[THS] Gareth Porter: Evidence of Iran Weapons Program May Be Fraudulent

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http://www.truth-out.org/the-iaea-and-fraudulent-iranian-nuclear-documents65241

Exclusive Report: Evidence of Iran Nuclear Weapons Program May Be Fraudulent

Thursday 18 November 2010

by: Gareth Porter, t r u t h o u t | Report

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(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: World's Saddest Man, Pierre J.,
ImageAbstraction)

Since 2007, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - with the support of the
United States, Israel and European allies UK, France and Germany - has been
demanding that Iran explain a set of purported internal documents portraying a
covert Iranian military program of research and development of nuclear weapons.
The "laptop documents," supposedly obtained from a stolen Iranian computer by an
unknown source and given to US intelligence in 2004, include a series of drawings of
a missile re-entry vehicle that appears to be an effort to accommodate a nuclear
weapon, as well as reports on high explosives testing for what appeared to be a
detonator for a nuclear weapon.

In one report after another, the IAEA has suggested that Iran has failed to cooperate
with its inquiry into that alleged research, and that the agency, therefore, cannot
verify that it has not diverted nuclear material to military purposes.

That issue remains central to US policy toward Iran. The Obama administration says
there can be no diplomatic negotiations with Iran unless Iran satisfies the IAEA fully
in regard to the allegations derived from the documents that it had covert nuclear
weapons program.

That position is based on the premise that the intelligence documents that Iran has
been asked to explain are genuine. The evidence now available, however, indicates
that they are fabrications.

The drawings of the Iranian missile warhead that were said by the IAEA to show an
intent to accommodate a nuclear weapon actually depict a missile design that Iran is
now known to have already abandoned in favor of an improved model by the time
the technical drawings were allegedly made. And one of the major components of
the purported Iranian military research program allegedly included a project labeled
with a number that turns out to have been assigned by Iran's civilian nuclear
authority years before the covert program is said to have been initiated.

The former head of the agency's safeguards department, Olli Heinonen, who shaped
its approach to the issue of the intelligence documents from 2005 and 2010, has
offered no real explanation for these anomalies in recent interviews with Truthout.

These telltale indicators of fraud bring into question the central pillar of the case
against Iran and raise more fundamental questions about the handling of the Iranian
nuclear issue by the IAEA, the United States and its key European allies.

Drawings of the Wrong Missile Warhead

In mid-July 2005, in an effort to get the IAEA fully behind the Bush administration's
effort to refer the Iranian nuclear dossier to the United Nations Security Council,
Robert Joseph, US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security,
made a formal presentation on the purported Iranian nuclear weapons program
documents to the agency's leading officials in Vienna. Joseph flashed excerpts from
the documents on the screen, giving special attention to the series of technical
drawings or "schematics" showing 18 different ways of fitting an unidentified payload
into the re-entry vehicle or "warhead" of Iran's medium-range ballistic missile, the
Shahab-3.

When IAEA analysts were allowed to study the documents, however, they discovered
that those schematics were based on a re-entry vehicle that the analysts knew had
already been abandoned by the Iranian military in favor of a new, improved design.
The warhead shown in the schematics had the familiar "dunce cap" shape of the
original North Korean No Dong missile, which Iran had acquired in the mid-1990s, as
former IAEA Safeguards Department Chief Olli Heinonen confirmed to this writer in
an interview on November 5. But when Iran had flight tested a new missile in
mid-2004, it did not have that dunce cap warhead, but a new "triconic" or "baby
bottle" shape, which was more aerodynamic than the one on the original Iranian
missile.

The laptop documents had depicted the wrong re-entry vehicle being redesigned.

When I asked Heinonen, now a senior fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center,
why Iran's purported secret nuclear weapons research program would redesign the
warhead of a missile that the Iranian military had already decided to replace with an
improved model, he suggested that the group that had done the schematics had no
relationship with the Iranian missile program. "It looks from that information that this
group was working with this individual," said Heinonen, referring to Dr. Mohsen
Fakrizadeh, the man named in the documents as heading the research program. "It
was not working with the missile program."

Heinonen's claim that the covert nuclear weapon program had no link to the regular
missile program is not supported by the intelligence documents themselves. The IAEA
describes what is purported to be a one-page letter from Fakrizadeh to the Shahid
Hemat Industrial Group dated March 3, 2003, "seeking assistance with the prompt
transfer of data" for the work on redesigning the re-entry vehicle.

Shahid Hemat, which is part of the Iranian military's Defense Industries Organization,
was involved in testing the engine for the Shahab-3 and, in particular, in working on
aerodynamic properties and control systems for Iranian missiles, all of which were
reported in the US news media. "Project 11" was the code name given to the
purported re-entry vehicle project.

Heinonen also suggested that the program's engineers could have been ordered to
redesign the older Shahab-3 model before the decision was made by the missile
program to switch to a newer model and that it couldn't change its work plan once it
was decided.

However, according to Mike Elleman, lead author of the most authoritative study of
the Iranian missile program thus far, published by the London-based International
Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) last May, Iran introduced the major innovations
in the design of the medium-range missile, including a longer, lighter airframe and
the new warhead shape, over a period of two to five years. Elleman, told me in an
interview that the redesign of the re-entry vehicle must have begun in 2002 at the
latest.

The schematics on the laptop documents' redesigned warhead were dated March-
April 2003, according to the IAEA report of May 2008.

Heinonen's explanation assumes that the Iranian military ordered an engineer to
organize a project to redesign the warhead on its intermediate-range ballistic missile
to accommodate a nuclear payload, but kept the project in the dark about its plans to
replace the Shahab-3 with a completely new and improved model.

That assumption appears wholly implausible, because the reason for the shift to the
new missile, according to the IISS study, was that the Shahab-3, purchased from
North Korea in the early to mid-1990s, had a range of only 800 to 1,000 km,
depending on the weight of the payload. Thus, it was incapable of reaching Israel.
The new missile, later named the Ghadr-1, could carry a payload of conventional
high-explosives 1,500 to 1,600 kilometers, bringing Israel within the reach of an
Iranian missile for the first time.

The missile warhead anomaly is a particularly telling sign of fraud, because someone
intending to fabricate such technical drawings of a re-entry vehicle could not have
known that Iran had abandoned the Shahab-3 in favor of the more advanced
Ghadr-1 until after mid-August 2004. As the IISS study points out, the August 11,
2004, test launch was the first indication to the outside world that a new missile with
a triconic warhead had been developed. Before that test, Elleman told me, "No
information was available that they were modifying the warhead."

After that test, however, it would have been too late to redo the re-entry vehicle
studies, which would have the biggest impact on news media coverage and political
opinion.

Iranian statements about the Shahab-3 missile would have been misleading for
anyone attempting to fabricate these schematics. The IISS study recalls that Iran had
said in early 2001 that the Shahab-3 had entered "serial production" and declared in
July 2003 that it was "operational." The IISS study observes, however, that the
announcement came only after the US invasion of Iraq, when Iran felt an urgent
need to claim an operational missile capability. The study says it is "very dubious"
that the missile was ever produced in significant numbers.

Skepticism and Resistance at the IAEA

A second inconsistency between the laptop documents and the established facts
emerged only in 2008. At a briefing for IAEA member states in February 2008,
Heinonen displayed an organization chart of the purported research program,
showing a "Project 5" with two sub-projects: "Project 5/13" for uranium conversion
and "Project 5/15" for uranium ore processing. Kimia Maadan, a private Iranian firm,
is shown to be running "Project 5."

One of the key documents in the collection, a one-page flow sheet for a uranium-
conversion process, dated May 2003, with Kimia Maadan's name on it, is marked
"Project 5/13."

Bush administration hardliners and the IAEA safeguard department had been
convinced in the 2004-2005 period that Kimia Maadan was a front for the Iranian
military. In a 2005 report, the IAEA questioned how that company, with such "limited
experience in ore processing," could have established an ore processing plant at
Gchine in such a short time from 2000 to mid-2001 on its own.

But in January 2008, Iran provided documents to the IAEA showing that Kimia
Maadan had actually been created by the civilian Atomic Energy Organization of Iran
(AEOI) in 2000 solely to carry out a contract to design, build and put into operation
an ore-processing facility. The documents also established that the firm's core staff
consisted entirely of experts who had previously worked for AEOI's Ore Processing
Center and that the conceptual design and other technical information had been
provided to Kimia Maadan by AEOI.

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But the most explosive new evidence provided by Iran showed that the code number
of "Project 5/15" on ore processing, supposedly assigned by the Iranian military's
secret nuclear weapon research program, had actually been assigned by the AEOI
more than two years before the purported nuclear weapons program had been
started. In the context of the documents on Kimia Maadan's relationship with AEOI,
the IAEA report of February 2008 acknowledged, "A decision to construct a UOC
[uranium ore concentration] plant at Gchine, known as 'project 5/15,' was made
August 25, 1999."

An unpublished paper by the IAEA safeguards department, leaked to the media and
the Washington, DC-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in
2009, identified early 2002 as the formal beginning of what it called the Iranian
military's "warhead development program."

Asked about this contradiction, Heinonen told me he couldn't answer the question,
because he did not recall the specific dates involved.

After the IAEA had acquired that new evidence of fraud in January 2008, an IAEA
official familiar with the internal debate inside the agency told me that some IAEA
officials had demanded that the agency distance itself publicly from the intelligence
documents. But IAEA reports made no concession to those demands. Instead,
beginning with the May 2008 report, the agency began to use language implying
that the documents were considered reliable.

Behind the scenes, a conflict was about to boil over between Heinonen and then
IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei, who was skeptical about the
authenticity of the laptop documents and refused to give them any official IAEA
endorsement. In late 2008, Heinonen began pushing ElBaradei to approve
publication of his department's favorable assessment of the intelligence documents,
which concluded that Iran had done research and development on nuclear weapons
components and speculated that it was continuing to do so.

But ElBaradei refused to do so and in August 2009, diplomats from the UK, France
and Germany, who were supporting Heinonen's view of the documents, leaked to
Reuters and The Associated Press that, for nearly a year, ElBaradei had been
suppressing "credible" evidence of Iran's covert work on nuclear weapons.

ElBaradei responded to those political pressures to publish the safeguards
department speculative study in an interview with The Hindu on October 1, 2009, in
which he declared, "The IAEA is not making any judgment at all whether Iran even
had weaponisation studies before because there is a major question of authenticity of
the documents."

Evidence of Israel's Role

The origin of the laptop documents may never be proven conclusively, but the
accumulated evidence points to Israel as the source. As early as 1995, the head of
the Israel Defense Forces' military intelligence research and assessment division,
Yaakov Amidror, tried unsuccessfully to persuade his American counterparts that Iran
was planning to "go nuclear." By 2003-2004, Mossad's reporting on the Iranian
nuclear program was viewed by high-ranking CIA officials as an effort to pressure the
Bush administration into considering military action against Iran's nuclear sites,
according to Israeli sources cited by a pro-Israeli news service.

In the summer of 2003, Israel's international intelligence agency, Mossad, had
established an aggressive program aimed at exerting influence on the Iran nuclear
issue by leaking alleged intelligence to governments and the news media, as Israeli
officials acknowledged to journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. According
to the book, "The Nuclear Jihadist," as part of the program, Mossad sometimes
passed on purported Iranian documents supposedly obtained by Israeli spies inside
Iran.

German sources have suggested that the intelligence documents were conveyed to
the US government, directly or indirectly, by a group that had been collaborating
closely with Mossad. Soon after Secretary of State Colin Powell made the existence of
the laptop documents public in November 2004, Karsten Voight, the coordinator of
German-American cooperation in the German Foreign Ministry, was quoted in The
Wall Street Journal as saying that they had been transferred by an Iranian "dissident
group." A second German source familiar with the case was even more explicit. "I
can assure you," the source told me in 2007, "that the documents came from the
Iranian resistance organization." That was a reference to the Mujahideen-E-Khalq
(MEK), also known as the People's Mujahideen of Iran, the armed Iranian exile group
designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department.

The National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), the political arm of the MEK, was
generally credited by the news media with having revealed the existence of the
Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz and Arak in an August 2002 press conference in
Washington, DC. Later, however, IAEA, Israeli and Iranian dissident sources all said
that the NCRI had gotten the intelligence on the sites from Mossad.

An IAEA official told Seymour Hersh that the Israelis were behind the revelation of
the sites and two journalists from Der Spiegel reported the same thing. So did an
adviser to an Iranian monarchist group, speaking to a writer for The New Yorker.
That episode was not isolated, but was part of a broader pattern of Israeli
cooperation with the MEK in providing intelligence intended to influence the CIA and
the IAEA. Israeli authors Melman and Javadanfar, who claimed to have good sources
in Mossad, wrote in their 2007 book that Israeli intelligence had "laundered"
intelligence to the IAEA by providing it to Iranian opposition groups, especially the
NCRI.

Israeli officials also went to extraordinary lengths to publicize the story of covert
Iranian experiments on a key component of a nuclear weapon, which was one of
messages the intelligence documents conveyed. As a result of satellite intelligence
brought to the attention of the IAEA in 2004 by Undersecretary of State John Bolton,
the IAEA requested two separate investigations at the main Iran military research
center at Parchin. The investigations, in January 2005 and November 2005, were
aimed at examining the charge that Iran was using facilities at Parchin to test high
explosives used in the detonation of a nuclear weapon. In each investigation, the
IAEA investigators were allowed complete freedom to search and take environmental
samples at any five buildings in the complex and their surroundings. But they failed
to find any evidence of any Iranian nuclear weapons-related experiments.

At that point, Israeli intelligence came up with a new story. Hersh reported  that,
earlier in 2006, Mossad had given the CIA an intelligence report - purportedly from
one of its agents inside Iran - claiming that the Iranian military had been "testing
trigger mechanisms" for a nuclear weapon. The experiment supposedly involved
simulating a nuclear explosion without using any nuclear material, so that it could not
be detected by the IAEA. But there were no specifics on which to base an IAEA
investigation - no test site specified and no diagrams - and CIA officials told Hersh
they could not learn anything more about the identity of the alleged Israeli agent.

The CIA evidently did not regard the Israeli claim as credible, because the
intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in late 2007,
which said that Iran had ended all work on nuclear weapons in 2003 and had not
restarted it. Israel expressed dismay at the US intelligence estimate, but Israeli
officials admitted that the official position that Iran was still working actively on a
nuclear weapon was based on an assumption rather than any hard evidence.

Israel encountered yet another problem in its effort to promote the covert Iranian
nuclear weapon narrative. The IAEA analysts doubted that Iran would be able to
develop a nuclear weapon small enough to fit into the missile it had tested in 2004
without foreign assistance, as David Albright, former IAEA contract officer and
director of the Institute for Science and International Security, wrote in a letter to
The New York Times in November 2005.

Sometime between February and May, however, yet another purported Iranian
document conveniently materialized that addressed the problem of the US NIE and
the "small bomb" issue noted by Albright. The document was a long, Farsi-language
report purporting to be about the testing of a system to detonate high explosives in
hemispherical arrangement. Based on the new document, the IAEA safeguard
department concluded that the "implosion system" on which it assumed Iran was
working "could be contained within a payload container believed to be small enough
to fit into the re-entry body chamber of the Shahab-3 missile."

The document was given to the IAEA by a "Member State," which was not identified
in the leaked excerpts from an unpublished IAEA report describing it. But Albright,
who knows Heinonen well, told me in a September 2008 interview, that the state in
question was "probably Israel."

The day before the Reuters and Associated Press stories attacking ElBaradei over his
refusal to publish the report appeared in August 2009, the Israeli daily Haaretz
reported that Israel "has been striving to pressure the IAEA through friendly nations
and have it release the censored annex." The operation was being handled by the
director general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and the Foreign Ministry,
according to the report. The Israeli objective, Haaretz reported, was to "prove that
the Iranian effort to develop nuclear weapons is continuing, contrary to the claims
that Tehran stopped its nuclear program in 2003."

Rethinking the Case Against Iran

Once the intelligence documents that have been used to indict Iran as plotting to
build nuclear weapons are discounted as fabrications likely perpetrated by a self-
interested party, there is no solid basis for the US policy of trying to coerce Iran into
ending all uranium enrichment. And there is no reason for insisting that Iran must
explain the allegations in those documents to the IAEA as a condition for any future
US-Iran negotiations.

News coverage of the purported intelligence documents over the past few years has
created yet another false narrative that distorts public discourse on the subject.
Almost entirely ignored is the possibility that the real aim of Iran's nuclear program is
to maintain a bargaining chip with the United States, and to have a breakout
capability to serve as a deterrent to a US or Israeli attack on Iran.

The evidence that documents at the center of the case for a covert Iranian nuclear
weapons program are fraudulent suggests the need for a strategic reset on Iran
policy. It raises both the possibility and the need for serious exploration of a
diplomatic solution for the full range of issues dividing the two countries, which is the
only sensible strategy for ensuring that Iran stays a non-nuclear state.