The Iran Wars

by Jay Solomon

  So began a six-year relationship that became central to Tehran’s development of nuclear weapons technologies, according to current and former IAEA officials. The Soviet expert made at least three visits to Tehran in this time—visits, he would tell the UN, in which he lectured on the seemingly benign science of creating nanodiamonds. These are synthetic gems created by bombarding graphite with the same sort of precision shock waves used to initiate a nuclear blast. But UN investigators concluded that Danilenko had also instructed the Physics Research Center “on explosion physics” and how to create an implosion device for a nuclear weapon. Danilenko’s public research on detonators exactly matched designs produced by scientists working at the Physics Research Center, the UN noted. In a 1992 paper, Danilenko described a fiber-optic instrument that measures precisely when a shock wave strikes thousands of different points along the surface of a sphere. Iran conducted at least one major test of such an instrument. Danilenko was also an expert in building the infrastructure in which to conduct such test blasts.

  The culmination of Danilenko’s collaboration with Iran and the Physics Research Center took place at a military facility twenty miles southeast of Tehran. The base, known as Parchin, had been built by the late shah’s father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, in the 1930s as the main garrison for troops protecting the Iranian capital. It stretched for miles in the desert. Iran developed and tested missile systems at Parchin throughout the monarchy’s years. But Fakhrizadeh used Parchin for a much more ambitious series of tests based on Danilenko’s expertise.

  In the northeast corner of the Parchin complex, Iranian military personnel stealthily constructed a large metal cylinder sometime in 2000. Inside was a test chamber that could safely mask the effects of tests involving 150 pounds of high explosives. It could also hide from foreign intelligence services the use of fissile materials such as natural or enriched uranium in those tests. The chamber was built by an Iranian company but based on a design created in Ukraine. The Soviets had used nearly identical equipment when conducting nuclear weapons tests at Chelyabinsk-70.

  The test chamber took more than two years to complete. In 2002, a project team from the Physics Research Center arrived at Parchin with the specific mission of testing Fakhrizadeh’s designs for a nuclear implosion device. Included in the mission were nuclear scientists believed by the IAEA to have trained under Fakhrizadeh and who worked with the center, even though the Iranian government denied the claims. One was a war veteran and university lecturer named Fereydoun Abassi-Davani. He was joined at Parchin by a nuclear engineer from Shahid Beheshti University, Majid Shahriari.

  One of the devices tested was a neutron initiator. The device is described by scientists as something like the lighter inside a barbecue grill: just as the lighter kindles the fire in charcoal, neutrons initiate fission in a nuclear warhead. The resulting chain reaction releases huge amounts of energy—a flash of light and deadly heat as well as radiation. In an implosion warhead, explosives compress a spherical core of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, or a mixture of both, to the point that it triggers a fissile reaction. The neutron initiator is a golf-ball-sized sphere embedded in the center of the core and usually made out of a mix of beryllium and polonium. It’s activated by the immense pressure from the converging shock wave, and its production of neutrons starts the nuclear reaction. Mastering the physics behind such an implosion bomb is highly complex and potentially dangerous given the extremely radioactive nature of the materials.

  Abbasi-Davani and Shahriari were experts in analyzing the yield of both conventional and nuclear blasts, and they were tasked with simulating the detonation of an implosion bomb and the ability of a neutron initiator to stimulate a fissile reaction. The test didn’t need actual nuclear explosive materials but could use stand-in materials, such as tungsten, to mimic the shock waves created by a nuclear blast. The team from the Physics Research Center set up neutron detectors and X-ray cameras just outside the test chamber to record the radiation from the explosion.

  This was seen as a major advance in Tehran. But their success made Fakhrizadeh, Abbasi-Davani, Shahriari, and the rest of their team marked men.

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  NOT LONG AFTER JAFARZADEH’S disclosure in Washington in 2002, the United States’ top electronic spying agency, the National Security Agency, made a breakthrough in its surveillance of Iran’s nuclear program. While sweeping up electronics intelligence that year, the American snoopers picked up phone communications between Fakhrizadeh and Iranian military personnel. The intelligence painted a confusing picture of the state of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The scientist is recorded vociferously complaining to colleagues that the Iranian government had significantly cut back funding for his work at the Physics Research Center. He said he would no longer be able to continue with his activities on anywhere near the same scale as before.

  Within months of this intelligence coup, U.S. spy satellites detected bulldozers in Iran razing the offices of Fakhrizadeh’s center in north Tehran. The entire compound was flattened and paved. In its place was constructed a sports facility. Iran seemed to American officials to be slowing, if not giving up, its Manhattan Project.

  Some U.S. officials believed Tehran had frozen Fakhrizadeh’s program because of the MeK’s exposure of the facilities in Natanz and Arak. They argued that Tehran feared that the United States might follow its invasion of Iraq with an attempt to topple the Islamic Republic. In 2003, the U.S. war effort in Baghdad was progressing and not yet facing the nationwide insurgency that would kill hundreds of thousands. Some American officials were openly talking about moving on to Tehran and Damascus after Iraq. Ending Iran’s weaponization work, at least temporarily, would deprive the United States of a primary rationale for starting such a conflict.

  However, there were deep divisions both inside the U.S. intelligence community and in European and Israeli intelligence agencies over whether Fakhrizadeh had really stopped his work and Tehran had really ceased its development of nuclear weapons. IAEA reports documented Fakhrizadeh continuing to establish new organizations to conduct weapons studies after 2003. And some U.S. officials and lawmakers argued that Fakhrizadeh’s hijacked communications were part of an elaborate Iranian ruse to confuse American spies. Tehran had historically proven to be a master of such subterfuge.

  Regardless, Fakhrizadeh’s communications ended up forming the core of a controversial 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Tehran had ceased its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Much of the report remains classified. But the Bush administration’s release of the NIE’s executive summary—done not because they wanted to release the report, since they knew it would undercut their Iran policy, but because they assumed it would leak—created consternation in Western capitals, almost as much as the MeK’s revelations had done in 2002.

  Hawkish members of the U.S. administration and their allies in Israel, France, and the United Kingdom believed the report had torpedoed any possibility of the United States’ launching military strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure during Bush’s final months in office. Some members of the White House even accused the U.S. intelligence agencies of purposely slanting their intelligence to undercut any moves toward military action. Ahmadinejad called the NIE a “divine victory” for Iran.

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  INTELLIGENCE ON IRAN’S NUCLEAR WORK continued to come into Washington and the IAEA’s headquarters in Vienna from a range of countries, not just Israel. Germany emerged as a critical partner for the United States on the Iran nuclear issue. While Germany’s diplomatic and business ties at times could pose a threat to the efforts to contain Tehran, the Germans were also a major source of intelligence. And they scored a real coup when one of their contacts, code-named Dolphin, provided a treasure trove of intelligence in exchange for seeking exile in the West.

  The CIA found more than one thousand pages of documents on the thumb drive Dolphin provided, including Iranian correspondence relating to the conversion of uranium oxide in
to uranium tetrafluoride. This chemical process is crucial to creating the highly enriched uranium used in weapons. The Iranians in the files referred to this step as the “Green Salt Project” and, according to the documents on the memory stick, the program was managed under a department known as Project 5.13. Its goal was to produce a ton of the “green salt” per year.

  The intelligence also indicated that Iran continued to pursue two tracks in developing its enrichment program—one through the military and one through the Atomic Energy Organization. The former was assumed to be related to Fakhrizadeh’s work. And this fueled doubts within the intelligence community about whether Tehran had truly shut down its bomb work.

  In February 2008 the IAEA presented an expansive report to its Board of Governors describing the suspected dealings of Fakhrizadeh’s office. The report relied heavily on the information derived from the German intercept. The Iranians claimed the information had been fabricated by the Mossad.

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  THE NAMES AND LOCATIONS of Fakhrizadeh’s core institution, the Physics Research Center, continued to morph as the focus on Iran’s nuclear work intensified. In 2008, the Europeans publicly accused Iran of moving some of its nuclear weapons work to Malek Ashtar, an Iranian university located in northern Tehran, not far from the center’s original offices. The CIA had begun tracking the school after it began procuring dual-use equipment that could be used in a nuclear weapons program, just as Sharif University had done in the early 1990s. Many of Fakhrizadeh’s collaborators were believed to be either based at the university or associated with it.

  The CIA began secretly communicating with a researcher at Malek Ashtar University named Shahram Amiri. The scientist, who was in his early thirties, wasn’t a high-ranking member of Fakhrizadeh’s organization, and he hadn’t played a direct role in the Parchin tests. But he knew the structure of Fakhrizadeh’s program and the extent of its work. As a result, Amiri became the target of a secretive CIA intelligence operation called “Brain Drain,” which was specifically focused on recruiting Iranian scientists and defense officials (the program had already been successful in helping a senior member of the Revolutionary Guard to defect in 2007).

  After making contact with the CIA, Amiri sent encrypted emails to the Agency, using normal Gmail and Yahoo accounts, and he sometimes spoke with his handlers via Skype. The information he provided challenged the U.S. intelligence community’s earlier 2007 assessment that Tehran had halted its efforts to design a nuclear weapon.

  But by April 2009 Amiri was spooked, and he worried he might be discovered by Iranian intelligence, particularly in the wake of the revelations provided by Dolphin. The CIA maintains the authority to bring as many as a hundred people into the United States each year under a government provision that allows the spy agency to bypass ordinary immigration requirements, and so Amiri arranged with his CIA handlers to take a trip to Saudi Arabia, ostensibly to perform the hajj; from there he would seek asylum in the United States. Leaving his wife and young son in Iran, Amiri traveled through the Saudi holy city of Medina, where his immigration documents to the United States were processed. The CIA paid the Iranian $5 million for his cooperation and established a residence for him in Arizona.

  What transpired afterward emerged as one of the strangest episodes in modern American espionage and underscored the murkiness of the U.S.-Iran spy wars. A year after Amiri’s arrival in the United States, the academic posted a video on YouTube from his new home in Tucson. In the video, an overweight Amiri, wearing a T-shirt and speaking in Persian, says he was kidnapped by the CIA after being injected with a drug while riding in a taxi in Medina.

  Just days later, however, Amiri posted a second video, this time with him wearing a suit, looking more composed, and speaking in English. This one describes how he was in the United States working to further his education and earn his Ph.D. He says he had no ties to Iran’s nuclear program and was free to travel around the United States. “My purpose in today’s conversation is to put an end to all the rumors that have been leveled against me over the past year,” he said. “I am Iranian, and I have not taken any steps against my homeland.”

  U.S. officials working on Amiri’s case said his sharp shift was driven by Iranian threats against the scientist’s family. These officials said Tehran was able to deliver its warnings into the United States through a sophisticated network of assets they maintained in immigrant communities in the country. The Iranians are believed to have exploited Amiri’s growing sense of cultural alienation after being thrust into a suburban American community. Former U.S. officials said they didn’t do a good job of acclimating and protecting Amiri, acknowledging that the separation from his family took a toll.

  Tehran’s threats eventually forced Amiri to take an almost unheard-of step: re-defection. Exasperated by Amiri’s rants on the Internet, the CIA allowed the Iranian to orchestrate his return to Tehran through Iran’s lone diplomatic mission in the United States, an “interests section” that was ostensibly part of the Pakistani embassy in Washington, D.C., though not housed there. On the evening of July 10, 2010, Amiri took a taxi alone to the Iranian mission, north of downtown. He was greeted by Iranian diplomatic personnel and quickly shuffled up to the building’s second floor. From there Amiri went on Iranian media to say that he was now free and that he was still a loyal defender of the revolution. He then said he hadn’t divulged any information and was returning to Iran of his own free will, despite being offered $50 million to stay. “I don’t think that any Iranian in my place would have sold his dignity to another country for a financial award,” Amiri said. He was then whisked off to Washington’s Dulles International Airport for his return trip to Iran.

  Two days later, Amiri arrived to a hero’s welcome in Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. The Iranian officials who greeted him at the airport said he had been working as a double agent all along, providing Tehran with classified information on the workings of the U.S. spy services. “This was an intelligence war between the CIA and us, which was planned and managed by Iran,” an unidentified Iranian official told state media at the airport. Amiri is seen on-screen weeping and hugging his seven-year-old son.

  U.S. officials to this day say Amiri proved to be an invaluable source for the U.S. government, providing detailed information on Fakhrizadeh and his organization’s operations and helping the United States uncover a secret uranium enrichment site in the Iranian holy city of Qom, a facility that the Obama administration believed was specifically designed to produce weapons-grade fuel. The plant was constructed inside a mountain and guarded by anti-aircraft missile batteries. The United States made public its discovery of the site not long before Amiri’s departure for Iran in 2010. Though Amiri received a hero’s welcome at first, some Americans think he may have been executed. The Iranian is believed to have paid for his espionage: Iranian media reports said he was sentenced to ten years in prison.

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  BETWEEN THE INFORMATION EXPOSED by Dolphin and the Amiri episode, the validity of the NIE claiming that Tehran had ceased nuclear weapons development continued to be whittled away. The spy games between the West and Iran, meanwhile, grew even more lethal, as Ahmadinejad accelerated his country’s nuclear program following his reelection in 2009. From just a few centrifuges at the beginning of his tenure, the program grew to include thousands. And Iranian officials indicated they were on the cusp of producing weapons-grade uranium at its two enrichment sites, though denying that it would be used for bombs. Despite their denials, Iranian nuclear scientists quickly became the targets of an expansive assassination campaign that shook Iran’s security establishment to its core.

  On an early March morning in 2010, on the grounds of Tehran’s infamous Evin prison, guards ushered twenty-six-year-old Majid Jamali Fashi to the gallows, where he confessed on Iranian state television to assassinating Tehran University professor Massoud Al-mohammadi three months earlier. The nuclear physicist had been sitting in his sedan when Fashi detonated a rem
ote-controlled bomb attached to the car’s undercarriage; Mohammadi was killed instantly, and Fashi fled into the streets of Tehran in an effort to evade capture. Some Iranian opposition groups claimed the killing was an inside job, authorized by the regime because of Mohammadi’s sympathies for the political opposition. But Western intelligence services said they believed the scientist had ties to Tehran’s weapons program.

  Fashi, in a lengthy account of the assassination publicized in Iranian state media, said the attack had been directly ordered and overseen by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. At the time, Mossad and the Israeli government were pursuing a vigorous campaign to derail Iran’s nuclear program. This included launching, in coordination with the United States, cyber attacks on the Natanz enrichment facility and the Bushehr nuclear reactor. Israel was also trying to slow down Iran’s nuclear work by introducing faulty equipment into the program’s supply chain.

  Fashi was an expert in the martial arts discipline called pankration, which combines wrestling, boxing, and forms of street fighting. As a member of the Iranian national team, he frequently traveled to competitions in neighboring countries, including Azerbaijan. It was in Azerbaijan, Fashi told his interrogators, that he was recruited by Mossad agents out of the Israeli embassy in Baku, the Azeri capital. The Israelis paid him $120,000 to carry out a string of attacks. It was certainly true that Mossad had extensive intelligence assets in the country; Israel had long had close relations with Azerbaijan, a result of the two countries’ mutual fear of Iran, which has historically viewed Azerbaijan as a rogue province that was part of the ancient Persian Empire and so should rightfully be under Tehran’s control.

  But Iranian officials briefed on the case also cited political motivations. They believed he was a member of the MeK, the dissident organization that was cooperating closely with the Mossad. The MeK was the group that had gone public with the intelligence on Natanz and Arak nearly a decade earlier in Washington. (The MeK neither confirmed nor denied its role in the assassinations.) Some Iran analysts say Fashi’s confession may have been coerced, but they acknowledge that the story sounded credible because of Israel’s history of operations against Iran.