{"id":112013,"date":"2018-05-28T12:00:41","date_gmt":"2018-05-28T11:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=112013"},"modified":"2018-06-04T11:40:44","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T10:40:44","slug":"there-hardly-ever-was-an-iranian-nuclear-weapons-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/05\/there-hardly-ever-was-an-iranian-nuclear-weapons-program\/","title":{"rendered":"There Hardly Ever Was an Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program!"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of the evidence points to Israeli and MEK (Mujahedeen-e-Khalq)<\/em> disinformation, not an open-and-shut case.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

25 May 2018 – <\/em>Donald Trump\u2019s decision to pull out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which has set the stage for another Iran crisis, has opened a new round of domestic political struggle, as Democrats in Congress, the anti-Trump television networks, and the tattered remains of the old anti-war movement try to push back.<\/p>\n

But that effort has a fatal weakness at its core. It concedes to Trump and opponents of the Iran deal an effective argument: that the Iranians have been lying when they say they\u2019ve never had a covert nuclear weapons program.<\/p>\n

The theme of Iran\u2019s duplicity has been the emotional core of the assault on the JCPOA. It is no accident that the title and consistent theme of Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s melodramatic YouTube slideshow<\/a> was \u201cIran lied.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I detail in my\u00a0investigative history of the Iran nuclear issue,<\/a> the Obama administration itself fell for a false narrative about a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program allegedly in operation from 2001 to 2003.<\/p>\n

After Netanyahu\u2019s April 30\u00a0show, former secretary of state John Kerry tweeted: \u201cEvery detail PM Netanyahu presented yesterday was every reason the world came together to apply years of sanctions and negotiate the Iran nuclear agreement\u2014because the threat was real and had to be stopped.\u201d<\/p>\n

But a far more effective counter would have been the truth: that the long-accepted accusation about Iran\u2019s covert nuclear weapons program is the product of an elaborate disinformation operation based on documents forged by Mossad, Israel\u2019s foreign intelligence agency.<\/p>\n

\u00a0A far more effective counter would have been the truth: that the long-accepted accusation about Iran\u2019s covert nuclear weapons program is the product of an elaborate disinformation operation based on documents forged by Mossad, Israel\u2019s foreign intelligence agency.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In mid-2004, the CIA acquired a massive set of documents that were said to have come from a secret Iranian nuclear weapons research program. Bush administration officials leaked a sensational story to selected news outlets about the intelligence find, describing to the\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a> what that newspaper described as Iranian drawings \u201ctrying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same story of Iran mating a nuclear weapon to its longer-range ballistic missile was given to the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em><\/a> and the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

But both the real provenance of the apparently incriminating documents and specific details about the documents themselves indicate that they are fraudulent.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A major clue about the papers\u2019 true origins was made public in November 2004, when Karsten Voigt<\/em>, the coordinator for German-North American cooperation in the German Foreign Office, was\u00a0quoted by the Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>\u00a0warning that the documents had been provided by \u201can Iranian dissident group,\u201d and that the United States and Europe \u201cshouldn\u2019t let their Iran policy be influenced by single-source headlines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Voigt was clearly suggesting that the mysterious documents had come from the Iranian regime-hating MEK (Mujahideen-e-Khalq)\u2014not from someone in the purported Iranian arms program.<\/p>\n

But no one in the corporate media universe followed up with Voigt, and it was not until 2013, three years after he\u2019d retired from the Foreign Office, that he agreed to give this writer the story behind his warning.<\/p>\n

Voigt recalled how senior officials of the Bundesnachtrichtendienst, or BND, the German foreign intelligence agency, had told him just days before the Wall Street Journal<\/em> interview that they were upset Secretary of State Colin Powell had referred publicly to \u201cevidence\u201d that Iran had tried to design a new missile to carry a nuclear weapon.<\/p>\n

Voigt explained that the documents to which Powell was alluding had been turned over to the BND by an Iranian who had been a sometime source\u2014but not a BND spy, contrary to later accounts in\u00a0the\u00a0Wall Street\u00a0Journal<\/em><\/a> and\u00a0Der Spiegel<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

In fact, he said, the BND did not regard the source as trustworthy, because they knew he was a member of the MEK, the exiled armed Iranian opposition group.<\/p>\n

The MEK is listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization because of its assassination of U.S. officers during the Shah\u2019s regime and its bombings of public events after the Islamic Revolution in Iran.<\/p>\n

The MEK also carried out \u201cspecial operations\u201d for Saddam Hussein\u2019s regime in Iraq against domestic opposition during the Iran-Iraq war, and after that had been used by Israel\u2019s Mossad to \u201claunder\u201d information that it wanted to make public but didn\u2019t want attributed to Israel,\u00a0according to two Israeli journalists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The MEK had pinpointed the location of Iran\u2019s Natanz enrichment facility in August 2002. But it had gotten the satellite intelligence from Mossad, as Seymour Hersh reported in his 2005 book\u00a0Chain of Command<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Two years before Voigt\u2019s conversation with BND officials, then-BND director August Hanning personally warned CIA director George Tenet<\/a> to be cautious about using the testimony of the infamous Iraq \u201cCurveball\u201d source regarding Iraqi bioweapons because it could not be independently confirmed. Other BND analysts said that \u201cCurveball\u201d was unreliable.<\/p>\n

Powell had nevertheless used the information in his infamous United Nations speech justifying the coming invasion of Iraq in March 2003.<\/p>\n

Two years later, BND officials were afraid history was about to be repeated in Iran. Germany had just joined France and Britain in reaching an accord with Tehran, which was aimed at averting a U.S. move to take the Iran file out of the IAEA and create a new crisis at the UN Security Council over the issue of the nuclear program.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t just the provenance of the MEK documents that was suspect. Their authenticity was never clearly established by the CIA, which could not rule out the possibility of falsification,\u00a0according to the Washington Post<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mohamed ElBaradei, then director-general of the IAEA, was put under heavy political pressure by a U.S.-led coalition to publish a report endorsing those documents as evidence against Iran.<\/p>\n

But Elbaradei responded to the pressure by declaring in an October 2009 interview, \u201cThe IAEA is not making any judgment at all whether Iran even had weaponization studies before because there is a major question of authenticity of the documents.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Benjamin Netanyahu gave the public its first view of the documents on which the Bush administration had heavily relied to sway Elbaradei, showing in his slideshow a surprisingly crude schematic drawing of a Shahab-3 missile reentry vehicle with a circle representing a nuclear weapon.<\/p>\n

What is important to note about that image is that the shape of the reentry vehicle is the \u201cdunce cap\u201d shape of the original missile that Iran had acquired from North Korea in the mid-1990s. As early as 2000, the CIA\u2019s national intelligence officer on Iranian missiles testified that Iran had already begun redesigning the Shahab-3 missile for better performance.<\/p>\n

But the outside world was in the dark about what the redesign would look like until the new missile was given its first test flight in August 2004. That test revealed that the redesigned reentry vehicle had a \u201ctri-conic\u201d or \u201cbaby bottle\u201d shape.<\/p>\n

However, the 36-page document of which the image shown by Netanyahu was a part, called \u201cImplementation of Mass Properties of Shahab-3 Missile Warhead with New Payload,\u201d was dated March-April 2003\u2014long after the redesign of the reentry vehicle had taken place\u2014as the IAEA\u2019s May 2008 report<\/a> shows on page two of its annex.<\/p>\n

The inescapable conclusion is that the authors of those drawings were not working for a project of the Iranian Defense Ministry but for a foreign intelligence agency, which guessed wrongly that the shape of Iran\u2019s missile would not change fundamentally.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lastly,* we have \u201cProject 5,\u201d another alleged project listed in the Iranian weapons program documents, supposedly involving uranium ore mining and conversion of uranium ore for enrichment. One of the sub-projects, designated \u201cProject 5.15\u201d, was for \u201core concentration.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when the IAEA accessed the original documents from Iran<\/a> in response to its questions, it found that the contract for a \u201cProject 5.15\u201d for ore concentration had been signed not by a secret nuclear weapons project but by the civilian<\/em> Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, which was in fact responsible for all activities relating to Iranian uranium ore mines.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the IAEA found that the project document had been signed in August 1999\u2014two years before the start date of the alleged secret nuclear weapons research project.<\/p>\n

When this writer confronted former IAEA Deputy Director Olli Heinonen<\/em> about the contradiction, he admitted that he could not explain it.<\/p>\n

The Israeli role in the creation of evidence of Iran\u2019s nuclear weapons ambitions didn\u2019t end with the papers delivered by the MEK.<\/p>\n

In 2008-09, Israel turned over more alleged Iranian documents to the IAEA, including a report on experiments with \u201cmulti-point initiation\u201d of a nuclear explosion, which Netanyahu emphasized in his recent YouTube presentation. The IAEA and the U.S.-led coalition of states that dominated it of course refused to identify the member state that had provided those documents, but ElBaradei revealed<\/a> in his memoirs that the state was indeed Israel.<\/p>\n

The historical impact of the Israelis getting U.S. national security, political, and media elites to accept that these fabrications represented genuine evidence of Iran\u2019s nuclear duplicity can hardly be understated.<\/p>\n

It has unquestionably been one of history\u2019s most successful\u2014and longest running\u2014disinformation campaigns. But it worked without a hitch, because of the readiness of those elites to believe without question anything that was consistent with their perceived interests in continued enmity toward Iran.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and TFF Associate. He is also the author of\u00a0<\/em>Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* Editor\u2019s Note 5\/14: The story was republished with additional information by the author.<\/em><\/p>\n

Originally published by <\/em>The American Conservative<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 transnational.live<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of the evidence points to Israeli and MEK (Mujahedeen-e-Khalq) disinformation, not an open-and-shut case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":112015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,147,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weapons-of-mass-destruction","category-energy","category-middle-east-north-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}