Not a ‘Hole in the Mountain’

Outgoing Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei had given New York Times an interview earlier this month where he had talked about the new uranium enrichment site at Fordow near Qom, which has been revealed to the public in September, as just a “hole in the mountain”. When U.N. inspectors visited the site on October 26 and 27, they had allegedly found “nothing to be worried about”. “The idea was to use it as a bunker under the mountain to protect things.”

The main question remains, however, why and when Iran had started construction work at Fordow. The latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear activities is more explicit:

“12. Iran explained that the Fordow site had been allocated to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) in the second half of 2007, and that that was when the construction of the FFEP (Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant) had started. Iran subsequently confirmed that explanation in a letter dated 28 October 2009. In that letter, Iran stated that:

“As a result of the augmentation of the threats of military attacks against Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran decided to establish contingency centers(!) for various organizations and activities …

“The Natanz Enrichment Plant was among the targets threatened with military attacks. Therefore, the Atomic Energy Organization requested the Passive Defence Organization to allocate one of those aforementioned centers for the purpose of [a] contingency enrichment plant, so that enrichment activities shall not be suspended in the case of any military attack. In this respect, the Fordow site, being one of those constructed and prepared centers, [was] allocated to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) in the second half of 2007. The construction of the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant sten started. The construction is still ongoing. Thus the plant is not yet ready for operation and it is planned to be operational in 2011.”

13. During the meetings, the Agency informed Iran that it had acquired commercially available satellite imagery of the site indicating that there had been construction at the site between 2002 and 2004, and that construction activities were resumed in 2006 and had continued to date. The Agency also referred to the extensive information given to the Agency by a number of Member States detailing the design of the facility, which was consistent with the design as verified by the Agency during the DIV (Design Information Verification). The Agency also informed Iran that these Member States alleged that design work on the facility had started in 2006.”

Thus, Iran admits that it has considered a number of possible contingency centers in case the Natanz facility is being attacked. How many of them have not been declared yet? Iran’s notification of the Fordow sites came only after it had become clear for Tehran that intelligence agencies had come to know of the site for some time.

Satellite imagery published earlier this month by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) has narrowed the time frame during which Iran would have begun construction work at the site to after January 2006 but before June 2007. Iran is clearly contradicting this evidence here. The question might be of importance when considering the modified Code 3.1 of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) under which Iran is obliged to immediately inform the IAEA about a possible nuclear facility at the time of planning. Iran has suspended its compliance with early notification rules in March 2007. Its majlis, or parliament, has never ratified Code 3.1. Nevertheless, the IAEA stresses (under 17.) that “Iran remains bound by the revised Code 3.1 of the Subsidiary Arrangements General Part to which it had agreed in 2003, which requires that the Agency be provided with preliminary design information about a new nuclear facility as soon as the decision to construct or to authorize constructiob of the facility is taken.”

The IAEA report further states:

“16. Iran stated that it did not have any other nuclear facilities that were currently under construction or in operation that had not yet been declared to the Agency. Iran also stated that any such future facilities would “be reported to the Agency according to Iran’s obligations to the Agency”. In a letter dated 6 November 2009, the Agency asked Iran to confirm that it had not taken a decision to construct, or to authorize construction of, any other nuclear facility which had not been declared to the Agency.”

Thus, the report clearly underlines Iran’s violation of its obligations under the NPT as regards the new enrichment facility near Qom. And it is not a ‘hole in the mountain’. The report’s detailed description gives a completely different picture:

“10. The DIV included a detailed visual examination of all areas of the plant, the taking of photographs of cascade piping and other process equipment, the taking of environmental samples and a detailed assessment of the design, configuration and capacity of the various plant components and systems. Iran provided access to all areas of the facility. The Agency confirmed that the plant corresponded with the design information provided by Iran and that the facility was at an advanced(!) stage of construction, although no centrifuges had been introduced into the facility. Centrifuge mounting pads, header and sub-header pipes, water piping, electrical cables and cabinets had been put in place but were not yet connected; the passivation tanks, chemical traps, cold traps and cool boxes were also in place but had not been connected. In addition, a utilities building containing electricity transformers and water chillers had also been erected.”

The report concludes that “Iran’s failure to inform the Agency, in accordance with the provisions of the revised Code 3.1, of the decision to construct, or to authorize construction of, a new facility as soon as such a decision is taken, and to submit information as the design is developed, is inconsistent with its obligations under the Subsidiary Arrangements to its Safeguard Agreement. Moreover, Iran’s delay in submitting such information to the Agency does not contribute to the building of confidence.”

“We Were Helping Them to Anticipate and Shape the Future”

Joshua Pollock at ArmsControlWonk.com has pointed today to a lecture by Thomas Fingar, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which was given at Stanford University on October 21 where he provides insights as to how the Intelligence Community, by declassifying minor parts of the classified 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities (NIE) may have manipulated lawmakers for the sake of drawing the ‘right’ conclusions and act accordingly.

It comes somehow as a surprise (even for Pollock) that “the White House [had] instructed the Intelligence Community to release an unclassified version of the report’s key judgments but declined to take responsibility for ordering its release.” (Emphasis added.)

“Critics on the right and the left denounced or praised the report as a deliberate effort by the Intelligence Community – or, in many of the commentaries, by me – to derail administration plans to attack Iran. That, too, is a story for another day.

“What I want to do here is to take advantage of the fact that a small portion of the estimate was declassified (3 of about 100 pages with none of the almost 1500 source citations) making it possible for me to talk about it in public.”

But an attack of Iran in late 2007 had been imminent. Seymour Hersh has had reported already one year before on the results of C.I.A. activities which were perceived in the White House with hostility. He wrote in The New Yorker on November 27, 2006:

“The Administration’s planning for a military attack on Iran was made far more complicated earlier this fall by a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A. challenging the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb. The C.I.A. found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency. (The C.I.A. declined to comment on this story.)

“The C.I.A.’s analysis, which has been circulated to other agencies for comment, was based on technical intelligence collected by overhead satellites, and on other empirical evidence, such as measurements of the radioactivity of water samples and smoke plumes from factories and power plants. Additional data have been gathered, intelligence sources told me, by high-tech (and highly classified) radioactivity-detection devices that clandestine American and Israeli agents placed near suspected nuclear-weapons facilities inside Iran in the past year or so. No significant amounts of radioactivity were found.

“A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the C.I.A. analysis, and told me that the White House had been hostile to it.”

It has also been reported that Vice President Dick Cheney had been outrageous when parts of the 2007 NIE were actually declassified and the public learned that Iranian had, with some confidence, not resumed their military nuclear program since 2003.

Most commentators intuitively understood the NIE’s main message that, if Iran had once found it reasonable, under its ‘reform’ president Mohammad Khatami, to halt, in response to international pressure, an existing, nuclear weapons program, diplomacy was still a valid option in 2007. In addition Fingar, in his lecture, makes the point that the NIE had also the timeline in mind, as to when Iran resumes, if it wants, the fabrication of a nuclear weapon. In the NIE, that date had been moved from late 2009 to “sometime during the 2010-2015 timeframe.” (In an updated testimony to Congress, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has further postponed the date to “not before 2013.”)

“The declassified portion of the (2007) estimate did not address how long it would take Iran to convert highly enriched uranium into a weapon but the classified text did.”

Who will get the classified version of intelligence information, which might lead to war, and who (lawmakers, the public) is put off with the declassified part is a sensitive issue. The declassified part of the 2007 NIE on Iran’s Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities has, so far, at least prevented another war in the Middle East with most probably disastrous consequences not only for the region which, as everybody knows, is a tinderbox. In that context, those who have decided to release it might have deserved the Nobel Peace Prize more than anybody else.

Fingar closes with an either naïve or cynical, anyway irrational, confidence of serving the good guys in a complicated world, beyond any democracy.

“How those judgments (in the NIE’s declassified portion) could be construed as dismissing the idea that Iranian nuclear activities were a major problem continues to mystify me, but the point I want to make here is that, in addition to many other things, the NIE gave policymakers a timeline, a sense of urgency, and possible alternative ways to address the problem. We were helping them to anticipate and shape the future.”

The Same Old Tricks

The widely perceived new crisis about Iran’s nuclear program has a pretty complicated history. Several Iranian lawmakers and even defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi have vehemently rejected a UN brokered deal according to which Iran should send 1200 kg of its low enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia for further enrichment and later to France for refinement.

In order to produce radio isotopes for medical purposes, such as Technetium-99m, medium enriched uranium has been fuelled into the 5 MW research reactor in Tehran for years, which has been supplied by the United States more than 40 years ago. Iran had purchased in 1988 about 116 kg of medium enriched uranium at 19.75% from Argentina, and this amount has been delivered to Iran by 1993. According to some calculations Iran would be running out this fuel by late 2010. Early in June 2009, Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Ali-Asgar Soltaniyeh had sent an inquiry to outgoing Director General Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei seeking to replace this supply.

Soltaniyeh’s letter to the IAEA of June 2 has obviously extensively been discussed in the October 1 Geneva talks by the P5+1 and Iran, both in plenary sessions and face-to-face talks. At least the Iranian delegation led by its chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili seemed to have accepted that most of its LEU stockpile would be send to Russia for further enrichment after which France would provide Iran with the refined fuel.

The Geneva talks have been described as largely open, professional, even constructive. That the U.S. and Iran achieved almost a deal in an allegedly first encounter since the 444-day American Embassy hostage crisis of 1979-1981 (which will be commemorated next week on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean with contradictory sentiments) was a true sensation. But one cannot disregard the current legitimacy crisis of Iran’s leaders after the catastrophic presidential election only four months ago; and the ever diverging opinions among the establishment. Tehran has definitely a couple of other options for consideration.

First, the country could enrich its so far produced LEU by simply reintroducing it into the centrifuges in Natanz. Soltaniyeh’s inquiry letter to ElBaradei contained most probably already such a suggestion, although even Tehran would consider it unrealistic that the IAEA would allow the country to step up their enrichment program for medical purposes. Most countries are already afraid of Iran’s enrichment program resulting possibly in a nuclear bomb. There have also been reports on contamination problems of the so far produced LEU with molybdenum hexafluoride which might put the centrifuges in Natanz at risk if used for further enrichment. However, while so far the country has failed in certain areas, it definitely tries hard to master the full nuclear cycle. These kinds of technical problems may indeed be solved soon.

Second, under the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) Iran is a signatory of since 1968, the country has actually the right to simply buy the stuff for medical reasons even under current UNSC resolution 1737.

And third, Iran may even reconsider its inquiry and shut down for the time being the more than 40 years old research reactor in Tehran after running out the Argentine medium enriched uranium. Tehran may consider producing radio isotopes for medical purposes easier and in much larger amounts in the heavy water reactor at Arak which might be operational soon.

In fact, Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA Ali-Asgar Soltaniyeh went to the Vienna talks which started on October 19 not with one, apparently unprofitable, option for Iran only; namely sending almost all LEU abroad. Given the bad reputation of French negotiators in nuclear issues in particular when it comes to Iran, all of the above three alternatives may have discussed already then. Why ElBaradei so much hurried with his deal which would put Iran in a position where it could easily be blackmailed by western powers may have something to do with his soon retirement. But Iran has got some experience in recent decades of not being fleeced at the end of the day.

It has certainly been a ‘golden opportunity’ of getting rid of Iran’s nuclear stuff, but the French, American and Russian delegation has not really succeeded in confidence building. It is hoped anyway that the talks will continue on a par with Iran.