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David Fickling
Thursday September 14, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
The UN's nuclear watchdog has made a stinging attack on the US Congress over an "outrageous and dishonest" report on Iran's nuclear programme.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that the congressional report published last month contained "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated information", and that it took "strong exception" to "incorrect and misleading" claims in the report that the IAEA was covering up some of its doubts about Iran's nuclear intentions.
A letter from the IAEA to Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the intelligence select committee in the house of representatives, was leaked to the Washington Post today.
Washington has been keen to ramp up pressure on Iran at a time when Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany - the other main negotiators over Iran's nuclear programme - are favouring a more cautious approach.
Although all six countries want Iran to stop enriching uranium, Russia and China are understood to oppose the imposition of economic sanctions and the European negotiators are opposed to any military action against Tehran.
There have been international concerns about Iran's nuclear programme since it announced success in enriching uranium earlier this year. Uranium must be enriched to be used in nuclear power plants, but further enrichment can produce material suitable for use in atomic bombs.
Iran insists that its nuclear programme is only intended for peaceful power generation purposes, but diplomats suspect that it is being used as cover for atomic weapons development.
The congressional report is said to have been written by a Republican staff member of the house intelligence committee who is known to have hardline views on Iran and who based the report's conclusions on published material, rather than secret intelligence.
The IAEA letter particularly criticised a caption in the report claiming that the Natanz plant in central Iran was enriching uranium to weapons grade. That claim was contradicted by the IAEA's latest report on Iran, released to diplomats at the end of last month and showing that enrichment had so far only reached low levels.
But the strongest response was to the report's retelling of an article in German newspaper Die Welt about the departure of former nuclear inspector Chris Charlier from the IAEA.
The report had claimed that Mr Charlier was removed by the IAEA director, Mohamed El Baradei, at the behest of Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, and that there was an "unstated IAEA policy barring IAEA officials from telling the whole truth about the Iranian nuclear programme".
The letter described these statements as "outrageous and dishonest", saying that the IAEA's founding rules stated that inspectors could only be sent to a country with the agreement of the country's government.
IAEA says Congress report on Iran's nuclear capacity is erroneous and misleading
· Claims about programme are 'unsubstantiated'
· Leak shows watchdog detected five major errors
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Friday September 15, 2006
The Guardian
The UN's nuclear watchdog has attacked the US Congress for what it termed an "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated" report on Iran's nuclear programme.
In a letter to the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives' intelligence committee, a senior director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the report was "incorrect" in its assessment that Iran had made weapons-grade uranium at a site inspected by the agency. Instead, the letter said, the facility had produced only small amounts of uranium, which were below the level necessary for weapons.
The letter, leaked to the Washington Post, also criticised the report for making the "outrageous and dishonest" claim that a senior inspector was removed "for concluding that the purpose of Iran's nuclear programme is to construct weapons".
While the IAEA noted five major errors in the report, intelligence officials told the Washington Post that it contained a dozen assertions that were either wrong or impossible to substantiate.
The House report, under the chairmanship of the Michigan Republican Peter Hoekstra, was released on August 23. It was not voted on or discussed by the full bipartisan committee but it was reviewed by the office of John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, before being released by Republican members of the committee.
Jane Harman, the Democrat vice-chairwoman of the committee, told colleagues in an email that the report "took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the Iran threat as more dire - and the intelligence community's assessments as more certain - than they are."
The report, titled Recognising Iran as a Strategic Threat, was written by Fredrick Fleitz, a CIA operative on secondment to the US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Mr Fleitz and Mr Bolton were involved in constructing the arguments in favour of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mr Fleitz is writing a report about North Korea for Mr Hoekstra's committee.
The row over the Iran report is reminiscent of the disputes between the IAEA, its chief Mohamed ElBaradei and the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. "This is like pre-war Iraq all over again," David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, told the Post.
Relations between the White House and the IAEA almost collapsed when the agency revealed that the administration had based some of its claims about Iraq's alleged WMD programme on forged documents. The White House subsequently led an unsuccessful campaign to prevent Mr ElBaradei's re-election last year.
The IAEA took "strong exception" to the report's assertion that Mr ElBaradei had removed an agency inspector, Chris Charlier, for breaking an "unstated IAEA policy barring IAEA officials from telling the whole truth about the Iranian nuclear programme". He was removed at the behest of the Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, the letter says, under the terms of Tehran's agreement to allow inspectors into the country. The letter points out that this is routine and that Iran has accepted the presence of more than 200 IAEA inspectors. Mr Charlier remains head of the IAEA's Iran sanctions section.
British Find No Evidence Of Arms Traffic From Iran
Troops in Southeast Iraq Test U.S. Claim of Aid for Militias
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 4, 2006; A21
ON THE IRAQ-IRAN BORDER -- Since late August, British commandos in the deserts of far southeastern Iraq have been testing one of the most serious charges leveled by the United States against Iran: that Iran is secretly supplying weapons, parts, funding and training for attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq.
A few hundred British troops living out of nothing more than their cut-down Land Rovers and light armored vehicles have taken to the desert in the start of what British officers said would be months of patrols aimed at finding the illicit weapons trafficking from Iran, or any sign of it.
There's just one thing.
"I suspect there's nothing out there," the commander, Lt. Col. David Labouchere, said last month, speaking at an overnight camp near the border. "And I intend to prove it."
Other senior British military leaders spoke as explicitly in interviews over the previous two months. Britain, whose forces have had responsibility for security in southeastern Iraq since the war began, has found nothing to support the Americans' contention that Iran is providing weapons and training in Iraq, several senior military officials said.
"I have not myself seen any evidence -- and I don't think any evidence exists -- of government-supported or instigated" armed support on Iran's part in Iraq, British Defense Secretary Des Browne said in an interview in Baghdad in late August.
"It's a question of intelligence versus evidence," Labouchere's commander, Brig. James Everard of Britain's 20th Armored Brigade, said last month at his base in the southern region's capital, Basra. "One hears word of mouth, but one has to see it with one's own eyes. These are serious consequences, aren't they?"
They are. Allegations that Iran or its agents are providing military support for Iraqi Shiite Muslim militias and other armed groups is one of the most contentious issues raising tensions between Washington and Tehran. Most gravely, U.S. generals and diplomats accuse Iran of providing infrared triggers for special explosives that are capable of piercing heavy armor.
Evidence of Iranian armed intervention in Iraq is "irrefutable," one U.S. commander in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Michael Barbero, told Pentagon reporters in August. The lead U.S. military spokesman in Iraq renews the allegation almost weekly in Baghdad.
Iraq's remote Maysan province is "a funnel for Iranian munitions," said Wayne White, who led the State Department's Iraq intelligence team during the war and now is an adjunct scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. White said that in the first year of the occupation a well-placed friend had seen "considerable physical evidence of it, and just about everyone in al-Amarah knew about it." Al-Amarah is the commonly used name of Maysan province.
Here in Maysan, Jasim Alawa Salum, an Iraqi father of 10 whose home is in a warren of thatched farmhouses near the border, agreed. "All troubles come from Iran," he said, bending his head to show a wound from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.
But Maj. Dominic Roberts of the Queen's Dragoons said: "We have found no credible evidence to suggest there is weapons smuggling across the border."
Asked why he could declare himself so confident that no arms were coming through, Labouchere mildly cited his confidence in Iraq's border force.
Guards at one of the 27 border forts now used to guard Maysan were dismissive of talk of military support from Iran. "It's just fabrication," insisted one, Haidar Hassan.
At one crossroads checkpoint, two border guards grinned awkwardly when a British desert patrol stopped in. No smugglers had come by, no untoward travelers, no problems, the guards said. The guards, however, come from tribes with a history of smuggling, and since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi border workers have redoubled their reputation for taking bribes.
To determine the truth of the charges, British commanders say, the British troops did something no other large-scale conventional unit in the U.S.-led coalition here has tried. They gave up their base.
Almost every night for months, rockets and mortar rounds had pounded Abu Naji, the outpost where British forces made their home outside Amarah, Maysan's provincial capital. In the base's last five months of use, 281 rockets or mortar rounds hit Abu Naji, Labouchere said.
Young soldiers would slip out of base at night to try to find the attackers. They would return in the morning as frustrated as when they left, he said. "The boys felt they were powerless," Labouchere said.
So the British forces packed up. The night before they left, mortars gave Abu Naji a farewell pounding.
About 5,000 townspeople gathered at the gates of Abu Naji on Aug. 24. When British troops pulled out that afternoon, the mobs moved in. Iraqi forces briefly tried to hold back the crowds, then gave way, said Maj. Charlie Burbridge, a British military spokesman at Basra. The mobs looted the base down to the bricks.
"This is the first Iraqi city that has kicked out the occupier!" loudspeakers at the local offices of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr trumpeted.
In their new mission, the British spread out over a desert carpeted with shrapnel, the legacy of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that claimed the bulk of its 1 million dead here in the deserts of Maysan. Pressing all hands into duty, a former tank crewman became a medic; the regiment chaplain took the wheel as a fuel tanker driver.
If trouble in most of Iraq had inevitably followed foreign soldiers, the soldiers in Maysan didn't seem to hear anything coming. Attackers had lobbed a rocket or mortar round at them during their first week in the desert, but there had been nothing since, they said.
At the least, Labouchere said, "I am satisfied our presence will reduce" the dangers for the rest of Iraq.
Ultimately, however, the British can do little more than demonstrate that the borders are closed, Labouchere said. Save for that, he said, they find themselves trying "to prove a negative."
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Julian Borger in Vienna
Thursday February 22, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Much of the intelligence on Iran's nuclear facilities provided to UN inspectors by US spy agencies has turned out to be unfounded, diplomatic sources in Vienna said today.
The claims, reminiscent of the intelligence fiasco surrounding the Iraq war, coincided with a sharp increase in international tension as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran was defying a UN security council ultimatum to freeze its nuclear programme.
That report, delivered to the security council by the IAEA director general, Mohammed ElBaradei, sets the stage for a fierce international debate on the imposition of stricter sanctions on Iran and raises the possibility that the US could resort to military action against Iranian nuclear sites.
At the heart of the debate are accusations - spearheaded by the US - that Iran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons.
However, most of the tip-offs about supposed secret weapons sites provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have led to dead ends when investigated by IAEA inspectors, according to informed sources in Vienna.
"Most of it has turned out to be incorrect," a diplomat at the IAEA with detailed knowledge of the agency's investigations said.
"They gave us a paper with a list of sites. [The inspectors] did some follow-up, they went to some military sites, but there was no sign of [banned nuclear] activities.
"Now [the inspectors] don't go in blindly. Only if it passes a credibility test."
One particularly contentious issue was records of plans to build a nuclear warhead, which the CIA said it found on a stolen laptop computer supplied by an informant inside Iran.
In July 2005, US intelligence officials showed printed versions of the material to IAEA officials, who judged it to be sufficiently specific to confront Iran.
Tehran rejected the material as forged, and there are still reservations within the IAEA about its authenticity, according to officials with knowledge of the internal debate in the agency.
"First of all, if you have a clandestine programme, you don't put it on laptops which can walk away," one official said. "The data is all in English which may be reasonable for some of the technical matters, but at some point you'd have thought there would be at least some notes in Farsi. So there is some doubt over the provenance of the computer."
IAEA officials do not comment on intelligence passed to the watchdog agency by foreign governments, saying all such assistance is confidential.
A western counter-proliferation official accepted that intelligence on Iran had sometimes been patchy, but argued that the essential point was Tehran's failure to live up to its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty.
"I take on board on what they're saying, but the bottom line is that for nearly 20 years [the Iranians] were violating safeguards agreements," the official said. "There is a confidence deficit here about the regime's true intentions."
That deficit will be deepened by yesterday's IAEA report, which concluded bluntly that "Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities", in defiance of a December UN ultimatum to stop.
The report noted that Iran had continued with the operation of a pilot enrichment plant.
Furthermore, the report said Iran had informed the agency of its plan to install 18 arrays, or cascades, of 164 centrifuges in an underground plant by May - a total of nearly 3,000.
At the moment, Iran's centrifuges are being used to make low enriched uranium, but if they were switched to making highly enriched, weapons grade uranium they could produce enough for a bomb in less than a year.
Mr ElBaradei's report said that Iran had so far not agreed to the IAEA installing remote monitoring devices in the enrichment plant to keep constant tabs on what the Iranians were doing with them.
Furthermore, the IAEA still has a string of questions about the Iranian programme that remain unanswered. Until they are, the agency will not give Iran a clear bill of health.
One of the "outstanding issues" listed in yesterday's report involves a 15-page document that appears to have been handed to IAEA inspectors by mistake with a batch of unrelated paperwork in October 2005.
That document roughly describes how to make hemispheres of enriched uranium, for which the only known use is in nuclear warheads. Iran has yet to present a satisfactory explanation of how and why it has the document.
"The issue here is the Iranians have not addressed outstanding issues, and we are still uncertain about the scope and intent of the programme," a senior UN official said last night.
"We cannot ensure the correctness and completeness of their declaration."
US intelligence on Iran does not stand up, say Vienna sources
· Tip-offs did not lead to signs of banned activity
· IAEA report raises pressure for new sanctions
Julian Borger in Vienna
Friday February 23, 2007
The Guardian
A Tehran student supports the nuclear programme
A Tehran student supports the nuclear programme. Photograph: Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty
Much of the intelligence on Iran's nuclear facilities provided to UN inspectors by American spy agencies has turned out to be unfounded, according to diplomatic sources in Vienna.
The claims, reminiscent of the intelligence fiasco surrounding the Iraq war, coincided with a sharp increase in international tension as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran was defying a UN security council ultimatum to freeze its nuclear programme.
That report, delivered to the security council by the IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, sets the stage for a fierce international debate on the imposition of stricter sanctions on Iran, and raises the possibility that the US might resort to military action against Iranian nuclear sites.
At the heart of the debate are accusations, spearheaded by the US, that Iran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons. However, most of the tip-offs about supposed secret weapons sites provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have led to dead ends when investigated by IAEA inspectors, according to informed sources in Vienna.
"Most of it has turned out to be incorrect," said a diplomat at the IAEA with detailed knowledge of the agency's investigations. "They gave us a paper with a list of sites. [The inspectors] did some follow-up, they went to some military sites, but there was no sign of [banned nuclear] activities."
"Now [the inspectors] don't go in blindly. Only if it passes a credibility test."
One particularly contentious issue concerned records of plans to build a nuclear warhead, which the CIA said it found on a stolen laptop computer supplied by an informant inside Iran. In July 2005, US intelligence officials showed printed versions of the material to IAEA officials, who judged it to be sufficiently specific to confront Iran.
Tehran rejected the material as forgeries and there are still reservations about its authenticity in the IAEA, according to officials with knowledge of the internal debate inside the agency.
"First of all, if you have a clandestine programme, you don't put it on laptops which can walk away," one official said. "The data is all in English which may be reasonable for some of the technical matters, but at some point you'd have thought there would be at least some notes in Farsi. So there is some doubt over the provenance of the computer."
IAEA officials do not comment on intelligence passed to the watchdog agency by foreign governments, saying all such assistance is confidential.
A western counter-proliferation official accepted that intelligence on Iran had sometimes been patchy but argued that the essential point was Iran's failure to live up to its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty.
"I take on board on what they're saying, but the bottom line is that for nearly 20 years [the Iranians] were violating safeguards agreements," the official said. "There is a confidence deficit here about the regime's true intentions."
That deficit will be deepened by yesterday's IAEA report. It concluded bluntly: "Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities", in defiance of a December UN ultimatum to stop. The report noted that Iran had continued with the operation of a pilot enrichment plant.
Furthermore, the report said that Iran had informed the agency of its plan to install 18 arrays, or cascades, of 164 centrifuges in an underground plant by May - a total of nearly 3,000. At the moment, Iran's centrifuges are being used to make low-enriched uranium, but if they were switched to making highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium, they could produce enough for a bomb in less than a year.
Dr ElBaradei's report said that Iran had so far not agreed to the IAEA installing remote monitoring devices in the enrichment plant to keep constant tabs on what the Iranians were doing with them.
Furthermore, the IAEA still has a string of questions about the Iranian programme that remain unanswered. Until they are, the agency will not give Iran a clear bill of health.
One of the "outstanding issues" listed in yesterday's report involves a 15-page document that appears to have been handed to IAEA inspectors by mistake in October 2005. That document roughly describes how to make hemispheres of enriched uranium, for which the only known use is in nuclear warheads. Iran has yet to present a satisfactory explanation of how and why it has the document.
Last night Iran, which says its nuclear fuel programme is designed only to produce electricity, remained defiant. "Regarding the suspension mentioned in the report, because such a demand has no legal basis and is against international treaties, naturally, it could not be accepted by Iran," Muhammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, told Reuters in Tehran. Mr Saeedi said the report showed that returning to talks was the best way to resolve the dispute.
The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said he was "deeply concerned". "I urge again that the Iranian government should fully comply with the demands as soon as possible and engage in negotiations with the international community so that we can resolve this issue peacefully."
Ahmadinejad: Iran expanding nuclear process
Defiant president says country can make nuclear fuel on ‘industrial scale’
BREAKING NEWS
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 8:18 a.m. PT April 9, 2007
WASHINGTON - Iran's latest statements on its nuclear program were "another signal" that Tehran was defying the international community's call to give up uranium enrichment activities, the United States said Monday.
"It's a missed opportunity," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said when asked about Iran's announcement that it had begun industrial scale nuclear fuel production. "This is another signal that Iran is defying the international community."
McCormack's statement was a reaction to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's announcement Monday that Iran was now capable of producing nuclear fuel on an "industrial scale" in an expansion of the uranium enrichment program that the United Nations has demanded it halt.
The announcement suggests Iran has succeeded in operating a larger number of centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment facility in central Iran.
Asked if Iran has begun injecting uranium gas into 3,000 centrifuges for enrichment, top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani replied, “Yes.” He did not elaborate, but it was the first confirmation that Iran had installed the larger set of centrifuges after months of saying it intends to do so. Until now, Iran was only known to have 328 centrifuges operating.
"With great honor, I declare that as of today our dear country has joined the nuclear club of nations and can produce nuclear fuel on an industrial scale," Ahmadinejad said.
Earlier on Monday, Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh also announced the start of “industrial scale” enrichment of uranium, calling it “another step toward the flourishing of Islamic Iran,” Aghazadeh said at Natanz.
Aghazadeh heads Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.
The U.N. has imposed limited sanctions on Iran until it suspends enrichment a key process that can produce either fuel for a nuclear reactor or the basis of a warhead. The United States and its allies accuse Iran of seeking to build nuclear weapons, a claim the country denies.
Defying the sanctions
Meantime, Iranian state television reported Monday that an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general who is banned from traveling abroad under the sanctions has visited Russia without any difficulty.
Gen. Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, who is also deputy interior minister for security affairs, was quoted on the state TV Web site as saying that his six-day journey to Moscow, which ended Monday, showed "the ineffectiveness of the resolution."
The resolution calls on all governments to ban visits by the 15 individuals and says that should such visits occur — presumably for exceptional circumstances — the countries should notify a U.N. committee.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Krivtsov confirmed that Zolqadr visited Russia. He told The Associated Press that the resolution does not prohibit visits by the listed individuals, instead calling for heightened vigilance and attention, and that "this vigilance is directed first of all at people who are directly related to nuclear programs," suggesting that Zolqadr was not.
EU boycott
The unveiling of new centrifuges at Natanz would be a strong show of defiance toward the United Nations, which has vowed to ratchet up sanctions as long as Iran refuses to suspend enrichment. The Security Council has set a new deadline of late May.
Tensions are also high between Iran and the West following the 13-day detention of 15 British sailors by Iran. The sailors, who were seized by Revolutionary Guards off the Iraqi coast, were released on Wednesday, but since then have said they were put under psychological pressure by their captors to force them to "confess" to being in Iranian waters when captured, angering many in Britain.
Diplomats from developing nations were attending Monday's celebrations at Natanz, but diplomats from European Union boycotted to protest Iran's refusal of the U.N. demands, said the Foreign Ministry in Germany, which currently holds the EU presidency.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said his country was willing to negotiate with the West and offer assurances that its program is peaceful. But he said the West must accept its nuclear program as a fact.
"We are ready to reach understanding with the Westerners through a corridor of real negotiations — in the current situation, in which Iran's nuclear activities have been concluded," state television quoted Larijani as saying.
"The understanding regards assuring the other party about the peacefulness of Iran's nuclear activities," he said. "But we do not give in our rights."
‘National day of nuclear energy’
Across Iran, school bells rang to mark the "national day of nuclear energy." The government sent out SMS messages of congratulations for the occasion to millions of mobile phone users.
In Tehran, some 200 students formed a human chain at Iran's Atomic Energy Organization while chanting "death to America" and "death to Britain." The students burnt flags of the U.S. and Britain.
On April 9, 2006, Iran announced it had first enriched uranium using an array of 164 centrifuges.
Iran has said its next step is to set up 3,000 centrifuges, but it is not clear where the project stands. Experts say the Natanz plant needs between 50,000 to 60,000 centrifuges to consistently produce fuel for a reactor or build a warhead.
In the enrichment process, uranium gas is pumped into a "cascade" of thousands of centrifuges, which spin the gas at supersonic speeds to purify it. Uranium enriched to a low level, at least 3 percent, can be used as fuel, while at a far higher level, more than 90 percent, it can be used to build a weapon.
Iran currently has two cascades of 164 centrifuges each operating at an aboveground portion of the Natanz facility in central Iran. The two cascades have produced small quantities of non-weapons grade enriched uranium, U.N. nuclear inspectors have said.
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