On December 11, the spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that his agency was, as Gareth Porter asserted on this website earlier this month, not interested in accepting a recent invitation by Iran to visit Marivan, at least at this time.
The spokesman, Serge Gas, reportedly told Reuters in an email that the agency had “explained clearly to Iran—on more than one occasion—that an offer of a visit of Marivan does not help address specific concerns related to the issue of large-scale high explosive experiments.” No further elaboration was made in the email, according to Reuters.
As someone who has worked at a senior level for the IAEA and who has respect for its mission and its dedicated personnel, I found this statement—and the decision not to accept Iran’s invitation—disappointing and worrisome.
In its 2011 special report on weaponization in Iran that was leaked to the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), among others, the IAEA asserted that it had received generally consistent “information” that “large scale high explosive experiments” for nuclear-weapon development had been carried out “in the region of Marivan” (paragraph 43 of the Annex). The information, which appeared in more than 1,000 pages of documents (paragraph 12), cited hemispherical explosive configuration, fiber optic sensors, and streak cameras, among many other details. Indeed, the IAEA’s description of the experiments allegedly carried out at Marivan was some of the most detailed in the weaponization annex.
The report said the source for this information was an unnamed “Member State” and that more than ten other Member States provided supplementary information (paragraph 13)—including “procurement information, information on international travel by individuals said to have been involved in the alleged activities, financial records, documents reflecting health and safety arrangements, and other documents demonstrating manufacturing techniques for certain high explosive components”—that “reinforces and tends to corroborate the information.”
The report about the large high-explosive experiments involving hemispherical charges at Marivan constitutes a very serious allegation because, if the hydrodynamic experiments were actually conducted using uranium (which is not mentioned in the report), they would constitute not only a violation of the IAEA’s safeguards agreement with Iran, but also a “smoking gun” pointing to the existence of a nuclear weapons program. And while such experiments carried out without uranium would not constitute a safeguards violation, they would unquestionably also support critics’ claims that Iran was indeed developing nuclear weapons.
The IAEA report and its annex have never been published by the Agency. In fact, a search for “Marivan” on the IAEA website turns up nothing. Nonetheless, no one has questioned the authenticity of the leaked version of the report that includes the paragraph referencing “the region of Marivan.” Since then, the story has been picked up by think tanks, NGOs, and media reports all of which breathlessly describe the alleged experiments but fail to mention their allegedly having taken place in Marivan.
As Porter reported, Iran’s Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Reza Najafi, informed the agency’s Board of Governors on November 21 that Iran was ready to give the IAEA “one managed access” to the Marivan region to verify the information included in the Annex. But the IAEA has now rejected the invitation. As noted by Reuters, “…the IAEA’s main priority for its long-stalled investigation into Iran’s nuclear program has been to go to another location, the Parchin military base [sic] southeast of Tehran, where the Vienna-based agency says other nuclear-related explosives tests may have been conducted, perhaps a decade ago.”
I addressed at some length in a previous post the many reasons why I find it quite improbable that the building that the IAEA has asked to visit at Parchin (which is actually not a base at all, but rather a sprawling complex of military factories) would be the site of sensitive nuclear weapons-related testing. Moreover, it bears noting that the alleged Marivan tests cited in the IAEA’s report are of too great a magnitude to be conducted at the Parchin site, which was purportedly designed to combine uranium and high explosives in much smaller experiments. The IAEA’s insistence to visit Parchin under the circumstances is puzzling, to say the least.
Marivan is important. In fact, it is the litmus test for the credibility of the IAEA’s 2011 report. If the IAEA claims detailed knowledge of a test and its location, it is critical that it work with Iran to verify that information. If, however, the information turns out to be false, irrelevant, inactionable or beyond the scope of IAEA’s expertise, then the agency should either withdraw its 2011 “Weaponization Annex” or issue a revised report after a thorough vetting of the rest of its contents. As noted above, the large-scale high explosive experiments are the most detailed claim in the agency’s weaponization report. That claim needs to be investigated and resolved, and the IAEA’s reluctance to do so is deeply disturbing.
Marivan is also important because if, indeed, the report was based on false information, it further weakens the already-thin case for visiting Parchin, which, in my view, constitutes a quixotic quest that threatens to derail far more important talks and agreements involving Iran’s nuclear materials The Agency’s strong suit has always been tracing and accurately reporting the quantities of nuclear materials of Member States, and it should focus on that mandate as a priority.
Bob Kelley is a professional nuclear engineer licensed in California. He spent the early years of his career in the nuclear weapons program of the US on topics such as plutonium metallurgy, vulnerability of nuclear warheads and warhead engineering. He has worked on a number of isotope separation schemes for the actinides including uranium separation by gas centrifuge and plutonium laser isotope separation. In mid-career he switched to analysis of foreign nuclear weapons programs. This included the use of satellite imagery and other kinds of intelligence information. This led to becoming Director of the Remote Sensing Laboratory in Las Vegas, the premier nuclear emergency response and aerial measurements laboratory for image and radiation sensing in the USDOE. He later applied this knowledge for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna as a Director for challenging nuclear inspections in Iraq and many other countries.
]]>by Gareth Porter
When Iran offered last month to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit the Marivan region near the border with Iraq, the IAEA might have been expected to respond with alacrity to the opportunity.
The IAEA had been complaining for months that Iran had not provided the information and access required to “clarify” allegations of nuclear weapons-related experiments. But the immediate IAEA response to the Iranian offer, as well as the previous history of the Marivan issue, suggest that the nuclear agency is less than eager to take advantage of it. That reason appears to be because the Agency’s source for the alleged experiments failed to identify the site where the alleged experiments were supposed to have been conducted.
The Agency’s November 2011 report asserted that “information” provided by a “Member State” indicated that Iran had carried out “large scale high explosive experiments” in “the region of Marivan” using a technique for initiating an explosive charge found in “some known nuclear explosive devices.”
In a significant development in the IAEA-Iran process for resolving the “possible military dimensions” (PMD) issue however, Iran’s Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Reza Najafi, told the Board of Governors during its quarterly conference November 21 that Iran was ready to give the IAEA “one managed access” to the western Marivan region to “prove” that the allegations of nuclear weapons experiments were “wrong and baseless.” He said such alleged experiments “could easily be traced if the exact site would be visited.”
The Iranian diplomat said the unnamed Member State that had made the charge—which he said was either the United States or Israel—“should specify the site’s exact location. Otherwise it should confess that it has misled the IAEA with false information.” Najafi added, “In fact, there is no such location at all.”
The response from Gill Tudor, the spokesperson for IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano, was non-committal. “The situation regarding a visit to the Marivan region is not as simple as that conveyed by Iran. The Agency will discuss the offer with Iran,” she said.
Two weeks after the Iranian offer, the IAEA was still silent on whether it has contacted Iran to discuss the offer. “The topic is still under consideration,” said Serge Gas, the IAEA Director of Communications, in response to this writer’s query December 3 about any follow-up with the statement.
A source close to the Agency told me, however, that the issue of a visit to Marivan “has gone to sleep for the moment.”
The Iranian mission to the IAEA, meanwhile, said it had nothing to add to Ambassador Najafi’s initial offer.
The IAEA’s apparent hesitancy about an inspection visit to Marivan is remarkable in light of Amano’s criticism of Iran for allegedly failing to provide information on suspect sites. Amano declared in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington Oct. 31 that Iran still had not provided information on the issues that Iran had agreed to address last summer, one of which was the alleged high explosives experiments.
But instead of pursuing a possible inspection of the site of the alleged Marivan experiment, Amano has focused solely on gaining access to the site at Iran’s Parchin military base where, according to the 2011 IAEA report, Iran had constructed a large explosives containment vessel in 2000 for hydrodynamic testing of nuclear weapons designs.
That report did not claim that the alleged cylinder at Parchin had actually been used for any nuclear weapons-related experiment, however. It asserted only that it was “suitable” for carrying out the same kind of experiment on a multipoint initiation system for a bomb that it said had been already performed in Marivan.
Former IAEA nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley, who had twice headed the Agency’s Iraq Action Team, has argued that an inspection of the alleged Marivan high explosives experiments should thus take the priority. In February 2012, Kelley, a former director of the US Department of Energy Remote Sensing Laboratory in Nevada, told Jonathan Tirone of Bloomberg News, “The Agency needs to put Marivan first, because it is the sleeping dog in the last report.”
The day after Kelley was quoted on Marivan, Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Ambassador Ali Asgar Soltanieh, told a visiting IAEA delegation, which had requested the day before to visit Parchin during its two-day stay, that it could carry out an inspection visit to Marivan instead. But the IAEA delegation rejected the offer, claiming that it had not been given enough lead-time to prepare for such a trip, according to Soltanieh.
The IAEA had never brought up Marivan publicly again until Najafi’s offer at the Board of Governors meeting. The only plausible reason for its present apparent reluctance to pursue such a visit is that the Member State that provided the intelligence on the alleged experiments failed to identify a specific site in the Marivan region.
Marivan is one of the “counties” of Iran’s Kurdistan province. It includes three districts with three cities and 151 populated villages with a total population of about 170,000 people.
The IAEA certainly had access to satellite images for the entire Marivan region, and would have searched through those images for any site that looked like it could be the location of the purported high explosives experiment. Apparently, it did not find a specific location that seemed plausible.
The allegation about the Marivan experiment isn’t the only one that lacked a specific location. The intelligence on the alleged explosives cylinder “suitable” for conducting the same type of experiment was also not connected to a specific site at the sprawling Parchin facility at the time that its alleged existence was first reported to the IAEA.
The IAEA revealed in its August 2012 report that the location of the Parchin site “was only identified in March 2011.” IAEA reports are carefully worded, and any intelligence information is always attributed to one or more unidentified Member States. The use of passive voice—which allowed the Agency to avoid the question of who did finally identify the location—strongly implies that the identification of the site at Parchin was not the result of new intelligence information provided by the original or some other, but rather resulted from the IAEA’s own searching through satellite images for a site with physical characteristics considered consistent with the intelligence the Agency had obtained. So the Parchin site is likely merely the IAEA’s best guess as to the location of the alleged object, the very existence of which is very much in question, as Kelley has argued on this website.
The fact that the unnamed Member State or States that provided the intelligence claims apparently failed to specify locations for either of the two major alleged Iranian nuclear weapons-related activities adds yet another reason to question the reliability of the intelligence used by the IAEA to construct what Amano calls the “case” that Iran carried out covert nuclear weapons research. But there are other compelling reasons to question those and other such intelligence claims. Kelley has discussed some of those reasons in multiple articles. Others are discussed in my own book-length study on the misinformation and disinformation surrounding the Iran nuclear issue.
Despite the problematic nature of the intelligence currently at the center of the PMD issue, the treatment of the issue in American news media continues to focus overwhelmingly on Iran’s refusal to allow the IAEA to inspect the site that has now been identified at Parchin. The implication has been that Iran is hiding something. At the same time, one would be hard-pressed to find US coverage of Iran’s latest offer.
There are other explanations for Iran’s reluctance to permit the IAEA to inspect Parchin, however. On one hand, Iran would not want to set a precedent for allowing inspections of its military sites on the basis of intelligence that it argues is not supported by credible evidence when hostile powers could exploit that opening to gather military intelligence. On the other hand, it can’t be expected to give away its ultimate negotiating chip to the IAEA without a concession of comparable value in return.
Photo: Resident Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran Reza Najaf photographed with IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano in Vienna, Austria, 26 September 2013. Credit: Dean Calma/IAEA
]]>by James A. Russell
The image of the finger-wagging Israeli Prime Minister at the United Nations this week provides the international community with a powerful message: the world — and the United States — must tirelessly search for “yes” as an answer in solving the world’s problems.
Israel’s persistent “no” model in seeking [...]]]>
by James A. Russell
The image of the finger-wagging Israeli Prime Minister at the United Nations this week provides the international community with a powerful message: the world — and the United States — must tirelessly search for “yes” as an answer in solving the world’s problems.
Israel’s persistent “no” model in seeking accommodation with its various antagonists is exactly the wrong approach — one that has placed it outside most acceptable norms of international behavior. A world of persistent war and confrontation may suit Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party, but it does not serve American or global interests.
After years of confrontation over its nuclear program and support for terrorism, the outstretched hand of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to the US and the international community provides an opening for both countries to end the state of undeclared war that has raged between them since 1979. Arriving at a settlement to end this state of overt hostility and bringing Iran back into the global community of nations would make the world a safer place.
To be sure, taking “yes” for an answer from your antagonists can be difficult. American foreign policy is full of examples. During the Cold War, the United States (through Republican and Democrat administrations) simultaneously negotiated arms reductions with its mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, while they were also engaged in a bitter and dangerous international rivalry.
It was a difficult political sell at home. Hardline Republicans and, at the time, neoconservative Democrats, opposed any compromise with an adversary that many argued was inherently evil, untrustworthy and bent on our destruction. It took great political courage for President Richard Nixon and his successors to pursue the arms control talks while American versions of Netanyahu lectured them on the dangers of such a folly.
Luckily for us, we reached an arrangement with our adversary and took “yes” as the answer to limiting our respective nuclear arsenals, which also helped manage our political relationship. The unintended consequences of arriving at “yes” in the nuclear arena helped us to arrive at a series of subsequent agreements with Russia that will see substantial reductions in our respective nuclear arsenals over the next decade. The world will be a safer place for it.
More recently, the disastrous consequences of abandoning the “yes” policy option stares the United States in the face. America’s 8-year war in Iraq in no small measure unfolded over a 15-20 year period during which the United States boxed itself in politically by refusing to take “yes” from its adversary Saddam Hussein. In 1997, the US foreclosed any “yes” options in Iraq when it formally adopted regime change as its official policy — a decision that, at the time, had everything to do with domestic politics and little to do with a sensible strategy.
I was among the audience in 1997 as a Pentagon staffer when then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a speech at Georgetown University explaining the US policy of supporting regime change in Iraq. Neither I nor anyone else could foresee the consequences of slamming the door on the possibility of taking a “yes” answer from Saddam Hussein. Earlier that year, I had initialed an internal policy paper to my boss, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, urging him to lobby the senior reaches of the Clinton administration to seek a deal with Saddam — a suggestion that surprisingly made it to his desk but that was of course never taken seriously.
Following the Albright speech, the Clinton administration allowed itself to be forced by neoconservatives and others into adopting the ill-conceived Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that formalized regime change into law — a law subsequently cited in the October 2002 authorization for the use of military force against Iraq. The war that followed was a human, economic and military disaster for all its participants, but the path to war had stretched back into the 1990s by a series of seemingly innocuous decisions that had foreclosed accommodation and the possibility of “yes.”
These two foreign policy episodes represent opposite poles for American decision makers and, to be sure, simplify the challenges of arriving at “yes” with adversaries. The arms control agreements that were reached with the Soviet Union resulted from years of painstaking work by committed public servants from both sides through the ups and downs of the overall political relationship. They happened because both parties shared an interest in a “yes” outcome and were prepared to take steps to convince each other about their seriousness.
In the case of Iran, the United States has every incentive to similarly pursue “yes” as the answer and should be under no illusions that the process will be any easier than it was with the Soviet Union. The polarized and fractured domestic political landscape that is exploited by the Israel lobby and others presents the Obama administration with a serious political challenge. As illustrated by the Sept. 23 letter to Obama signed by 79 Senators, the overwhelming preference seems tilted towards “no” and continued pressure and confrontation. Netanyahu further amplified the volume for this approach at the UN this week.
Interestingly, the issues facing the two antagonists pale in comparison to those faced in the US-Soviet Cold War conflict. The path to a US-Iran deal is relatively clear: Iran must honor its obligations as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), open its facilities at Fordow and Parchin for inspection as called for in the treaty, agree to implement the Additional Protocol, and provide the requested information to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about its past nuclear research that was almost certainly part of an illicit weapons program. In short, Iran must agree to have a nuclear program with the kind of transparency that’s called for by the NPT. For its part, the United States must agree to lift sanctions and be ready for an agreement to reach a broader political accommodation if Iran takes these steps. All should recognize that, as was the case with the Soviet Union, such agreements depend on reasonable verification steps and confidence building measures by both parties that demonstrate a commitment to “yes.”
The Obama administration’s stumbling into a “yes” answer with Syria, which may result in the elimination of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons stockpile, suggests that keeping policy options open for solutions that may not be immediately apparent can result in positive outcomes.
The United States needs to keep “yes” on the table as a solution to its standoff with Iran and resist the pressure from those who seem to prefer war and confrontation. The world will be a safer place if we can get to a “yes” with our adversary; after more than a decade of war in the Middle East, it is our responsibility to focus our best efforts on this challenging endeavor.
Photo: Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev signing a joint communiqué on the SALT Treaty in Vladivostok, November 24, 1974
]]>by Peter Jenkins
Divining the Obama administration’s foreign policy intentions can be intellectually challenging.
At the beginning of February the US Vice President appeared to be offering Iran an opportunity to enter into bilateral talks on the nuclear dispute.
Three weeks ago the US was encouraging its European allies to review [...]]]>
by Peter Jenkins
Divining the Obama administration’s foreign policy intentions can be intellectually challenging.
At the beginning of February the US Vice President appeared to be offering Iran an opportunity to enter into bilateral talks on the nuclear dispute.
Three weeks ago the US was encouraging its European allies to review their opening position for the upcoming Almaty talks and be open to demanding a bit less of Iran while offering a little more.
Two weeks ago the Secretary of State was hailing the outcome of the Almaty meeting as useful and expressing hope that serious engagement could lead to a comprehensive agreement.
Yet last week in New York, addressing a UN Security Council committee, Ambassador Susan Rice, a member of President Obama’s cabinet, was speaking of Iran as though nothing had changed since the end of January.
There are many clever people working for the Obama administration. So I suppose we must assume that this apparent incoherence is in fact part of a highly sophisticated stratagem, which will deliver what most — though not all — of us want: peace in our time.
Any, though, who are less inclined to think more of US officials than former British diplomats do, should be forgiven for feeling perplexed — perhaps even a little worried — by Ambassador Rice’s remarks.
Let me try to illustrate that by reviewing a few of her points from the position of a Non-Aligned (NAM) member of the UN. Of course, a former British diplomat cannot hope to imagine the thoughts of NAM counterparts with pin-point accuracy. But I have rubbed shoulders with NAM diplomats for a sufficient number of years, and listened to enough of their intergovernmental interventions, to have a rough idea of what impression Ambassador Rice will have made.
“The Iranian nuclear issue remains one of the gravest threats to international security” she intoned. Really? I, as a NAM diplomat, am not sure Iran has ever violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and am certain Iran has not violated that treaty’s most important provisions. Surely North Korea, which has just conducted its third nuclear test, is a greater threat? And what about Israel, which possesses hundreds of dangerous weapons of mass destruction, as well as sophisticated long-range delivery systems? What about India and Pakistan, which came close to nuclear blows in 2002? What about Israel’s refusal to withdraw from territories it has occupied for over 45 years, a standing affront to Arab self-respect? What about the potential consequences of Western-sponsored civil war in Syria, civil unrest in Iraq, and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan?
“We meet at a time of growing risks.” Is that so? Surely the latest International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report suggests that Iran is being careful to deny Israel’s Prime Minister a pretext to draw the US into a war of aggression?
“[Iran is] obstruct[ing] the IAEA’s investigation into the program’s possible military dimension by refusing to grant access to the Parchin site.” Well, yes. But surely the question of access to Parchin is legally more open to dispute than this implies? And hasn’t the US intelligence community concluded that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program ten years ago? Don’t the IAEA’s suspicions relate to experiments that may have taken place more than ten years ago and that would have involved only a few grams of nuclear material? Why all the fuss?
“More alarming still…Iran is now….installing hundreds of second-generation centrifuges”. Why is this so alarming? Surely Iran has declared this installation to the IAEA, will submit the machines’ operations to frequent IAEA inspection and intends to use them to produce low-enriched uranium for which Iran will account? Developing centrifuge technology under IAEA safeguards is not a treaty violation.
“These actions are unnecessary and thus provocative.” Since when have states been entitled to dictate what is necessary to one another? Some states certainly don’t see these actions as provocative.
“[Iran’s missile launches] allow Iran to develop a technology that [could] constitute an intolerable threat to peace and security.” Iran has no treaty obligation to refrain from developing missile technology. Many other states have done so. And, didn’t I (NAM diplomat) read recently on the US Congressional Research Service that Iran is unlikely to have an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) by 2015?
“Working together, we can continue to clarify for Iran the consequences of its actions and show Iran the benefits of choosing cooperation over provocation.” My, that sounds patronising, even a little threatening! Will it encourage Iranians to believe that the latest US offer of engagement is sincere?
So what, US readers may feel. The US can say what it likes; it’s a Great Power. Yes, but a power that has the misfortune to be great in an age when greatness confers responsibility for nurturing a law-based international system.
It doesn’t do much good to that system for US ambassadors to sound unreasonable, alarmist, bereft of a sense of proportion and perhaps a little inclined to double standards. Good leaders lead from the middle, not one of the extremities.
And could it be the case that the US is a Great Power that needs a diplomatic solution to an intractable dispute? Neither the Pentagon nor the US public wants another war at this stage. Sanctions have been hurting innocent Iranians but benefitting Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and conservative elite, who feel confident of their ability to contain popular discontent.
When one is running out of options, negotiating theorists suggest that building trust in one’s good faith is a better tactic than dishing out hyperbole and half-truths.
Photo Credit: US Embassy New Delhi/Flickr
]]>Any reader of my last piece on this site will be unsurprised that I was disappointed by the Iran chapter of “US Non-Proliferation Strategy for the Middle East” — a policy paper produced by five self-proclaimed “non-partisan specialists”. (Jim Lobe has written about it here.)
The authors assume that denying certain states dual-use [...]]]>
Any reader of my last piece on this site will be unsurprised that I was disappointed by the Iran chapter of “US Non-Proliferation Strategy for the Middle East” — a policy paper produced by five self-proclaimed “non-partisan specialists”. (Jim Lobe has written about it here.)
The authors assume that denying certain states dual-use nuclear technologies is the West’s only option for keeping the number of nuclear-armed states down to four. The supply-under-safeguards provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) should be ignored, they imply, whenever expedient. The US objective should be to induce Iran to “permanently circumscribe” its nuclear programme.
But that is not my chief objection to this paper.
As a young diplomat I was taught that policy papers should be balanced; they should take into consideration every aspect of a problem and weigh all options for resolving it. This is not the approach favoured by these five “non-partisan specialists”. They are only interested in worst-case speculations about Iranian intentions. They ignore less alarming possibilities, for example, that Iran’s leaders have only ever sought a threshold capability to produce weapons if threatened by a nuclear-armed state (vide Article X of the NPT), or that the uncovering of clandestine nuclear research activities in 2003 led these leaders to realise that advancing beyond the threshold would be unwise.
From worst-case assumptions the authors argue that the US has only one policy option: to apply sufficient pressure through sanctions to dissuade Iran from seeking a “critical capability”, or a capability to produce, undetected, enough material for at least one bomb in a secret enrichment plant, which could not be destroyed because its location would be unknown.
This scenario merits certain observations.
The authors envisage Iran diverting partially enriched uranium to the secret plant from a safeguarded plant but appear to discount the possibility of “timely detection” of this diversion. They overlook the fact that, thanks to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the odds are that detection would occur shortly after the occurrence of diversion.
Once it has learnt of diversion, the US would have more options at its disposal than the authors imply when they lament that a secret plant would be invulnerable to US attack. The most obvious move would be to convene the UN Security Council. Diversion of declared nuclear material is the gravest sin that NPT parties can commit. All five veto-wielding members of the Council would be determined to apply diplomatic pressure on Iran to account for the diversion, and they could count on the support of all but a small handful of NPT Non-Nuclear Weapon States. Iran, a state which aspires to being a respected emerging power, like Turkey or Brazil or South Africa – not an outcast like North Korea or Israel – would come under such intense pressure, including the threat of a military operation authorised by the Security Council, that almost certainly it would back down.
It is uncertain whether the authors are right to suggest that Iran could produce a weapon within days of acquiring the necessary fissile material, and that Iran could be confident in such a weapon functioning satisfactorily. It is equally uncertain whether Iran could configure a device to fit into the nose-cone of one of its medium-range missiles. The authors skirt round this question by suggesting that a weapon could be transported to its target by truck. Perhaps they’ve been watching too many Hollywood movies.
A similar determination to convince readers that Armageddon is approaching emerges from random details:
- the authors describe a building at Iran’s Parchin site as a “weaponisation facility”. For the IAEA, it is merely a building suspected of housing or having housed a chamber for high explosive testing;
- they describe Iran’s centrifuge manufacturing plants as “hidden”, but they are simply outside the scope of IAEA safeguards. (When the West was negotiating seriously with Iran, however, between 2003 and 2005, Iran allowed the IAEA access to these plants as a confidence-building measure.)
- they state that there is considerable debate regarding the stage at which timely detection would no longer be possible, but then go on to describe the position of only one (alarmist) voice in this debate: that of Israel’s Prime Minister.
An underlying problem is the authors’ apparent lack of awareness of the full range of motives that can determine the decision-making of a participant in the international state system. Iran is portrayed as a one-dimensional villain, hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons quickly so as to inflict pain on Israel and the southeastern zone of NATO, and only tractable through sanctions and force.
Fortunately, the world I inhabited as a diplomat is much richer than that. States have complex, multi-dimensional personalities, and can be influenced in many ways. Diplomats thrive when politicians finally get round to asking them for solutions to problems.
]]>Considering the misleading claims made about non-existent Iraqi and Iranian nuclear weapons, and the ramifications of another costly and catastrophic war, there should be more analyses like Scott Peterson’s highlighting of lessons from the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
A declassified January 2006 report published in [...]]]>
Considering the misleading claims made about non-existent Iraqi and Iranian nuclear weapons, and the ramifications of another costly and catastrophic war, there should be more analyses like Scott Peterson’s highlighting of lessons from the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
A declassified January 2006 report published in September by the indispensable National Security Archive shows that CIA analysts allowed their search for non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to overshadow Saddam Hussein’s reasons for bluffing about them. Peterson accordingly suggests that Iranian attempts to eradicate traces of what appears to be previous weapons work (halted in 2003, according to the 2007 NIE), could be a face-saving measure rather than evidence of malicious intent. Increasing “scrutiny and distrust” directed at Iraq also led to counterproductive activities from both sides:
But that Iranian refusal – while at the same time engaging in “substantial” landscaping of the site, which the IAEA says undermines its ability to inspect it for traces of past nuclear work – echoes many Iraqi weapons inspections in the 1990s. In those standoffs, Iraqi officials often behaved as if they had something to hide, when in fact they did not.
As the CIA’s 2006 assessment states, “Iraq’s intransigence and deceptive practices during the periods of UN inspections between 1991 and 2003 deepened suspicions … that Baghdad had ongoing WMD programs.”
The CIA further notes that Iraqi attempts “to find face-saving means to disclose previously hidden information” meant that Iraqi attempts later to “close the books” only “reinvigorated the hunt for concealed WMD, as analysts perceived that Iraq had both the intent and capability to continue WMD efforts.…”
This led Iraq to one conclusion, similar to the public declarations of Iranian leaders today: “When Iraq’s revelations were met by added UN scrutiny and distrust, frustrated Iraqi leaders deepened their belief that inspections were politically motivated and would not lead to the end of sanctions,” read the CIA report.
Some analysts have dared to suggest that Iranian attempts to remove traces of halted weapons work is ultimately a positive sign. Consider the assessment of MIT international security expert Jim Walsh, who focuses on Iran’s nuclear program, talking about Parchin last week at a conference in Washington last week:
]]>So I think they had a weapons program; they shut it down. I think part of what was happening was at Parchin, this gigantic military base that the IAEA visited, but because it’s so large, they went to this building and not that building and that sort of thing. Then they get – IAEA gets some intel that says, well, we think the explosives work was being done in this building, and, you know, all this time, Iran’s being – Parchin’s being watched by satellites continuously, and there’s no activity there. Nothing for five years, right? And then – or – not five years, but some period of time – years.
So then, the IAEA says, well, we want to go to that building, and then suddenly, there’s a whole lot of activity. You know, there’s cartons put up and shoveling and scalping of soil and all that sort of thing. So I read this as – that was a facility involved in the bomb program, and they’re cleaning it up, and IAEA is not going to get on the ground until it’s cleaned up. Now here’s the part where I’m practical and blunt – I don’t care. Right? This is part of a program from the past. And I wish they didn’t have the program from the past, but I’m more worried about Iran’s nuclear status in the future than the past, and so, you know, if it’s dead, and all they’re doing is cleaning it up so there’s no evidence of what they did before, I – you know, it’s regretful and blah, blah, but I don’t care. I would rather get a deal that prevents Iran from moving forward towards a nuclear weapon or moving forward so that we don’t have a military engagement that leads to a nuclear weapons decision by Iran.
The always thorough Mark Hibbs has a smart piece regarding the meaning of the resolution passed last week by the International Atomic Energy Association’s (IAEA) Board of Governors regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The resolution was initiated by the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council [...]]]>
The always thorough Mark Hibbs has a smart piece regarding the meaning of the resolution passed last week by the International Atomic Energy Association’s (IAEA) Board of Governors regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The resolution was initiated by the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) and modified with South African input, with only Cuba dissenting and Egypt, Tunisia, and Ecuador abstaining.
Rather than interpreting it as a message of unity among the P5+1 , Hibbs sees the resolution as “a lowest-common-denominator product” whose main intention was to “emphasize that the diplomatic process should continue and that the war of words should not intensify.”
So the resolution was not merely intended for Iran. Its emphatic, twice-mentioned support for a “comprehensive negotiated, long term solution, on the basis of reciprocity and a step-by-step approach, which restores international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program consistent with the NPT,” Hibbs points out, was also directed at Benjamin Netanyahu who despite being told in no uncertain terms to let go of the idea of resolving the nuclear issue militarily at least for now, seems unable to do so.
By avoiding inflammatory language, the board in effect delayed serious conversation about the intricacies of dealing with Iran’s nuclear program until after the United States November 6 presidential election. In Hibbs’ words:
[T]he IAEA resolution was informed by the perspective that as long as Iran doesn’t know who will be in the White House next January, it can’t be expected to negotiate seriously with the P5+1 on a long-term solution that would require that the U.S. make some firm commitments to Iran.
In other words, the change of subject to the broad support for diplomacy versus war has in effect lent the Obama Administration a hand in keeping the real Iran question – which has to do with how it plans to address Iran’s insistence on its nuclear rights through negotiation – out of the presidential contest.
But “kicking the can down the road” does not necessarily mean progress in figuring out how to resolve thorny issues. From the looks of it, neither does the idea of “we are going to keep sanctioning until Iran decides to negotiate seriously.” To be sure, one can continue to hope that this is not so. In the words of the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, the Iranian economy is “beginning to buckle” under a new round of tough sanctions. “So we think that there’s still considerable time for this pressure to work,” she said. But even Rice has to acknowledge that “this is not an infinite window.”
The reality is that sanctions may or may not prod Tehran to accept a bad deal but, after almost 9 years of negotiations, it is highly unlikely that the Iranian leadership will back down from its repeatedly declared position even in the face of a deteriorating economy. This is especially so since Tehran’s declared stance — that it will not sign onto something that will permanently treat Iran differently than other countries in terms of its permitted enrichment activities and the kind of inspection regime that is required to oversee its nuclear program — is not an especially outrageous position.
This is why Hibbs is correct to assert that a long-term solution to the stand-off will require some sort of firm commitments to Iran, including for instance “permitting Iran to continue enriching uranium after the IAEA, having implemented Additional Protocol-plus, delivers its imprimatur that Iran’s nuclear program is clearly dedicated to peaceful use.”
But the way Hibbs has laid out the end game already hints at how difficult negotiations are going to be even if – a very big if – a re-elected Obama Administration gives firm commitments to permit Iran to continue enriching eventually. Tehran will have all sorts of concerns and questions. How can it be assured that the IAEA’s imprimatur will not take forever? What does the “Additional Protocol-plus” entail? Iran knows it includes the inspection of the military site at Parchin, but is that it? Will the “plus” remain permanent or in a state of constant flux? And how does this schedule of the IAEA giving a clean bill of health to Iran coordinate with the potpourri of sanctions imposed by the UN, US, and EU?
The United States for its part will have all sorts of concerns, the most important of which is the fear that Iran will play games if sanctions are lessened in a step-by-step approach pushed by the Russians and now included in the IAEA resolution. The decision to ease up, even a little, on an instrument that has been quite successful in cornering Tehran for the sake of continued negotiations will not be easy. It could even prove impossible. But, assuming a re-election, the Obama Administration will no longer have electoral politics as an excuse for not deliberating on it.
]]>Now, however, both explicit statements on the issue by the Iranian Ambassador to [...]]]>
News media reported last week that Iran had flatly refused the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to its Parchin military test facility, based on a statement to reporters by IAEA Deputy Director General, Herman Nackaerts, that “We could not get access”.
Now, however, both explicit statements on the issue by the Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA and the language of the new IAEA report indicate that Iran did not reject an IAEA visit to the base per se but was only refusing access as long as no agreement had been reached with the IAEA governing the modalities of cooperation.
That new and clarifying information confirms what I reported February 23. Based on the history of Iranian negotiations with the IAEA and its agreement to allow two separate IAEA visits to Parchin in 2005, the Parchin access issue is a bargaining chip that Iran is using to get the IAEA to moderate its demands on Iran in forging an agreement on how to resolve the years-long IAEA investigation into the “Possible Military Dimensions” of the Iranian nuclear program.
In an email to me and in interviews with Russia Today, Reuters, and the Fars News Agency, the Iranian Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said Iran told the high-level IAEA mission that it would allow access to Parchin once modalities of Iran-IAEA cooperation had been agreed on.
“We declared that, upon finalization of the modality, we will give access [to Parchin],” Soltanieh wrote in an email to me.
In the Russia Today interview on February 27, reported by Israel’s Haaretz and The Hindu in India but not by western news media, Soltanieh referred to two IAEA inspection visits to Parchin in January and November 2005 and said Iran needs to have “assurances” that it would not “repeat the same bitter experience, when they just come and ask for the access.” There should be a “modality” and a “frame of reference, of what exactly they are looking for, they have to provide the documents and exactly where they want [to go],” he said.
But Soltanieh also indicated that such an inspection visit is conditional on agreement on the broader framework for cooperation on clearing up suspicions of a past nuclear weapons program. “[I]n principle we have already accepted that when this text is concluded we will take these steps,” Soltanieh said.
The actual text of the IAEA report, dated February 24, provides crucial information about the Iranian position in the talks that is consistent with what Soltanieh is saying.
In its account of the first round of talks in late January on what the IAEA is calling a “structured approach to the clarification of all outstanding issues”, the report states: “The Agency requested access to the Parchin site, but Iran did not grant access to the site at that time [emphasis added].” That wording obviously implies that Iran was willing to grant access to Parchin if certain conditions were met.
On the February 20-21 meetings, the agency said that Iran “stated that it was still not able to grant access to that site.” There was likely a more complex negotiating situation behind the lack of agreement on a Parchin visit than had been suggested by Nackaerts and reported in western news media.
But not a single major news media report has reported the significant difference between initial media coverage on the Parchin access issue and the information now available from the initial IAEA report and Soltanieh. None have reported the language of the report indicating that Iran’s refusal to approve a Parchin visit in January was qualified by “at that time”.
Only AFP and Reuters quoted Soltanieh at all. Reuters, which actually interviewed Soltanieh, quoted him saying, “It was assumed that after we agreed on the modality, then access would be given.” But that quote only appears in the very last sentence of the article, several paragraphs after the reiteration of the charge that Iran “refused to grant [the IAEA] access” to Parchin.
The day after that story was published, Reuters ran another story focusing on the IAEA report without referring either to its language on Parchin or to Soltanieh’s clarification.
The Los Angeles Times ignored the new information and simply repeated the charge that Iran “refused to allow IAEA inspectors to visit Parchin military base”. Then it added its own broad interpretation that Iran “has refused to answer key questions about its nuclear development program”. Iran’s repeated assertions that the documents used to pose questions to it are fabricated were thus dismissed as non-qualified answers.
The Parchin access story entered a new phase today with a Reuters story quoting Deputy Director General Nackaerts in a briefing for diplomats as saying that there “may be some ongoing activities at Parchin which add urgency to why we want to go”. Nackaerts attributed that idea to an unnamed “Member State”, which is apparently suggesting that the site in question is being “cleaned up”.
The identity of that “Member State”, which the IAEA continues to go out of its way to conceal, is important, because if it is Israel, it reflects an obvious interest in convincing the world that Iran is working on nuclear weapons. As former IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei recounts on p. 291 of his memoirs, “In the late summer of 2009, the Israelis provided the IAEA with documents of their own, purportedly showing that Iran had continued with nuclear weapon studies until at least 2007.”
The news media should be including cautionary language any time information from an unnamed “Member State” is cited as the source for allegations of covert Iran nuclear weapons work. It is very likely to be from a State with a political agenda. But the unwritten guidelines for news media coverage of the IAEA and Iran, as we have seen in recent days, are obviously very different.
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