Gareth Porter

Guess who credits the Mossad with producing the ‘laptop documents?’

Evidence mounts pointing to the Mossad as the source of dubious claims about Iran’s uranium enrichment program contained in the ‘laptop documents’

In the United States and Europe, it is unchallenged in political and media circles that intelligence documents purporting to be from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program for which the IAEA long demanded an Iranian explanation are genuine.

Photo: Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Minister Rafi Eitan (2nd L), who was a member of the Mossad team that captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, look at objects displayed at an exhibition at the Knesset in Jerusalem on 12 December, 2011(AFP)

But evidence has continued to accumulate that the documents – sometimes called the “laptop documents” because they were said to have been on a laptop computer belonging to one of the participants in the program – were fabricated by Israel’s foreign intelligence agency (Mossad). We now know that the documents did not come from an Iranian participant in the alleged project, as the media were led to believe for years; they were turned over to German intelligence by the anti-regime Iranian terrorist organisation, Mujahedeen E Khalq, (MEK). I first reported this in 2008 and have now confirmed from an authoritative German source in my book on the Iran nuclear issue. The MEK was well known to have been a client of the Mossad, serving to launder Israeli intelligence claims that the Israelis did not want attributed to themselves.

Although it has never been mentioned in news media, former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General, Mohamed El Baradei recalled in his memoirs that he was doubtful of the authenticity of the documents. “No one knew if any of this was real,” he wrote in reference to the laptop documents. Another former senior IAEA official told me, “It just really didn’t add up. It made more sense that this information originated in another country.” And as I have detailed in articles and in my book, key documents in the collection bear clear indications of fabrication.

Support for that virtually unknown part of the Iran nuclear story has come from a surprising source: a popular Israeli account, celebrating the successes of the Mossad’s covert operations. “Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service,” first published in Hebrew in 2010, and then published in English in 2012, was Israel’s best-selling book for months in 2010. But not only does it acknowledge that it was indeed the MEK that delivered the documents, it also suggests that at least some of the documents came from the Mossad.

The co-authors of the book are far from critics of Israel’s policy toward Iran; One of the co-authors, Michael Bar-Zohar, is a well-connected former member of the Israeli Knesset and former paratrooper, who had previously written an authorised biography of Shimon Peres, as well as the biography of Isser Harel, the Mossad chief who presided over the kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann in Argentina.

Much of what Bar-Zohar chronicled in the book had already been reported earlier by Israeli journalists – especially Ronen Bergman of the daily Yedioth Ahronoth. In fact, Bergman accused Bar-Zohar of plagiarising his articles for much of the book, while changing only a few words.

But one thing that Bar-Zohar and co-author Nisham Mishal did not get from other Israeli journalists, was the role of the Mossad in regard to the laptop documents.

Although they do not flatly state that the Mossad was the source of the documents, they certainly lead the reader to that conclusion. They begin by establishing the fact that the MEK was fronting for the Mossad in its revelation in August 2002 of Iran’s first enrichment facility at Natanz. The CIA, they write, “appeared to believe that the Mossad and the British MI6 were feeding MEK intelligence they had obtained, using the Iranian opposition as a hopefully credible source”. And they explicitly confirm CIA’s suspicions. “According to Israeli sources,” they write, “It was, in fact, a watchful Mossad officer who had discovered the mammoth centrifuge installation at Natanz.”

Other sources, including Seymour Hersh and Connie Bruck have reported that the MEK got the intelligence on Natanz from the Israelis, but theirs is the first explicit acknowledgement attributed to an Israeli source that the MEK had revealed Natanz on the basis of Mossad intelligence. What the Israeli co-authors do not say is that the Mossad was simply guessing at the purpose of Natanz, which the MEK mistakenly called a “fuel fabrication” facility, rather than a centrifuge enrichment facility.

Turning to the laptop documents, they make it clear that western intelligence had indeed obtained the documents from the MEK and suggest that the MEK got them from somewhere else. “The dissidents wouldn’t say how they had gotten hold of the laptop,” they write. They again frame the question of the origins of those documents in terms of CIA suspicions. “[T]he skeptical Americans suspected that the documents had been only recently scanned into the computer,” they write. “They accused the Mossad of having slipped in some information obtained from our own sources – and passing it to the MEK leaders for delivery to the West."

Bar-Zohar and Mishal steer clear of any suggestion that the Mossad fabricated any documents, but their account leaves little doubt that they are convinced that the Mossad should be credited for the appearance of the documents. Their approach of referring to US suspicions, rather than stating it directly, appears to be a way of avoiding problems with Israeli military censors, who often clamp down on local reporting on sensitive issues while allowing references to foreign reports.

The authors further suggest that the Mossad was behind information later released by the MEK on Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian physics professor said to be shown in the laptop documents as the man in charge of that purported Iranian nuclear weapons research program. The MEK disclosed such personal details as Fakhrizadeh’s passport number and his home telephone number. But the Mossad chroniclers write: “This abundance of detail and means of transmission leads one to believe that, again, “a certain secret service” ever suspected by the West of pursuing its own agenda, painstakingly collected these facts and figures about the Iranian scientists and passed them to the Iranian resistance.”

I asked Bar-Zohar’s research assistant, Nilly Ovnat, whether he had Israeli sources for those statements relating to the MEK and the laptop documents. She responded by e-mail: “Professor Bar Zohar had other sources for most of the material concerning MEK and Natanz [and the] laptop, yet they could not be mentioned and cannot be discussed.”

Bar-Zohar and Mishal are little concerned with whether the Mossad’s laptop caper involved fraud or not. They obviously view the Israeli intelligence agency’s use of an Iranian exile group to get out documents that had been central to the international sanctions regime against Iran as a great triumph. But whatever their reasons, their book adds another layer to the growing body of evidence showing that the Bush administration and its allies hoodwinked the rest of the world with those documents.

– 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.

December 20, 2014 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

How US Policy on Iran Came to Be Based on Fabricated Documents

The key “evidence” of an Iranian nuclear weapons program comes via the MEK, a cult-like terrorist group—and was likely produced by Israel.

The nuclear talks between the P5 plus 1 (the permanent five UN Security Council members plus Germany) and Iran entered the drafting phase in Vienna on May 13. The objective is to reach a final deal in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program by July 20, although the talks could be extended by mutual agreement for another six months. But the Obama administration is demanding a deep reduction in Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities, which makes a successful conclusion of the negotiations highly unlikely.

This deal-killing demand is not based on an objective assessment of Iran’s nuclear program. It has been justified by the highly politicized concept of “breakout,” which refers to the time it would take Iran, in theory, to enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade level for a single nuclear weapon. But the administration’s embrace of the breakout concept is based on a false narrative about an alleged past covert Iranian nuclear weapons program, which the Obama administration inherited without the slightest questioning from the George W. Bush administration.

The Obama administration’s decision to demand draconian cuts was adumbrated by Robert Einhorn, who was the State Department’s special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control until June 2013. In a report published this past March, Einhorn wrote, “The number and type of centrifuges will be limited to ensure that breakout times are…a minimum of 6 to 12 months at all times.” And in a later article in The National Interest, Einhorn explained what that would mean in terms of reduction from Iran’s present 19,000 centrifuges: “an enrichment capacity greater than a few thousand first-generation centrifuges would give Iran an unacceptably rapid breakout capability.”

Secretary of State John Kerry confirmed that Einhorn revelation in testimony on April 8 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Responding to committee chairman Robert Menendez’s complaint that the administration would allow Iran to accumulate enough weapons-grade uranium to make a single nuclear weapon within six to twelve months of a decision to do so, Kerry said, “I’m not saying that’s what we’d settle for,” hinting that the administration might demand an even longer breakout period. And he defended six to twelve months as “significantly more” than the two months he said was estimated to be the existing Iranian breakout capability.

The insistence on such a reduction in Iran’s enrichment capability is certain to be rejected. Iran has long asserted that it needs a much greater number of centrifuges than specified in US demands, enough to provide nuclear fuel for future nuclear power reactors as they come online. Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif explained to me in an interview on June 3 that Iran is proposing to reassure the United States and its negotiating partners that it isn’t interested in breakout; it will do so by converting all low-enriched uranium immediately into a form that would not be available for weapons-grade enrichment (around 90 percent purity), and then into fuel assemblies for a nuclear reactor.

The Obama administration has taken the position that Iran has no legitimate need to produce its own reactor fuel and should rely instead on the Russians and the French for its supply. Zarif told me, however, that it is “thirty years too late” to tell the Iranians that they must rely on other states for their nuclear fuel. He pointed to the long history of agreements with other states, both on nuclear fuel supply and other forms of nuclear cooperation, on which the other states have reneged.

France, under US pressure, refused to provide enriched uranium fuel assemblies to Iran in the early 1980s despite earlier legal arrangements to do so. It was precisely because US intervention had eliminated the possibility of reliance on foreign enrichment that Iran decided in the mid-1980s to develop its own enrichment capability. That lesson was underlined once again when Russia, under US pressure, delayed the shipment of nuclear fuel for the Bushehr power plant in 2005–06 in order to pressure Iran to cease enrichment entirely.

The insistence that Iran must not be allowed to have the enrichment facilities that would support a civilian nuclear program is the logical consequence of a false narrative about Iran—namely, that Tehran has been systematically concealing a nuclear weapons program that was active at least as late 2003. This view, now almost universally accepted by the US national security establishment and political elites in the United States and Europe, has been reinforced by nearly a decade of mainstream media coverage. The centerpiece of the narrative is the idea that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has published, in the form of two sets of intelligence documents, hard evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program at least from 2001 to 2003.

The first set of documents, which surfaced in 2004, was said to have come from the laptop computer of an Iranian scientist working on the program. It included a series of drawings of efforts to integrate a nuclear weapon into the re-entry vehicle of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile. Descriptions of those drawings were leaked to selected journalists from 2005 on, generating sensational media stories of a “smoking gun” of nuclear weapons intent.

The US National Intelligence Estimates of 2005 and 2007, which concluded that Iran had carried out a nuclear weapons program, were based in large part on the assumption that those documents were genuine. The IAEA described them as “credible” in 2008—despite the fact that its director general at the time, Mohamed ElBaradei, warned repeatedly that their authenticity had not been established.

But a fundamental error in the re-entry vehicle documents proves they were fabricated: the missile they showed had been abandoned by 2000—two years before the drawings were made—in favor of an improved model whose re-entry vehicle bore no resemblance to that of the old model. And the real story of those documents, revealed to me last year by Karsten Voigt, a former senior official in Germany’s foreign ministry, is that they were turned over to Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, by a member of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), the cult-like Iranian terrorist group that has been fighting the Tehran regime ever since the early 1980s. Furthermore, a senior BND official told Voigt that German intelligence officials regarded the source as “doubtful” and were concerned about what appeared to them to be the Bush administration’s intention to base its Iran policy on those documents.

The MEK role in transferring the documents indicates that they originated in Israel, because the MEK had been serving as a client of Israel for several years, including the “laundering” of Israeli intelligence reports by presenting them to the IAEA and the press as coming from the MEK itself. Israel also provided a new series of documents and intelligence reports to the IAEA in 2008 and 2009 claiming that Iran had been testing nuclear weapons designs and had continued to work on other components of nuclear weapons well after 2003. Although the IAEA never mentioned Israel publicly, former director general ElBaradei reveals in his memoirs that Israel provided the documents directly. After ElBaradei was succeeded by the more pliable Yukia Amano, the IAEA used those Israeli-supplied documents as the basis for its November 2011 report, which made a series of new accusations about Iranian nuclear weapons research projects going beyond the alleged 2001–03 program.

The unquestioning acceptance of this false narrative has shifted the political discourse surrounding the nuclear negotiations sharply toward the Israeli position. As a result, the Obama administration is more vulnerable to the propaganda war against negotiations that Israel’s clients in Congress are waging.

The biggest impact of the false narrative has been to impose the concept of breakout on the administration’s diplomatic posture. That concept is always presented as merely a technical tool to measure Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon. Its real significance, however, is the assumption implicit in it that the Islamic Republic has been working feverishly to obtain nuclear weapons and must be prevented by US power from doing so.

During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ruled out the possession of weapons of mass destruction as illicit under Islam, even as Iraq was inflicting horrific casualties on Iran with chemical weapons attacks. That episode makes the fatwa against nuclear weapons by the present supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, entirely credible.

The actual behavior of Iran in recent years has also belied the breakout narrative. By early 2010, breakout theory advocates were already claiming that Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb in just six months. The Ahmadinejad government leaned toward an extreme nationalist, anti-Western political constituency, and at the time there were neither active negotiations nor punishing sanctions on Iran’s oil industry that would have provided an incentive to slow a race toward breakout capacity. But instead of using the years from 2010 to mid-2012 to begin enriching to weapons grade, Iran moved in the opposite direction. It did not use more than half the centrifuges it already had in place to enrich uranium, and it began converting much of its 20-percent-enriched uranium to oxide form, making it far more difficult and time-consuming to enrich to weapons-grade levels.

In fact, the breakout concept is based on an entirely implausible assumption—that Iran would deliberately invite confrontation with the United States by rushing to enrich enough uranium for a single bomb—one that would not even be available for use for as long as three or four years, according to US intelligence estimates.

The narrative that now threatens to plunge the United States into much more dangerous tensions with Iran is the most successful example of a fundamental and persistent problem of US national security policy. Falsified intelligence was used to get the US public to go along with wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The falsehoods about the Tonkin Gulf incident before the Vietnam buildup and Iraq’s alleged WMD programs before the Iraq War were eventually unmasked, albeit after US troops had been committed.

The success of the false narrative on Iran has been facilitated by the disappearance of the investigative function of Congress and the corporate media. Resistance to the manipulation of opinion on national security issues can only be successful if we strengthen the ability of independent media to alert Americans to strategic falsehoods early in their gestation.

Gareth Porter , The Nation

June 12, 2014 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

US Blocks Release of Iran Nuke Papers

U.S. officials have put up roadblocks to stop the International Atomic Energy Agency from sharing documents with Iran regarding its alleged nuclear weaponization, creating an obstacle to negotiations, writes Gareth Porter for Inter Press Service.

US Blocks Release of Iran Nuke Papers The Barack Obama administration has demanded that Iran resolve “past and present concerns” about the “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear program as a condition for signing a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Tehran.

Administration officials have suggested that Iran must satisfy the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding the allegations in the agency’s report that it has had a covert nuclear weapons program in the past.

But the record of negotiations between Iran and the IAEA shows Tehran has been ready for the past two years to provide detailed responses to all the charges of an Iranian nuclear weapons work, and that the problem has been the refusal of the IAEA to share with Iran the documentary evidence on which those allegations have been based.

The real obstacle to providing those documents, however, has long been a U.S. policy of refusing to share the documents on the assumption that Iran must confess to having had a weaponization program.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, declared on Feb. 12, “The authenticity of each allegation should be proven first, then the person who submitted it to the agency should give us the genuine document. When we are assured of the authenticity, then we can talk to the agency.”

Neither the IAEA nor the Obama administration has responded publicly to Salehi’s statement. In response to a query from Inter Press Service (IPS), the spokesperson for the National Security Council, Bernadette Meehan, said the NSC officials would have no comment on the Iranian demand for access to the documents.

The spokesperson for IAEA Director Yukiya Amano did not answer a request from IPS on Thursday for the agency’s comment.

But a draft text of an agreement being negotiated between the IAEA and Iran dated Feb. 20, 2012, shows that the only difference between the two sides on resolving issues about allegations of Iranian nuclear weapons work was Iran’s demand to have the documents on which the allegations are based.

The draft text, which was later published on the website of the Arms Control Association, reflects Iran’s deletions and additions to the original IAEA proposal. It calls for Iran to provide a “conclusive technical assessment” of a set of six “topics”, which included 12 distinct charges in the report in a particular order that the IAEA desired.

Iran and the IAEA agreed that Iran would provide a “conclusive technical assessment” on a list of 10 issues in a particular order. The only topics that Iran proposed to delete from the list were “management structure” and “procurement activities,” which did not involve charges of specifically nuclear weapons work.

The two sides had agreed in the draft that the IAEA would provide a “detailed explanation of its concerns”. But they had failed to agree on provision of documents to Iran by the IAEA. The IAEA had proposed language that the agency would provide Iran with the relevant documents only “where appropriate.” Iran was insisting on deletion of that qualifying phrase from the draft.

The first priority on the list of topics to which both sides had agreed in the draft was “Parchin” – referring to the claim of intelligence from an unnamed state that Iran had installed a large cylinder at the Parchin military reservation.

A November 2011 IAEA report suggested the cylinder was intended for testing nuclear weapons designs and had been built with the assistance of a “foreign expert.” Iran also agreed to respond in detail on the issue of the “foreign expert,” who has been identified as Vyacheslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian specialist on nanodiamonds.

The evidence associated with that claim and others published in the 2011 report shows that they were based on intelligence reports and documents given to the IAEA by Israel in 2008-09. Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei referred to a series of documents provided by Israel in his 2012 memoirs.

Iran also agreed to respond in detail to allegations that Iran had sought to integrate a nuclear weapon into the reentry vehicle of the Shahab-3 missile, and that it had developed high explosives as a “detonator” for a nuclear weapon.

Both alleged activities had been depicted or described in documents reported in the U.S. news media in 2005-06 as having come from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program. Those documents, about whose authenticity ElBaradei and other senior IAEA officials have publicly expressed serious doubts, have now been revealed as having given to Western intelligence by an anti-regime Iranian terrorist organization.

Former senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt revealed in an interview last year for a newly-published book by this writer that senior officials of the German intelligence agency BND had told him in November 2004 that the BND had gotten the entire collection of documents from a member of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) who had been one of their sources, and that they did not consider the source to be reliable.

The MEK, considered by the United States and European states as a terrorist organization, had been used by Saddam Hussein’s regime to support the war against Iran and by Israel to issue intelligence and propaganda that Mossad did not want attributed to it.

ElBaradei, who retired from the IAEA in November 2009, had declared repeatedly that sharing the documents was necessary to ensure “due process” in resolving the issue, but the United States had prevented him from doing so. In his final statement to the Board of Governors on Sept. 7, 2009, he appealed to “those who provided the information related to the alleged weaponization studies to share with Iran as much information as possible.”

A former IAEA official, who asked not to be identified, told IPS that the United States had allowed only a very limited number of documents to be shown to Iran in the form of Power Point slides projected on a screen.

A May 2008 IAEA report described a number of documents purported to be from the Iranian weapons program but said that the IAEA “was not in possession of the documents and was therefore unfortunately unable to make them available to Iran.”

Around 100 pages of documents were given by the United States to the agency to share with Iran, the former official said, but none of the documents described in the report were among them.

The U.S. policy of denying Iranian access to the documents continued during the Obama administration, as shown by a U.S. diplomatic cable from Vienna dated April 29, 2009, and released by WikiLeaks. At a P5+1 technical meeting, both U.S. and IAEA officials were quoted as implying that the objective of the policy was to press Iran to confess to the activities portrayed in the papers.

U.S. officials said that a failure by Iran to “disclose any past weaponization-related work” would “suggest Iran wishes to hide and pursue its past work, perhaps to keep a future weapons option”.

IAEA Safeguards Chief Olli Heinonen made it clear that no copies of the relevant documents charging Iran with weaponization would be provided to Iran and complained that Iran had continued to claim that the documents were fabricated. In its report of Nov. 14, 2013, the IAEA said it had received more information – presumably from Israel – that “corroborates the analysis” in its 2011 report.

The past unwillingness of the Obama administration to entertain the possibility that the documents provided by the MEK were fabricated or to allow Iran the opportunity to prove that through close analysis of the documents, and the IAEA’s continued commitment to the weaponization information it has published suggest that the issue of past claims will be just as contentious as the technical issues to be negotiated, if not more so.

Consortiumnews.com

March 3, 2014 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Indictment of Iran for ’94 Terror Bombing Relied on MEK

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman based his 2006 warrant for the arrest of top Iranian officials in the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 on the claims of representatives of the armed Iranian opposition Mujahedin E Khalq (MEK), the full text of the document reveals.

The central piece of evidence cited in Nisman’s original 900-page arrest warrant against seven senior Iranian leaders is an alleged Aug. 14, 1993 meeting of top Iranian leaders, including both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then president Hashemi Rafsanjani, at which Nisman claims the official decision was made to go ahead with the planning of the bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA).

But the document, recently available in English for the first time, shows that his only sources for the claim were representatives of the MEK or People’s Mujahideen of Iran. The MEK has an unsavoury history of terrorist bombings against civilian targets in Iran, as well as of serving as an Iraq-based mercenary army for Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Iran-Iraq War.

The organisation was removed from the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups last year after a campaign by prominent former U.S. officials who had gotten large payments from pro-MEK groups and individuals to call for its “delisting”.

Nisman’s rambling and repetitious report cites statements by four members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which is the political arm of the MEK, as the sources for the charge that Iran decided on the AMIA bombing in August 1993.

The primary source is Reza Zakeri Kouchaksaraee, president of the Security and Intelligence Committee of the NCRI. The report quotes Kouchaksaraee as testifying to an Argentine Oral Court in 2003, “The decision was made by the Supreme National Security Council at a meeting that was held on 14 August, 1993. This meeting lasted only two hours from 4:30 to 6:30 pm.”

Nisman also quotes Hadi Roshanravani, a member of the International Affairs Committee of the NCRI, who claimed to know the same exact starting time of the meeting – 4:30 pm – but gave the date as Aug. 12, 1993 rather than Aug. 14.

Roshanravani also claimed to know the precise agenda of the meeting. The NCRI official said that three subjects were discussed: “The progress and assessment of the Palestinian Council; the strategy of exporting fundamentalism throughout the world; and the future of Iraq.” Roshanravani said “the idea for an attack in Argentina” had been discussed “during the dialogue on the second point”.

The NCRI/MEK was claiming that the Rafsanjani government had decided on a terrorist bombing of a Jewish community centre in Argentina as part of a policy of “exporting fundamentalism throughout the world”.

But that MEK propaganda line about the Iranian regime was contradicted by the U.S. intelligence assessment at the time. In its National Intelligence Estimate 34-91 on Iranian foreign policy, completed on Oct. 17, 1991, U.S. intelligence concluded that Rafsanjani had been “gradually turning away from the revolutionary excesses of the past decade…toward more conventional behavior” since taking over as president in 1989.

Ali Reza Ahmadi and Hamid Reza Eshagi, identified as “defectors” who were affiliated with NCRI, offered further corroboration of the testimony by the leading NCRI officials. Ahmadi was said by Nisman to have worked as an Iranian foreign service officer from 1981 to 1985. Eshagi is not otherwise identified.

Nisman quotes Ahmadi and Eshagi, who made only joint statements, as saying, “It was during a meeting held at 4:30 pm in August 1993 that the Supreme National Security Council decided to carry out activities in Argentina.”

Nisman does not cite any non-MEK source as claiming such a meeting took place. He cites court testimony by Abolghassem Mesbahi, a “defector” who had not worked for the Iranian intelligence agency since 1985, according to his own account, but only to the effect that the Iranian government made the decision on AMIA sometime in 1993. Mesbahi offered no evidence to support the claim.

Nisman repeatedly cites the same four NCRI members to document the alleged participation of each of the seven senior Iranians for whom he requested arrest warrants. A review of the entire document shows that Kouchaksaraee is cited by Nisman 29 times, Roshanravani 16 times and Ahmadi and Eshagi 16 times, always together making the same statement for a total of 61 references to their testimony.

Nisman cited no evidence or reason to believe that any of the MEK members were in a position to have known about such a high-level Iranian meeting. Although MEK propaganda has long claimed access to secrets, their information has been at best from low-level functionaries in the regime.

In using the testimony of the most violent opponents of the Iranian regime to accuse the most senior Iranian officials of having decided on the AMIA terrorist bombing, Nisman sought to deny the obvious political aim of all MEK information output of building support in the United States and Europe for the overthrow of the Iranian regime.

“The fact that the individuals are opponents of the Iranian regime does not detract in the least from the significance of their statements,” Nisman declared.

In an effort to lend the group’s testimony credibility, Nisman described their statements as being made “with honesty and rigor in a manner that respects nuances and details while still maintaining a sense of the larger picture”.

The MEK witnesses, Nisman wrote, could be trusted as “completely truthful”.

The record of MEK officials over the years, however, has been one of putting out one communiqué after another that contained information about alleged covert Iranian work on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, nearly all of which turned out to be false when they were investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The only significant exception to the MEK’s overall record of false information on the Iranian nuclear programme was its discovery of Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility and its Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.

But even in that case, the MEK official who announced the Natanz discovery, U.S. representative Alireza Jafarzadeh, incorrectly identified it as a “fuel fabrication facility” rather than as an enrichment facility. He also said it was near completion, although it was actually several months from having the equipment necessary to begin enrichment.

Contrary to the MEK claims that it got the information on Natanz from sources in the Iranian government, moreover, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh reported, a “senior IAEA official” told him in 2004 that Israeli intelligence had passed their satellite intelligence on Natanz to the MEK.

An adviser to Reza Pahlavi, the heir to the Shah, later told journalist Connie Bruck that the information about Natanz had come from “a friendly government”, which had provided it to both the Pahlavi organisation and the MEK.

Nisman has long been treated in pro-Israel, anti-Iran political circles as the authoritative source on the AMIA bombing case and the broader subject of Iran and terrorism. Last May, Nisman issued a new 500-page report accusing Iran of creating terrorist networks in the Western hemisphere that builds on his indictment of Iran for the 1994 bombing.

But Nisman’s readiness to base the crucial accusation against Iran in the AMIA case solely on MEK sources and his denial of their obvious unreliability highlights the fact that he has been playing a political role on behalf of certain powerful interests rather than uncovering the facts.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising 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.

IPS

August 8, 2013 0 comment

USA

POLITICS: Iran Nuke Laptop Data Came from Terror Group

WASHINGTON, Feb 29 (IPS) – The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the "laptop documents" — 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop — as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear programme.

Iran Nuke Laptop Data Came from Terror Group

But those documents have long been regarded with great suspicion by U.S. and foreign analysts. German officials have identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organisation.

There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel’s Mossad.

In its latest report on Iran, circulated Feb. 22, the IAEA, under strong pressure from the Bush administration, included descriptions of plans for a facility to produce "green salt", technical specifications for high explosives testing and the schematic layout of a missile reentry vehicle that appears capable of holding a nuclear weapon. Iran has been asked to provide full explanations for these alleged activities.

Tehran has denounced the documents on which the charges are based as fabrications provided by the MEK, and has demanded copies of the documents to analyse, but the United States had refused to do so.

The Iranian assertion is supported by statements by German officials. A few days after then Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the laptop documents, Karsten Voight, the coordinator for German-American relations in the German Foreign Ministry, was reported by the Wall Street Journal Nov. 22, 2004 as saying that the information had been provided by "an Iranian dissident group".

A German official familiar with the issue confirmed to this writer that the NCRI had been the source of the laptop documents. "I can assure you that the documents came from the Iranian resistance organisation," the source said.

The Germans have been deeply involved in intelligence collection and analysis regarding the Iranian nuclear programme. According to a story by Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer soon after the laptop documents were first mentioned publicly by Powell in late 2004, U.S. officials said they had been stolen from an Iranian whom German intelligence had been trying to recruit, and had been given to intelligence officials of an unnamed country in Turkey.

The German account of the origins of the laptop documents contradicts the insistence by unnamed U.S. intelligence officials who insisted to journalists William J. Broad and David Sanger in November 2005 that the laptop documents did not come from any Iranian resistance groups.

Despite the fact that it was listed as a terrorist organisation, the MEK was a favourite of neoconservatives in the Pentagon, who were proposing in 2003-2004 to use it as part of a policy to destabilise Iran. The United States is known to have used intelligence from the MEK on Iranian military questions for years. It was considered a credible source of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear programme after 2002, mainly because of its identification of the facility in Natanz as a nuclear site.

The German source said he did not know whether the documents were authentic or not. However, CIA analysts, and European and IAEA officials who were given access to the laptop documents in 2005 were very sceptical about their authenticity.

The Guardian’s Julian Borger last February quoted an IAEA official as saying there is "doubt over the provenance of the computer".

A senior European diplomat who had examined the documents was quoted by the New York Times in November 2005 as saying, "I can fabricate that data. It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt."

Scott Ritter, the former U.S. military intelligence officer who was chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, noted in an interview that the CIA has the capability test the authenticity of laptop documents through forensic tests that would reveal when different versions of different documents were created.

The fact that the agency could not rule out the possibility of fabrication, according to Ritter, indicates that it had either chosen not to do such tests or that the tests had revealed fraud.

Despite its having been credited with the Natanz intelligence coup in 2002, the overall record of the MEK on the Iranian nuclear programme has been very poor. The CIA continued to submit intelligence from the Iranian group about alleged Iranian nuclear weapons-related work to the IAEA over the next five years, without identifying the source.

But that intelligence turned out to be unreliable. A senior IAEA official told the Los Angeles Times in February 2007 that, since 2002, "pretty much all the intelligence that has come to us has proved to be wrong."

Former State Department deputy intelligence director for the Near East and South Asia Wayne White doubts that the MEK has actually had the contacts within the Iranian bureaucracy and scientific community necessary to come up with intelligence such as Natanz and the laptop documents. "I find it very hard to believe that supporters of the MEK haven’t been thoroughly rooted out of the Iranian bureaucracy," says White. "I think they are without key sources in the Iranian government."

In her February 2006 report on the laptop documents, the Post’s Linzer said CIA analysts had originally speculated that a "third country, such as Israel, had fabricated the evidence". They eventually "discounted that theory", she wrote, without explaining why.

Since 2002, new information has emerged indicating that the MEK did not obtain the 2002 data on Natanz itself but received it from the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Yossi Melman and Meier Javadanfar, who co-authored a book on the Iranian nuclear programme last year, write that they were told by "very senior Israeli Intelligence officials" in late 2006 that Israeli intelligence had known about Natanz for a full year before the Iranian group’s press conference. They explained that they had chosen not to reveal it to the public "because of safety concerns for the sources that provided the information".

Shahriar Ahy, an adviser to monarchist leader Reza Pahlavi, told journalist Connie Bruck that the detailed information on Natanz had not come from MEK but from "a friendly government, and it had come to more than one opposition group, not only the mujahideen."

Bruck wrote in the New Yorker on Mar, 16, 2006 that when he was asked if the "friendly government" was Israel, Ahy smiled and said, "The friendly government did not want to be the source of it, publicly. If the friendly government gives it to the U.S. publicly, then it would be received differently. Better to come from an opposition group."

srael has maintained a relationship with the MEK since the late 1990s, according to Bruck, including assistance to the organisation in beaming broadcasts by the NCRI from Paris into Iran. An Israeli diplomat confirmed that Israel had found the MEK "useful", Bruck reported, but the official declined to elaborate.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

By Gareth Porter-IPS-Feb 29

March 2, 2008 0 comment

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