Iran places trust in 'passive defense' By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Iran had "quietly
hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex" in a vast network of
tunnels and bunkers buried in mountainsides.
The story continued a narrative begun last September, when a second Iranian
uranium enrichment facility near Qom was reported to have been discovered by
United States and Western intelligence. The premise of that narrative is that
Iran wanted secret nuclear facilities in order to be able to make a nuclear
weapon without being detected by the international community.
But evidence indicates that the real story is exactly the opposite: far from
wanting to hide the existence of nuclear facilities from the
outside world, Iran has wanted Western intelligence to conclude that it was
putting some of its key nuclear facilities deep underground for more than three
years.
The reason for that surprising conclusion is simple: Iran's primary problem in
regard to its nuclear program has been how to deter a US or Israeli attack on
its nuclear sites. To do that, Iranian officials believed they needed to
convince US and Israeli military planners they wouldn't be able to destroy some
of Iran's nuclear sites and couldn't identify others.
The key to unraveling the confusion surrounding the Qom facility and the system
of tunnel complexes is the fact that Iran knew the site at Qom was being
closely watched by US and other intelligence agencies both through satellite
photographs and spy networks on the ground well before construction of the
facility began.
The National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), the political arm of the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) anti-regime terrorist organization, held a press
conference on December 20, 2005, in which it charged that four underground
tunnel complexes were connected with Iran's nuclear program, including one near
Qom.
NCRI had created very strong international pressure on Iran's nuclear program
by revealing the existence of the Natanz enrichment facility in an August 2002
press conference. A number of its charges had been referred to the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for investigation.
It is now clear that there was nothing in the tunnel complex at Qom related to
the nuclear program when the NCRI made that charge.
Given the close ties between the MEK and both the US and Israel, however,
Iran's decision-makers had to be well aware that foreign intelligence agencies
would focus their surveillance in Iran on the tunnel complexes that the MEK had
identified.
United States and European officials have confirmed that systematic
surveillance of the site by satellite photography began in 2006.
What happened next is a particularly important clue to Iran's strategy.
According to multiple sources, an anti-aircraft battery was moved to the base
of the mountain into which the tunnel complex had been dug. That was a clear
indication that Iranian officials not only knew the site was under surveillance
but wanted to draw attention to it.
That move prompted serious debate within the intelligence community. A French
security consultant, Roland Jacquard, who had contacts in the intelligence
community, recalled to Time magazine last October that some analysts suggested
that it could be a "decoy", aimed at fixing intelligence attention on that
site, while the real nuclear facilities were being built elsewhere.
If Iran had believed the site was not under surveillance, there would have been
no reason to move an anti-aircraft battery to it.
That anti-aircraft battery was evidently intended to ensure that foreign
intelligence would be watching as construction of a new facility continued at
Qom. Satellite imagery that has been obtained by the Institute for Science and
International Security in Washington DC shows that construction of the facility
began sometime between mid-2006 and mid-2007, according to satellite imagery
interpretation specialist Paul Brannan of the ISIS.
Intelligence analysts could not be certain of the site's precise purpose until
a later stage of construction. A senior US intelligence official revealed in
the September 25 briefing that the analysts were not confident that it was
indeed an enrichment facility until sometime in spring 2009.
Meanwhile, the Iranians were providing foreign intelligence agencies with clear
evidence it would use a "passive defense strategy" to protect its nuclear
facilities. In a statement on Iranian television on September 24, 2007, the
chairman of the Passive Defense Organization, Gholam Reza Jalali, said the
strategy would "conceal and protect the country's important and sensitive
facilities, [which] would minimize their vulnerability ..."
Jalali revealed to Mehr news agency on August 24, 2007, that a nuclear
installation monitored by the IAEA was part of the plan. As the New York Times
reported on Tuesday, tunnels have been built into mountains near the Isfahan
uranium conversion complex.
News media have consistently reported that Iran informed the IAEA about the Qom
facility in a letter dated September 21 only because the site had been
discovered by Western intelligence.
But a set of questions and answers issued by the Barack Obama administration
the same day as the press briefing admitted "we do not know" in answer to the
question, "Why did the Iranians decide to reveal this facility at this time?"
In fact, Iran's September 21 letter to the IAEA, an excerpt of which was
published in the November 16 IAEA report, appears to have been part of the
strategy to confuse US and Israeli war planners. It stated that the
construction of a second enrichment facility had been "based on [its] sovereign
right of safeguarding ... sensitive nuclear facilities through various means
such as utilization of passive defense systems ..."
As Time magazine's John Barry noted in an October 2 story, the letter was read
by intelligence analysts as suggesting that among the more than a dozen tunnel
sites being closely monitored were more undisclosed nuclear sites.
A few days later, the Iranian daily Kayhan, which is very close to President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad, said the announcement of the site had helped to foil plans
for a military strike by the West because "the multiplicity of facilities is a
very effective defensive action".
That statement hinted that Iran was able to complicate the task of US and
Israeli military planners by introducing uncertainty about where additional
nuclear facilities might be hidden.
The New York Times article on Iran's tunnel complex indicates that Iran's
strategy has succeeded in influencing debates in Israel and the United States
over the feasibility of a devastating blow to the Iranian nuclear program. The
Times called the tunneling system "a cloak of invisibility" that is
"complicating the West's military and geopolitical calculus".
It said some analysts considered Iran's "passive defense" strategy "a crucial
factor" in the Obama administration's insistence on a non-military solution.
One indication of that the Iranian strategy has had an impact on Israeli
calculations is that Major General Aharon Ze'evi Farkash, the head of
intelligence for the Israeli Defense Force from 2002 to 2006, supported an
attack on Iran by the US Air Force - a standard Israeli position - at a meeting
at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy last October.
But Farkash warned that Western intelligence still might not know about all of
Iran's nuclear sites. In other statements, Farkash has opposed an Israeli
strike.
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.
(Inter Press Service)
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