Gareth Porter

Back to the future? Bolton, Trump and Iranian Regime Change

Now that the Trump administration has derailed the Iran nuclear deal, the old issue of regime change in Iran is back again. National Security Adviser John Bolton is obviously the chief regime-change advocate in the administration, and there is every reason to believe he has begun to push that policy with Donald Trump in his first month in the White House.

Bolton was part of the powerful neoconservative faction of national security officials in the George W Bush administration that had a plan for supporting regime change in Iran, not much different from the one Bolton is reportedly pushing now. But it was a crack-brained scheme that involved the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) exiled terrorist organisation that never had Bush’s support.

Bolton may find history repeating itself, with Trump resisting his plan for regime change, just as Bush did in 2003.

Trump calls for change

Trump has appeared to flirt with the idea of Iranian regime change in the past. During the December protests in Iran, he said on Twitter that it was time for a change, noting: “The great Iranian people have been repressed for many years.”

Trump’s killing of the nuclear deal, however, stopped short of rhetoric signalling the aim of overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Instead, Trump suggested that “Iran’s leaders” are “going to want to make a new and lasting deal, one that benefits all of Iran and the Iranian people”. He added: “When they do, I am ready, willing and able.”

Bolton has been one of the most enthusiastic clients among former US officials who have associated themselves with MEK, which seeks to overthrow the Tehran regime with US backing

A few days after the Trump announcement, an unnamed National Security Council (NSC) official avoided any hint of regime change, telling the neoconservative Washington Free Beacon: “Our stated policy is to change the Iranian regime’s behaviour.” Now, Bolton has issued an even more explicit denial, telling ABC News: “That is not the policy of the administration. The policy of the administration is to make sure Iran never gets close to deliverable nuclear action.”

And on CNN’s State of the Union, he said:

I’ve written and said a lot of things when I was a complete free agent. I certainly stand by what I said at the time, but those were my opinions then. The circumstance I’m in now is I’m the national security adviser to the president. I’m not the national security decision-maker.

It’s not difficult to read between the lines: the implied message is that his views on regime change have not prevailed with Trump.

Advocating to bomb Iran

Bolton has long been one of the most vocal supporters of such a policy, although he is better known as the primary advocate of bombing Iran. He has been one of the most enthusiastic clients among former US officials who have associated themselves with MEK, which seeks to overthrow the Tehran regime with US backing.

Bolton has not only appeared at MEK rallies in Paris, along with other former US officials on the take from the well-endowed paramilitary organisation. In July 2017, he declared that the Trump administration should adopt the goal of regime change in Iran, calling MEK a “viable” alternative to the regime. And his final line, delivered with his voice rising dramatically, noted that “before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran”.

It appears that Bolton was still pushing the idea within the administration as of last week. The Washington Free Beacon reported on 10 May that a three-page paper outlining a regime-change strategy from a small far-right organisation called the Security Studies Group, with which Bolton is said to have close ties, was circulated among NSC officials. The quotes from the paper in the story make it clear that the strategy is based largely on seeking to exploit ethnic and religious conflicts in Iran.

The paper reportedly makes the point that ethnic minorities – such as Kurds, Azeris, Ahwazi Arabs and Baloch – represent one-third of Iran’s population, and argues that the Iranian regime’s “oppression of its ethnic and religious minorities has created the conditions for an effective campaign to splinter the Iranian state into component parts”. It adds: “US support for their independence movements, both overt and covert, could force the regime to focus attention on them and limit its ability to conduct other malign activities.”

Those minorities have all had organisations that have carried out violent actions, including bombings and assassinations against Iranian officials, over the past decade, and such a strategy would presumably involve supporting a step-up in such activities – in other words, US support for terrorist activities against Iranian government targets.

The role of MEK

But none of this is new. It was the official line of the powerful alliance between the neoconservatives and the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis within the Bush administration. By 2003, Douglas Feith, the uber-neoconservative former undersecretary of defense for policy, had developed a plan for giving MEK, whose army had been captured by US troops in Iraq, a new name and using them for a covert paramilitary operation in Iran.

Meanwhile, Iran was offering to provide names and other data on al-Qaeda officials it had captured in return for US information on MEK. When former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld sought to protect MEK from such a deal, Bush’s response was: “But we say there is no such thing as a good terrorist.”

Despite the neocon fixation with supporting MEK, both the CIA and the Israelis have long regarded the idea that it could be an instrument for regime change in Iran as ridiculous. After the organisation helped Saddam Hussein’s regime suppress Shia and Kurdish uprisings, it lost any semblance of legitimacy inside Iran. After it relocated to Iraq, moreover, it was transformed into an authoritarian cult.

The former Israeli ambassador to Iran, Uri Lubrani, who was given a free hand to organise a programme for destabilising Iran, recognised long ago, as he told two Israeli journalists, that MEK has no capacity to do anything inside the country.

It was Lubrani who first advanced the argument that about a third of the total Iranian population were ethnic minorities, and that promoting their anti-Tehran activities could help to destabilise the government. Those groups have carried out terrorist bombings and other armed actions in various parts of Iran over the years, and it is well documented that Israel was supporting and advising the Baloch extremist organisation Jundallah on such operations. But the Israelis have used MEK mainly to put out disinformation on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The policy paper Bolton is reportedly pushing states explicitly that the regime change policy should include the use of military force against Iran if necessary. That was the premise of the Cheney-Bolton plan for regime change in Iran, as former Vice President Dick Cheney’s Middle East adviser, David Wurmser, later revealed. And it is the game that Bolton, the enthusiast for bombing Iran, is apparently still playing.

By Gareth Porter, Orbitt.net

First published in Middle East Eye

May 19, 2018 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Untold Story of John Bolton’s Campaign for War With Iran

Everyone knows Bolton is a hawk. Less understood is how he labored in secret to drive Washington and Tehran apart.

In my reporting on U.S.-Israeli policy, I have tracked numerous episodes in which the United States and/or Israel made moves that seemed to indicate preparations for war against Iran. Each time—in 2007, in 2008, and again in 2011—those moves, presented in corporate media as presaging attacks on Tehran, were actually bluffs aimed at putting pressure on the Iranian government.

Gareth Porter

But the strong likelihood that Donald Trump will now choose John Bolton as his next national security advisor creates a prospect of war with Iran that is very real. Bolton is no ordinary neoconservative hawk. He has been obsessed for many years with going to war against the Islamic Republic, calling repeatedly for bombing Iran in his regular appearances on Fox News, without the slightest indication that he understands the consequences of such a policy.

His is not merely a rhetorical stance: Bolton actively conspired during his tenure as the Bush administration’s policymaker on Iran from 2002 through 2004 to establish the political conditions necessary for the administration to carry out military action.

More than anyone else inside or outside the Trump administration, Bolton has already influenced Trump to tear up the Iran nuclear deal. Bolton parlayed his connection with the primary financier behind both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump himself—the militantly Zionist casino magnate Sheldon Adelson—to get Trump’s ear last October, just as the president was preparing to announce his policy on the Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He spoke with Trump by phone from Las Vegas after meeting with Adelson.

It was Bolton who persuaded Trump to commit to specific language pledging to pull out of the JCPOA if Congress and America’s European allies did not go along with demands for major changes that were clearly calculated to ensure the deal would fall apart.

Although Bolton was passed over for the job of secretary of state, he now appears to have had the inside track for national security advisor. Trump met with Bolton on March 6 and told him, “We need you here, John,” according to a Bolton associate. Bolton said he would only take secretary of state or national security advisor, whereupon Trump promised, “I’ll call you really soon.” Trump then replaced Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with former CIA director Mike Pompeo, after which White House sources leaked to the media Trump’s intention to replace H.R. McMaster within a matter of weeks.

The only other possible candidate for the position mentioned in media accounts is Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was acting national security advisor after General Michael Flynn was ousted in February 2017.

Bolton’s high-profile advocacy of war with Iran is well known. What is not at all well known is that, when he was under secretary of state for arms control and international security, he executed a complex and devious strategy aimed at creating the justification for a U.S. attack on Iran. Bolton sought to convict the Islamic Republic in the court of international public opinion of having a covert nuclear weapons program using a combination of diplomatic pressure, crude propaganda, and fabricated evidence.

Despite the fact that Bolton was technically under the supervision of Secretary of State Colin Powell, his actual boss in devising and carrying out that strategy was Vice President Dick Cheney. Bolton was also the administration’s main point of contact with the Israeli government, and with Cheney’s backing, he was able to flout normal State Department rules by taking a series of trips to Israel in 2003 and 2004 without having the required clearance from the State Department’s Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs.

Thus, at the very moment that Powell was saying administration policy was not to attack Iran, Bolton was working with the Israelis to lay the groundwork for just such a war. During a February 2003 visit, Bolton assured Israeli officials in private meetings that he had no doubt the United States would attack Iraq, and that after taking down Saddam, it would deal with Iran, too, as well as Syria.

During multiple trips to Israel, Bolton had unannounced meetings, including with the head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, without the usual reporting cable to the secretary of state and other relevant offices. Judging from that report on an early Bolton visit, those meetings clearly dealt with a joint strategy on how to bring about political conditions for an eventual U.S. strike against Iran.

Mossad played a very aggressive role in influencing world opinion on the Iranian nuclear program. In the summer of 2003, according to journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in their book The Nuclear Jihadist, Meir Dagan created a new Mossad office tasked with briefing the world’s press on alleged Iranian efforts to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. The new unit’s responsibilities included circulating documents from inside Iran as well from outside, according to Frantz and Collins.

Bolton’s role in a joint U.S.-Israeli strategy, as he outlines in his own 2007 memoir, was to ensure that the Iran nuclear issue would be moved out of the International Atomic Energy Agency and into the United Nations Security Council. He was determined to prevent IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei from reaching an agreement with Iran that would make it more difficult for the Bush administration to demonize Tehran as posing a nuclear weapons threat. Bolton began accusing Iran of having a covert nuclear weapons program in mid-2003, but encountered resistance not only from ElBaradei and non-aligned states, but from Britain, France, and Germany as well.

Bolton’s strategy was based on the claim that Iran was hiding its military nuclear program from the IAEA, and in early 2004, he came up with a dramatic propaganda ploy: he sent a set of satellite images to the IAEA showing sites at the Iranian military reservation at Parchin that he claimed were being used for tests to simulate nuclear weapons. Bolton demanded that the IAEA request access to inspect those sites and leaked his demand to the Associated Press in September 2004. In fact, the satellite images showed nothing more than bunkers and buildings for conventional explosives testing.

Bolton was apparently hoping the Iranian military would not agree to any IAEA inspections based on such bogus claims, thus playing into his propaganda theme of Iran’s “intransigence” in refusing to answer questions about its nuclear program. But in 2005 Iran allowed the inspectors into those sites and even let them choose several more sites to inspect. The inspectors found no evidence of any nuclear-related activities.

The U.S.-Israeli strategy would later hit the jackpot, however, when a large cache of documents supposedly from a covert source within Iran’s nuclear weapons program surfaced in autumn 2004. The documents, allegedly found on the laptop computer of one of the participants, included technical drawings of a series of efforts to redesign Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to carry what appeared to be a nuclear weapon.

But the whole story of the so-called “laptop documents” was a fabrication. In 2013, a former senior German official revealed the true story to this writer: the documents had been given to German intelligence by the Mujahedin E Khalq, the anti-Iran armed group that was well known to have been used by Mossad to “launder” information the Israelis did not want attributed to themselves. Furthermore, the drawings showing the redesign that were cited as proof of a nuclear weapons program were clearly done by someone who didn’t know that Iran had already abandoned the Shahab-3’s nose cone for an entirely different design.

Mossad had clearly been working on those documents in 2003 and 2004 when Bolton was meeting with Meir Dagan. Whether Bolton knew the Israelis were preparing fake documents or not, it was the Israeli contribution towards establishing the political basis for an American attack on Iran for which he was the point man. Bolton reveals in his memoirs that this Cheney-directed strategy took its cues from the Israelis, who told Bolton that the Iranians were getting close to “the point of no return.” That was point, Bolton wrote, at which “we could not stop their progress without using force.”

Cheney and Bolton based their war strategy on the premise that the U.S. military would be able to consolidate control over Iraq quickly. Instead the U.S. occupation bogged down and never fully recovered. Cheney proposed taking advantage of a high-casualty event in Iraq that could be blamed on Iran to attack an IRGC base in Iran in the summer of 2007. But the risk that pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq would retaliate against U.S. troops was a key argument against the proposal.

The Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were also well aware that Iran had the capability to retaliate directly against U.S. forces in the region, including against warships in the Strait of Hormuz. They had no patience for Cheney’s wild ideas about more war.

That Pentagon caution remains unchanged. But two minds in the White House unhinged from reality could challenge that wariness—and push the United States closer towards a dangerous war with Iran.

By Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to TAC. He is also the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. Follow him on Twitter @GarethPorter.

April 3, 2018 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The IAEA’s “Final Assessment”

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessment has cleared the way for the board of governors to end the Agency’s extraordinary investigation into accusations of Iran’s past nuclear weapons work. But a closer examination of the document reveals much more about the political role that the Agency has played in managing the Iran file.

Contrary to the supposed neutral and technical role that Director General Yukiya Amano has constantly invoked and the news media has long accepted without question, the Agency has actually been serving as prosecutor for the United States in making a case that Iran has had a nuclear weapons program.

The first signs of such an IAEA role appeared in 2008 after the Bush administration insisted that the Agency make a mysterious collection of intelligence documents on a purported Iranian nuclear weapons research program the centerpiece of its Iran inquiry. The Agency’s partisan role was fully developed, however, only after Amano took charge in late 2009. Amano got U.S. political support for the top position in 2009 because he had enthusiastically supported the Bush administration’s pressure on Mohammed ElBaradei on those documents when Amano was Japan’s permanent representative to the IAEA in 2008.

Amano delivered the Agency’s November 2011 report just when the Obama administration needed additional impetus for its campaign to line up international support for “crippling sanctions” on Iran. He continued to defend that hardline position and accuse Iran of failing to cooperate as the Obama administration sought to maximize the pressure on Iran from 2012 to 2015.

When the Obama administration’s interests shifted from pressuring Iran to ensuring that the nuclear agreement with Iran would be completed and fully implemented, Amano’s role suddenly shifted as well. In late June, according to Iranian officials involved in the Vienna negotiations, Secretary of State John Kerry reached agreement with both the Iranians and Amano that the “possible military dimensions” (PMD) issue would be resolved through a report by Amano before the end of the year.

Based on that agreement, Amano would write a report that would reach no definitive conclusion about the accusations of nuclear weapons work but nevertheless bring the PMD inquiry to an end . The report was still far from even-handed. It could not be, because Amano had embraced the intelligence documents that the United States and Israel had provided to the IAEA, around which the entire investigation had been organized.

Dodgy Intelligence Documents

Iran had insisted from the beginning that the intelligence documents given to the IAEA were fraudulent, and ElBaradei had repeatedly stated publicly from late 2005 through 2009 that the documents had not been authenticated. ElBaradei observes in his 2011 memoirs that he could never get a straight answer from the Bush administration about how the documents had been acquired. Different cover stories had been leaked to the media over the years suggesting that either an Iranian scientist involved in the alleged weapons program or a German spy had managed to get the documents out of Iran. But in 2013, former senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt revealed to me in an interview that German intelligence had obtained the documents in 2004 from a sometime source whom they knew to be a member of the Mujahideen E-Khalq (MEK). A cult-like Iranian exile terrorist group, MEK had once carried out terror operations for the Saddam Hussein regime but later developed a patron-client relationship with Israeli intelligence.

Quite apart from the unsavory truth about the origins of the documents, the burden of proof in the IAEA inquiry should have been on the United States to make the case for their authenticity. There is a good reason why U.S. judicial rules of evidence require that “the proponent must produce evidence sufficient to support a finding that the item is what the proponent claims it is.”

But instead Amano has required Iran, in effect, to prove the negative. Since it is logically impossible for Iran to do so, that de facto demand has systematically skewed the entire IAEA investigation toward the conclusion that Iran is guilty of the covert activities charged in the intelligence documents. And the Agency has reinforced that distorted frame in its final assessment by constantly making the point that Iran possesses technology that could have been used for the development of a nuclear weapon. Every time Iran produced evidence that a technology that the IAEA had suggested was being used for the development of nuclear weapons was actually for non-nuclear applications, the Agency cast that evidence in a suspicious light by arguing that it bore some characteristics that are “consistent with” or “relevant to” work on nuclear weapons. The “final assessment” uses that same tactic to frame not only Iranian development of various technologies but its organizations, facilities, and research activities as inherently suspicious regardless of evidence provided by Iran that they were for other purposes.

Another tactic the IAEA had used in the past to attack Iran’s credibility is the suggestion that the government actually made a partial confession. In May 2008, the IAEA had claimed in a quarterly report that Iran “did not dispute that some of the information contained in the documents was factually accurate but said the events and activities concerned involved civil or conventional military applications.” That statement had clearly conveyed the impression that Iran has admitted to details about activities shown in the documents. But in fact Iran had only confirmed information that was already publicly known, such as certain names, organizations, and official addresses, as the IAEA itself acknowledged in 2011. Furthermore, Iran had also submitted a 117-page paper in which it had pointed out that “some of the organizations and individuals named in those documents were nonexistent.”

The IAEA resorted to the same kind of deceptive tactic in the final assessment’s discussion of “organizational structure.” It stated, “A significant proportion of the information available to the Agency on the existence of organizational structures was confirmed by Iran during implementation of the Road-map.” That sentence implied that Iran had acknowledged facts about the organizations that supported the purported intelligence claims of a nuclear weapons research program. But it actually meant only that Iran confirmed the same kind of publicly available information as it had in 2008.

On the issue of whether an Iranian organization to carry out nuclear-weapons research and development had existed, the final assessment again uses suggestive but ultimately meaningless language: “[B]efore the end of 2003, an organizational structure was in place in Iran suitable for the coordination of a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.”

Similar language implying accusation without actually stating it directly can be found in most of the assessments in the document. In the section on “procurement activities,” the report refers to “indications of procurements and attempted procurements of items with relevance, inter alia, to the development of a nuclear device.” That language actually means nothing more than that Iranians had sought to purchase dual-use items, but it preserves the illusion that the procurement is inherently suspicious.

EBW and MIP

The use of “relevance” language was, in fact, the IAEA’s favorite tactic for obscuring the fact that it had no real evidence of nuclear weapons work. On the issue of the purported intelligence documents showing that Iran had developed and experimented with Exploding Bridge-Wire (EBW) technology for the detonation of a nuclear weapon, Iran had gone to great lengths to prove that its work on EBW technology was clearly focused on non-nuclear applications. It provided detailed information about its development of the technology, including videos of activities it had carried out, to show that for the objective of the work was to develop safer conventional explosives.

The IAEA responded by saying “ that the EBW detonators developed by Iran have characteristics relevant to a nuclear device.” By that same logic, of course, a prosecutor could name an individual as a suspect in a crime simply because his behavior showed “characteristics relevant” to that crime.

A similar tactic appears in the assessment of the “initiation of high explosives” issue. The 2011 IAEA report had recorded the intelligence passed on by the Israelis that Iran had done an experiment with a high explosives detonation technology called multipoint initiation (MIP) that the Agency said was “consistent with” a publication by a “foreign expert” who had worked in Iran. That was a reference to the Ukrainian scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko, but he was an expert on producing nanodiamonds through explosives, not on nuclear weapons development. And the open-source publication by Danilenko was not about experiments related to nuclear weapons but only about measuring shock waves from explosions using fiber optic cables.

The 2011 report also had referred to “information” from an unnamed member state that Iran had carried out the “large scale high explosives experiments” in question in the “region of Marivan.” In its final assessment, the Agency says it now believes that those experiments were carried out in a “location called ‘Marivan’,” rather than in the “region of Marivan.” But although Iran has offered repeatedly to allow the IAEA to visit Marivan to determine whether such experiments were carried out,the IAEA has refused to carry out such an inspection and has offered no explanation for its refusal.

The Agency relies on its standard evasive language to cover its climb-down from the 2011 assessment. “The Agency assesses that the MPI technology developed by Iran has characteristics relevant to a nuclear device,” it said, “as well as to a small number of alternative applications.” That wording—combined with its refusal to make any effort to check on the one specific claim of Iranian experiments at Marivan—makes it clear that the Agency knows very well that it has no real evidence of the alleged experiments but is unwilling to say so straightforwardly.

The Agency did the same thing in regard to the alleged “integration into a missile delivery system.” A key set of purported intelligence documents had shown a series of efforts to integrate a “new spherical payload” into the existing payload chamber of the Shahab-3 missile. The final assessment avoids mention of the technical errors in those studies, which were so significant that Sandia National Laboratories found through computer simulations that not a single one of the proposed redesign efforts would have worked. And it later became apparent that Iran had begun redesigning the entire missile system—including an entirely different reentry vehicle shape from the one shown in the drawings—well before the start date of the purported nuclear weapons work.

But the IAEA was only interested in whether the workshops portrayed in the purported intelligence were in fact workshops used by the Iranian government. Iran allowed the Agency to visit two of the workshops, and the final assessment declares that it has “verified that the workshops are those described in the alleged studies documentation” and that “the workshop’s features and capabilities are consistent with those described in the alleged studies documentation.”

Flawed Computer Modeling

One of the most egregious cover-ups in the assessment is its treatment of the alleged computer modeling of nuclear explosions. The agency recalled that it had “received information from Member States” that Iran had done modeling of “nuclear explosive configurations based on implosion technology.” Unfortunately for the credibility of that “information,” soon after that 2011 report was published someone leaked a graph of one of the alleged computer modeling efforts attributed to Iran to Associated Press reporter George Jahn. The graph was so similar to one published in a scholarly journal in January 2009 that Scott Kemp, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said he suspected the graph had been “adapted from the open literature.”

Furthermore the information in the graph turned out to be inaccurate by four orders of magnitude. In response to that revelation, a senior IAEA official told Jahn that the Agency knew that the graph was “flawed” as soon as it had obtained it but that IAEA officials “believe it remains important as a clue to Iranian intentions.” In fact the official revealed to Jahn that the Agency had come up with a bizarre theory that Iranian scientists deliberately falsified the diagram to sell the idea to government officials of a nuclear explosion far larger than any by the United States or Russia.

That episode surely marks the apogee of the IAEA’s contorted rationalizations of the highly suspect “information” the Agency had been fed by the Israelis. In the final report, the Agency ignores that embarrassing episode and “assesses that Iran conducted computer modeling of a nuclear explosive device prior to 2004 and between 2005 and 2009,” even though it describes the modeling, enigmatically, as “incomplete and fragmentary.

The assessment further “notes some similarity between the Iranian open source publications and the studies featured in the information from Member States, in terms of textual matches, and certain dimensional and other parameters used.” Unless the Agency received the “information” from the unidentified states before the dates of the open-source publications, which one would expect to be noted if true, such similarities could be evidence of fraudulent intelligence rather than of Iranian wrong-doing. But the assessment provides no clarification of the issue.

Nuclear Material

On the issue it calls “nuclear material acquisition,” however, the Agency makes a startling retreat from its previous position that has far-reaching implications for the entire collection of intelligence documents. In its 2011 report, the IAEA had presented a one-page flow sheet showing a process for converting “yellow cake” into “green salt” (i.e., uranium that can be enriched) as a scheme to “secure a source of uranium suitable for use in an undisclosed enrichment program.”

But the final assessment explicitly rejects that conclusion, pronouncing the process design in question “technically flawed” and “of low quality in comparison with what was available to Iran as part of its declared nuclear fuel cycle.” In other words, Iran would have had no rational reason to try to seek an entirely new conversion process and then turn the project over to incompetent engineers. Those were precisely the arguments that Iran had made in 2008 to buttress its case that the documents were fabricated.

The assessment carefully avoids the obvious implication of these new findings—that the anomalies surrounding the “green salt” documents make it very likely that they have were fabricated. To acknowledge that fact would cast doubt on the entire collection. But the surprising backtracking on the “green salt’ evidence underlines just how far the IAEA has gone in the past to cover up awkward questions about the intelligence at the center of the case.

Now that the Obama administration has settled on a nuclear agreement with Iran, the IAEA will no longer have to find contorted language to discuss Iran’s past and present nuclear program. Nevertheless, the Agency remains a highly political actor, and its role in monitoring and reporting on the implementation of the agreement may bring more occasions for official assessments that reflect the political interest of the U.S.-led dominant coalition in the IAEA board of governors rather than the objective reality of the issue under review.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

Counter punch,

December 19, 2015 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The New Yorker Doesn’t Factcheck What ‘Everyone Knows’ Is True

Dexter Filkins has been one of the top journalists covering America’s wars since 9/11—first for the New York Times, and since 2011 for the New Yorker—often uncovering stories that were not welcomed by the US national security structure. But when Filkins, in a long-form New Yorker article last summer (7/20/15), took on the subject of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s untimely death and its relation to his role in indicting senior Iranian officials for a 1994 Buenos Aires terror bombing, it tested how far Filkins would go in questioning conventional wisdom.

The July 18, 1994, bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires (known by the Spanish initials AMIA), which killed 85 people and wounded nearly 300, is almost always blamed on Iran in media references to the attack. Other than my own investigation of the case in 2008 (The Nation, 1/19/08), I’m aware of no journalist who has gone beyond that frame in covering it.

Filkins apparently intended to write a journalistic portrait of Nisman and the disputed circumstances in which he died of a gunshot wound last January, rather than to explore the case itself. But in order to write such a portrait, Filkins had to deal with the evidence Nisman used in his AMIA indictment, and Filkins stumbled badly in writing about those issues.

Filkins’ failure goes to the root of a systemic problem of news media coverage of Iran and many other issues. Certain narratives about episodes and issues in recent history have become so unanimously accepted among political and media elites as to be virtually unchallengeable in media reporting. Such narratives have been repeated in one form or another for so many years that reporters simply would not think to question them for a moment, much less actually investigate their truth.

The narrative surrounding the AMIA bombing and its Iranian origins is a notable example of the phenomenon. Reporting on the Argentine investigation of the bombing and the indictment of the Iranians by Nisman in 2006 has treated Iran’s responsibility as an accepted and documented fact. And when Filkins believes he is adding independent reporting that corroborates Nisman’s interpretation of the evidence, he actually committed errors that a careful reporter would normally have avoided.

Filkins presents the primary evidence of Iranian/Hezbollah responsibility in Nisman’s 2006 indictment as follows:

In the course of 801 pages, he charged seven Iranian officials, including the former president, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, and also indicted Hezbollah’s senior military commander, Imad Mugniyah. “The decision to carry out the attack was made not by a small splinter group of extremist Islamic officials,” Nisman wrote, but was “extensively discussed and ultimately adopted by a consensus of the highest representatives of the Iranian government.” Drawing on the testimony of Iranian defectors, Nisman wrote that the decision was made on August 14, 1993, at a meeting of the Committee for Special Operations, which included the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.

But if Filkins had read the English-language version of Nisman’s indictment, which is now available, or had done an online search on the subject, he would have learned that the sources that Nisman relied for that spectacular intelligence claim were not “defectors,” but the four members of the Mujahideen E Khalq’s political front, the National Council of Resistance Iran (NCRI). The MEK, an armed opposition group, had been a terrorist arm of the Saddam Hussein regime during the Iran/Iraq War, and had carried out terrorist actions against Americans and Iranians in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was taken off the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations in 2012 after a well-funded campaign to buy off prominent political and national security figures.

The two MEK sources that made specific claims about the meeting were senior officials of the organization: Reza Zakeri Kouchaksaraee, president of the NCRI’s Security and Intelligence Committee, and Hadi Roshanravani, a member of its International Affairs Committee. Nisman quotes from testimony by Kouchaksaraee before the Argentine Oral Court in 2003 that the decision to bomb the AMIA had been made by a meeting of the Supreme National Security Council on August 14, 1993: “This meeting lasted only two hours from 4:30 to 6:30 pm,” said the MEK official.

Nisman quoted Roshranravani as having testified to the same starting time, but a meeting date two days earlier: August 12, 1993. Roshranravani even claimed that the NCRI knew the exact agenda of the meeting, and that “the idea for an attack on Argentina” had been discussed during a discussion on “the strategy of exporting fundamentalism throughout the world.”

Neither NCRI official nor Nisman himself offered any explanation for how an exiled armed opposition organization could have penetrated the highest level of the Iranian government—or why Argentine investigators had been unaware of such crucial alleged intelligence for nearly a decade. Furthermore, the NCRI had by then a long history of publicizing intelligence claims—especially on alleged Iranian weapons of mass destruction—that Mossad, Israel’s international intelligence service, hoped would influence international opinion.

Nisman called two other NCRI members who testified before the same court “defectors.” But one of them, Ali Reza Ahmadi, was identified as an Iranian foreign service officer from 1981 to 1985, while the other, Hamid Reza Eshagi, was not otherwise identified. Those two witnesses made only joint statements, merely supporting what the senior officials of the NCRI had testified. They made no claim to independent knowledge of the meeting.

A review of the indictment reveals that Nisman cited the same four NCRI members a total of 61 times to document the alleged participation of each of the seven senior Iranians for whom Nisman was requesting arrest warrants. Nearly half of the citations were for Kouchaksaraee, the head of NCRI’s Security and Intelligence Committee.

Filkins appears to have been unaware, however, of Nisman’s reliance on the testimony of the armed opposition to the Iranian regime, with its shady history, for the crucial information on which his indictment of the Iranians was based. “Much of the testimony that guided Nisman toward the Iranian regime,” Filkins writes, “was provided by a man referred to in court documents as ‘Witness C’—Abolghasem Mesbahi, an Iranian intelligence agent who defected to Germany in 1996.”

But in identifying Mesbahi as the key source, Filkins not only misrepresents the alleged evidence in Nisman’s indictment, but also demonstrates a remarkable lack of curiosity about a figure whose record as a witness on this and other cases was marked by serious anomalies and even absurdities.

Mesbahi’s claims about Iranian sponsorship of the AMIA terror bombing had provided fodder for a number of stories on the case for years. But it turns out his story was not consistent. Mesbhai’s initial statement to Argentine investigators, in a secret 100-page deposition in 2000, claimed that Iranian planning for the AMIA bombing began in 1992. According to the transcript, Mesbahi said one Iranian intelligence cell was devoted to “cooperating with members of the Argentine police, corrupting them or threatening them to collaborate with the attack,” while another worked on obtaining the explosives.

But when Mesbahi testified to the oral court by video conference from the Argentine embassy in Berlin in November 2003, he declared: “It’s a rule that in terrorist operations, local sources of the chosen country can never be trusted. It is not possible that anyone who lived in Argentina was involved in or informed about the attack.”

In the same sensational 2000 deposition, Mesbahi claimed that, after the attack, Argentine President Carlos Menem had sent an emissary to Tehran, whom he described as a bearded man of about 50 years of age, who had negotiated a deal that resulted in a $10 million deposit to a numbered account that Menem had provided. In return, Mesbahi testified, Menem agreed to “make declarations that there was no evidence against Iran that it was responsible.” The money, he writes “was paid from another Swiss account, controlled by Rafsanjani, the Iranian president.”

But in his 2003 testimony, Mesbahi backed away from this account, saying that everything he knew about the affair had come from someone who had died in 1997, and that he did not know if any payments had actually been made.

And as for the previous date for the Iranian decision to carry out the bombing, Mesbahi told the oral court the decision was made in 1993, not 1992, as he had claimed before.

It was not only in regards to AMIA that Mesbahi was known to the US intelligence community as a “fabricator.” He had claimed to German investigators that Iran asked Libya and the Abu Nidal terrorist organization to carry out the attack on Pan Am 103 in December 1988. That claim was discredited by the FBI.

Even more outrageously, he had also concocted a tale of having been tipped off by Iranian contacts, through a series of “coded messages” in the summer and early September of 2001, about plans for a coming Iranian terrorist strike in the United States that would involve crashing civilian airliners into buildings in major US cities, including Washington and New York, on September 11–and that he had frantically tried to contact someone in German or US intelligence about the information. In fact, neither the German nor US government ever got any communication from Mesbahi.

Filkins does quote a single sentence from the head of the FBI’s mission to Buenos Aires to assist in the AMIA investigation, James Bernazzani, summing up his view of Mesbahi as a witness: “Mesbahi was full of shit.” But he does not confront the significance of Bernazzani’s comment. “Still, many American officials believe that Iran was involved in the bombing,” he writes, as if to dismiss questions of Mesbahi’s suspect credibility.

Filkins quotes former CIA operative Robert Baer as saying Iran could be presumed to be involved because of the alleged involvement of the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia group Hezbollah:

The assumption was that the Iranians were involved, because the attack was carried out by a unit that they created…. [Hezbollah security chief Imad] Mugniyah never did anything without the green light of the Supreme Leader.

But Filkins’ assumption that the United States had hard evidence of Hezbollah’s involvement is seriously misguided. Filkins cites Bernazzani’s account of assisting the Argentine intelligence agency SIDE with its investigation of the bombing by examining the truck and finding “bits of flesh and bluejeans stuck to a fragment of metal.” Filkins completes Bernazzani’s account:

Technicians at an FBI lab quickly identified a man who they believed was the driver: Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Hezbollah operative from Lebanon. Intelligence analysts determined that Berro’s family had been fêted by Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, shortly after the bombing. “The case we made would have stood up in the US judicial system,” Bernazzani said.

But that is not what happened. As Bernazzani told me in a November 2007 interview, the FBI investigators did believe the DNA evidence they found in an evidence locker had come from the suicide bomber, but they could not link it with any specific individual, because they had no DNA sample at that point with which the compare the evidence. In fact, the only evidence the FBI and its Argentine colleagues were able to find for Iranian and/or Hezbollah involvement in the bombing for several years was, he said, “circumstantial.”

Bernazzani recalled that it was more than eight years after he began working on the case in late 1996 that Nisman had taken a DNA sample from one of Ibrahim Hussein Berro’s brothers during his visit in September 2005. Bernazzani told me that he assumed—though he didn’t know for a fact—that the Argentines had compared the DNA found earlier with that of the brother.

But Nisman never talked about the DNA evidence publicly—including in his indictment—except to claim to a reporter in 2006 that the samples had been contaminated. Bernazzani was certainly under the impression in 2005, before he retired from the FBI, that the sample was not contaminated. The implication is that the DNA sample from the evidence locker and the sample taken from Berro’s brother did not match.

Filkins cites Nisman’s claim in the indictment that the coordinator of the entire AMIA bombing operation was Mohsen Rabbani, previously the leader of the Al Tawhid mosque in Buenos Aires and, in 1994, the cultural attache of the Iranian embassy. It was Rabbani, according to Nisman, “who financed the attack, oversaw the purchase of the Renault [van used in the bombing] and directed the assembly of the bomb.”

But the evidence of Rabbani’s guilt cited by Nisman is based on the kind of inferential leaps usually employed to construct crude conspiracy theories. The indictment argues, for example, that it is “reasonable to infer” that Rabbani’s withdrawal of a total of $94,000 from a bank account between March 22 and July 18, 1994, was to pay for expenses related to the AMIA attack.

The evidence for Nisman’s conclusion that Rabbani had overseen the purchase of the suicide bomb car consists entirely of the fact that Rabbani “made inquiries at various Buenos Aires car dealers concerning the purchase of a van that was identical or similar to the one that was used as a car bomb in the AMIA attack several months later.” But in fact the Renault Trafic van was just about the only vehicle available in Buenos Aires for hauling relatively small loads, and the intelligence report on the surveillance of Rabbani available in the public record of the Argentine investigation shows that Rabbani had looked at a car dealer’s white Trafic on May 1, 1993—15 months before the bombing—but had not bought it.

Filkins notes approvingly Nisman’s use of phone metadata and travel dates to infer the involvement of Iran and Hezbollah in the plot to carry out the bombing. The approach used by the Argentina’s SIDE, as described in Nisman’s indictment, began with the assumption that a certain set of phones that were in contact with one another only from July 1 through July 18, 1994, represented the “operational group” for the bombing. Then they inferred that the fact that some of those phones were in contact with subscribers in Lebanon who were, in Nisman’s words, “suspected of having ties with Hezbollah” was evidence of Hezbollah’s involvement in the bombing.

Bernazzani told me that he was appalled by SIDE’s use of “link analysis” to establish responsibility, and that officials in Washington had not taken such “speculative” theorizing seriously either.”It can be very dangerous,” he said. “Using that analysis, you could link my telephone to bin Laden’s.”

Filkins thus assembled a set of “facts” from Nisman and others supporting his thesis of Iranian guilt, without any serious effort to inquire into its accuracy, reliability and significance. His handling of Bernazzani’s testimony further suggests a readiness to interpret data that doesn’t fit the accepted picture in such a way as to keep it intact.

The point of deconstructing this New Yorker piece is not that Filkins is more careless about checking facts than his journalistic peers; rather, it is to direct attention to much more bigger and more complex problem affecting the entire news media structure: a climate of opinion in which certain issues are matters of such solid consensus that normally alert and energetic journalists suspend their skepticism and factchecking, because, after all, “everybody knows” that certain propositions are true.

——————————————————————————–

Gareth Porter, an independent investigative journalist and historian on US national security policy, is the winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. His latest book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published in 2014.

Fair.org

November 5, 2015 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Behind the Scenes: How the US and Iran Reached Their Landmark Deal

When groggy diplomats announced the successful completion of the Iran nuclear deal in Vienna on July 14, it ended one of the longest continuous negotiating processes in diplomatic history and produced what may be the longest (at 159 pages) and most complex international arms-control agreement ever.

The final round of negotiations was one of the most heavily covered stories, other than major wars, in recent decades, with nearly 600 journalists accredited for the full 18 days of talks. But the real story of how the United States and Iran finally came to agreement in Vienna, known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has yet to be told. Inevitably, the few public briefings, statements, and leaks to the media from the US side provided a politically convenient view of the state of negotiations rather than a reliable account of what was actually going on.

Piecing together a reasonably complete account of the Vienna negotiations will take many years. The account that follows is an effort to provide at least a first approximation of how the two sides reached an agreement. It is based on a series of informal meetings in Vienna over two weeks with two Iranian officials close to the negotiations. They cannot be identified under the terms of those meetings, but they were both in a position to provide authoritative information on how the negotiations were unfolding, at least from the Iranian government’s perspective.

Of course, some of what the two Iranian officials said about the negotiations reflected a desire to cast them in a light favorable to Iranian interests. Nevertheless, they provided crucial information about key turning points in the talks—information that did not serve any apparent Iranian tactical objective and yet was not reported in commercial news media. The two officials also provided valuable insight into Iranian calculations about the negotiations.

The story that I have assembled includes several surprising revelations. It shows that in the first few days of negotiations, the most important and difficult issues were quickly resolved, in large part because of moves by the Obama administration to reconcile the interests of the two sides. But it also reveals that the administration hardened its line and even slowed progress in the final stage of the talks, mainly for domestic political reasons.

Reaching a Deal on Lifting Sanctions

When Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met at Vienna’s Palais Coburg on Saturday, June 27, to begin what was generally recognized as the final round of negotiations, it was in the context of a distinctly pessimistic view of the prospects for agreement presented by the US news media. Three days before that meeting, The Washington Post reported that demands made by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a speech that week “could undercut the ability of Iranian negotiators to make concessions” as the June 30 deadline approached. A before the meeting, a “senior Western diplomat” in Vienna was quoted by Reuters as saying that “on major issues there are still big differences.” And the day after the meeting, The New York Times reported that the two sides “remained divided over how to limit and monitor Tehran’s nuclear program and even on how to interpret the preliminary agreement they reached two months ago.”

Contrary to the gloomy media coverage, however, Iranian negotiators were decidedly upbeat in their assessment of the overall trend of the talks. In a private conversation on June 28, a well-informed Iranian official denied that there was anything like a deadlock. “The sense outside that it’s still a crisis is just not true,” he told me. In fact, he described the US posture as moving in the right direction. “I believe America is revising its past policies toward Iran,” said the official. “We feel some sense of change in its policy.”

The issue that mattered most to Tehran was the timing of the lifting of US and EU sanctions in relation to Iran’s implementation of its nuclear obligations in the agreement. The idea that the two sides had to carry out their respective obligations in a way that is “simultaneous and parallel” had been one of the principles on which Kerry and Zarif had agreed in their last marathon session in Lausanne on April 2, according to the Iranian official with whom I spoke.

Although the Lausanne framework included definitive agreement on issues involving Iran’s nuclear obligations, there was no agreement on what that actually meant for the timing of lifting sanctions. The US fact sheet on the framework had said, “U.S. and E.U. nuclear-related sanctions will be suspended after the IAEA has verified that Iran has taken all of its key nuclear-related steps.” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani had declared on April 3, however, “On the basis of this framework, all sanctions…against Iran will be canceled on the very first day of the implementation of the deal…”

The biggest Iranian concern was that the United States would use old accusations of nuclear-weapons work as a pretext to keep the sanctions in place. In a June 23 speech, just before the start of the Vienna talks, Supreme Leader Khamenei referred to the “complicated formula” the US delegation had proposed on the timing of lifting of sanctions and complained that it would take too long. The main problem, he said, was that it would require Iran to wait for the IAEA to make a qualitative judgment about Iranian responses to allegations of Iranian nuclear-weapons work. The Iranians did not trust IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano—who had fully cooperated with the US diplomatic strategy on Iran—to deliver an assessment that would allow sanctions to be lifted any time soon.

During the Lausanne talks, the Iranians had proposed that each time Iran completed one of its obligations, the Western powers would lift some of the sanctions. That was still its demand when the Vienna talks began. Khamenei referred to that concept in his June 23 speech, when he said, “We accept that the procedure of lifting sanctions should be in line with the procedure of the fulfillment of the commitments that Iran has taken on: some in return for some; others in return for others….”

On June 29, however, the same Iranian official with whom I had spoken the previous day reported a breakthrough in the talks. “Last night there was something new on sanctions relief,” he said. “[The Americans] have come up with a concept so that [the lifting of sanctions and Iran’s nuclear steps] would be at the same time.” The proposal introduced the idea of distinguishing between a preparatory phase beginning with “adoption day”—in which both sides would make legal and other “preparations” for implementation of their respective obligations—and what was called the “operational” phase of implementation.

The US proposal called the day when the United States and the European Union would lift their sanctions against Iran (which would also be the day Iran’s nuclear steps were to be officially verified by the IAEA) “implementation day.” That would allow Iran to say that the United States lifted sanctions on “implementation day.” But more importantly, as the official explained it, the United States and the European Union would provide legal guarantees regarding the lifting of sanctions months before, on “adoption day,” in the form of new EU legislation on lifting them and US presidential issuance of waivers on the sanctions, both of which would take effect on “implementation day.” Iranian negotiators viewed those legally binding US and EU commitments as “credible assurances” that sanctions would indeed be lifted when Iran had completed its nuclear-related steps, according to the Iranian official.

The Iranian delegation accepted the basic plan presented by the US delegation, according to the official. But there were additional issues to be resolved. Although the Iranians believed that their own actions regarding their nuclear program could be completed within two or three months, they thought what the United States and the European Union would need to do to make the lifting of sanctions effective would take significantly longer. “They need to do some preparatory work to change the culture of sanctions,” the Iranian officials said. “They need to inform the companies. They can do it gradually over six months. What is important to us is to realize that sanctions lifting is not a process of one day.” But the Americans were still resisting. “They say we can’t do that,” said one of the officials. The Iranian delegation would press for specific language outlining those steps to educate businesses and financial institutions on the ending of sanctions.

Over the next 24 hours, the agreement on lifting sanctions was completed, as an Iranian official confirmed in a meeting with me on June 30. Iran had gotten the US negotiators to spell out in the text the US actions that Iran had demanded. “The US agreed to a detailed list of actions,” the official said. “The United States and EU will have to take physical actions. They will have to brief the banks.”

From then on, the negotiations on sanctions removal were confined to “operational details,” as an Iranian official told me on July 2. But the news media continued to report that the issue was still a sticking point for several more days. It wasn’t until July 4 that a major news outlet reported that a text on timing of sanctions relief had been completed.

A Fix on “Possible Military Dimensions”

For months before the Lausanne framework was adopted, Western diplomats had been linking the lifting of sanctions with the resolution of the issue the United States and its negotiating partners had called “possible military dimensions,” or PMD—the demand that Iran account for two sets of intelligence documents purporting to demonstrate Iranian nuclear-weapons-related research and development. But one set of documents had originated in Israel, and the other had been submitted by the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the cult-like Iranian terror group that had been known to act as a client for Israel. The authenticity of both sets of documents was extremely doubtful, as indicated by a number of anomalies in the papers, especially the fact that the most important documents purported to show Iranian efforts to integrate a nuclear weapon into a missile that Iran had already abandoned. Iran had ot only rejected the linkage between its response to those documents and the lifting of sanctions; it also refused to accept the phrase “possible military dimensions,” which the IAEA had coined in 2008. Instead, the final document refers to “clarification of past and present outstanding issues.”

The US and European negotiators had treated resolution of this issue as a potential bargaining chip that could be used on other issues, according to the Iranian official I met on June 29. “They would say if you reduce this, reduce that, we will get a resolution of the PMD,” the official told me. But he said Iran had never agreed to any linkage requiring that it must wait for an official IAEA assessment on PMD before getting sanctions lifted. The Lausanne framework included language that Iran would carry out “an agreed set of measures” on the PMD issue, but those measures remained to be negotiated.

In May, the United States had submitted to Iran a list of Iranian scientists and military men whom it wanted Iran to make available for interviews by the IAEA. On May 30, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, told Iranian television that his name was at the top of the list, which he said had 23 names on it. According to the Iranian official, the Americans demanded interviews with senior military figures because some of the scientists on the list had studied at Malek-Ashtar University of Technology, which has close ties to the military. “So the Americans considered the military should be interviewed, too,” he said. But Iranian negotiators rejected the US demand, according to Shamkhani.

“We are not afraid to give access to people,” the official explained to me on June 29, “but we had a very bitter experience with the IAEA about our scientists.” He recalled that Iran had submitted a detailed paper to the IAEA in 2008 on the background of Iran’s exploding bridge-wire (EBW) program that he said had proved it was for road-building, rather than for nuclear weapons. The November 2011 IAEA report acknowledged that Iran had turned over that paper, but had not identified its co-authors.

The official revealed that one of the co-authors of the paper was Darioush Rezai-Nejad, the young engineer who was killed in July 2011 as part of an assassination program that US officials have confirmed was overseen by Israel’s Mossad. Iran believed that the paper it had given to the IAEA had found its way into the hands of Israeli intelligence. “We can clarify issues, but not in a way that results in the death of our scientists,” the official said.

“We can clarify issues, but not in a way that results in the death of our scientists.” —top Iranian official

By June 29, however, the United States was no longer insisting on that list of scientists and military men to be interviewed, according to the official. The Americans had offered to negotiate with Iran on a set of measures for resolving the issue involving a selected set of scientists and some sites that the IAEA would be allowed to visit. And, more important to the Iranians, the United States was prepared for the first time to agree to a deadline for the IAEA assessment, meaning that the issue would no longer be allowed to delay the lifting of sanctions.

On June 30, the Iranian official who had just summarized the state of the negotiations the day before told me, “We did reach a decision on this with the Americans.” The key to the agreement, he revealed, was that Amano had agreed not only that his final assessment would be submitted by a date certain, but that it would reflect information from Iran rebutting the PMD accusations. “Now Amano’s assessment will be about establishing two reasonable narratives,” the official said. Five days later, the same official repeated the Iranian understanding that Amano would not reach “authoritative judgment” on the issue and that both sides would be represented, while Iran’s cooperation would be acknowledged.

On July 2, Amano flew to Tehran and met with President Rouhani and Supreme National Security Council secretary Shamkhani. In Vienna on July 4, he emerged from the Palais Coburg to tell the news media, “With the cooperation from Iran, I think we can issue a report by the end of the year.” That announcement reflected negotiations that Amano had already held with Kerry and Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency chief and Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi on detailed requirements and a precise timeline for Iran’s cooperation and Amano’s response to it.

Whether Iran and Amano had agreed explicitly on such an arrangement, the discussions with both Kerry and Amano had clearly led Iran to believe that its cooperation would result in a report by Amano that would be part of the process of lifting sanctions. And the agreement between Amano and Salehi that was announced in conjunction with the completion of the overall agreement on July 14 is consistent with what the Iranian official told me more than two weeks earlier.

Called “Road-map for the clarification of past and present outstanding issues regarding Iran’s nuclear program”—thus rejecting the IAEA’s “possible military dimensions” terminology—it established a timeline for resolving the issues raised in the annex to the IAEA’s November 2011 report: Iran was to turn over all information and documentation addressing IAEA concerns by August 15, and Amano would provide his final assessment by December, as he had indicated on July 4. Iran was ready to turn over information it had previously withheld from the IAEA because it had finally gotten a firm commitment to a deadline for ending the process once and for all.

A separate “arrangement” on the issue of Parchin military facility, which is referred to in the “Road-map” but has not been made public, established the parameters for environmental sampling, photos, and videos to be taken at the massive complex that the IAEA has asked to see for three and a half years. An AP story published August 19 seemed to suggest that Iranians would carry out inspection of the site itself, without the IAEA’s presence, but as former senior IAEA official Tariq Rauf pointed out, there is no reason Iranian specialists could not carry out those functions under the supervision of IAEA inspectors in a position to verify its implementation.

IAEA Access: Posturing After Reaching Agreement

The Vienna negotiations unfolded under intense domestic political pressures on the Obama administration. Republican senators and pro-Israel think tanks launched a campaign to press the administration not to make any more concessions to Iran. The campaign sought to exploit the fact that the administration preferred the negotiations to be finished by July 9 to meet its deadline for delivering it to Congress, in the hopes of getting a Congressional vote on the agreement before the August recess. Former Obama adviser on WMD Gary Samore, who had gone on to become president of United Against Nuclear Iran, a group that had opposed any Iranian enrichment capability, sounded the campaign’s keynote in a comment quoted in The New York Times on June 28: “Don’t make any more concessions to get a deal in early July.”

Foes of the agreement portrayed Obama and Kerry—particularly the latter—as prone to making unnecessary concessions because of the July 9 deadline. That was the main theme of a June 30 article in Politico by Michael Crowley, a former senior editor at The New Republic when the pro-Israel zealot Martin Peretz was editor in chief. Crowley wrote that “Republican critics, foreign officials, and even some ex-administration officials” were arguing that Kerry’s “eagerness for a deal…risks that the Iranians will seduce him into a bad one.” Crowley advised Kerry that “walking away from a deal” would “at least, put the questions about his motives to rest.”

The same day the Crowley piece appeared, Obama assumed a hardline public stance on the issue of IAEA access to what the United States had called “suspicious sites” in Iran—the issue that critics of the talks had focused on. Obama cast the issue in terms of an alleged threat by Iran to backtrack from what had been decided in April. “There has been a lot of talk on the other side from the Iranian negotiators,” he said, “about whether, in fact, they can abide by some of the terms that came up in Lausanne.” Obama then threatened, in effect, to walk away from the talks if Iran didn’t come around to US demands. “If the inspection regime, verification regime is inadequate, then we’re not going to get a deal, and we’ve been very clear to the Iranian government about that.”

But that threat over the issue of IAEA access to undeclared sites was political theater to appease Obama’s domestic audience that obscured major progress in the negotiations. The Iranian official with whom I met on June 30 told me that a two-page agreement had already been reached on the procedures for IAEA access to Iranian sites.

After the Lausanne framework, the media made frequent references to a public statement by Ali Khamenei on April 9, which rejected any inspection of military sites. Khamenei’s rejection apparently reflected sensitivity to possible demands to visit Iranian missile sites in order to gather intelligence for targeting purposes. A senior political figure who had recently met with Khamenei said he had recalled Iran’s dependence on missiles during the Iran-Iraq War as the reason for rejecting a demand by the IAEA to go wherever it wanted in Iran, according to the well-informed Najmeh Bozorgmehr of The Financial Times.

In the weeks that followed Khamenei’s speech, the lead Iranian negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, declared publicly that “Iran has agreed to grant managed access to military sites.” That term meant that Iran could impose limits on how the IAEA carried out its inspections to hide sensitive facilities or equipment unrelated to the inspection.

The two pages on access in the final agreement show that Iran has the right to propose alternative means of resolving IAEA concerns about “undeclared nuclear materials and activities or activities inconsistent with the JCPOA” at a particular site. The Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—which Iran signed and implemented up to early 2006 but has not yet ratified—gives the IAEA complete access to declared nuclear sites but imposes limits on IAEA inspection of undeclared sites.

The US threat regarding IAEA access to undeclared sites was political theater to appease Obama’s domestic audience.

The final text of the JCPOA goes beyond that protocol, however, in providing that, if the IAEA still cannot verify the absence of undeclared materials or activities after the alternative has been tried, within two weeks the members of the Joint Commission (Iran, the P5+1, and the European Union) would “advise on the necessary means to resolve the IAEA’s concerns” by majority vote. Iran would implement that decision within three days.

The text does not say so explicitly, but it was understood by both sides that Iran would provide “managed access” to sensitive sites. Such access is explicitly stated in the Additional Protocol, which Iran had agreed to apply as soon as it began implementing the agreement. A “senior [Obama] administration official” who briefed the news media in Vienna on June 29 confirmed that access provided by Iran would be “managed access.”

Even though that text had already been negotiated by June 29, the media (including PBS, CBS, Reuters, and Bloomberg) continued to report over the next week that IAEA “access” to sensitive sites remained a “sticking point,” although Reuters acknowledged on July 3 that a compromise was “emerging” on the issue. It was another case of the two sides being closer than Western diplomats were willing to acknowledge to the media.

A US-Russian Deal on “Snapback”?

Only one contentious issue remained to be negotiated after June 30: the new UN Security Council resolution that would have to be passed to replace a previous set of resolutions that had imposed a range of sanctions on Iran. Resolving that issue would of course require not only US involvement but that of the four other permanent members of the Council (the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China) as well.

But the US and Iranian delegations had already begun discussing it before the Vienna round. The United States wanted the new resolution to include a scheme that would allow the “snapback” of sanctions on Iran in case of Iranian violations even without a Security Council resolution, which would have meant that Russia could veto it. The US delegation was also demanding re-imposition of the conventional arms embargo and language that would continue to treat Iran’s ballistic-missile program as illicit.

For the Obama administration, the embargo and ballistic-missile issues had suddenly become much more political, because of the major changes that had occurred in Middle Eastern politics. After King Salman succeeded to the throne in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, he presided over a much more aggressive political-military campaign to push back against what the Saudis described as Iran’s attempt to become regional hegemon. That Saudi strategy included bombing the Houthi rebels in Yemen (which Saudi Arabia alleged was receiving Iranian support); backing the anti-Assad military command led in part by the Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria; and pressing the Obama administration to become part of the regional anti-Iran strategy.

In its eagerness to demonstrate its support for the Saudi-led anti-Iran bloc of Sunni Arabs, the White House made a series of political-diplomatic moves to support Saudi initiatives in Yemen and Syria and hardened its rhetoric on Iran’s role in the region. Pushing for re-imposing conventional-weapons and ballistic-missile sanctions against Iran in the new Security Council resolution was part of that larger Obama strategy of mollifying the Saudis.

Iran was strongly opposed to the re-imposition of the arms embargo in the new resolution, but not because the language of previous resolutions limited Iran’s regional policy or the development of its missile program. “Security Council sanctions against Iran are not powerful or crippling,” an Iranian official explained to me in a meeting on July 9. “What makes them significant is that they create a political atmosphere for other pressures.” The Security Council sanctions, which were imposed in a series of resolutions beginning in 2006, had no discernible impact on Iran’s military posture, because Iran had long since become independent of the international arms market for its defense—and even for the development of its longer-range missiles. Nor had the arms embargo prevented Iran from providing weapons to its Hezbollah ally in Lebanon or to the Assad regime in Syria.

A second issue in the Security Council resolution negotiations was potentially more serious. The United States was pushing for inclusion of a proposal that would allow a single state to charge that Iran had breached its commitments and set in motion the restoration of sanctions. The proposal provided that such a move could only be reversed by a decision of the Security Council, meaning that the United States could veto it.

That proposal raised suspicions in Iran that the United States planned to wait until Tehran had carried out all its obligations and then invoke snapback on a trumped-up charge of violations. Iranian officials viewed this as a last US effort to retain the option of maintaining sanctions. “The US government is obsessed with sanctions,” the Iranian official declared in the June 30 meeting. “They believe it is their greatest asset.”

In his first meetings with Kerry in Vienna on June 27 and 28, according to the official, Foreign Minister Zarif had asked Kerry whether the objective of US policy was to get rid of sanctions or to keep them. He warned that there would be no agreement if Washington did not pull back from language that appeared to be aimed at keeping them. Kerry had promised to look into it and come up with a way to overcome the obstacles to progress, the official said.

The Iranians had come to believe that Kerry was personally committed to getting an agreement, the official said. But it was also clear to them that serious differences existed within the Obama administration, not just on the nuclear negotiations but on US policy in the region as well. They viewed Kerry as being kept on a short leash in the negotiations, and regarded National Security Adviser Susan Rice, to whom Kerry was reporting frequently, as pushing a harder line on the Security Council sanctions and other issues.

Nevertheless, the Iranians believed that the Obama administration needed to get an agreement by July 9. In a meeting on July 2, an Iranian official said the administration was concerned that if the agreement wasn’t reached by then, the Israeli lobby would have an extra 30 days to influence members of Congress to vote against the agreement. The Iranian negotiators also believed that the United States would not be able get a consensus within the P5+1 group in support of its position on sanctions in the Security Council resolution, because the Russians had made no secret that they were opposed to the US demands.

But starting on July 5, as the two sides prepared for two days of intensive negotiations among foreign ministers, the tone of the US side became noticeably tougher. Hobbling across the street from the Palais Coburg on crutches (the result of a cycling accident) to speak to as many as 200 journalists, Kerry delivered a familiar warning: The Iranians had to make “hard choices.”

That night, at a private meeting with Zarif, Kerry presented a package of proposals from the P5+1 on the remaining issues, including the snapback of sanctions, to which Zarif objected strongly, according to an Iranian official I met on July 9. The following day, Zarif told a group of Iranian journalists off the record that he and Kerry had raised their voices until an aide to Kerry had opened the door to the room and said they had to lower their voices, because everyone could hear them. Zarif explained to the Iranian journalists, however, that his anger wasn’t real. At a certain stage in the negotiations, he said, he deliberately used body language and tone to influence the meeting. “Sometimes you are angry because you need to be angry,” he explained.

On the evening of July 6, the foreign ministers of the six powers met with Zarif to discuss a package of proposals from the P5+1 to resolve the remaining issues. Now the package had become even worse than before, according to the Iranian official. Zarif told Iranian journalists later that after he had rejected those proposals, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said that if Iran was not ready to reach agreement, they all might as well go home. Zarif immediately shot back, “Never threaten an Iranian,” to which Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov added, “Or a Russian.”

The following day, July 7, White House spokesman Josh Earnest stepped up the pressure on Iran to accept proposals Zarif had rejected. “The president is ready to call the team home” if American objectives cannot be met, he said. During their Senate Armed Services Committee testimony that same day, the two top US military officials, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, effectively committed the administration to re-imposition of the arms embargo and missile sanctions. “Under no circumstances should we relieve pressure on Iran relative to ballistic-missile capabilities and arms trafficking,” Dempsey declared.

The major issue that was decided during those two days of negotiations, however, was the US proposal regarding snapback, which was accepted as part of the text of the new Security Council resolution. An Iranian official with whom I met on July 9 acknowledged that the United States would merely have to make a complaint claiming Iran had seriously violated the agreement—and then, if necessary, veto a Security Council resolution extending the removal of sanctions—in order to achieve the snapback. The language of the new Security Council resolution, which was not released until July 20, confirmed that revelation.

The crucial factor in that outcome was that Lavrov had gone along with the US proposal, despite the fact that it deprived Russia of its veto power on a very important geopolitical issue. The Iranian official revealed that the Russian foreign minister had sought to play down Moscow’s concession on snapback by suggesting that the United States would have to write an official report to the Security Council to justify its demand. The Iranians did not find that explanation persuasive, and they suspected that a side agreement had been reached between Kerry and Lavrov. “There are very few interests that are above the veto,” the Iranian official remarked.

The Iranians were displeased by the Russian move, but believed in the end that they could not reject the entire agreement on account of that issue. Also, as an Iranian official observed in a conversation on July 5, the Iranians knew that Iran could respond to any US move to re-impose sanctions by carrying out Iran’s own “snapback”—that is, by reversing some of the reductions and restrictions in its enrichment program to which it agreed.

As soon as Lavrov left town on July 6, the Obama administration and its negotiating partners began to slow the talks down. The Iranian official with whom I met on July 9 described a process that had begun the previous morning: “We negotiate with Americans, then they have to negotiate with their allies, and then they come back with something totally new.” The other two Western Security Council allies (the United Kingdom and France) suddenly had their own red lines on the remaining issues, he said.

The result was that the United States spent very little time negotiating with Iran on the two crucial days before the July 9 midnight deadline. Kerry had spent only half an hour with Zarif on July 9, the Iranian official said. The Iranian delegation was convinced that the Obama administration had decided not to try to make the deadline, in order to fend off the accusation that Obama and Kerry were too ready to make concessions in order to beat that deadline.

While Lavrov was attending a BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) summit in Russia on July 8–10, he called for lifting the arms embargo on Iran “as soon as possible” and said, “We will support the choices that Iran’s negotiators make.” Upon his return, however, Lavrov agreed to a compromise on the conventional arms issue that the Iranians had hoped to avoid. It required that a state wishing to provide conventional arms to Iran must obtain advance approval from the Security Council on a “case-by-case basis” for a period of five years. That formulation effectively keeps an arms embargo in place for another five years.

On the other hand, Iran could claim a minor victory on the issue of its ballistic-missile program. The language called on Iran “not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons” for a period of eight years, or until the IAEA submits a report declaring Tehran’s nuclear program entirely peaceful. But Iran could rightly point out that the provision ended what had been a meaningless ban, because its ballistic missiles were not designed for nuclear weapons.

A Longer-Term Perspective

This account of the final round of negotiations highlights the fact that the issues remaining to be resolved in Vienna were far less significant than the Obama administration had publicly suggested. In fact, it indicates that they were turned into political issues by the Israel lobby and Congressional Republicans.

The Obama administration’s adoption of a tough posture on all three issues decided in the first few days of the round—the timing of sanctions lifting, the “possible military dimensions” issue, and the issue of access to Iranian military sites—obscured the reality that it knew all of them were in the process of being resolved, if not already resolved. And the terms of access for the IAEA had become such a hot-button issue in US domestic politics that Obama decided to score additional points by issuing a stern warning to Iran, even though Washington and Iran had already reached agreement on it.

The final set of issues, the ones related to Security Council resolutions on the snapback of sanctions and on an arms embargo and the Iranian missile program, were also far more important in terms of domestic US politics than they were in regard to their impact on Iran’s compliance regarding its nuclear obligations or on the regional geopolitics. Iranian compliance was not dependent on unilateral US power to trigger the snapback of sanctions, but insisting on that mechanism was deemed necessary to the administration’s domestic political strategy. And the continuation of the arms embargo and of language accusing Iran of having a missile program intended for delivery of nuclear weapons had no practical impact on Iranian policy.

For all the high drama surrounding the supposedly difficult negotiations on these issues, for the Obama administration, the struggle in Vienna was more with domestic political foes of the agreement than with Iran. •

The Nation

September 7, 2015 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The”Possible Military Dimensions”Bomb That Could Blow Up the Iran Deal

The United States and Iran may have agreed on a vague framework for resolving remaining issues between them, including the lifting of sanctions, but the final stage of the negotiations will bring a diplomatic confrontation over the sequence and timing of lifting sanctions.

And the most difficult issue in the coming talks will be how the "Possible Military Dimensions" or "PMD" – the allegations of Iranian nuclear weapons work that have been at the center of the entire Iran nuclear crisis for several years – is to be linked to lifting certain UN Security Council sanctions.

On that linkage Iran will insist that its cooperation in providing access to the International Atomic Energy Agency must be reciprocated with the lifting of certain sanctions on an agreed-upon timetable, regardless of how long the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) takes to make up its mind and what judgment it renders, according to a source in close contact with the Iranian negotiating team.

The US "fact sheet" on the "parameters" of an agreement says, "All past United Nations Security Council resolutions on the Iran nuclear issue will be lifted simultaneously with the completion by Iran of nuclear related activities addressing all key concerns," and the list that follows includes "PMD."

However, nothing was officially agreed on in Lausanne on how Iranian cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the PMD issue would be linked to sanctions relief, according to the source close to the Iranian negotiators. But the source said that an informal understanding was reached that the linkage would involve the lifting of UN Security Council sanctions directly involving Iran’s imports for its nuclear and missile programs.

Iran is prepared to cooperate to complete the IAEA investigation of past allegations, the source said, but will demand concrete limits that provide assurances that the process will not be prolonged indefinitely.

Iran continues to insist that the evidence being used to impugn its intentions was "manufactured." Nevertheless, Iran "would be ready to give access to the IAEA on PMD even though that goes beyond NPT [Nonproliferation Treaty]," the source told Truthout.

But the source said Iran would not agree to make the lifting of those UN sanctions contingent on any IAEA judgment about the PMD issue. Instead, Iran will demand a list in advance of everything the IAEA wants. "We would give the IAEA access to everything on the list," said the source.

Once the IAEA completed its visits and its environmental sampling, however, Iran will consider that the process is finished. "We don’t care what the IAEA analysis would be or how long it took," the source said. "What Iranians cannot accept is that [the PMD issue] becomes an indefinite instrument for the Israelis, because they want to find out about Iranian capability and ask for this or that military site and a new inspection."

The negotiations on the PMD-sanctions linkage will be part of a broader set of negotiations in which Iran will insist on a detailed set of arrangements on sanctions relief in return for each of its concessions in the agreement, according to the source. "Each of the elements listed in the US fact sheet must have a step-by-step plan with a timetable and proportionate reciprocation," said the source.

Obama Under Pressure He Helped Create

The Obama administration has been under heavy pressure from the Israelis and their supporters in Washington to insist that Iran confess to having carried out nuclear weapons research and development as a condition for sanctions relief.

That pressure is the result of several years of news media coverage that has treated allegations that Iran carried out research and development on nuclear weapons, published by the IAEA in 2011, as established fact. The media have constantly repeated the theme that Iran has been "stonewalling" the IAEA to cover up its past nuclear weapons experiments.

Absent from the media narrative is the fact that the allegations that the IAEA is demanding that Iran explain are all based on intelligence that is now known to have come from Israel and which the IAEA itself suspected of being fabricated, from 2005 to 2009.

But the Obama administration itself helped to make PMD a hot button issue in American politics. It made Iran’s alleged refusal to cooperate with the IAEA investigation of the purported intelligence alleging an Iranian nuclear weapons research and development program the rationale for imposing punishing sanctions on Iran.

The administration has been wary of demanding an actual admission of guilt, which it knew was unrealistic, but it has been unwilling to completely dismiss the position of the Israelis and their followers either. Last November a "senior Western official" told Reuters that the United States and the other five powers would try to "be creative" in finding a formula to satisfy both those who were insisting that Iran must "come clean" about its nuclear past and those who said it was not realistic to expect a confession.

In an April 8 interview with Secretary of State John Kerry, the host of "PBS NewsHour" Judy Woodruff asserted that the IAEA wanted Iran to "disclose past military-related activities" but that Iran was "increasingly looking like it’s not going to do this." Woodruff then asked, "Is the US prepared to accept that?"

Without challenging the premise that Iran is expected to "disclose past military activities," Kerry responded, "No. They have to do it. It will be done."

Fabricated Intelligence and IAEA Investigation

The George W. Bush administration pressed documents supposedly from the laptop computer of an Iran scientist involved in an Iranian nuclear weapons research program on the IAEA in mid-2005. But Mohamed ElBaradei, then IAEA director general, refused to regard the documents as legitimate evidence because they had never been authenticated, and Bush administration officials refused to answer questions about their origins. In his memoirs published in 2011, ElBaradei writes, "The problem was, no one knew if any of this was real.

Information now available shows that the documents were created in Israel. According to a senior German office official, those documents were given to Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, in 2004 by the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), the armed exile Iranian opposition group that had been an Israeli client organization for several years.

A popular Israeli history of the most successful covert operations by Israel’s Mossad, originally published in Hebrew in Israel, asserts that Mossad provided some of the documents to the MEK that later become the centerpiece of the case against Iran.

ElBaradei also reveals in his memoirs that the IAEA received another series of purported Iranian documents directly from Israel in summer 2009. Among them was a two-page document in Farsi describing a four-year program to produce a neutron initiator for a fission chain reaction. The former IAEA chief inspector in Iraq, Robert Kelley has recalled that ElBaradei found that document to be lacking credibility because it had no chain of custody, no identifiable source, and no official markings or anything else that could establish its authenticity. But ElBaradei’s successor as IAEA director general, Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano, gave the IAEA’s imprimatur to the entire collection as well as the earlier set of documents in an annex to the November 2011 report. After his election, Amano assured US officials that he was "solidly in the US court" in his handling of the Iran file.

The IAEA has never revealed that Israel was the source of the latter set of documents. The IAEA justified its decision to keep the identity of the member states that provided intelligence secret by citing the alleged necessity to protect "sources and methods." The decision to maintain silence on the source has served to shield both Israel and the IAEA itself from questions about the obvious political motives behind the purported intelligence.

The other major purported intelligence find published by the IAEA was the claim from Israel that Iran had installed a large steel explosives containment cylinder at its military base in Parchin in 2000 for nuclear weapons-related testing. But no corroborating evidence has ever been produced, and Robert Kelley has challenged the IAEA’s adoption of the Israeli intelligence claim on the grounds it was technically implausible.

Relations between Iran and the IAEA on cooperation over the PMD issue have gone through three major phases. In a series of meetings in early 2012, Iran and the IAEA were close to reaching agreement on a framework for Iranian cooperation. Iran agreed on an IAEA visit to Parchin, where the bomb test cylinder was said to have been located, as part of the process. But the talks broke down over the IAEA’s insistence that the investigation would never have an end point, and that the Agency would have the right to return to any question or site, even after Iran had provided the necessary access and other cooperation.

A second phase of relations began when Iran and the IAEA reached agreement on a "Framework for Cooperation" in February 2014. Iran agreed to provide information and access in regard to a list of PMD issues, starting with the "Exploding Bridgewire" (EBW) issue.

But after Iran provided documentary evidence to show that its research in the field was for its oil and gas industry and not for nuclear weapons, Amano refused to acknowledge publicly that Iran had discredited one of the arguments about the intelligence documents.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akhbar Salehi, claimed that the IAEA had promised in the agreement to close issues once Iran had provided required information, and the IAEA did not challenge his claim. Amano insisted, however, that the IAEA would not issue any assessment until it had completed its investigation of all of the issues.

Iran apparently concluded from that experience that the IAEA would keep Iran on the hook as long as the United States and its allies wanted to maintain leverage over Iran. The Obama administration has now confirmed that conclusion by holding the lifting of sanctions hostage to Iran’s "cooperation" on PMD.

US officials have never explained how they would expect Iran to satisfy the IAEA if the intelligence at issue was indeed fabricated.

Truthout,

April 18, 2015 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Terror Bombing, the Prosecutor, the Spy and Mossad

The apparent murder of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman last month has given rise to two opposing theories. One is that the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was responsible for Nisman’s death, to prevent him from indicting the president and foreign minister for an alleged conspiracy to lift the accusation against Iran for the 1994 terror bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and injured 300.

The other theory, from Kirchner government officials, is that it was the most powerful figure in the country’s intelligence service, Horacio Antonio Stiuso, better known as "Jaime Stiuso," who had the motive to kill Nisman. The argument holds that having "manipulated" Nisman to bring the indictment against Kirchner and foreign minister Hector Timerman – and then having been fired from his position as chief of operations of the intelligence agency – Stiuso hoped to get revenge against Kirchner by provoking suspicion that her administration was responsible for the murder.

However Nisman died, his fate was deeply intertwined with that of Stiuso. From the time Nisman took over the AMIA investigation in 2004, he relied heavily on the shadowy intelligence official for secret information in putting together his indictment of Iran for the bombing. The story of Nisman’s reliance on Stiuso, which has shaped the narrative on the terror bombing, reveals both the enormous power that Stiuso has wielded over that narrative as well as the overweening influence of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, on Stiuso’s position on the issue.

It also shows how the crucial elements of that narrative were falsified.

"The Man Whom Everyone Fears"

Jaime Stiuso entered what was known for decades as the Secretaría de Inteligencia de Estado, or SIDE, in 1972 at the age of 18. When the "dirty war" began in 1976, SIDE became an arm of the Argentine military dictatorship, deployed against domestic leftist enemies. Thousands were killed, and thousands more disappeared during the war, which targeted Jewish intellectuals based on an anti-Semitic theory prevalent in the Argentine military and intelligence services.

In 1980, in the midst of that repressive war, Stiuso joined the counterintelligence directorate and became an expert in the use of telephone wiretaps. He rose to become head of counterintelligence. But Stiuso’s expertise was not only applied against those considered subversives, foreign spies and criminals. Over the years, he began to acquire a reputation for keeping files on large numbers of prominent figures in Argentine politics and society and for making clandestine videos of political figures in compromised situations.

In July 2004, then-Minister of Interior Gustavo Beliz learned about details of illegal activities allegedly carried out by Stiuso. Beliz met with then-President Nestor Kirchner about what he had learned. But one of the things Beliz had discovered about Stiuso’s operations was that Kirchner’s 2003 presidential campaign had been financed in large part by secret funds from the $100 million that had been added to SIDE’s budget that year, according to an account by Jorge Rosales in La Nacion, Argentina’s leading conservative daily.

Within a few hours of the meeting with the president, Beliz was ordered to sign a letter of resignation. But Beliz shocked the entire country by going on a television show to announce that he had been dismissed from the government. He went on to denounce SIDE as a "parallel security ministry." He said the intelligence agency had become the secretariat of a "secret police state" over which there were no controls.

Beliz held up a black-and-white photograph of Stiuso – the only image of him ever seen by the public up to that time – and referred to him as "the real power in the SIDE" and "the man whom everyone fears."

Well before the AMIA terror bombing, Stiuso had begun tapping Iranian embassy phones and carrying out systematic surveillance of Iranian diplomats and the new Iranian head of the local mosque in Buenos Aires, Mohsen Rabbani. And Stiuso was sharing all the data he collected on the Iranians with Mossad in Israel, according to the author of the most detailed account of Stiuso’s career, SIDE, La Argentina Secreta, by journalist Gerardo Young of the daily Clarin.

After the July 1994 explosion, Stiuso had control over the AMIA investigation. But the three top US Embassy officials and the head of the FBI’s Hezbollah office, James Bernazzani, all told this writer in 2007 that SIDE had found no evidence of Iranian involvement in the bombing in the first few years. In 1996, the lead role in the investigation at SIDE was taken away from Stiuso and given to another group, called "Sala Patria," which had been cooperating with CIA and Mossad on trying to penetrate what were assumed to be terrorist cells in the "Triple Frontier" area where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet.

Responsibility for the AMIA case was shifted back to Stiuso, however, after an internal power struggle between counterintelligence and the "Sala Patria" group resulted in the firing of Patricio Pfinnen, the "Sala Patria" official who had been in charge of the investigation, in December 2001. "Stiuso regained control over all the files," Gerardo Young told me in a 2007 interview.

"Boy, You Are Going to Work With Him"

In September 2004, after four suspects accused of being part of the AMIA bombing plot had been acquitted, President Kirchner created a new special prosecutor’s unit for the AMIA investigation and named General Prosecutor Nisman to lead the unit.

But it was understood from the beginning that Nisman would take his cues from Stiuso. In a meeting with Nisman and Stiuso, later reported in the Argentine press, Kirchner pointed to Stiuso and told Nisman, "Boy, you are going to work with him."

Stiuso had worked closely with both the CIA and Mossad, but Mossad had been more aggressive in providing intelligence implicating the Iranians in the bombing. And, as Young observed in his book, Stiuso "had a weakness for Mossad."

In 2002, Stiuso had begun compiling a 1,000-page final report on the AMIA investigation, according to Young, based in crucial respects on intelligence supplied by Mossad.

The most important information he got from Mossad was a series of reports claiming that the "suicide bomber" was a Lebanese member of Hezbollah, Ibrahim Hussein Berro. Stiuso testified in the AMIA court case in September 2003 that as early as 1995, an unidentified "collateral" intelligence service had given SIDE information that an individual named "Brru" had traveled from Lebanon to the "triple frontier" area and had participated in the AMIA bombing.

That "collateral" service was Mossad. Nisman used a lot of the details he had gotten from Stiuso’s report. Young told this writer in 2007 that a Mossad agent had revealed to him shortly before our conversation that the Israeli service had been unhappy about the intelligence relating to Berro that had been included in Nisman’s report. "There was a lot of information they had transmitted [to SIDE] that they wouldn’t want in a public report," Young said.

Stiuso testified that information from the "collateral" agency had prompted SIDE to send a spy to get more detailed information in Lebanon on the AMIA bombing. The spy, who apparently had ties to Mossad, claimed to SIDE officials that a former Hezbollah militant had revealed to him that Berro, a Hezbollah member who had been reported killed in an attack on Israel troops in Southern Lebanon, had actually been killed carrying out the AMIA bombing.

But the creator of "Sala Patria," Patricio Pfinnen, who had been in charge of that operation before being fired in late 2001, told the court that when SIDE got back to the spy with questions about what he called "gaps" in the story, it "fell apart." He suggested that the spy may have been "lying to us" and declared, "I have my doubts about [Berro] being [the] person who was immolated."

Stiuso had chosen to ignore the questionable end of the operation and instead accepted Mossad’s claims about Berro. One of those was a story that Mossad had a recording of the telephone call Berro had made to his family shortly before carrying out the bombing, according to reports by Haaretz military affairs correspondent Ze’ev Schiff and El Diario del Juicio in Buenos Aires.

That story would imply that Mossad had been sitting on the recording of a call by the suicide bomber to his family for nearly a decade rather than turning it over to the Argentine prosecutor from the beginning.

Nisman nevertheless cited Stiuso as the authority for the conclusion in his 2006 request for the arrest of senior Iranian officials that the bombing had been carried out by Berro.

The other sensational claim that Nisman’s report made was purported evidence that the entire senior Iranian government leadership, including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, had made the decision on the AMIA bombing at a mid-August 1993 meeting. Nisman quoted court testimony by four officials of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (People’s Mujahedeen, or MEK), the exile Iranian organization trying to use the West to overthrow the regime.

The MEK officials claimed to know the exact day, hour, place and agenda of the meeting (although two different dates were mentioned). But an exile group, which had been at war with the Islamic regime for 13 years, obviously was not in a position to obtain such information. And the MEK had long been a client of the Mossad, which the Israelis used to put out information about Iran that it did not want to be linked to Israel itself. And Mossad leaked to Haaretz the claim that it had its own account of that meeting.

Nisman and Stiuso turn against Kirchner

Nisman adopted the Israeli accusation of Iranian responsibility for the AMIA bombing, at least in part, because President Nestor Kirchner’s government had decided to go along with Bush administration pressure to blame the bombing on Iran. A May 2008 WikiLeaks cable reveals that, when Nisman was preparing a request for the arrest of former President Carlos Menem for allegedly covering up the "local connection" with the bombing, both an Argentine foreign ministry official and a political adviser to the umbrella organization of the Jewish community, DAIA (Delegacion de Asociaciones Israelitas) observed that Nisman was doing so because he was "completely beholden" to Kirchner’s chief of staff, Alberto Fernandez. The US Embassy agreed with that assessment.

But having tied his career to the accusation of Iranian responsibility, Nisman became passionately attached to that position. When Fernandez de Kirchner reached an agreement with Iran in 2013 for a "truth commission" on AMIA, Nisman reportedly viewed the agreement as a dismissal of his 900-page indictment of Iran. His first response was to release a 502-page report arguing that Iran had been building a network of terrorist cells throughout Latin America, in which the central evidence was the tendentious claim that Iran had been directly involved in a half-baked plot to blow up fuel tanks at JFK airport.

Stiuso, who had loyally served Nestor Kirchner up to that moment, also saw a threat to his own career. He had been tapping the phones of everyone who had contact with the Iranians, including government officials, and he made the transcripts available to Nisman. So for the second time in his career, Nisman began drafting a long, rambling indictment based on material from Stiuso. This time, he aimed at showing that Kirchner and Timerman had secretly reached an agreement with Iran to clear the Iranians of the AMIA bombing. Like his 2006 indictment of Iranian officials, it contained many pages – quotes from the wiretaps that didn’t prove his thesis.

In late 2014, the Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner government learned about the Stiuso-Nisman collaboration and fired Stiuso and two other top SIDE officials known to be allied with him. The stage was set for Nisman’s mysterious death on January 18.

The Kirchner government’s argument that Stiuso "manipulated" Nisman is far too pat. Nisman used Stiuso’s information because it suited his interests. Whether the interests of Nisman and Stiuso ever diverged before January 18 remains to be seen.

Truthout,

Gareth Porter (@GarethPorter) is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February 2014.

February 24, 2015 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Nisman Murder and the AMIA Terror Bombing: A Tangled Thread

The evidence already available about Argentine Prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s death from a gunshot to the head creates a strong presumption that he was murdered. He was about to present publicly his accusation that President Christina Fernández de Kirchner and her foreign minister, Héctor Timerman conspired to absolve Iran of the 1994 AMIA bombing and lift the Interpol red notices on the accused Iranians.

And it was Nisman’s 2006 request for the arrest of six former senior Iranian officials for the bombing that prompted his push for those red notices. In the context of Argentine political culture, with its long experience of impunity for crimes committed by the powerful, the circumstances of his death have led to a general conviction that the government must have been behind his murder.

But there is good reason to be cautious about that assumption. Nisman’s case against Kirchner was problematic. The central accusation in his affidavit, made 96 times, according to press accounts, was that Kirchner and Timerman had sought to revoke the Interpol arrest warrants against the former Iranian officials. But Ronald K. Noble, the secretary general of Interpol for fifteen years until last November, denied Nisman’s accusation. Noble declared, “I can say with 100 percent certainty, not a scintilla of doubt, that Foreign Minister Timerman and the Argentine government have been steadfast, persistent and unwavering that the Interpol’s red notices be issued, remain in effect and not be suspend or removed.”

Noble’s denial raises an obvious question: Why would the Kirchner government, knowing that Nisman’s main claim could be easily refuted, have any reason to kill him on the eve of the presentation of his case? Why give those seeking to discredit the government’s policy on the AMIA bombing the opportunity to shift the issue from the facts of the case to the presumption of officially sponsored assassination?

The Kirchner-Timerman negotiation of an agreement with Iran in January 2013 for an “international truth commission” on the AMIA bombing that would have sent five respected international judicial figures to Iran to question the accused Iranians. That was a way of getting around the Iranian refusal to subject former high-ranking officials to Argentine justice. But Nisman was trying to prove that was an illicit cover-up for a cynical deal with Iran. He considered it “a betrayal of the country and his work”, according to his friend, Gustavo Perednik.

Nisman’s “criminal complaint” against Kirchner and Timerman claimed the government’s negotiations with Iran involved a “sophisticated criminal plan” to make a deal with one of the Iranians the prosecutor accused of the AMIA bombing, former cultural attaché Mohsen Rabbani. It asserted that Argentina promised Iran that it would lift the Interpol notices on the six Iranian in exchange for an “oil for grains” deal.

Nisman’s accusation was based on snippets of transcripts from 5,000 hours of wiretaps of conversations of allies of Kirchner government that have now been made public by a judge. One of the excerpts quotes Rabbani himself, in a conversation with an ally of Fernandez, as saying:

Iran was Argentina’s main buyer and now it’s buying almost nothing. That could change. Here [in Iran] there are some sectors of the government who’ve told me they are willing to sell oil to Argentina … and also to buy weapons.

The statement proves nothing, however, except that that Rabbani knew some Iranian officials who were interested in oil sales to Argentina. No evidence of Rabbani being involved in negotiating on behalf of Iran is suggested in the Nisman document, and the person at the other end of the line was not an Argentine official. So the conversation did not involve anyone who even had direct knowledge of the actual negotiations between the governments of Iran and Argentina.

The same thing applies to the other individuals who have been identified as speaking on the wiretaps in favour of such a deal. Those individuals are friendly with officials of the Kirchner government and friendly with Iran, but the actual negotiations were carried out by senior officials of the foreign ministries of Iran and Argentina, not by private individuals. The distinction between knowledge and hearsay is a fundamental principle in judicial processes for a very good reason.

The presentation of facts or allegations as proof of guilt, even though they proved nothing of the sort, was also a pattern that permeated Nisman’s 2006 “Request for Arrests” in the 1994 AMIA bombing. Contrary to the general reverence in the news media for his indictment of senior Iranian officials for their alleged responsibility for the bombing, his case was built on a massive accumulation of highly dubious and misleading claims, from the “irrefutable evidence” of Rabbani’s participation in planning to the identification of the alleged suicide car bomber. This writer’s investigation of the case over several months, which included interviews with US diplomats who had served in the Embassy in Buenos Aires in the years following the AMIA bombing as well as with the FBI official detailed to work on the case in 1996-97, concluded that the Argentine investigators never found any evidence of Iranian involvement.

Nisman asserted that the highest Iranian officials had decided to carry out the bombing at a meeting on 12 or 14 August, 1993, primarily on the testimony of four officials of the Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK), the Iranian exile terrorist group that was openly dedicated to the overthrow of the Iranian regime. The four MEK officials claimed to know the precise place, date and time and the three-point agenda of the meeting.

When US Ambassador, Anthony Wayne, meeting with Nisman in November 2006, asked him about Argentine press reports that had criticised the document for using the testimony of “unreliable witnesses,” Nisman responded, according to the Embassy reporting cable, that “several of the witnesses were “former senior Iraqi [sic] officials, e.g. Bani Sadr, with direct knowledge of events surrounding the conception of the attacks.”

Nisman’s suggestion that former Iranian president Abolhassen Banisadr had “direct knowledge” related to the AMIA bombings was a stunningly brazen falsehood. Banisadr had been impeached by the Iranian legislature in June 1981 and had fled to Paris the following month – thirteen years before the bombing.

Nisman also cited the testimony of Abolghassem Mesbahi, who called himself a “defector” from the Iranian intelligence service, that Iranian officials had made such a decision sometime in August 1993. But Mesbahi was known by US intelligence analysts as a “serial fabricator”, who had also told an obviously false story about Iranian involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Nisman failed to mention, moreover, that Mesbahi had given a secret 100-page deposition to Argentine investigators in 2000 in Mexico in which he had claimed the planning for the attack had begun in 1992.

Nisman’s was so convinced of Iran’s guilt that he was ready to see almost any fact as supporting evidence, even when there was an obvious reason for doubting its relevance. For example, he cited Rabbani’s shopping for a van “similar to the one that exploded in front of the AMIA building a few months later.” In fact, however, as I reported in 2008, the Argentine investigation files include the original intelligence report on the surveillance of Rabbani showing that Rabbani’s visit to the car dealer was not “a few months” before the bombing, but a full fifteen months earlier.

Despite the Argentine intelligence following Rabbani’s every move and tapping his telephones for all those months, Nisman cites nothing indicating that Rabbani did anything indicating his involvement in preparations for a terror bombing. The FBI official who assisted the investigation told me in a November 2007 interview that the use of phone metadata to suggest that Rabbani was in touch with an “operational group” nothing but “speculation”, and said that neither he nor officials in Washington had taken it seriously as evidence or Rabbani’s involvement.

The fact that Nisman’s two indictments related to Iran and AMIA were extremely tendentious obviously does not dispose of the question of who killed him. But whatever the reason for his being killed, it wasn’t because he had revealed irrefutable truths about AMIA and Argentine government policy.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book is Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He can be contacted at porter.gareth50@gmail.com.

The Middle East Eye by Gareth Porter,

February 8, 2015 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Four ways the West got the Iran nuclear issue wrong

First denying Iran’s nuclear rights and then using suspect intelligence to build a false picture of its programme

For more than three decades, the United States and its European allies have committed one fundamental error after another in the process of creating a commonly held narrative that Iran was secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. The story of how suspicions of the Iranian programme hardened into convictions is a cautionary tale of political and institutional interests systematically distorting the judgments of both policymakers and intelligence analysts.

Too many of these basic errors have been committed along the way to cover them all in a single article. But four major failures of policymaking and intelligence represent the broad outlines of this systematic problem.

1. Denial of Iranian rights, followed by denial of the truth

The first failure, which set in train all the others, involved the US trying to strangle the nuclear programme of the Islamic Republic in its cradle and then blithely acting as though it bore no responsibility for the resulting shift in Iranian nuclear policy. It all started with a decision by the Reagan administration early in the Iran-Iraq war in 1983 to put diplomatic pressure on its allies to stop all nuclear cooperation with Iran. France was pressed to forbid a French-based multilateral consortium from providing the nuclear fuel that Iran had counted on for its lone nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

The US State Department acknowledged at the time that it had no evidence that Iran was working on or even wanted nuclear weapons. That US effort to choke off any nuclear assistance to Iran thus represented an extremely serious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guaranteed Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology.

Not surprisingly Iran responded to that US denial of its nuclear rights by defying US wishes and acquiring the technology to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel itself on the black market and later through negotiations with China and Russia. US aggressiveness toward Iran’s nuclear programme had backfired.

But instead of recognising that it had made a serious error, Washington compounded the original policy blunder by treating the Iranian response as prima facie evidence of nuclear weapons intent. In 1995 Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in the course of explaining an order by President Bill Clinton banning all US trade and investment in Iran, accused Iran of having an “organised structure dedicated to acquiring and developing nuclear weapons.” That was an obvious reference to the Iranian efforts to acquire centrifuge and other enrichment technology. The Clinton administration thus acted as though there was no relationship between Iran’s interest in obtaining gas centrifuge technology and the US denial policy that preceded it.

2. The intelligence goes wrong

The CIA and other Western intelligence agencies began to drift away from reality on the Iran nuclear issue in the early 1990s, when Western intelligence agencies were gleefully poring over intercepted telexes from Sharif University in Tehran seeking various “dual use” technologies – those that could be used either for a nuclear programme or for non-nuclear applications. They had found that the telex number on many of the messages was that of the Physics Research Centre, which was known to do research for the Iranian defence ministry. That was enough to convince them that Iran was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons programme.

The telexes ultimately turned out to be false positives, however. In late 2007 and early 2008, Iran turned over detailed documentation showing that every one of the “dual use” procurement items sought in those telexes had been requested by various faculties of Sharif University for faculty and student research. And the Physics Research Centre’s telex number was on the telexes because the former head of the organisation was teaching at the university and had been asked to help in the procurement of the items. The intelligence analysts had wrongly interpreted the inherently ambiguous “dual use” evidence as confirming pre-existing suspicions of Iran’s intentions.

That analytical failure was a template for a series of four intelligence assessments of the Iranian nuclear programme by the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center and later by the US intelligence community as a whole that falsely concluded that Iran had an active nuclear weapons development programme as of the time of the assessment. That string of false positives raises serious questions about the 2007 US national intelligence estimate by a team of analysts that had just repeated the same mistake in a draft estimate only a few months earlier.

3. Ignoring the Fatwa against chemical weapons

The belief of Western governments that Iran must have pursued nuclear weapons has been based on their ignorance of a pivotal historical episode that should have caused them to question that belief. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Saddam’s troops attacked Iran with chemical weapons many times, killing 20,000 Iranians and severely injuring 100,000. Yet Iran never retaliated with its own chemical weapons, as Joost Hiltermann’s A Poisonous Affair, the authoritative source on chemical attacks in that war, has documented.

That fact poses a fundamental challenge to the Western narrative on the Iran nuclear issue, because there is no credible explanation for the Iranian failure to retaliate with chemical weapons other than the fact that supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forbidden the possession and use of all weapons of mass destruction as illicit in Islam. The Revolutionary Guards acted on their own to acquire the capability to produce mustard gas weapons, as the wartime Iranian Minister for military procurement has confirmed in a recent interview. But his account of his meetings with supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini also confirms that Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against such weapons early in the war and repeated it in 1987.

The implications of that historical episode for an understanding of the politics of WMD policy in Iran are obviously far-reaching. It lends strong credibility to the Iranian claim that the current supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons is an absolute bar to Iran possessing such weapons. But the news media has continued to dismiss the problem by clinging to an old narrative, which was based on false information that Iran not only had possessed chemical weapons but also had used them.

4. Refusing to acknowledge the weaponisation evidence is tainted

For nearly a decade, the international politics of the Iran nuclear issue have revolved around intelligence documents and reports of Iran nuclear weapons work. A 1,000-page cache of documents that surfaced in 2004 showed the redesign of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to accommodate a nuclear weapon and high explosives experiments that could only be used for nuclear weapons. More incriminating intelligence documents followed in 2008-09. The IAEA has now been investigating them for nine years.

But Western governments, abetted by compliant news media coverage, have chosen to ignore the considerable evidence that these documents were of very dubious origins. Contrary to the cover story that the documents were passed on to Western intelligence by a participant in a covert Iranian programme or by a German spy, a former senior German foreign office official has now revealed that the German intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, obtained them from a sometime source who was a member of the Iranian exile terrorist organisation Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK). The MEK was then serving Israel’s Mossad as a means of laundering alleged intelligence, so it is safe to assume that the documents came from Israel.

IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei (1997-2009), who insisted that the documents had not been authenticated, recalled in his memoirs, “No-one knew if any of this was real.” Against the wishes of the Bush administration, he refused to use them as evidence against Iran.

Major contradictions between information in the papers and the independently verifiable timelines of Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes indicated that the authors were not Iranian specialists. The re-entry vehicle depicted in the studies, for example, was not the one that Iran was redesigning at the time and that was revealed to the world only after the documents were handed over.

El Baradei also revealed that a subsequent series of intelligence documents, which included the claim that Iran had installed a large cylinder at Parchin to test atomic weapons designs, had been passed on to the IAEA directly by Israel. That intelligence proved to be equally problematic: former IAEA nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley found the Parchin cylinder claim technically implausible.

The US government and its Western allies have all closed their eyes, however, to the evidence that these documents were designed to justify US action by the United States against the Islamic republic. The political convenience of the accepted narrative of the Iran nuclear issue has continued to suppress any active interest in learning the truth.

– Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national security policy. His latest book, “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” was published in February 2014.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Middle East Eye

January 12, 2015 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

How the Iran-Nuke Crisis Was Hyped

A prized weapon in the U.S. geopolitical arsenal is “information warfare,” the ability to promote false or misleading information to heighten the pressure on an adversary, often using supposedly neutral UN agencies as a front, as may have happened on Iran’s nuclear program, reports Gareth Porter.

In a critique of the handling of the Iran file by the International Atomic Energy Agency, former IAEA Director General Han Blix has called for greater skepticism about the intelligence documents and reports alleging Iranian nuclear weapons work and warned that they may be used to put diplomatic pressure on Tehran.

In an interview with this writer in his Stockholm apartment late last month, Blix, who headed the IAEA from 1981 to 1997, also criticized the language repeated by the IAEA under its current director general, Yukiya Amano, suggesting that Iran is still under suspicion of undeclared nuclear activity.

Blix, who clashed with U.S. officials when he was head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from 2000 to 2003, said he has long been skeptical of intelligence that has been used to accuse Iraq and Iran of having active nuclear-weapons programs.

“I’ve often said you have as much disinformation as information” on alleged weaponization efforts in those countries, Blix said.

Referring to the allegations of past Iranian nuclear weapons research that have been published in IAEA reports, Blix said, “Something that worries me is that these accusations that come from foreign intelligence agencies can be utilized by states to keep Iran under suspicion.”

Such allegations, according to Blix, “can be employed as a tactic to keep the state in a suspect light — to keep Iran on the run.” The IAEA, he said, “should be cautious and not allow itself to be drawn into such a tactic.”

Blix warned that compromising the independence of the IAEA by pushing it to embrace unverified intelligence was not in the true interests of those providing the intelligence.

The IAEA Member States providing the intelligence papers to the IAEA “have a long-term interest in an international service that seeks to be independent,” said Blix. “In the Security Council they can pursue their own interest, but the [IAEA] dossier has to be as objective as possible.”

In 2005, the George W. Bush administration gave the IAEA a large cache of documents purporting to derive from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons research and development program from 2001 to 2003. Israel provided a series of documents and intelligence reports on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work in 2008 and 2009.

Blix’s successor as IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, recalled in his 2011 memoirs having doubts about the authenticity of both sets of intelligence documents. ElBaradei resisted pressure from the United States and its European allies in 2009 to publish an “annex” to a regular IAEA report based on those unverified documents.

But Amano agreed to do so, and the annex on “possible military dimensions” of the Iranian nuclear program was published in November 2011. During the current negotiations with Iran, the P5+1 (U.S., UK, Russia, China, France plus Germany) has taken the position that Iran must explain the intelligence documents and reports described in the annex.

The provenance of the largest part of the intelligence documents — the so-called “laptop documents” — was an unresolved question for years after they were first reported in 2004 and 2005. But former senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt confirmed in 2013 that the Iranian exile opposition group, the Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK), gave the original set of documents to the German intelligence service (BND) in 2004.

The MEK has been reported by Seymour Hersh, Connie Bruck, and a popular history of the Mossad’s covert operations to have been a client of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, serving to “launder” intelligence that Mossad did not want to have attributed to Israel.

Blix has been joined by two other former senior IAEA officials in criticizing the agency for its uncritical presentation of the intelligence documents cited in the November 2011 annex. Robert Kelley, the head of the Iraq team under both Blix and ElBaradei, and Tariq Rauf, the former head of the Agency’s Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office, have written that the annex employed “exaggeration, innuendo and careful choice of words” in presenting intelligence information from an unidentified Member State of the IAEA on the alleged cylinder at the Parchin military facility.

Blix said he is “critical” of the IAEA for the boilerplate language used in its reports on Iran that the Agency is “not in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities….”

Blix added that it is “erroneous” to suggest that the IAEA would be able to provide such assurances if Iran or any other state were more cooperative. As head of UNMOVIC, Blix recalled, “I was always clear that there could always be small things in a big geographical area that can be hidden, and you can never guarantee completely that there are no undeclared activities.”

“In Iraq we didn’t maintain there was nothing,” he said. “We said we had made 700 inspections at 500 sites and we had not seen anything.”

Blix emphasized that he was not questioning the importance of maximizing inspections, or of Iran’s ratification of the Additional Protocol. “I think the more inspections you can perform the smaller the residue of uncertainty,” he said.

Consortium News,

Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist and historian specializing in U.S. “national security” policy and was the recipient of the Gellhorn Prize for journalism in 2012. His latest book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. [This article first appeared at LobeLog.]

December 24, 2014 0 comment

Newer Posts

Older Posts