by Erich Follath and Holger Stark Spiegel
2nd part of 3
Camouflage and Deception
In the mid-1990s, the Iranians start building secret facilities to house the centrifuges, marking the beginning of a game of camouflage and deception that has continued to this day, and with which the country is forfeiting the right to uranium enrichment, to which it is formally entitled. The Kalaye Electric watch factory in a
After the devastating Iraq War, a heavy weight has descended on the country. It is becoming increasingly evident that the mullahs have no effective solutions, neither for the economy nor to address social issues. The West, for its part, doesn't know what to think of a regime that is sending out cautious gestures of goodwill, while at the same time dispatching death squads against members of the opposition living abroad.
Meanwhile, in neighboring
The American intelligence agency has since become more vigilant and has identified the Pakistani nuclear jihadist as a threat to world peace. But the extent of his deals remains unclear.
It is now the year 2000, and there is a mole in the Khan network, someone with very close connections. Urs Tinner enjoys the trust of his boss and, in the
The CIA believes that it has everything under control as far as Khan is concerned, but he proves to be anything but an easily controlled marionette.
And there is another player in the Iranian nuclear program that hasn't even appeared on the Americans' radar screen, someone whose role remains mysterious to this day. The trail leads to
'Arming to Threaten the Peace of the World'
Act 3: How a BND Agent Discovers the 'Laptop of Death' Vyacheslav D. is an internationally recognized specialist in the field of nanotechnology. His good reputation is based on a discovery he and his fellow Soviet scientists made in July 1963. When they exposed carbon to the shock waves from an explosion, the abrupt compression turned the carbon into gems called nanodiamonds. The Iranians have no need for sparkling gems, but they are interested in all things related to detonating a bomb -- which is where the Russian comes in. During the Cold War, D. spent years working on the Soviets' nuclear weapons program. Chelyabinsk-70 in Siberia, 1,500 kilometers due east of
The Iranians take notice of D. in 1992, when he and his colleagues publish a groundbreaking essay in a professional journal. In the article, they discuss the challenge of making the shock waves expand as uniformly as possible after an explosion, an important factor in the detonation of a certain type of nuclear warhead. To this end, many small channels have to be cut into the warhead "so as to be able to measure the intervals at which the waves arrive," D. writes. According to IAEA sources, a deal is struck around 1995.
From then on, the Russian scientist will work for
It is a process of nuclear armament that remains long hidden from the world, until one of those golden, late-summer days in
A Global Political Sensation
The Iranian exiles meet with the press in the Taft room on the third floor. "What I am showing you today are two top-secret sites that the Iranian regime has sought to conceal until now," says a spokesman of the People's Mujahedin. His words are a global political sensation. A heavy water reactor to produce plutonium in
The regime critics claim that the presentation is the "result of our own intensive research," but this isn't true. In fact, the
The unexpected exposure of
By then,
The new doctrine of the neo-conservatives in the
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian head of the Vienna-based IAEA, flies to
Test Detonations
In the summer of 2003, the
The charges are designed to simultaneously ignite a large charge of conventional explosives inside the hemisphere.
The goal of the test is to determine whether the ensuing shock waves coming from all sides act simultaneously on the potential nuclear core. About 1,000 fiberglass sensor wires are arranged inside the hemisphere to transmit a light signal to a digital measuring device. A high-speed camera takes pictures at intervals of a fraction of a second. This allows the scientists to analyze the course of the experiment.
If the Western intelligence services are to be believed, the results represent a technical breakthrough. The message of the summer of 2003 is that the detonator technology appears to be controllable Even as the engineers are announcing their successes, international pressure seems to be having an effect.
instructions from the Iranian government that suggest a drastic reduction in the military research budget. A number of scientists complain that they are no longer being allowed to pursue their projects. The government is so concerned about the discovery of its secret nuclear projects that, in February 2004, bulldozers appear in front of a building at the Physics Research Center in northeast Tehran, which houses a military segment of the
nuclear research program. The fact that Western intelligence agencies are able to monitor internal Iranian communications is due in part to the work of
An Important German Source
The Germans have an important source in
The agents from Pullach prefer to meet with Dolphin during his trips abroad, which, shortly before the end of the millennium, the regime still allows. Dolphin is a smart man who knows that the intelligence agencies love betrayal but not the betrayer. To cover his back, he takes out a form of life insurance: He collects all the classified documents about the nuclear program he can get his hands on, digitizes them and hides the laptop as a
deposit on his own security. He doesn't want to stay in
The CIA has also taken notice of the Iranian businessman. He is a manageable entity, someone who is actively involved in the nuclear program and, when Dolphin first expresses his desire to leave
The laptop becomes her Green Card.
The 'Green Salt Project' The more than 1,000 pages of documents on the computer include Iranian correspondence relating to the conversion of uranium oxide into uranium
tetrafluoride. The Iranians refer to this step as the "Green Salt Project" and, according to the documents on the laptop, the program is managed under a department known as “Project 5.13." Its goal is to produce a ton of the "green salt" per year. The laptop also contains a document dated May 2003, under the letterhead of Kimia Maadan, a Tehran-based company. The Iranian ambassador to the IAEA will later deny the existence of the project in question, and he will claim that the company was merely involved in uranium
production at a mine near the town of
The
the Americans. They don't trust Bush and his CIA.
Finally, the
'A Very Dangerous Man'
Act 4: The True Identity of Iran's Biggest Adversary in the West If there was ever a man more unlike James Bond in the world of espionage, it has to be Olli Heinonen. He has the telltale beginnings of a paunch, he wears off-the-rack suits and he favors ties in the decidedly uncool shades of yellow and gray. The IAEA's easy-going deputy director general has not only been underestimated before, he also possesses a healthy dose of a
virtue the Finns call sisu: tenacity, stubbornness and endurance. He also happens to be one of the world's preeminent nuclear specialists.
Heinonen grew up in
Heinonen soon becomes fascinated by the realm of the Persians. The Iranians suspend the IAEA's activities after the revelations about Natanz and
ElBaradei dispatches his deputy on a secret mission to investigate the presumed black-market dealer's network and to examine his connections to
But even as the stoic Finn is collecting data, the Western intelligence agencies have intensified their scrutiny of the Khan connection. When the CIA raids the German freighter BBC China in the Italian
West Ratchets Up Pressure on
By now, the West is putting so much pressure on Pakistan that President Pervez Musharraf drops his support for Khan, allowing a national hero to fall. In his 11-page confession in early 2004, which remains classified to this day, Khan says that the Iranians offered him a deal worth billions. Now, more than ever, Heinonen is convinced that Khan is the source of many Iranian nuclear components.
On a May day in 2004, the IAEA's answer to James Bond receives a call from a woman who appears to be surprisingly well-versed on nuclear matters. He meets with her in a cafe in
The Robert Oppenheimer of
At that presentation in
Like Oppenheimer, who, beginning in 1942, secretly worked as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fakhrizadeh also keeps an extremely low profile, determined to prevent leaks of information about the military portion of Iran's nuclear research effort.
His physics research center is located in northeastern
For a long time, the world takes no notice of the scientist, who was born in 1961, joined the Revolutionary Guard as a young man and later took a job at the Defense Ministry. Fakhrizadeh has two children and, to this day, occasionally gives lectures at
According to an intelligence dossier that has been circulating between
A neutron generator is a key element on the path to a nuclear explosion. The device, which shoots deuterium at tritium, is placed into the center of a hollow sphere of enriched uranium, where its purpose is to trigger the desired chain reaction. This may be the way the Pakistanis detonated their bomb, and apparently
possibility of additional permanent posts for academics. "Our capacities are adequate at the moment," Fakhrizadeh writes, "but of course they are not perfect."
The IAEA is also familiar with the strategy document. The nuclear inspectors have asked the Iranian government several times for permission to meet with Fakhrizadeh, but to no avail. The Iranian officials argue that the scientist works exclusive in the conventional defense industry. The UN placed his name on a blacklist in 2007, and the European Union characterizes Fakhrizadeh as a "high-ranking scientist in the Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics."
Erich Follath and Holger Stark Spiegel
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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