[THS] Gareth Porter: Heinonen Pushed Dubious Iran Nuclear Weapons Intel

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25860.htm

Heinonen Pushed Dubious Iran Nuclear Weapons Intel

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Jul 2, 2010 (IPS) - Olli Heinonen, the Finnish nuclear engineer who
resigned Thursday after five years as deputy director for safeguards of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was the driving force in turning that
agency into a mechanism to support U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran.

Heinonen was instrumental in making a collection of intelligence documents showing
a purported Iranian nuclear weapons research programme the central focus of the
IAEA's work on Iran. The result was to shift opinion among Western publics to the
view that Iran had been pursuing a covert nuclear weapons programme.

But his embrace of the intelligence documents provoked a fierce political struggle
within the Secretariat of the IAEA, because other officials believed the documents
were fraudulent.

Heinonen took over the Safeguards Department in July 2005 - the same month that
the George W. Bush administration first briefed top IAEA officials on the intelligence
collection.

The documents portrayed a purported nuclear weapons research programme,
originally called the "Green Salt" project, that included efforts to redesign the
nosecone of the Shahab-3 missile, high explosives apparently for the purpose of
triggering a nuclear weapon and designs for a uranium conversion facility. Later the
IAEA referred to the purported Iranian activities simply as the "alleged studies".

The Bush administration was pushing the IAEA to use the documents to accuse Iran
of having had a covert nuclear weapons programme. The administration was
determined to ensure that the IAEA Governing Board would support referring Iran to
the U.N. Security Council for action on sanctions, as part of a larger strategy to force
Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment programme.

Long-time IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei and other officials involved in
investigating and reporting on Iran's nuclear programme were immediately sceptical
about the authenticity of the documents. According to two Israeli authors, Yossi
Melman and Meir Javadanfar, several IAEA officials told them in interviews in 2005
and 2006 that senior officials of the agency believed the documents had been
"fabricated by a Western intelligence organisation".

Heinonen, on the other hand, supported the strategy of exploiting the collection of
intelligence documents to put Iran on the defensive. His approach was not to claim
that the documents' authenticity had been proven but to shift the burden of proof to
Iran, demanding that it provide concrete evidence that it had not carried out the
activities portrayed in the documents.

From the beginning, Iran's permanent representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar
Soltanieh, denounced the documents as fabrications. In Governing Board meetings
and interviews, Soltanieh pointed to several indicators, including the absence of
official stamps showing receipt of the document by a government office and the
absence of any security markings.

The tensions between Heinonen and the senior officials over the intelligence
documents intensified in early 2008, when Iran provided detailed documentation to
the agency disproving a key premise of the intelligence documents.

Kimia Maadan, a private Iranian company, was shown in the intelligence documents
as having designed a uranium conversion facility as part of the alleged military
nuclear weapons research programme. Iran proved to the satisfaction of those
investigating the issue, however, that Kimia Maadan had been created by Iran's
civilian atomic energy agency solely to carry out a uranium ore processing project
and had gone out of business before it fulfilled the contract.

Senior IAEA officials then demanded that Heinonen distance the organisation from
the documents by inserting a disclaimer in future agency reports on Iran that it could
not vouch for the authenticity of the documents.

Instead Heinonen gave a "technical briefing" for IAEA member countries in February
2008 featuring a diagram on which the ore processing project and the uranium
processing project were both carried out by the firm and shared the same military
numbering system.

The IAEA report published just three days earlier established, however, that the ore
processing project number -- 5/15 -- had been assigned to it not by the military but
by the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran. And the date on which it was assigned
was August 1999 - many months before the purported nuclear weapons programme
was shown to have been organised.

Heinonen carefully avoided endorsing the documents as authentic. He even
acknowledged that Iran had spotted technical errors in the one-page design for a
small-scale facility for uranium conversion, and that there were indeed "technical
inconsistencies" in the diagram.

He also admitted Iran had provided open source publications showing spherical firing
systems similar to the one depicted in the intelligence documents on alleged tests of
high explosives.

Heinonen suggested in his presentation that the agency did not yet have sufficient
information to come to any firm conclusions about those documents. In the May 2008
IAEA report, however, there was no mention of any such caveats about the
documents.

Instead, the report used language that was clearly intended to indicate that the
agency had confidence in the intelligence documents: "The documentation
presented to Iran appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different
periods of time, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent."

That language, on which Heinoen evidently insisted, did not represent a consensus
among senior IAEA officials. One senior official suggested to IPS in September 2009
that the idea that documents came from different sources was not completely honest.

"There are intelligence-sharing networks," said the official. It was possible that one
intelligence organisation could have shared the documents with others, he explained.

"That gives us multiple sources consistent over time," said the official.

The same official said of the collection of intelligence documents, "It's not difficult to
cook up."

Nevertheless, Heinonen's position had clearly prevailed. And in the final year of
ElBaradei's leadership of the agency, the Safeguards Department became an
instrument for member states - especially France, Britain, Germany and Israel - to
put pressure on ElBaradei to publish summaries of intelligence reports portraying
Iran as actively pursuing a nuclear weapons programme.

The active pressure of the United States and its allies on behalf of the hard line
toward Iran was the main source of Heinonen's power on the issue. Those states
have been feeding intelligence on alleged covert Iranian nuclear activities to the
Safeguards Division for years, and Heinonen knew that ElBaradei could not afford to
confront the U.S.-led coalition openly over the issue.

The Bush administration had threatened to replace ElBaradei in 2004 and had
reluctantly accepted his reelection as director-general in 2005. ElBaradei was not
strong enough to threaten to fire the main antagonist over the issue of alleged
studies.

ElBaradei’s successor Yukio Amano is even less capable of adopting an independent
position on the issues surrounding the documents. The political dynamics of the IAEA
ensure that Heinonen's successor is certain to continue the same line on the Iran
nuclear issue and intelligence documents as Heinonen's.

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