The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  One country that kept coming up in the raw intelligence and the briefings about likely candidates to pursue an atomic bomb was Pakistan. In fact, the consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies was that the Pakistanis had already launched a campaign to go nuclear. It didn’t really require much intelligence work. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had proclaimed long ago that his country needed a nuclear weapon, and India’s test had underscored the threat next door. Even before the military installed him as president, Bhutto had warned that Pakistan would make any sacrifice to match its rival. “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own,” he had written. “We have no alternative.”

  Threats existed elsewhere, too. The French were not only trying to sell a reprocessing plant to Pakistan but negotiating to provide the same technology to South Korea. The Germans were trying to sell an entire nuclear fuel cycle to Brazil. South Africa and Iraq were also suspected of having designs on nuclear weapons. American intelligence had already concluded that Israel had used technology supplied by France in the mid-1950s to develop a nuclear arsenal. President Kennedy’s earlier prediction of fifteen to twenty nuclear nations seemed to be coming true.

  IN 1957, four years after he was restored to the throne in an American-backed coup that ousted a democratically elected government, the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, signed a nuclear-cooperation agreement with the Eisenhower administration. In the years that followed, thousands of Iranian students and scientists were trained in nuclear physics at top universities in the United States and Europe. In 1960, as part of Atoms for Peace, the Americans agreed to provide Iran with a five-megawatt research reactor. The reactor went on line in 1967, and three years later Iran ratified the new Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, opening the door to a full-fledged civilian nuclear industry. The Iranians opened negotiations with the Americans, French, and Germans to spend billions of dollars on civilian reactors to generate electricity. Concerns were raised in mid-1974 by newspaper articles in the United States and Europe suggesting that the shah’s real goal was a nuclear arsenal. The Iranian embassy in Paris issued a statement denying any weapons aspirations, and the shah said that “not only Iran, but also other nations in the region should refrain from planning to gain atomic arsenals,” but the suspicions remained.

  Since the 1950s, the United States had depended on Iran and the shah to watch over its interests in the Persian Gulf. The relationship had been cemented in May 1972 when President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger stopped off to visit the shah in Tehran after a trip to Moscow. Nixon agreed to increase the number of American military advisers in Iran and to sell the shah billions of dollars’ worth of advanced weaponry, ranging from F-16 fighter jets and fourteen thousand missiles to four destroyers and three submarines. With his foreign policy under pressure from the debacle in Vietnam, Nixon ended his meeting with the shah by pleading, “Protect me.”

  But no one could protect the president. On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate affair, succeeded by Gerald Ford, a former congressman from Michigan who had been appointed vice president less than a year earlier, following the resignation of Spiro Agnew in a bribery scandal. Ford was inexperienced when it came to foreign policy, so he retained Kissinger as both secretary of state and the White House national-security adviser, the two positions he had held under Nixon. Much of the rest of the hierarchy from the Nixon administration was tainted by Watergate, so Ford had to reach out to form his own leadership team. As chief of staff, he picked Donald Rumsfeld, who had served in Congress with Ford and was currently ambassador to NATO in Brussels, far enough removed from Washington to be clear of the controversy. Rumsfeld chose as his deputy a thirty-three-year-old former aide named Dick Cheney.

  Cheney had grown up in Wyoming and received a scholarship to Yale University after his girlfriend, Lynne Vincent, intervened on his behalf with a powerful Yale donor. He spent three semesters in New Haven, mostly playing cards and hanging out with the football team, before he was asked to leave. Returning home, he married Vincent in 1964 and graduated from the University of Wyoming a year later. After starting work on a doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin in 1968, he had gone to Washington on a fellowship and met Rumsfeld, at the time a powerful congressman from Illinois. As White House deputy chief of staff, Cheney became known for his attention to detail. In one famous incident, he questioned the use in the White House residence of “little dishes of salt with funny little spoons” instead of “regular salt shakers.”

  Cheney’s chief attribute appeared to be his loyalty to Rumsfeld, a trait that earned him the Secret Service code name “Backseat.” With Cheney at his side, Rumsfeld quickly established control over the White House staff and domestic policy, pushing aside staff members who had been brought in from Ford’s congressional office or were leftovers from his days as vice president. By early 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney were working to undermine Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, the former New York governor whom they considered too liberal, and Kissinger, whose policy on détente and arms control with the Soviet Union was anathema to the two conservatives.

  At the time, Kissinger held unusual sway over American foreign policy, controlling both the State Department and the National Security Council at the White House. He was trying to strengthen ties with the shah by selling billions of dollars’ worth of the most advanced American nuclear technology to Iran. In April 1975, Kissinger circulated a memo outlining the administration’s plan to sell Iran six to eight reactors and grant the shah the unprecedented opportunity to purchase an American-built reprocessing plant to extract plutonium from the spent fuel.

  Iran’s oil-based economy was booming, rolling up an amazing 42 percent growth rate after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries quadrupled the price of oil. Iran was pumping six million barrels of oil per day, but the shah preferred to sell it abroad rather than consume it at home, arguing that Iran needed twenty or more reactors to generate electricity for domestic needs and thus maintain its reserves. A strategy paper prepared by the Ford administration in 1976 supported Iran’s determination to build nuclear plants, saying that Tehran needed to “prepare against the time—about 15 years in the future—when Iranian oil production is expected to decline sharply.” Among the companies eager to get a share of the billions the shah planned to spend were the giants of the American civilian nuclear industry, Westinghouse and General Electric. The United States dominated sales of nuclear technology to the world, accounting for 70 percent of the international market, but in Iran they were competing against West German and French companies.

  Competition with the Europeans was fierce, so the Ford administration sweetened the deal by reversing U.S. policy on the export of reprocessing technology. In previous transactions, Washington had refused to approve exports of the technology to reprocess spent fuel into plutonium. A nuclear power plant capable of generating electricity to serve a city of one million people generates enough spent fuel per year to produce five hundred pounds of plutonium, which could be used to destroy several cities of the same size. But the spent fuel cannot be turned into plutonium for weapons without a reprocessing plant. Yet as it pushed the sale of this technology to Iran, Washington was citing proliferation fears in objecting to plans by France to sell reprocessing technology to Pakistan, an apparent double standard that angered the French.

  Kissinger said later that the administration was not concerned that Iran might build nuclear weapons because it was a friend. “I don’t think the issue of proliferation came up,” he recalled. “They were an allied country and this was a commercial transaction. We didn’t address the question of them one day moving toward nuclear weapons.” Other members of the administration, however, had different recollections. Charles Naas, the deputy U.S. ambassador in Iran at the time, later said that nuclear experts expressed concerns about the proliferation impact of the deal, but he said it was “attractive in terms of comme
rce, and the relationship as a whole was very important.”

  Tony Benn, Britain’s energy secretary, visited the shah in January 1976 and spent a long time discussing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which envisioned an industry far larger than that of Britain itself. In addition to buying the plutonium-reprocessing technology from the United States, the shah told Benn that he wanted centrifuges for uranium enrichment and that he knew he could get them from the Germans and the French if the British and Americans would not sell them. If the shah succeeded, he would have the ability to build nuclear weapons from plutonium and enriched uranium. Despite those concerns, the Americans were clearly willing to do business and, reflecting on the conversation thirty years later, Benn said: “Most astonishing of all, in the light of the present discussions, is that the problem of Iran developing such a huge nuclear capacity caused no problems for the Americans because, at that time, the shah was seen as a strong ally, and had indeed been put on the throne with American help. There could hardly be a clearer example of double standards than this.”

  While Kissinger was the architect of the nuclear agreement with Iran, Rumsfeld and Cheney eventually usurped much of Kissinger’s authority. In the fall of 1975, the two men persuaded Ford to take away Kissinger’s title as national-security adviser, reducing his influence. Ford also ousted James Schlesinger as defense secretary, replacing him with Rumsfeld. Cheney moved into Rumsfeld’s job as White House chief of staff. George H. W. Bush, who had been head of the U.S. liaison office in Beijing, was brought back to serve as director of the CIA.

  Rumsfeld, a strong believer in American military power, was skeptical about arms-control treaties and other agreements that he feared might weaken U.S. supremacy. As a result, Rumsfeld advocated the sale of nuclear technology to Iran as a way to bolster American influence in the region, a view that aligned him with Kissinger and other administration officials, including Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, a young former congressional aide who was responsible for nonproliferation issues at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the government’s top counterproliferation office. With the support of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, Ford signed a directive authorizing the sale to Iran in January 1976, which marked a dramatic divergence in U.S. nonproliferation policy.

  As an accidental president, Ford went into the 1976 election with little mandate from voters. He had appeased some elements of the Republican party with his pardon of Nixon for Watergate, but the same action had angered Democrats. After beating back a challenge from California governor Ronald Reagan to win the Republican nomination, Ford faced Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter, the populist governor from Georgia. Carter, who had served as a nuclear officer aboard a submarine in the navy, made proliferation an issue in the campaign, which forced Ford onto the defensive over the pending sales to Iran. In October, a month before the election, the president said that he had reviewed U.S. nuclear policy and concluded that avoiding proliferation had to take precedence over economic considerations. He said that he would prohibit the export of reprocessing technology and equipment. More than politics were behind Ford’s change of heart—earlier in 1976, the CIA had obtained new evidence that Iran was buying technology to develop a nuclear weapon.

  It remains an open question whether Ford would have scuttled the deal with Iran, but he never got the chance because he lost to Carter. Although Carter promised to prohibit the sale of reprocessing technology, when he met with the shah at the end of 1977 he surprised his aides by assuring him that he could buy any nuclear technology he wanted from the United States, including reprocessing equipment. So the deal remained alive despite a worsening political situation in Iran, where the shah embarked on a brutal crackdown against militants and religious supporters of a fiery Islamic cleric named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

  On Capitol Hill, Len Weiss was concerned about the prospective sales to Iran and pushed Senator Glenn to persuade the new Democratic administration to abandon the idea. From a national-security viewpoint, Weiss argued, allowing large numbers of nuclear reactors and reprocessing technology into the Middle East was incendiary. “While we couldn’t stop the French or Germans from selling this technology, I didn’t see any reason why the United States should participate,” he explained later.

  Westinghouse, which hoped to sell six billion dollars’ worth of nuclear technology to Iran, had more than one hundred employees in Tehran preparing for what would be a major commercial venture. Both Westinghouse and General Electric used their influence in Washington to push for the sale. In Westinghouse’s case, its chief lobbyist, former U.S. ambassador Dwight Porter, was a close friend of the shah’s, and he worked tirelessly to persuade Congress that selling nuclear equipment to Iran would cement an important geopolitical alliance. Porter knew Glenn’s office was the leading opponent of proliferation on the Hill, so he tried more than once to convince Weiss that the deal was justified. But Weiss refused to relent, maintaining that even an ally should be denied access to such technology.

  ALMOST every country that has pursued nuclear weapons has relied to one degree or another on technology and equipment obtained from other countries. As the original nuclear power, the United States has long maintained a double standard about sharing nuclear technology. After World War II, the Americans helped Britain develop its nuclear arsenal but refused assistance to France, which was regarded as a less reliable ally. But the most dramatic illustration is the evolution of America’s attitude toward a nuclear Israel.

  In 1956, the Israelis struck a secret agreement with France to build a plutonium reactor in a remote corner of the Negev desert, near the village of Dimona. The project was massive, with as many as 1,500 Israeli and French workers building an extensive underground complex that covered fourteen square miles. Not long after work started, American U-2 spy planes spotted the construction, and the Eisenhower administration demanded to know what was happening. Israel initially claimed the site was for a textile factory, yet later described it as a metallurgical-research facility. By 1960, the CIA had identified the Dimona complex as a nuclear reactor and suspected that it was part of a weapons program. The Israelis acknowledged the existence of the reactor but claimed it was solely for civilian purposes.

  Soon after taking office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy, who opposed nuclear weapons in the Middle East, pressured the Israelis to allow an American team to inspect Dimona. A postvisit memo written by the team said that the scientists were “satisfied that nothing was concealed from them and that the reactor is of the scope and peaceful character previously described to the United States.” In fact, critical portions of the complex were hidden from them and six other inspection teams that followed during the 1960s. The weapons work was conducted deep underground in laboratories accessible only through elevator banks that had been disguised.

  By the end of the decade, the CIA had nevertheless concluded that Israel was developing nuclear weapons at Dimona, a determination that led to growing concern that the discovery could prompt an Arab attack on the complex and destabilize the region. In the first months of the Nixon administration in 1969, senior officials argued that Washington had to persuade Israel to halt its weapons work for the sake of stability. Later that year, however, President Nixon struck a deal with Israeli prime minister Golda Meir: As long as Israel did not test a nuclear weapon or otherwise publicize its existence, the United States would not pressure its ally to shelve the program. Since then, Israel’s possession of a nuclear arsenal has remained an open secret, dubbed “nuclear ambiguity” by the Israeli press.

  Israel and Iran both demonstrate the conveniently permissive attitude adopted by the United States toward proliferation. Different rules have applied to different countries. In the case of allies, the United States was willing to turn a blind eye or even to sell billions of dollars’ worth of technology. India and Pakistan, on the other hand, were regarded as unreliable allies, and government policy was to block such sales to them.

  Weiss played a central role in crafting legisla
tion aimed at restricting sales to India and Pakistan. He worked closely with the staffs of Senator Stuart Symington, a Democrat from Missouri, and Senator Jacob Javits, a New York Republican. There was talk about establishing an entirely new export-control regime for nuclear technology that would impose tight restrictions on sales to any country, but the plan was abandoned as too ambitious. Instead, the staffs drew up more specific legislation that focused on plutonium and reprocessing technology because enrichment know-how remained classified. The legislation, known as the Symington amendment, required countries that wanted to buy nuclear technology or receive American military assistance to allow regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and it passed Congress in May 1976 as part of the Foreign Assistance Act, which governed American foreign aid. The legislation assigned the White House the job of determining who was violating the amendment and taking action against them. It was not a popular requirement at the White House because the executive branch instinctively dislikes laws that it feels ties its hands, especially on foreign-policy matters.

  The legislation marked a U-turn in congressional thinking about nuclear proliferation. Since Atoms for Peace in the 1950s, U.S. policy had encouraged free trade in nuclear technology to promote its civilian use. But attitudes had begun to change in response to the Indian nuclear test and worries over Pakistan’s intentions. The Symington amendment was the first effort by Congress to force the White House to take action against proliferators.