The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  Such information would have been invaluable to the IAEA, but the only thing the American ambassador provided to ElBaradei that August was his belief that the exile group’s charges regarding Iran were accurate. Still, ElBaradei was convinced the accusations were serious enough for a full-scale inquiry. He told Heinonen to persuade Tehran to let senior officials, including ElBaradei, visit Natanz and the other locations as soon as possible. The IAEA lacked the authority to demand access to Natanz, but a routine inspection of other Iranian facilities was scheduled for October.

  The next morning, Heinonen called Alireza Esmaeli, an official with the Iranian delegation to the IAEA, to tell him that ElBaradei planned to accompany the October inspection team and wanted to visit Natanz and other suspicious sites. Esmaeli said Heinonen would have to talk to Ambassador Salehi for permission. Unfortunately, he added, the ambassador was on vacation.

  Heinonen had dealt with Iranians enough over the years to understand that every encounter carried the likelihood of extended negotiations, and this was to be no different. His initial contact started a back and forth that was to last for years and went like this: The IAEA would ask for access to a site and then wait days, weeks, and months for a response. While the Iranians stalled, they concealed any suspicious work and concocted cover stories. In this instance, simply getting permission for ElBaradei to go to Iran turned into a game of diplomatic chess, played purely according to the Iranian clock. On September 5, ElBaradei met with Salehi and a delegation of Iranian nuclear officials in Vienna. ElBaradei emphasized that the agency had to evaluate all of the evidence that came its way, regardless of the merits of the organization making the accusations, and he said he wanted to visit the sites. Salehi responded that he lacked the authority to permit access to the locations, but he promised to convey the request to Tehran.

  The October inspection arrived without Iranian approval of ElBaradei’s request, so Heinonen went without him. As usual, the team was limited to Iran’s declared sites, leaving Natanz, Arak, and Kalaye off-limits. Heinonen had visited the research reactors and other declared installations in the past, but now he saw those facilities in a different light. He didn’t see proof of illegal activities, but he picked up subtle signs that something was amiss—more equipment than he expected in some locations, more sections of research centers marked “off-limits.”

  Back in Vienna, Heinonen went back to his old files and documents, accumulated over the years from earlier inspections, to reconstruct Iran’s nuclear program, keeping an eye out for imports of equipment or material that might have contributed to a hidden atomic program. He also reached out for more information from sources outside the IAEA, including contacts at foreign intelligence agencies. His persistence and thoroughness were rewarded with the discovery that Iran had secretly imported uranium hexafluoride from China in the early 1990s, without declaring it to the IAEA. The discovery was significant for two reasons: First, Iran’s failure to declare receipt of nuclear material constituted a breach under its safeguards agreement with the IAEA; second, the concealment was a powerful indication that the Iranians were indeed hiding nuclear activities. Before contacting the Iranians, Heinonen asked Goldschmidt to write an official letter to the Chinese delegation to the IAEA, asking about the transfer. Surprisingly, the Chinese acknowledged that they had sold nearly two tons of uranium hexafluoride and other nuclear chemicals to the Iranians in 1991. The agency didn’t want to confront the Iranians quite yet, so Heinonen filed the letter from China and put a copy in his briefcase for his next trip to Iran.

  IT WAS not until February 20, 2003, six months after the disclosure in Washington, that the Iranian government permitted ElBaradei to visit the country. Even then, the trip was restricted to two days, and Iran insisted that it be described as a visit, not an official inspection. Not wanting to waste time, ElBaradei and his delegation went straight from the Tehran airport to the construction site at Natanz, where they found the work divided into two parts: A warehouselike structure was nearly complete in one area, and nearby earthmoving equipment was digging a vast hole in the ground. The Iranians acknowledged that the structure was for a pilot facility where they planned to begin testing centrifuges; the hole in the ground, they said, would eventually be home to a massive uranium-enrichment plant capable of holding fifty thousand or more centrifuges and producing enriched uranium to fuel a series of reactors around the country to generate electricity. The scale was enormous, and the IAEA officials were stunned that the Iranians had made such dramatic progress without the IAEA suspecting anything. The question remained whether the work violated any of Iran’s obligations under the nonproliferation treaty or under the safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

  Ushering ElBaradei and the rest of the delegation through the pilot plant, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, was visibly proud of the technical accomplishments. Nearly one hundred centrifuges in various states of assembly were lined up in the pilot plant. Lifting a component for one of them, the Iranian official boasted that the machines were built from indigenous designs and components. The work was far enough along, he said, that the first one thousand centrifuges were to be installed by May. Aghazadeh emphasized that no nuclear material had been introduced into the pilot plant, the first step that would trigger Iran’s obligation to report the facility to the IAEA. Despite the alarm bells set off by the secrecy, if Aghazadeh was telling the truth, the work at Natanz was not an obvious violation of Iran’s obligations to the agency.

  Heinonen dropped a few steps behind the larger group to get a closer look at the centrifuges. Impressed by the apparent quality of the machines, he thought the design looked familiar. Heinonen was not a centrifuge expert, but he had seen thousands of them on inspections around the world. He thought to himself, “Either someone is helping these guys or they are miracle workers.”

  Back in Tehran, ElBaradei met with a host of Iranian political and religious leaders, from reformers like President Mohammad Khatami to hard-liners like Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president and military commander who had restarted Iran’s nuclear program in the 1980s. Even the reformers stressed that Iran’s nuclear program was intended only to generate electricity in order to conserve its vast oil and gas reserves, insisting that Iran had the right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. The Iranians continued to claim they had made no effort to enrich uranium at Natanz or any of the other undisclosed sites and had not tested any of their centrifuges with nuclear material, which meant they had not breached their obligation. But why had they carried out the construction at Natanz and research elsewhere in secret? The Iranian answer was that they had been forced to work below the international radar because of sanctions imposed by the United States and other Western countries after the revolution in 1979.

  No one among the IAEA experts believed Iran’s program was totally indigenous. The technology and equipment that had brought them this far were available only from accomplished manufacturers and designers outside the country. The Iranians acknowledged purchasing some material in Europe and elsewhere, but they remained evasive, saying the paperwork had been lost and the people who had been involved had died.

  At one point in the discussions, ElBaradei told Aghazadeh that the agency suspected the Chinese had helped Iran. When the Iranian said he knew nothing of any such transaction, Heinonen played his trump card, pulling out the letter from the Chinese. Merely possessing undeclared nuclear material was a breach of the country’s IAEA agreement, and Aghazadeh was forced to acknowledge the purchase. He claimed none of the material had been used, however, and promised Iran intended to declare the material formally to the IAEA as part of its effort to come clean about its past nuclear activities. The pattern was to become familiar: Iranian officials would deny an accusation until confronted with proof, and then they would try to explain away the lies and evasions, and pledge not to do it again.

  ElBaradei and his team were dubious of new Ira
nian claims. What they saw at Natanz and other places convinced them that Iran was farther along than Iraq had been when the Gulf War ended Saddam Hussein’s dream of joining the nuclear club. It seemed unlikely that Iran could have gone so far without testing centrifuges. When ElBaradei left at the end of his allotted two days, Heinonen and several inspectors stayed behind, determined to get a look inside the other facilities so that they could get a clearer understanding of just what Iran was doing in time to report to the full IAEA board in March.

  ON FEBRUARY 26, five days after ElBaradei’s departure, Goldschmidt and Heinonen met with senior officials from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and requested for the first time that their inspectors be permitted to visit Kalaye Electric. Aghazadeh acknowledged that a workshop at Kalaye had been used to machine components for centrifuges and assemble some machines for the pilot plant at Natanz, but he denied that any testing had been carried out there with fissile material. Arranging a visit on such short notice, he said, was not possible. When Goldschmidt pressed him, Aghazadeh said he would see what he could do.

  Heinonen had to return to Vienna to write the report for the board, but other team members stayed on to continue their sleuthing. On the afternoon of March 12, several inspectors were driven by their Iranian minders to Kalaye Electric. The company was housed in a three-building compound, surrounded by a high fence in a desolate industrial district on the eastern edge of Tehran. One small building contained the offices and a café for workers, but the two larger buildings were apparently where the centrifuge work had taken place. As the inspectors approached the first of the large buildings, one of the Iranian officials said, “I’m sorry. We do not have the keys for these buildings.” The inspectors suspected that the Iranians never intended to let them in, but they were determined not to leave Kalaye empty-handed and asked to return to the smaller building to take photographs and conduct tests—called environmental sampling—for nuclear residue.

  IAEA scientists had developed the sampling technique to detect the presence of nuclear material after the Iraq debacle. The procedure was straightforward. Cotton swabs the size of tennis balls came six to a package; an inspector would swipe them across the surfaces of a room. The cotton could pick up minute particles of nuclear residue, even if the material had been removed months earlier and the room had been cleaned thoroughly. An IAEA official compared the precision of the sampling to finding a single four-leaf clover in a field that was six miles long, nine miles wide, and 150 feet deep. The swabs were then resealed, and each was sent to a separate destination—one to be archived, one given to the country where the testing took place, one to the IAEA lab outside Vienna, and three to independent labs for testing. If particles are detected, it is conclusive proof that nuclear material was present at the location. Each nuclear particle has individual characteristics, much like fingerprints. Additional tests were capable of determining the level of enrichment and whether the particles matched samples on file at the IAEA. In the best of circumstances, the particles identified the origin of the nuclear material.

  Faced with the inspectors, their swabs out and ready to begin work, the Iranians refused to permit the inspectors to conduct any sampling or take photographs, even in the smaller buildings that were unlocked, saying they had no authority to allow such activities. They promised to find the keys and return with permission before the inspectors were scheduled to go back to Vienna three days later, but on March 15 the Iranians said that religious holidays had left them unable to find the keys or get permission for the tests, and the inspectors left without photos or samples.

  Another inspection team arrived in Tehran in May. One of the key members of the team was Trevor Edwards, a British centrifuge specialist. The visit to Natanz went smoothly, and this time samples were collected. There, the Iranians had nothing to hide because no nuclear material had yet been introduced. At Kalaye, the inspectors were permitted for the first time to enter the two large buildings. One of the buildings was old and smelly, and clearly no work had been done in it for years. The second building was another matter. It had undergone a recent top-to-bottom renovation, with bright lights on motion detectors, freshly painted walls, and floors tiled so recently that the grout was still wet. In a room on the second floor, the inspectors found boxes of clocks manufactured by a Japanese company, presumably part of the abandoned cover story that Kalaye was a clock company. Clearly a thorough effort had been made to erase any evidence of what had occurred there. When the inspectors began to pull out their cotton swabs for the environmental tests, they were stopped and told that sampling and photography were still forbidden. The consensus among the inspectors was that the Iranians were hiding something. “This clearly had been extensively renovated,” explained one of the inspectors who had been present at Kalaye. “But if we asked questions about why, they got upset. They told us they had repainted it seven years earlier.”

  By the time the inspection team left Iran, suspicions were running even higher. The refusal to permit a thorough inspection of Kalaye had been repeated at other locations. But what inspectors were permitted to see raised questions, too. When Trevor Edwards visited the pilot plant at Natanz and examined the components there, he recognized that the design had most likely originated at Urenco. Edwards was in a position to know because he had worked on the Urenco project for the British government in the 1970s and 1980s. The question was, How had Iran acquired the plans?

  CHAPTER 26

  SPY GAMES

  THE IAEA INSPECTION DRAMA unfolding in Iran in the summer of 2003 was being watched closely by American policymakers and intelligence agencies. President Bush had labeled Iran part of the “axis of evil” in his State of the Union address in 2002, and the administration had repeatedly denounced Iranian claims that its nuclear intentions were strictly peaceful. Bush himself had warned that a nuclear Iran was unacceptable and that “all options were on the table” to stop Tehran from acquiring atomic weapons. The Pentagon began making secret contingency plans for aircraft and missile attacks on key Iranian nuclear installations, consulting their Israeli counterparts in the process.

  Israeli intelligence was at least as worried as Washington about Iran’s progress toward a functional nuclear weapon and warned the CIA that Iran must not be allowed to master the technology to enrich uranium. “Once they learn to enrich uranium at Natanz, they will be able to take the technology anyplace inside the country, outside our view,” explained an Israeli agent at the time. “The trouble with enrichment is that it can be done inside a small factory or even a mosque, and we’d never be able to find it.” Still, the Israelis and Americans thought they had time before a decision had to be made on whether to take out the plant at Natanz and other nuclear installations, an attack certain to inflame the Middle East and provoke retaliation. There were plenty of targets for Iran. Thousands of American troops remained in Afghanistan, struggling to keep a fragile peace, and more than 150,000 U.S. soldiers were stationed in Iraq following the American invasion in March 2003.

  For their part, Iranian leaders were nervous about being wedged between two pro-American regimes in neighboring countries and, after seeing Saddam ousted, influential factions in Tehran were more determined than ever to protect their country with a nuclear weapon. Beneath the protection of its own nuclear umbrella, Tehran could also take a more interventionist approach to helping its fellow Shiites in Iraq and protecting its own interests in Afghanistan. Iran’s constant threats to destroy Israel would carry far more weight if it were armed with nuclear weapons.

  The American government had good reason to voice anxiety about Iran’s nuclear intentions, but Washington’s credibility was in tatters when it came to warnings about clandestine nuclear-weapons programs because its primary justification for invading Iraq had turned out to be wholly unfounded. Iran could count on countries remembering the certainty with which the United States had made the case that Saddam maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and resumed his quest for a nuclear a
rsenal, and how wrong they had been.

  The most distinct moment in that campaign occurred on February 5, 2003, when Bush sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to present the case for invading Iraq to the UN Security Council. Powell relied on slides and satellite photos to identify numerous locations inside Iraq that he asserted unequivocally were part of Saddam’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. “The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world,” explained Powell, who probably commanded more respect from world leaders than did any other administration figure. American intelligence had ample evidence that Saddam remained determined to build an atomic bomb, he said, adding, “He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from eleven different countries even after the inspections resumed.”

  Like much of the evidence presented by Powell, the tubes had been the subject of debate within the administration. The first shipment of tubes had been intercepted in 2001, and George Tenet later told a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee that CIA scientists had determined that they were intended to be used as rotors for centrifuges in a hidden uranium-enrichment program. Tenet’s opinion was not shared by everyone within the government, however, and experts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory had found that the tubes were not suitable for a nuclear program. Instead, they said the dimensions perfectly matched conventional artillery that Iraq was permitted to manufacture. Opinions that countered the push to justify the invasion of Iraq were ignored, and administration officials had leaked the existence of the tubes to The New York Times, claiming that they were hard evidence that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons.