Changes at Parchin suggest Iranian
ploy By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) and Western governments acted
last week to escalate their accusations that Iran
had "sanitized" a site at its Parchin military
complex to hide evidence of nuclear weapons work,
showing satellite images of physical changes at
the site to IAEA member delegations.
The
nature of the changes depicted in the images and
the circumstances surrounding them suggest,
however, that Iran made them to gain leverage in
its negotiations with the IAEA rather than to hide
past nuclear experiments.
The satellite
images displayed to IAEA member delegations by
Deputy Director General Herman Nackaerts, head of
the agency's Safeguards Department, showed a
series of changes that have been the subject of
leaks to the news media: a stream of water
coming out of a building
at a site at Parchin, the demolition of two small
buildings nearby the larger building said by the
IAEA to have housed a bomb containment chamber,
and earth moved from locations north and south of
the site to be dumped further north.
After
seeing the pictures, US permanent representative
to the IAEA Robert Wood declared, "It was clear
from some of the images that were presented to us
that further sanitization efforts are ongoing at
the site."
But the activities shown in
those satellite images show activities appear to
be aimed at prompting the IAEA, the United States
and Israel to give greater urgency and importance
to a request for an IAEA inspection visit to
Parchin in the context of negotiations between
Iran and the IAEA.
The latest round in
those negotiations, on a framework for Iran's
cooperation with the IAEA in clearing up
allegations of Iranian covert nuclear weapons
work, failed to reach agreement on Friday.
Greg Thielmann, former director of
Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs
Office of the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research, said in an interview
with Inter Press Service (IPS) that he didn't know
whether the changes shown in satellite images were
part of a conscious Iranian negotiating strategy.
But Thielmann, now a senior fellow at the
Arms Control Association, said the effect of the
changes is to "increase the interest of the IAEA
in an inspection at Parchin as soon as possible
and to give Iran more leverage in the
negotiations".
Nuclear scientist Dr Behrad
Nakhai, who has worked at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory and has closely followed the Iranian
nuclear program, suggested that Iran's overt moves
on the ground in Parchin were a way of ensuring
that "the IAEA will be enticed to give more value
to an inspection of Parchin".
Muhammad
Sahimi, who tracks news coverage and comments on
Iran's nuclear program for the PBS Frontline
website "Tehran Bureau", agrees that Iranians have
made physical changes at Parchin "so that when
they allow the IAEA in, it will be at a higher
price".
Access to Parchin has been
recognized implicitly by both sides as Iran's
primary leverage in those negotiations. The IAEA
has insisted in the past that a Parchin visit must
come before reaching the broader agreement on
Iran's cooperation, while Iran has refused to
permit a visit to the site until after the
agreement is completed.
The primary issue
in the wider negotiations has been whether the
IAEA inquiry would end if and when Iran answered
all the questions that have been raised by the
IAEA or whether the agency could go back to issues
as often and whenever it wishes.
The
charge that Iran is "sanitizing" the site assumes
that Iran believes that the activities depicted
would actually eliminate traces of radioactivity
left by past testing at the site. The IAEA's
November 2011 report said a bomb containment
chamber at the site in Parchin was used for
"hydrodynamic tests", which utilize natural or
depleted uranium as a substitute for fissile
materials.
David Albright, director of the
Institute for Science and International Security
(ISIS), suggested in a May 11 commentary on the
organization's website that if Iran were to grind
down the surfaces inside the building, collect the
dust, wash, repair and repaint the building, and
remove dirt around the building, it "could be
effective in defeating environmental sampling".
But nuclear experts have contradicted that
statement.
Pierre Goldschmidt, IAEA deputy
director general for safeguards from 1999 to 2005,
responding to an e-mail query from IPS, said, "Of
course there would be no way to remove the traces
of a nuclear test."
Robert Kelley, who has
also managed the US Department of Energy's Remote
Sensing Laboratory, which specializes in high-tech
detection of nuclear activities, and was twice
head of the IAEA's Iraq inspection group, has
pointed out that Syria was sent to the UN Security
Council over a site that had been bulldozed a year
earlier, because of the discovery of tiny
microscopic particles of radioactive material
found at the site.
Nuclear scientist Nakhi
told IPS, "It's virtually impossible to clean up
radiation from a nuclear test completely."
Referring to the charges of "sanitization"
of evidence of nuclear device testing at the
Parchin site, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Iran's lead
nuclear negotiator with the European states in
2005, told IPS, "Iranians know very well they
couldn't eliminate traces of such activities even
after 10 years."
Mousavian, now a visiting
scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson
School, added, "I personally cannot imagine there
were such activities [at Parchin]."
Nakhai
told IPS in an interview that Iranian officials
are also acutely aware of the fact that everything
they are doing at the site is being tracked by
Western intelligence agencies through spy
satellites. The physical changes that have been
carried out at Parchin, he suggests, have been
deliberately staged for IAEA and Western
governments.
"The only thing missing is
somebody waving to the satellite," Nakhai said.
Former nuclear negotiator Mousavian would
not comment directly on whether Iran is making
changes at Parchin to increase the negotiating
value of permitting an IAEA inspection. But he
told IPS that, in the end, "Iran will be able to
prove to international opinion that this
accusation is false."
The satellite images
shown to the IAEA member states were published on
May 8 and May 30 by ISIS. The earlier picture,
dated April 9, showed the stream of water
emanating from the building. The later images,
dated May 25, showed the demolished buildings and
evidence of earth having been moved.
The
changes at the site shown on the satellite images
appear to have one thing in common: they all lead
the IAEA directly to places on or near the site
where environmental sampling can be done easily by
an IAEA team.
The water shown in the April
9 image appears to collect in a ditch a short
distance away from the building. Former IAEA
senior inspector Kelley observed in a May 23
article on the website of the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute that the
IAEA team would have an "enhanced opportunity" to
find uranium particles if they were present.
The May 25 image appears to show soil that
was moved from two areas roughly 200-300 feet
(61-91 meters) north of the building and 33-70
meters south of it. But the soil appears to have
been carried only a short distance further north
of the former area where it is shown to have been
dumped, offering another inviting target for
environmental sampling.
The fragments of
the two small buildings demolished at the site
appear in the May 25 image to have been left
intact on the ground, offering yet another easy
objective for a visit.
Meanwhile, the
building in which the IAEA reported last November
that a bomb containment chamber had been used for
hydrodynamic testing and the soil south and east
of it remain undisturbed.
The claim that
such a chamber was installed at a site in Parchin
in 2000 to carry out hydrodynamic testing appears
to depend entirely on unspecified information from
unidentified countries. The claim has been
challenged by Kelley, making no sense on the basis
of technical inconsistencies.
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.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
