WASHINGTON - The George W Bush
administration has long pushed the "laptop
documents" - 1,000 pages of technical documents
supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop - as hard
evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear
weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose
the only remaining obstacles to the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran
has resolved all unanswered questions about its
nuclear program.
But those documents have
also been regarded with great suspicion by US and
foreign analysts. German officials identified the
source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as
the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), which along with its
political arm, the National Council of Resistance
in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the US
State Department as a
terrorist organization.
There are some
indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the
documents not from an Iranian source but from
Israel's Mossad.
In its latest report on
Iran, circulated on February 22, the IAEA, under
strong pressure from the Bush administration,
included descriptions of plans for a facility to
produce "green salt", technical specifications for
high explosives testing and the schematic layout
of a missile re-entry vehicle that appears capable
of holding a nuclear weapon. Iran has been asked
to provide full explanations for these alleged
activities.
Tehran has denounced the
documents on which the charges are based as
fabrications provided by the MEK, and has demanded
copies of the documents to analyze, but the United
States has refused to do so.
The Iranian
assertion is supported by statements by German
officials. A few days after then-secretary of
state Colin Powell announced the laptop documents,
Karsten Voight, the coordinator for
German-American relations in the German Foreign
Ministry, was reported by the Wall Street Journal
on November 22, 2004, as saying that the
information had been provided by "an Iranian
dissident group".
A German official
familiar with the issue confirmed to this writer
that the NCRI had been the source of the laptop
documents. "I can assure you that the documents
came from the Iranian resistance organization,"
the source said.
The Germans have been
deeply involved in intelligence collection and
analysis regarding the Iranian nuclear program.
According to a story by Washington Post reporter
Dafna Linzer soon after the laptop documents were
first mentioned publicly by Powell in late 2004,
US officials said they had been stolen from an
Iranian whom German intelligence had been trying
to recruit, and had been given to intelligence
officials of an unnamed country in Turkey.
The German account of the origins of the
laptop documents contradicts the insistence by
unnamed US intelligence officials who insisted to
journalists William J Broad and David Sanger in
November 2005 that the laptop documents did not
come from any Iranian resistance groups.
Despite the fact that it was listed as a
terrorist organization, the MEK was a favorite of
neo-conservatives in the Pentagon, who were
proposing in 2003-2004 to use it as part of a
policy to destabilize Iran. The United States is
known to have used intelligence from the MEK on
Iranian military questions for years. It was
considered a credible source of intelligence on
the Iranian nuclear program after 2002, mainly
because of its identification of the facility in
Natanz as a nuclear site.
The German
source said he did not know whether the documents
were authentic or not. However, Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA)analysts, and European
and IAEA officials who were given access to the
laptop documents in 2005, were very skeptical
about their authenticity.
The Guardian's
Julian Borger last February quoted an IAEA
official as saying there is "doubt over the
provenance of the computer".
A senior
European diplomat who had examined the documents
was quoted by the New York Times in November 2005
as saying, "I can fabricate that data. It looks
beautiful, but is open to doubt."
Scott
Ritter, the former US military intelligence
officer who was chief United Nations weapons
inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, noted in an
interview that the CIA has the capability to check
the authenticity of laptop documents through
forensic tests that would reveal when different
versions of different documents were created.
The fact that the agency could not rule
out the possibility of fabrication, according to
Ritter, indicates that it had either chosen not to
do such tests or that the tests had revealed
fraud.
Despite its having been credited
with the Natanz intelligence coup in 2002, the
overall record of the MEK on the Iranian nuclear
program has been very poor. The CIA continued to
submit intelligence from the Iranian group about
alleged Iranian nuclear weapons-related work to
the IAEA over the next five years, without
identifying the source.
But that
intelligence turned out to be unreliable. A senior
IAEA official told the Los Angeles Times in
February 2007 that, since 2002, "pretty much all
the intelligence that has come to us has proved to
be wrong".
Former State Department deputy
intelligence director for the Near East and South
Asia Wayne White doubts that the MEK has actually
had the contacts within the Iranian bureaucracy
and scientific community necessary to come up with
intelligence such as Natanz and the laptop
documents. "I find it very hard to believe that
supporters of the MEK haven't been thoroughly
rooted out of the Iranian bureaucracy," says
White. "I think they are without key sources in
the Iranian government."
In her February
2006 report on the laptop documents, the Post's
Linzer said CIA analysts had originally speculated
that a "third country, such as Israel, had
fabricated the evidence". They eventually
"discounted that theory", she wrote, without
explaining why.
Since 2002, new
information has emerged indicating that the MEK
did not obtain the 2002 data on Natanz itself but
received it from the Israeli intelligence agency
Mossad. Yossi Melman and Meier Javadanfar, who
co-authored a book on the Iranian nuclear program
last year, write that they were told by "very
senior Israeli Intelligence officials" in late
2006 that Israeli intelligence had known about
Natanz for a full year before the Iranian group's
press conference. They explained that they had
chosen not to reveal it to the public "because of
safety concerns for the sources that provided the
information".
Shahriar Ahy, an adviser to
monarchist leader Reza Pahlavi, told journalist
Connie Bruck that the detailed information on
Natanz had not come from the MEK but from "a
friendly government, and it had come to more than
one opposition group, not only the Mujahideen".
Bruck wrote in the New Yorker on March,
16, 2006, that when he was asked if the "friendly
government" was Israel, Ahy smiled and said, "The
friendly government did not want to be the source
of it, publicly. If the friendly government gives
it to the US publicly, then it would be received
differently. Better to come from an opposition
group."
Israel has maintained a
relationship with the MEK since the late 1990s,
according to Bruck, including assistance to the
organization in beaming broadcasts by the NCRI
from Paris into Iran. An Israeli diplomat
confirmed that Israel had found the MEK "useful",
Bruck reported, but the official declined to
elaborate.
Gareth
Porter is an historian and national
security policy analyst. The paperback edition of
his latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam,
was published in 2006.
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