Author: Joby Warrick
Publication: Washington Post
Date: December 21, 2003
Complex Network Acquired Technology
and Blueprints
Evidence discovered in a probe of
Iran's secret nuclear program points overwhelmingly to Pakistan as the
source of crucial technology that put Iran on a fast track toward becoming
a nuclear weapons power, according to U.S. and European officials familiar
with the investigation.
The serious nature of the discoveries
prompted a decision by Pakistan two weeks ago to detain three of its top
nuclear scientists for several days of questioning, with U.S. intelligence
experts allowed to assist, the officials said. The scientists have not
been charged with any crime, and Pakistan continues to insist that it never
wittingly provided nuclear assistance to Iran or anyone else.
Documents provided by Iran to U.N.
nuclear inspectors since early November have exposed the outlines of a
vast, secret procurement network that successfully acquired thousands of
sensitive parts and tools from numerous countries over a 17-year period.
While Iran has not directly identified Pakistan as a supplier, Pakistani
individuals and companies are strongly implicated as sources of key blueprints,
technical guidance and equipment for a pilot uranium-enrichment plant that
was first exposed by Iranian dissidents 18 months ago, government officials
and independent weapons experts said.
While American presidents since
Ronald Reagan worried that Iran might seek nuclear weapons, U.S. and allied
intelligence agencies were unable to halt Iran's most significant nuclear
acquisitions, or even to spot a major nuclear facility under construction
until it was essentially completed.
Although the alleged transfers occurred
years ago, suggestions of Pakistani aid to Iran's nuclear program have
further complicated the relationship between the United States and Pakistan,
a key ally in the war against terrorism.
In documents and interviews with
investigators of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iranian officials
have offered detailed accounts of how they obtained sensitive equipment
from European, Asian and North American companies. Much of the equipment
was routed through a transshipment hub in the Persian Gulf port city of
Dubai to conceal the actual destination, according to officials familiar
with Iran's disclosures.
The disclosures offer a striking
illustration of the difficulties faced by U.S. officials in trying to detect
and interdict shipments of contraband useful in making weapons of mass
destruction. Iran appears to have obtained the equipment by exploiting
a gray zone of porous borders, middlemen, front companies and weak law
enforcement where the components of such weapons are bought and sold.
Iran's pilot facility, which is
now functional, and a much larger uranium-enrichment plant under construction
next door are designed to produce enough fissile material to make at least
two dozen nuclear bombs each year.
China and Russia also made significant
contributions to the Iranian program in the past, IAEA documents show.
Both countries were the focus of a long-running U.S. campaign to cut off
nuclear assistance to Iran.
In a new finding, sophisticated
laboratory tests by the IAEA detected traces of Soviet-made highly enriched
uranium at Iran's Kalaye nuclear facility, a former testing center for
uranium-enrichment equipment, knowledgeable officials said. Several distinct
types of enriched uranium have been found at the site, the officials added.
Although there are other possible explanations, the finding could indicate
that Iran obtained some fissile material from a former Soviet state to
use in testing its equipment, the officials said.
By far the most valuable assistance
to Iran came from still-unnamed individuals who provided top-secret designs
and key components for uranium-processing machines known as gas centrifuges,
the officials said.
Centrifuges are technologically
complex machines that spin at supersonic speeds to extract the small amounts
of fissile material present in natural uranium. Uranium that has been enriched
at lower levels is typically used as fuel in nuclear power plants, while
a more concentrated product known as highly enriched uranium is used in
nuclear submarines, research reactors and nuclear weapons.
The blueprints, which the IAEA has
reviewed, depict a type of centrifuge that is nearly identical to a machine
used by Pakistan in the early years of its nuclear program, according to
U.S. officials and weapons experts familiar with the designs. The plans
and components, which were acquired over several installments from the
late 1980s to the mid-1990s, allowed Iran to leapfrog over several major
technological hurdles to make its own enriched uranium, a necessary ingredient
in commercial nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons.
"Acquiring the drawings and a few
components was a tremendous boost to Iran's centrifuge efforts," said David
Albright, a former IAEA inspector in Iraq and president of the Institute
for Science and International Security, a Washington research group that
tracked Iran's nuclear procurements for more than a decade. "The possession
of detailed designs could allow Iran to skip many difficult research steps."
Surprising Disclosures
It is unclear exactly why the United
States and its allies failed to detect and halt Iran's most significant
nuclear acquisitions.
One possible reason, according to
some former government officials and outside experts, is that U.S. agencies
were looking in the wrong place. American administrations since the late
1980s viewed the Soviet Union and then Russia as the most likely source
of nuclear aid to Iran, launching intensive efforts to persuade Moscow
to sever or scale back technological links to the Islamic republic.
"For too long we were running our
Iran policy through Moscow," said Jon Wolfsthal, a nonproliferation expert
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "We saw Russia as Iran's
main source of technology, and if shut off, the flow to Iran's program
would freeze in its tracks. That was shortsighted."
Former top U.S. proliferation officials
contend that the attention paid to Russia was hardly misplaced. The United
States foiled several efforts by Iran to obtain sensitive technology from
Russia in the 1990s. But some officials acknowledged that they were stunned
to learn of the progress Iran had made with the help of partners closer
to home.
"While the U.S. was heavily focused
on Russian assistance, the Iranians were getting help elsewhere on the
centrifuge program and making major headway -- and the U.S. was essentially
in the dark on that," said Robert Einhorn, the State Department's former
assistant secretary for nonproliferation. "It took information from an
Iranian dissident group to expose how far Iran had gotten."
Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons,
insisting that it is only exercising its right to develop a civilian nuclear
power industry, including its own indigenous supply of nuclear fuel. Russia
is helping Iran build a nuclear power plant in the port city of Bushehr
that both countries insist is a civilian nuclear project.
Last month, in the face of mounting
international pressure, Iran's leaders agreed to open the country's nuclear
facilities to surprise inspections and to turn over hundreds of pages of
documents to the IAEA. The agency has not commented publicly on the contents
of the documents, but several U.S. officials and diplomatic sources familiar
with Iran's disclosures agreed to discuss them on the condition they not
be identified by name. Some of the revelations about Iran's nuclear procurement
program also are described in a draft of a new report by Albright's research
group. A copy of the draft study was made available to The Washington Post.
The disclosures do not provide a
definitive answer to the question of whether Iran was actively seeking
to build nuclear weapons. But they do show that Iran was intent on keeping
its nuclear acquisitions secret, and that it sought a range of technologies
far beyond those typically found in countries with commercial nuclear power
programs.
An IAEA report made public in November
revealed that Iran had secretly manufactured small amounts of uranium and
plutonium, a violation of Iran's agreements under the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. That report also documented Iran's efforts to enrich uranium using
a variety of methods, including gas centrifuges and lasers. Iran's biggest
success, the construction of a pilot gas centrifuge plant for enriching
uranium, was a well-guarded secret until it was exposed last August by
the National Council for Resistance in Iran, an umbrella group representing
opponents of Iran's Islamic government.
When IAEA inspectors discovered
160 working centrifuges during their first visit to the Natanz plant in
February, Iran initially claimed to have designed and built them alone.
But Iran's story began to unravel when the inspectors found traces of highly
enriched uranium at Natanz and at a second, now-defunct pilot plant in
Kalaye.
Iran, which insists it has never
made highly enriched uranium, admitted receiving substantial foreign help,
including numerous secondhand centrifuge components that were imported
from an unnamed country.
Officially, Iran's leaders maintain
that they bought the components on the black market, and they still don't
know where the parts came from. But to the inspectors and independent experts
on centrifuge design, the machines offer abundant clues.
The draft report by Albright's group,
based on experts familiar with the Iranian machine, describes it as a modified
version of a centrifuge built decades ago by Urenco, a consortium of the
British, Dutch and German governments. The machine is about six feet high
and is made of aluminum and a special type of high-strength steel. The
design is one of several known to have been stolen in the 1970s by a Pakistani
nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who later became known as the father
of the Pakistani bomb.
Pakistan modified the Urenco design
and manufactured a number of the machines before abandoning the centrifuge
for a sturdier model, said Albright, co-author of the study. The blueprints
obtained by Iran show "distinctive" modifications similar to the ones made
by Pakistan, Albright said.
Traces of highly enriched uranium
on centrifuge components in Iran indicated they had been used before. Most
of the contaminants are of a type of highly enriched uranium believed to
be "consistent with material produced in Pakistan," Albright said.
The evidence collectively supports
a view widely held among nuclear experts and nonproliferation officials
that Iran obtained castoff parts and designs from a centrifuge that was
no longer needed by Pakistan, said Gary Samore, a former adviser on nonproliferation
on the Clinton administration's National Security Council.
"The particular machine that Iran
is using is not the mainstay of the Pakistani program," said Samore, now
the director of studies at the Institute for International Strategic Studies
in London. "Pakistan had these used aluminum-rotor machines that it no
longer needed. The most plausible explanation for what happened is that
Pakistan sold its surplus centrifuges, which have now turned up in Iran."
Much of Iran's basic nuclear infrastructure
-- from research reactors to lasers used to manipulate uranium atoms --
was supplied by U.S. companies before Islamic revolutionaries deposed the
shah in 1979. U.S. officials later discovered that the shah, a staunch
U.S. ally, was conducting his own secret nuclear weapons research before
he was overthrown.
Iran's revolutionary leader, Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, canceled the shah's contracts with a German company
to build nuclear power reactors in Bushehr. But by 1985, during a war with
Iraq, Iran reversed course, reopened its nuclear labs and began exploring
its options for making enriched uranium and plutonium. It also began looking
for new business partners to complete the Bushehr reactor, which had remained
frozen since 1979.
Iran's explanation -- that it was
only interested in developing nuclear power for electricity -- was greeted
with skepticism then and now because Iran sits atop vast reserves of oil
and natural gas.
A Big Break
U.S. intelligence officials began
detecting attempts by Iran to acquire nuclear-related technology beginning
in the mid-1980s. Much of the activity, as U.S. officials understood it
at the time, involved Iranian efforts to acquire sensitive technology through
legitimate deals with Russian, Chinese and East European companies. The
United States sought to use a variety of diplomatic and commercial incentives
and punishments to persuade Iran's potential trade partners to abandon
projects, ranging from a proposed centrifuge plant to a Russian agreement
to complete Iran's nuclear reactors in Bushehr.
"We were very concerned about Russian
support of Iran's nuclear activity," said Robert Gallucci, a special envoy
on nonproliferation during the Clinton administration and now dean of Georgetown
University's School of Foreign Service. "At the same time, we were hearing
about other activities involving the entire nuclear fuel cycle."
Iran's first big break came in 1987,
when it obtained the complete set of designs and parts for gas centrifuges.
Around the same time, Iran began receiving technical guidance from foreign
experts who steered the country toward some of the same suppliers that
had assisted Pakistan's nuclear program years earlier, said Albright, citing
information obtained in the IAEA investigation.
"Armed with component specifications
and drawings, Iran would be able to design and implement a strategy to
develop a reliable centrifuge and create a manufacturing infrastructure
to make thousands of centrifuges," Albright wrote in the report. "It would
be able to find companies to make centrifuge components, often unwittingly."
Beginning around 1993, Iran launched
a broader effort to acquire parts for hundreds of centrifuges, as well
as machines and tools to create its own manufacturing center. According
to officials familiar with Iran's disclosures to the IAEA, the effort relied
on a small group of middlemen from European and Middle Eastern countries
who put together orders, made purchases and arranged the shipping.
Iran provided names of a handful
of agents to the IAEA, which has since sought to locate and interview them.
According to Iran, the middlemen secured a long list of sensitive items,
ranging from electronic beam welders and vacuum pumps to shipments of high-strength
aluminum and steel that became the raw products for centrifuges.
Some of the shipments were intercepted
by U.S. and European intelligence agencies and customs officials. But by
the late 1990s, Iran had acquired all the parts it needed for a pilot centrifuge
and was preparing to cross another important threshold.
"Iran appears to have secretly achieved
self-sufficiency in centrifuge manufacturing," Albright said.
Questions Linger
In early December, there were reports
in Pakistan about the disappearance of nuclear scientist Farooq Mohammed,
a colleague of Kahn's in the creation of Pakistan's atomic bomb.
First thought to be missing, government
officials later confirmed he had been detained by Pakistani security officials
for extended questioning. Two subordinates were also picked up, according
to a Western official knowledgeable about the incident.
A CIA spokesman denied that any
Americans were involved in rounding up the scientists, but other officials,
speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the U.S. government was aware
of the incident and had been allowed to participate in the questioning.
The episode followed what one official described as high-level requests
by both the IAEA and the U.S. government for Islamabad to respond to new
evidence suggesting that Pakistan's nuclear secrets had been passed to
Iran.
Some experts see the detention of
the scientists as a hopeful sign, suggesting that Pakistan is preparing
to increase its cooperation with IAEA investigators.
"The Pakistanis know the Iranians
have fingered them," said Samore, the former adviser on nonproliferation
for the Clinton administration. "They know the IAEA is asking questions.
This could be the beginning of what Richard Nixon used to call a 'limited
hangout' operation."
But other experts see only more
obstacles in an already difficult quest for the truth. Doubts are already
being voiced regarding whether the IAEA, or anyone, will be able provide
definitive answers about Iran's nuclear history and future intentions,
said Henry D. Sokolski, a former Defense Department adviser on nonproliferation.
"What is most worrying is not what
the Iranians did in the past, but, rather, what they're going to do," said
Sokolski, who now directs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center,
a Washington research organization. "What does our past experience with
Iran tell us about the prospects of catching them in a lie in the future?"
