Iran nuclear leaks 'linked to Israel' By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - A report on Iran's nuclear program issued by the United States
Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month generated news stories
publicizing an incendiary charge that US intelligence is underestimating Iran's
progress in designing a "nuclear warhead" before the halt in nuclear
weapons-related research in 2003.
That false and misleading charge from an intelligence official of a foreign
country, who was not identified but was clearly Israeli, reinforces two of
Israel's key themes on Iran - that the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE) on Iran is wrong, and that Tehran is poised to build nuclear weapons as
soon as possible.
But it also provides new evidence that Israeli intelligence was the source of
the collection of intelligence documents which have
been used to accuse Iran of hiding nuclear weapons research.
The committee report, dated May 4, cited unnamed "foreign analysts" as claiming
intelligence that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because
it had mastered the design and tested components of a nuclear weapon and thus
didn't need to work on it further until it had produced enough sufficient
material.
That conclusion, which implies that Iran has already decided to build nuclear
weapons, contradicts both the 2007 NIE on Iran, and current intelligence
analysis. The NIE concluded that Iran had ended nuclear weapons-related work in
2003 because of increased international scrutiny, and that it was "less
determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005".
The report included what appears to be a spectacular revelation from "a senior
allied intelligence official" that a collection of intelligence documents
supposedly obtained by US intelligence in 2004 from an Iranian laptop computer
included "blueprints for a nuclear warhead".
It quotes the unnamed official as saying that the blueprints "precisely
matched" similar blueprints the official's own agency "had obtained from other
sources inside Iran".
No US or International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) official have ever claimed
that the so-called laptop documents included designs for a "nuclear warhead".
The detailed list in a May 26, 2008, IAEA report of the contents of what have
been called the "alleged studies" - intelligence documents on alleged Iranian
nuclear weapons work - made no mention of any such blueprints.
In using the phrase "blueprints for a nuclear warhead", the unnamed official
was evidently seeking to conflate blueprints for the re-entry vehicle of the
Iranian Shehab missile, which were among the alleged Iranian documents, with
blueprints for nuclear weapons.
When New York Times reporters William J Broad and David E Sanger used the term
"nuclear warhead" to refer to a re-entry vehicle in a November 13, 2005, story
on the intelligence documents on the Iranian nuclear program, it brought sharp
criticism from David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and
International Security.
"This distinction is not minor," Albright observed, "and Broad should
understand the differences between the two objects, particularly when the
information does not contain any words such as nuclear or nuclear warhead."
The Senate report does not identify the country for which the analyst in
question works, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff refused to
respond to questions about the report from Inter Press Service (IPS), including
the reason why the report concealed the identity of the country for which the
unidentified "senior allied intelligence official" works.
Reached later in May, the author of the report, Douglas Frantz, said he was
under strict instructions not to speak with the news media.
After a briefing on the report for selected news media immediately after its
release, however, the Associated Press reported May 6 that interviews were
conducted in Israel. Frantz was apparently forbidden by Israeli officials from
revealing their national affiliation as a condition for the interviews.
Frantz, a former journalist for the Los Angeles Times, had extensive contacts
with high-ranking Israeli military, intelligence and Foreign Ministry officials
before joining the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. He and co-author
Catherine Collins conducted interviews with those Israeli officials for The
Nuclear Jihadist, published in 2007. The interviews were all conducted
under rules prohibiting disclosure of their identities, according to the book.
The unnamed Israeli intelligence officer's statement that the "blueprints for a
nuclear warhead" - meaning specifications for a missile re-entry vehicle - were
identical to "designs his agency had obtained from other sources in Iran"
suggests that the documents collection which the IAEA has called "alleged
studies" actually originated in Israel.
A US-based nuclear weapons analyst who has followed the "alleged studies"
intelligence documents closely says he understands that the documents obtained
by US intelligence in 2004 were not originally stored on the laptop on which
they were located when they were brought in by an unidentified Iranian source,
as US officials have claimed to US journalists.
The analyst, who insists on not being identified, says the documents were
collected by an intelligence network and then assembled on a single laptop.
The anonymous Israeli intelligence official's claim, cited in the committee
report, that the "blueprints" in the "alleged studies" collection matched
documents his agency had gotten from its own source seems to confirm the
analyst's finding that Israeli intelligence assembled the documents.
German officials have said that the Mujahedin E Khalq (MEK), the Iranian
resistance organization, brought the laptop documents collection to the
attention of US intelligence, as reported by IPS in February 2008. Israeli ties
with the political arm of the MEK, the National Committee of Resistance in Iran
(NCRI), go back to the early 1990s and include assistance to the organization
in broadcasting into Iran from Paris.
The NCRI publicly revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium-enrichment
facility in August 2002. However, that and other intelligence apparently came
from Israeli intelligence. The Israeli co-authors of The Nuclear Sphinx of
Tehran, Yossi Melman and Meir Javeanfar, revealed that "Western"
intelligence was "laundered" to hide its actual provenance by providing it to
Iranian opposition groups, especially NCRI, in order to get it to the IAEA.
They cite US, British and Israeli officials as sources for the revelation.
New Yorker writer Connie Bruck wrote in a March 2006 article that an Israeli
diplomat confirmed to her that Israel had found the MEK "useful" but declined
to elaborate.
Israeli intelligence is also known to have been actively seeking to use alleged
Iranian documents to prove that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program just
at the time the intelligence documents which eventually surfaced in 2004 would
have been put together.
The most revealing glimpse of Israeli use of such documents to influence
international opinion on Iran's nuclear program comes from the book by Frantz
and Collins. They report that Israel's international intelligence agency Mossad
created a special unit in the summer of 2003 to carry out a campaign to provide
secret briefings on the Iranian nuclear program, which sometimes included
"documents from inside Iran and elsewhere".
The "alleged studies" collection of documents has never been verified as
genuine by either the IAEA or by intelligence analysts. The Senate report said
senior United Nations officials and foreign intelligence officials who had seen
"many of the documents" in the collection of alleged Iranian military documents
had told committee staff "it is impossible to rule out an elaborate
intelligence ruse".
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. 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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