by Erich Follath and Holger Stark Spiegel
1st part of 3
In the dispute over Tehran's nuclear program, the UN Security Council has imposed new sanctions. Is Iran truly building a nuclear bomb as Western countries claim? Or are countries playing up the dangers to bring Iran to its knees? SPIEGEL traces the history of Tehran's nuclear program -- with stops in Washington, Vienna and Isfahan.
It is yet another of those secret meetings at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The deputy director general of the agency, who works on behalf of the United Nations to prevent nuclear bombs from getting into the wrong hands, has invited 35 diplomats to a meeting on the fifth floor of the UN building in Vienna. Some take pictures with their mobile phones of the ice floes on the Danube River drifting by below. Everyone is prepared for a routine meeting. But everything will be different this time. With the help of high-tech espionage, history is written on this February day in 2008. And perhaps it will later be said that it was the day Iran finally lost its innocence, and the day the Israelis were provided with arguments for a war.
Olli Heinonen confronts the diplomats with new information about Tehran's nuclear program. The Finnish nuclear scientist, the IAEA's deputy director general and head of the Department of Safeguards, has been to Natanz and Isfahan several times himself, and his inspectors, or "watchdogs," report back to him regularly. In addition, cameras monitor nuclear activities in many of the Iranian facilities. As useful as all of this is, it doesn't replace supplementary, secret information.
Heinonen knows that there are many things happening in Iran that he doesn't know about. Nevertheless, he has received critical information through indirect sources, including recordings made by a leading Iranian nuclear scientist.
A Treasure Trove of Facts
Always wary of attempts to manipulate him, Heinonen has spent a lot of time comparing the exclusive information with his own records and checking it against other reports. His research has led him to conclude that he has been given a treasure trove of facts, images and names -- all of it "with a 90-percent likelihood of being authentic."
The room is dark as the projector hums in the background. For the next two hours, Heinonen projects images, diagrams and copies of manuscripts onto the wall. The story they tell is diametrically opposed to the official Tehran version, which holds that Iran is using fissile material for peaceful purposes only and that there is no military nuclear program. "Project 5" describes Iran's uranium mining program and how it processes the material into uranium hexafluoride, an intermediate product in the process of producing nuclear fuel. "Project 110" depicts the testing of highly explosive nuclear materials. "Project 111" illustrates attempts to build a warhead for Iran's Shahab-3 missile. The IAEA experts have translated a literary motif on the first page of the document that reads: "Fate does not change people as long as people do not change fate."
Heinonen says that all of this information raises urgent questions, particularly about a man named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the secret head of the program, whose name is mentioned repeatedly in the documents. Although Heinonen doesn't say that his information constitutes evidence of a nuclear bomb program, no one has ever come this close to offering a "smoking gun" for an Iranian military nuclear program. The presentation, by a Scandinavian known for his levelheadedness, offers a convincing body of evidence -- and makes a very strong impression on the assembled experts.
The Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, jumps up excitedly and promptly claims the information Heinonen has just presented is nothing but "fabrications," a claim he will later be forced to partially retract.
The Americans, the French and others are busy taking notes and trying to take pictures of the slides with their mobile phones, as one of the attendees recalls.
'Chariots of Fire'
Heinonen has kept the best for the end: a three-minute film from Tehran that was probably intended for the country's senior political leaders and is as professionally produced as a trailer for a Hollywood movie. It shows the computer-supported simulation of an explosion of a missile warhead. As the IAEA deputy director general soberly points out, the simulated explosion, at an altitude of 600 meters (1,970 feet), would make no sense for the use of conventional, chemical or biological weapons.
The clip uses the powerful theme music from the film "Chariots of Fire," by Vangelis, which won an Oscar in 1982, together with the film of the same name. But there is also another context to the phrase "chariots of fire," and it can be assumed that the highly educated Iranian scientists knew what it was. The 19th-century British writer William Blake popularized the unusual phrase, with its biblical origins, in a short poem from the preface to his epic "Milton: A Poem," best known today as the hymn "Jerusalem." The
lyrics read: "Bring me my bow of burning gold / Bring me my arrows of desire / Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold! / Bring me my chariot of fire!" Were the Iranians using the phrase "chariots of fire" as a poetic euphemism for the atom bomb?
Pinpricks with Little Impact on Berlin
In 2010, nothing has been higher on the agenda of international diplomacy than the prospect of a secret Iranian nuclear program and the fear that Tehran's leaders could obtain nuclear weapons to threaten their sworn enemy Israel and American troops in the Persian Gulf. And nothing underscored the dramatic impact of the events as effectively as the secret IAEA meeting in 2008.
The Iranian regime's refusal to abandon its uranium enrichment program, or at least suspend it once again, prompted the UN Security Council to tighten its sanctions for a third time last Wednesday. The new sanctions will isolate Iranian companies even further, hamper weapons imports, limit the Revolutionary Guard's room for maneuver and facilitate inspections of Iranian ships. US President Barack Obama called them the "toughest sanctions ever faced by Iran," while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fumed that the UN resolution was nothing but "worthless paper." In truth, the new rules
are merely pinpricks with little impact on Tehran, partly because Russia and, most of all, China opposed restrictions to the oil trade.
The global public is divided. Brazil and Turkey voted against the UN draft resolution, as watered-down as it already was. No one wants an Iranian bomb. The deliberately false, or at least exaggerated, reports by Western intelligence agencies on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction," which were even used as justification for going to war, are still a source of
indignation today. The CIA, Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, and Britain's MI6 have had a credibility problem ever since, particularly when sounding the alarm on the subject of the ultimate weapon. And hanging over everything like a sword of Damocles is the threat by Israeli politicians to launch a military strike to stop Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad, who said recently that the Israeli attack on a flotilla bound for Gaza sounded "the death knell of the Zionist regime."
Iran and the bomb: A tale of errors and entanglements, complete with deceptive maneuvers on all sides. It is a powerful drama being presented on a stage that extends to every corner of the world, with a cast of royalist politicians and religious warriors, pseudo-democrats and scheming generals, corruptible Russian scientists and seemingly upright Swiss business people.
The settings are places like Vienna and Washington, Tehran and Tel Aviv, Pyongyang and Berlin.
Act 1: Why the Shah Is Pursued Weapons -- and the Ayatollahs Are Following Suit There are few places in the world where one feels pride in humanity. Persepolis, in the south of present-day Iran, is one of them. Darius the Great built his capital here in the 6th century B.C., and the ruins of that city, still impressive today, bear witness to a superior
civilization. And even though the Macedonians, the Arabs and the Mongols conquered the country, and it later came to be dominated by British oil companies and American generals, no one has ever deprived the Persians of the proud sense, bordering on arrogance, of being part of a superior culture, and of the conviction that they are the natural dominant power in a region of "backward" Arabs.
The Shah only manages to preserve his power through a CIA-backed coup against Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister and member of the National Front Party. He imposes a radical shift toward Western modernity on his people. With his "White Revolution," he seeks to bring progress to the country by force and buys state-of-the-art weapons in the West to beef up his military arsenal. In 1957, the Shah signs a nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States, and a decade later the first
research reactor is built in Tehran. But Iran's ruler has even greater ambitions. In 1976, US President Gerald Ford signs a directive under which he not only pledges to provide Iran with several nuclear power plants, but also a reprocessing plant to recover nuclear fuel.
A 'Suspicious Western Innovation'
But the Shah is never able to realize his dream of acquiring nuclear weapons, and not even the nuclear power plant in Bushehr, a project under German leadership, is completed. In 1979, the Shah is driven out of office in the Islamic Revolution, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini triumphantly assumes power in Iran. The purity of Shiite faith is at the center of his theocracy, while the purity of uranium is seen as irrelevant. Khomeini dismisses the nuclear program as a "suspicious Western innovation" that has no business in his Islamic Republic. Besides, weapons of mass destruction are haram, or forbidden, according to the teachings of Allah.
Khomeini's position is astonishing. By this time, Israel is already a nuclear power, after having built a secret nuclear reactor in the Negev Desert and functioning nuclear weapons. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir presumably confessed to US President Richard Nixon about the existence of the bombs. In the fall of 1980, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein feels emboldened by the US government to attack his Iranian neighbors. The war will rage for eight years, claiming half a million lives. Bushehr is one
of the bombing targets, and Iran's nuclear reactor there, still unfinished, is largely destroyed.
In a dramatic letter to the revolutionary leader, Mohsen Rezai, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard (and a critic of Ahmadinejad today), requests his permission for the development of nuclear weapons. He argues that this is the only way Iran can defend itself and deter its enemies. Prime Minister Hossein Mousavi (the leader of the popular resistance movement today) writes a personal appeal to support Rezai's argument in
favor of the bomb.
In July 1988, Khomeini, with a heavy heart, agrees to a ceasefire with the Iraqis. The move, he says, is "more bitter than poison." At this point, he apparently begins to rethink his position on nuclear weapons. When faced with an existential threat, the Shiite can avail himself of the takiya, or sanctioned lying to serve the greater good. If Khomeini reinterprets this principle, he can preserve his own principles, and at the same time tell his people that they can move forward with their efforts to build the atom bomb.
In 1988, Iran conducts its first serious negotiations with neighboring Pakistan. In the 1970s, Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had said: "Even if we have to eat grass, we will make nuclear bombs." And indeed, Pakistan developed into a nuclear power. But its Sunni government is
deeply distrustful of the Shiites and tells its politicians to stall the Iranian negotiators.
But the men in Tehran have a Plan B: direct negotiations with the "father of Pakistan's atomic bomb," Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan is more than willing to pass on his knowledge to his fellow Muslims in Iran, provided such a deal translates into sufficient compensation for him. Khan sees no contradiction in being both a wannabe jihadist and an aspiring millionaire.
How the World's Nuclear Dealer Got His Start
Act 2: How Mr. Khan Learned to Love the Bomb
Even as a child, Abdul Qadeer Khan has always hated the feeling of being humiliated by a superior adversary. After the bloody partition of British India in 1947, his father, a Muslim teacher, decided to leave the Indian city of Bhopal and move to Pakistan ("The Land of the Pure"). Khan, who is 16 at the time, watches Hindu soldiers robbing women. A border guard steals a ballpoint pen from him, a gift from his brother that had meant a lot to Khan. The underdog swears that he will avenge himself one day and dreams of exacting revenge from a position of strength.
After attending school in Karachi, the highly gifted Khan earns his doctorate in metallurgy in the Belgian city of Leuven. He takes a job with a supplier to the centrifuge builder URENCO, where, thanks to the company's incomprehensible recklessness, he gains access to the nuclear hearth that is every bomb-maker's dream. No one objects when the Pakistani takes the top-secret documents home, where he can calmly make copies of the technology developed by German engineers.
The scientist knows what he has in his hands: the breakthrough for a nuclear weapons program. The biggest obstacle to making a nuclear bomb is acquiring the necessary fissile material. The more discreet of two possible approaches leads through uranium enrichment and centrifuges. This in turn requires uranium ore, which is relatively accessible on the global market and is also mined in Iran. Further enrichment into weapons-grade material can be done in facilities that are relatively easy to hide. Uranium enrichment is a high-tech version of panning for gold: Hundreds of precisely manufactured centrifuges must operate at high speeds and with great precision to obtain
the material for a bomb.
A First Meeting with the Iranians
The pleasant Mr. Khan disappears in January 1976. In 1983, a court in Amsterdam convicts the Pakistani of industrial espionage and sentences him in absentia to a four-year prison term. By 1985, Pakistan is successfully enriching uranium, and the nuclear research institute at Kahuta, 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the capital Islamabad, is named Khan Research Laboratories, in honor of its director.
Khan meets with the Iranians for the first time in Dubai. Detailed construction plans are handed over at a meeting in 1987 with Masoud Naraghi, the head of the Iranian nuclear energy commission. Tehran also gets two centrifuges that Khan has managed to divert in Kahuta.
It is the beginning of a glorious friendship of brothers in arms for Iran and of a lucrative career as an arms dealer for Khan. Pakistan's top scientist makes at least a dozen trips to North Korea, Dubai and North Africa, literally peddling his nuclear weapons components. The bomb expert is invited to Tehran a number of times and is even given a villa on the Caspian Sea. According to a defector, Khan rarely leaves the country without
a suitcase full of cash.
Iran's clandestine nuclear program picks up the pace in 1991. It is the year in which the assembled American intelligence agencies give the all-clear signal in a report on Tehran, noting that, although the Iranian leadership is interested in an atomic weapon, the program is "too disorganized to be taken seriously."
A year later, then CIA Director (and current Defense Secretary) Robert Gates qualifies the results of that report. He now has new information from Naraghi, the Iranian nuclear chief, who has since lost his job and applied for asylum in the United States. He also exposes his contact: Khan. But the Americans do not assign any importance to the Pakistan connection, nor do they warn the IAEA inspectors. Valuable years are lost, years in which Iran begins serious development of its centrifuges.
Erich Follath and Holger Stark Spiegel
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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