How a US and International Atomic Energy Agency Deception Haunts the Nuclear Talks

How a US and International Atomic Energy Agency Deception Haunts the Nuclear Talks





 How a US and International Atomic Energy Agency Deception Haunts the Nuclear Talks

By Gareth Porter, Truthout | News Analysis


In 2008, the Bush administration and a key IAEA official agreed on a strategy of misrepresenting Iran's position on the authenticity of intelligence documents, which they used to establish an official narrative of Iran "stonewalling" the IAEA investigation. That narrative continues to shape Obama administration policy in the nuclear talks.

The accusation by US and other Western diplomats that Iran has been "stonewalling" the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) investigation of alleged past nuclear weapons work has been a familiar theme in mainstream media coverage of Iran's relations with the IAEA for years.

What remains virtually unknown, however, is how a brazen deception by the George W. Bush administration and a key official within the IAEA created the false narrative of Iranian refusal to cooperate with the IAEA and was used to justify harsh international sanctions.

The initial deception was the suggestion by the IAEA that Iran had acknowledged that the activities portrayed in controversial intelligence documents purportedly from an Iranian nuclear weapons project were real, but had claimed they were for non-nuclear purposes. The IAEA then used that brazen falsehood as a pretext to demand that Iran provide sensitive military information on its missile program - a demand that the US officials behind the scheme knew would be rejected. That ploy thus offered the Bush administration a crucial rationale for pushing for new international economic sanctions against Iran.

The story of that highly successful deception, assembled from the public record, interviews with former IAEA officials and diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, shows the conscious misleading of the public was central to US policy at a crucial turning point in the nuclear issue. It has contributed to the general consensus that Iran must be hiding past work on nuclear weapons that has led the Obama administration to insist that unless Iran satisfies the IAEA on that issue there can be no final agreement to remove the sanctions against Iran.





The origins of the IAEA deception lie in the Bush administration's
determination to force Iran to cease its nuclear enrichment, which
required the IAEA to maintain the image of Iran as hiding an alleged
past nuclear weapons program. When then IAEA director general Mohamed
ElBaradei negotiated a "work plan" with Iran in August 2007 to resolve a
series of six issues the IAEA Safeguards Department had raised in
previous years, the Bush administration was furious. Along with its key
European allies, the United States warned ElBaradei when he negotiated
the plan that clearing Iran of suspicion on the six issues would be
unacceptable, according to a January 2008 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.




After ElBaradei proceeded to clear away the six issues, the United
States became even more aggressive toward ElBaradei. Ambassador to the
IAEA Gregory Schulte sent a cable to the State Department written in
early February focusing on the question of ElBaradei's handling of the
intelligence documents purporting to show a covert Iranian weapons
program that the Bush administration had been urging the IAEA to use to
confront Iran. The United States and its allies would have to "warn the
DG [director general] in very stark terms," Schulte wrote, "that . . .
any hint of whitewash of Iran's weapons activities would cause
irreparable harm to the Agency's relationship with major donors."




In other words, Schulte was saying Washington would have to threaten
to severely reduce or even cut off its funding for the IAEA if ElBaradei
refused to cooperate.




But US officials had an equally important source of leverage on IAEA
policy in the person of Olli Heinonen, the Finnish head of the
Safeguards Department.




Heinonen had acquired a reputation in the agency for working closely
with the most powerful patron available. When he was responsible for the
Middle East region in Safeguards from 2002 to 2005, he went around his
boss, Deputy Director General for Safeguards Pierre Goldschmidt, and
dealt directly with Director General ElBaradei, according to a former
IAEA official. But after ElBaradei named Heinonen head of the Safeguards
Department in 2005, the official recalled, he immediately began going
around ElBaradei and dealing directly with the Americans.




In late 2007 and early 2008, as US anger toward ElBaradei peaked over
his closure of the files on the six issues, Heinonen privately assured
US diplomats that he was not happy with ElBaradei's decision, according
to a January 2008 diplomatic cable. Another cable from Schulte in March
reveals that Heinonen had assured US officials that he wanted to "press
ahead" on the investigation of the intelligence documents, despite
ElBaradei's reluctance to do so.

Iran objected, in a letter to the IAEA secretariat on September 5,
2008, that the IAEA demand represented an unwarranted intrusion on its
conventional military security, as well as a blatant violation of the
agency's statute.

Soltanieh's point was that any competent fabricator of documents
tries to include some details that are accurate, such as the ones in
those documents shown to Iran in order to convince the targets of the
fraud that they are genuine. Iran pointed out in a letter to the IAEA
secretariat a few months later that it was standard procedure. The
letter denied that Iran had ever acknowledged the accuracy of anything
in the intelligence documents except for those incidental details.


Only after Heinonen had left the agency for a position at Harvard
University did the IAEA acknowledge in its September 2011 report that
the only thing Iran had "confirmed" about the documents had been the
"names of people, places and organizations."


Heinonen clearly had intensive discussions with Schulte and other
Western officials about the Iranian response to the documents and what
to do about it. Two diplomatic cables indicate that Heinonen agreed as a
result of those discussions that the IAEA would take the position that
Iran had admitted that the documents were authentic, but claimed that
the activities described were not for nuclear weapons.


In the first diplomatic cable,
sent in mid-February, Schulte wrote that the next phase of the IAEA's
should be to force Iran to "fully disclose" its past alleged nuclear
weapons program and make a "confession." That cable apparently reflected
agreement with Heinonen on the strategy to be pursued.


A second cable dated March 27, 2008,
quoted French Ambassador Francois-Xavier Deniau as declaring at a
meeting of P5+1 ambassadors, "Iran has acknowledged some of the studies,
while claiming they were for non-nuclear purposes."



Deniau's statement strongly suggests that Heinonen and the Americans
had already adopted a very concrete formula to be used publicly to
manage the issue several weeks before the drafting of the next IAEA
report had begun in May. That statement accurately anticipated the
wording of the Iranian position that would be used in the May 2008 IAEA
report.


The language in the report was carefully chosen to mislead the reader
without technically telling an outright lie. The report said Iran "did
not dispute that some of the information contained in the documents was
factually accurate, but said the events and activities concerned
involved civil or conventional military applications."



That tortured wording avoided saying
directly that the "information" that Iran had not disputed involved
"events and activities" portrayed in the documents. But it was clearly
intended to lead readers to that conclusion. Elsewhere, the report made
it clear that the activities shown in the documents on the redesign of
the reentry vehicle Shahab-3 ballistic missile and on exploding bridge
wire detonators could only have been for a nuclear weapon.




Heinonen and his American handlers exploited the fact that Iran had
publicly acknowledged redesigning the Shahab-3 missile and development
of an exploding bridge wire (EBW).


The wording on the EBW program issue was further reinforced to drive
home the deception. "Iran acknowledged that it had conducted
simultaneous testing with two to three EBW detonators with a time
precision of about one microsecond," the report said, adding, "Iran
said, however, that this was intended for civil and conventional
military applications."




Those two sentences were bound to be interpreted by the unwary reader
as indicating that Iran had admitted to having done experiments
involving the firing rate shown in the documents. In fact, however, as
Heinonen had revealed in a briefing for member states on February 25,
2008, the document in question portrayed experiments in which EBW
detonators fired at a rate of 130 nanoseconds - nearly eight times
faster than the firing rate in the experiments that the report was
saying that Iran had acknowledged carrying out.




In meetings of the IAEA Iran report drafting group, Heinonen made no
secret that he intended to show that Iran was lying. "He revealed to the
Iran report drafting group a strategy to trap the Iranians into some
small lies leading to being caught up in a major contradiction," a
former IAEA official familiar with those meetings, who asked to remain
anonymous because of fear of retaliation by the agency, told Truthout.




IAEA officials in the drafting group who were aligned with ElBaradei
were not happy with his proposed wording, according to the former
official. "There were a lot of differences over what Iran had admitted,"
he recalled. "We had to agree with language we weren't entirely
comfortable with."


As the text of the May 2008 report shows, the IAEA drafting group
also insisted on juxtaposing those misleading sentences on which
Heinonen was insisting with US support, with Iran's denial that the
documents were genuine and its assertions that the documents "contained
numerous inconsistencies" and that "many were based on publicly
available information."




The report thus represented a compromise between the positions of
Heinonen and ElBaradei, reflecting the political pressure that the
United States and its allies was then putting on ElBaradei to go along
with its hardline strategy.




The former IAEA official described the US political pressure on
ElBaradei at that point as "intense." The US threat of a funding cutoff
was only part of it. ElBaradei also knew that his enemies in Washington
and Tel Aviv were prepared to use police tactics to destroy him
politically. Under Secretary of State John Bolton had tapped ElBaradei's
phone in 2004 in the hope of getting information that could be used to
prevent ElBaradei from running for a third term in 2005.


Bolton failed to find anything he could use to promote that scheme,
but ElBaradei's enemies in Washington and Tel Aviv also spread rumors
aimed at smearing him as an Iranian agent. One such story, which
ElBaradei recalled in his memoirs, had Iran depositing $600,000 in a
bank account under ElBaradei's wife's name in Switzerland. Yet another
such rumor was that his wife, Aida, an Egyptian, was actually Iranian.




ElBaradei was also following events in Egypt, where opposition
newspapers were being harassed and hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood
members were being jailed by the Mubarak regime. He knew he would one
day want to return to Egypt and he did not want to be viewed by the US
government as anti-American.




But the US-Heinonen strategy had an even bigger objective in mind -
to use the insinuation that Iran had admitted to the activities that the
documents portrayed as a pretext to demand that Iran provide the IAEA
with highly sensitive information on both its missile and conventional
weapons programs. At two meetings with Iranian officials in August 2008,
Heinonen insisted that Iran share with IAEA experts the details of its
work on exploding bridge wire technology as well as on the redesign of
the Shahab-3 missile in order to prove its innocence.




The September 2008 IAEA report
revealed the demand: "The Agency proposed discussions with Iranian
experts on the contents of the engineering reports examining in detail
modeling studies related to the effects of various physical parameters
on the re-entry body from time of launch of the missile to payload
detonation." It explained that the discussions would be "aimed at
ascertaining whether these studies were associated with nuclear related
activities or, as Iran has asserted, related only to conventional
military activities."




Heinonen later denied publicly that he had ever demanded the transfer
of classified conventional Iranian military data to the IAEA. But a
senior IAEA official acknowledged to me in a September 2009 interview
that the agency was indeed demanding that Iran turn over such
information.


Predictably, Iran objected, in a letter to the IAEA secretariat on September 5, 2008,
that the IAEA demand represented an unwarranted intrusion on its
conventional military security, as well as a blatant violation of the
agency's statute. Iran informed ElBaradei that it was refusing to
participate in future meetings on the subject of "possible military
dimensions" as long as that demand was on the table.


That was exactly what the Bush administration and Heinonen were hoping for.




US Ambassador Schulte drafted a set of talking points he proposed to
be used by the entire P5+1 for all interactions with the IAEA
secretariat. As revealed in a diplomatic cable in January 2009,
the key points expressed concern that Iran had "refused to cooperate
with the IAEA's investigation in a full and substantive manner" and
declared, "We do not accept Iran's blockage of the IAEA investigation."


The Obama administration continued the Bush administration's policy
of protesting Iran's alleged refusal to cooperate with the IAEA as a
means of building support for its real objective - to pressure Iran to
suspend enrichment indefinitely. On March 3, 2009, a statement on behalf
of all six powers to the IAEA board called on Iran to "cooperate fully
with the IAEA by providing the Agency such access and information that
it requests" to resolve the "possible military dimensions" issue.




The demand that Iran "cooperate fully with the IAEA" on the "possible
military dimensions" became part of the Obama administration's official
mantra on Iran, along with the charge that Iran had failed to do so.
That charge was even included in UN Security Council Resolution 1929 in
June 2010. The administration repeated it in the meetings of the IAEA
Board of Governors.




Senior administration officials, including Secretary of State John
Kerry have said that Iran must "come clean" about its past nuclear
weapons work as part of the comprehensive settlement that is now being
negotiated. Israel and its supporters in Congress have pressed that
demand on the Obama administration vehemently. The clever dissimulation
by the Bush administration and Heinonen continues to cast a long shadow
over the talks.





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