by Jay Solomon
“Many secretive nuclear activities are at work [in Iran], without any knowledge” of it in the United States or United Nations, Jafarzadeh announced to the world as the cameras rolled. “The very fact that Iran can be building nuclear sites without…monitoring is terrifying.”
The dissident continued for forty minutes, detailing how Iran’s secret nuclear program was under the direct guidance of Supreme Leader Khamenei. Jafarzadeh revealed that Russian nuclear experts from the former Soviet Union were based at some of the Iranian sites. And the Iranian military was pursuing a broader program of weapons of mass destruction, which included chemical and biological agents.
Jafarzadeh culminated his presentation with an appeal to the Bush administration and European governments. End any diplomatic outreach to Iran’s rulers, he said, and accelerate economic sanctions on Tehran. In turn, the regime’s opponents and the Iranian “resistance” would overthrow the mullahs. “If Western countries refrain from a policy of appeasement, the Iranian people will deal with this regime,” Jafarzadeh said.
Jafarzadeh, in his early forties at the time, was the U.S. representative of an Iranian opposition group called the Mujahedin e-Khalq, or People’s Holy Warriors, which was formally listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. Many in Washington and Europe were wary of Jafarzadeh and the MeK, a onetime Marxist-Islamist student movement that had joined with the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1970s to depose the shah. During the political turmoil of that time, MeK operatives killed American diplomats and military contractors who were seen as supportive of the monarchy, eventually landing the MeK on the U.S. terrorism blacklist.
Many Persian Americans didn’t understand how the MeK could operate so openly in Washington and how Jafarzadeh could be holding press conferences live on C-SPAN so close to the Oval Office. But the MeK had morphed in the decades after the revolution into the most committed and militant opponent of the Islamic Republic of Iran worldwide. The leftist organization and Iran’s ruling clerics competed for power and clashed in the post-shah era, culminating in the mass arrests and executions of the MeK’s leaders and followers. As a result, the MeK had made some powerful friends in the United States and Israel who shared their hatred of the Iranian regime. MeK members, often using the names of front organizations, were regular visitors on Capitol Hill and attended conferences run by pro-Israel groups in Washington. They passed on their intelligence troves to analysts at the Pentagon and the CIA.
Jafarzadeh, however, didn’t expose the MeK’s secret collaborator in bringing to light Iran’s nuclear work that afternoon. As the world prepared for the invasion of Iraq, Israel’s security and intelligence services grew concerned that Iran, which was seen as the far bigger threat, would get lost in the shuffle. They not so subtly joked that the Bush administration had misinterpreted their comments and was getting ready to attack the wrong Middle East country that started with the letter I.
Seeking to draw attention to Iran’s nuclear advances, Israeli intelligence looked for a conduit to make their information public in the summer of 2002, according to U.S. and European officials who worked on Iran. The Mossad initially sought to convey its information on Natanz and Arak via Reza Pahlavi, the Virginia-based son of the last Iranian monarch. But the “Baby Shah,” as he was widely called, bristled at playing this role. He was worried that he’d be branded by Tehran as a tool of the “Zionist entity.” The Pahlavi dynasty had already been criticized by Iran’s mullahs for allying themselves with the Israelis in the 1960s and 1970s against the Palestinians and other Muslim causes. The MeK, however, proved a willing collaborator. U.S. and European officials said Jafarzadeh’s organization emerged in the 2000s as a close ally of the Israelis, driven by their shared hatred of Tehran’s theocratic leadership.
Despite Jafarzadeh’s exhortations, the press conference ended in a whimper. Many of the journalists appeared uninterested and headed for lunch. A few went up to Jafarzadeh and quizzed him about his findings but in the end didn’t file reports.
“They seemed to have trouble digesting this thing. They didn’t know what to think,” Jafarzadeh told me ten years later over tea in a downtown Washington conference room. The Iranian American had become more polished in the ensuing decade, writing books on Iran’s terrorism threat and appearing regularly as a Fox News television analyst. He also led a high-cost, and eventually effective, campaign to get his organization removed from the U.S. terrorism list. A long list of influential Republicans and Democrats were recruited—and paid—to speak for the MeK. They included former presidential candidate and Vermont governor Howard Dean and the Bush administration’s first homeland security czar, Tom Ridge. “Our announcement on Natanz and Arak changed the political landscape toward Iran,” he went on, a small smile forming under his pencil-thin mustache.
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THE MEK’S DISCLOSURE, while dismissed or misunderstood by much of the press, rocked the international diplomatic community and the Bush administration, even as they were focused on the Iraq War. The United States was building its case for Saddam’s overthrow largely based on the threat allegedly posed by Iraq’s nuclear program. But Iran was suddenly exposed as having nuclear facilities far more advanced than anything Iraq was believed to possess. Tehran also had far more extensive ties to terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, than Baghdad did. This meant a huge risk of nuclear proliferation if Iran decided to share its capabilities with its proxies.
One of the sites disclosed by Jafarzadeh, located in the central Iranian city of Natanz, was an enrichment facility that could allow Iran to transform crushed uranium ore, widely known as yellowcake, into a gas that through additional refinement could form the grapefruit-sized metal sphere at the heart of a nuclear warhead. The Iranians had built two large halls to house the equipment to produce this nuclear fuel, the MeK revealed, under the guise of conducting experiments in desert cultivation. Already a thousand Iranian government workers were at the site. The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran was overseeing the project, and top-level politicians were regularly flying in from Tehran to monitor developments.
A separate covert site in the city of Arak hosted a plant that was immediately suspected of being intended to produce the heavy water used in a nuclear reactor. The spent fuel from this type of reactor can be mined for the plutonium that could provide the heart of a different type of nuclear bomb. American nuclear experts called a heavy water reactor a “bomb-making factory.” The heavy water plant had been under construction for nearly six years and was already 90 percent complete, the MeK concluded. It had been built near the bank of a local river in order to provide the reactor with adequate water to cool it. Iran was moving toward having the complete nuclear fuel cycle.
Indeed, Tehran was moving to develop two paths to a nuclear bomb, the evidence suggested—one based on enriched uranium and the other on plutonium. This strategy was similar to the one pursued by the Americans involved in the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. The United States hadn’t been sure which was easier or quickest, so it went down both paths.
Within days of Jafarzadeh’s announcement, inspectors from the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, wrote Iran’s Foreign Ministry and demanded access to the Natanz and Arak facilities. A private Washington think tank, meanwhile, acquired satellite photos that pinpointed these nuclear sites and identified Natanz as a gas centrifuge plant. After some initial stonewalling, Tehran consented to the IAEA’s inspectors’ visit. In a dramatic speech, President Mohammad Khatami went on television in January 2003 and admitted Iran was building the sites highlighted by Tehran’s enemy, the MeK, but stressed they were strictly for peaceful purposes.
Instead of assuaging U.S. concerns, Tehran’s confirmation of the sites set off a scramble inside Western intelligence services to learn just how far the country might already have gone in its pursuit of a nuclear bomb. The facilities at Arak and Natanz, rather than representing
the nascent beginnings of a weapons program, could be part of a much more elaborate infrastructure already in place, they feared. U.S. intelligence services already knew that Tehran had purchased equipment from the rogue Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who was caught red-handed in 2003 selling atomic weapons designs to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and centrifuge components to North Korea. Did Iran have access to the foreign-made designs as well? How many other sites were hidden in the vast expanses of the Iranian deserts?
The United States, the Europeans, and the Israelis would use everything in their arsenal over the next decade to try to stop Iran’s advances on the nuclear front, including spying, computer attacks, and assassinations. As this campaign advanced, the United States and its allies increasingly focused on a small group of Iranian scientists and military officers believed to be overseeing Iran’s own version of the Manhattan Project.
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IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, Iran’s Ministry of Defense constructed a cluster of offices in a secluded park near the hills of northern Tehran to house a top-secret program, called the Physics Research Center. The center’s work was kept totally separate from the country’s main nuclear bureaucracy, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, which was a public body and had relations with the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, and other international scientific bodies, going back to the shah’s rule. Indeed, the United States provided nuclear materials, including enriched uranium and a five-megawatt research reactor, to the shah’s government in the 1960s as part of the Atoms for Peace program launched by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The United States eventually sought to reclaim the enriched uranium after Iran’s Islamic revolution in a blunt lesson of the law of unintended consequences.
The Physics Research Center was initially headed by a Sharif University professor named Seyed Abbas Shahmoradi, a well-known Iranian academic who specialized in nuclear physics. But his new office had no formal listing in Iran’s government registries. He was joined at the center two years later by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a physicist and a senior officer in the Revolutionary Guard who also occasionally taught engineering at Imam Hossein University, which is directly overseen by the IRGC. Born in 1961, Fakhrizadeh joined the military in his twenties and was immediately dispatched to the front to fight the Iraqis.
The men had had little previous contact, engaged in careers at two very distinct Iranian institutions, Sharif University and the Revolutionary Guard. But their shared expertise in nuclear physics made them standouts in postrevolutionary Iran, and together they would preside over a massive expansion of the Physics Research Center at the request of the Iranian military and the IRGC.
Shortly after it was established, the Physics Research Center began sending out a stream of telexed orders to engineering and equipment companies in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The content of the center’s requests hinted at its interest in the technologies required for nuclear weapons, as among the orders placed were ones for magnets that could form parts for centrifuges and high-speed cameras used to map fissile detonations. Western analysts cautioned that this equipment could have dual uses—that is, it could theoretically be used for civilian purposes, such as in medicine or the mining industry, as well as for military projects. The center also requested from European universities and scientific institutes research papers and books describing the physics normally associated with the triggering of a nuclear detonation. Those were definitely not dual-use items. But at the time, there was little Western scrutiny of Iran’s activities and no real knowledge of the Physics Research Center. Tensions over Israel were still relatively low. And the world had yet to expose the underground nuclear black market run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan, which sent dangerous technologies to countries ranging from North Korea to Libya. The exposure of his network would reveal just how easily sensitive technologies were being acquired by rogue states.
Furthermore, Shahmoradi and Fakhrizadeh took great care to mask the center’s role in these procurements. Many of the orders were formally made by Sharif University, either through Shahmoradi’s office or through other academics. This gave the appearance that the university’s physics department was seeking equipment and research papers as part of normal academic work. A closer look at the paperwork, however, would have revealed that many of the orders were ultimately delivered to the center’s offices, not Sharif University.
For example, in a telex sent on January 1, 1991, Sharif University’s purchasing department requested catalogues and samples of magnets that could be used in developing gas centrifuges from a European engineering firm called Magnet Applications Ltd. But the return address was the post office box and fax number in Tehran of the Physics Research Center, not Sharif University. The magnets matched the specific dimensions of those used in centrifuges produced by European firms. A centrifuge enriches uranium by circulating the chemical element in a gaseous form in a cylinder that rapidly rotates like a top on a pin. The magnets help keep the cylinders stable and upright as the rotation separates a heavier isotope of uranium, called U-238, from a lighter and more fissile one, U-235. The greater the concentration of U-235, the more powerful the fissile reaction that could be generated by detonating an atomic bomb.
The telexes also show that a “Department 70” linked to the Physics Research Center spent tens of thousands of dollars in the early 1990s purchasing technical reports from a British company, also using Sharif University as a cover. The reports covered all the scientific elements related to producing nuclear fuel, including centrifuge and laser enrichment, uranium conversion, and heavy water development.
Iranian scientists who later rose to become prominent members of the Islamic Republic’s government assisted the Physics Research Center by making requests on its behalf. One of these was Ali Akbar Salehi. In the 1970s he had been one of the dozens of physicists the shah sent to the United States as part of his nuclear program, and he earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. It was in his role as a dean at Sharif University that Salehi made the requests linked to the Physics Research Center. Later he served as Tehran’s ambassador to the IAEA during the late 1990s and became the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. He was Iran’s foreign minister from 2010 to 2013 and was one of the chief negotiators involved in the nuclear agreement talks with the Obama administration. Salehi has denied any role in a weapons program but has served as one of Tehran’s most public and effective defenders of its nuclear program. “We have strongly marked our opposition to weapons of mass destruction on many occasions,” the scientist wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Post in 2012. “Almost seven years ago, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a binding commitment. He issued a religious edict—a fatwa—forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons.”
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REPLACING SHAHMORADI IN THE EARLY 1990s as the head of the Physics Research Center, Fakhrizadeh built on the fruits of this initial research and acquisitions and grew its staff during the 1990s to include more than six hundred people in twelve divisions. Among them were offices focused on uranium enrichment, laser enrichment, and the science needed to convert uranium gas into the metallic spheres used in a nuclear warhead. There were also departments focused on the mining of uranium and its conversion into the powder-like form called yellowcake. Fakhrizadeh repeatedly changed the name of his organization in a bid to throw Western intelligence agencies and the IAEA off the scent. First it merged into an office inside the Defense Ministry called the AMAD Plan in 2003. This later turned into an organization called FEDAT, or the Field of Expansion and Deployment of Advanced Technologies.
Fakhrizadeh and his team placed particular focus on developing a component called a neutron initiator, which has no civilian application. The device floods neutrons into the core of an atomic weapon after the detonation of the high explosives, facilitating the chain reaction of an atomic bomb. Fakhrizadeh cast about Tehran’s universities seeking greater support to develop a
nd build this device. In one memo written in the 1990s and later acquired by Western intelligence agencies, the physicist called for cooperation between his office and scientists at Shahid Beheshti University, another government school. He made a desirable offer to the scientists and academics: permanent employment in an unstable Iranian job market. “Our [nuclear] capacities are adequate at the moment,” Fakhrizadeh wrote, “but of course they are not perfect.” The understated memo hinted at the clandestine life the scientists at the center would be forced to lead in order to ensure their safety, revealing Iran’s obsessive focus on infiltration by U.S., Israeli, and Arab saboteurs and assassins since the 1979 revolution.
A breakthrough for Fakhrizadeh’s program came in 1995 when Iranian officials made contact with a Russian nuclear weapons scientist who had worked during the 1970s and 1980s at Chelyabinsk-70, a Soviet nuclear research site in the Ural Mountains. Like many Soviet scientists, Vyacheslav Danilenko needed to find commercial work outside the government as the communist state imploded. While at Chelyabinsk-70, Danilenko had specialized in creating small, highly precise detonators that sent powerful shock waves through the plutonium or enriched uranium that lies at the core of a nuclear weapon. These types of detonators helped the Soviets miniaturize nuclear weapons, allowing them to fit inside missiles or conventional bombs. Searching for new opportunities, Danilenko reached out to the Iranian embassy seeking joint ventures. Shahmoradi and the Physics Research Center eagerly replied.