’s Remote Sensing Laboratory, immediately pointed
out that the IAEA description of the alleged explosive containment
chamber and its intended purpose made no sense technically. Kelley
observed that the capacity of the alleged chamber to contain 70
kilograms of high explosives reported by the IAEA would have been as
“far too small” for the kind of hydrodynamic nuclear tests the report
claimed as its purpose. Kelley and three other intelligence experts on
photo interpretation also pointed out that the satellite photos of the
site at Parchin indicate that it displays none of the characteristics
that would be associated with a high explosives testing site.
And
Iran’s behavior in regard to the site in Parchin contradicts the notion
that it needed to hide evidence of nuclear testing there. Iran allowed
the IAEA to pick any five sites in one of the four quadrants of Parchin
to visit and take environmental samples in February 2005 and then did
the same thing again in November 2005. And the IAEA reported in February
2012 that it had obtained the complete run of satellite photos of the
site from February 2005 to February 2012 and found that there was no
evidence of any significant activity at the site for the entire seven
years.
The
tainted intelligence underlying the charges of a covert Iranian nuclear
weapons program is now one of the major issues in the nuclear
negotiations with Iran. The introduction of the demand that Iran must
satisfy the IAEA indicates either that the Obama administration believes
completely in the official nuclear narrative and is dangerously
overconfident about its bargaining position or that the administration
has been assured by IAEA director general Yukiya Amano that he will do
what is necessary to reach agreement with Iran on the issue of “possible
military dimensions” of the nuclear program. In either case, the fate
of the false intelligence and the fate of the nuclear talks are now
deeply intertwined.
Gareth
Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian who
writes on U.S. national security issues. His latest book Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February by Just World Books.
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