Iran's Intransigence May Spur Crisis
October 15, 2003
The Baltimore Sun
Bennett Ramberg
The international community is turning up the diplomatic heat on Iran's nuclear ambitions. But judging from the investment Tehran has already made to get the bomb, the diplomacy is unlikely to bear fruit, and another Middle East crisis is looming as a result.
Pressed by the United States, the International Atomic Energy Agency imposed an Oct. 31 deadline on Iran to reveal the hidden details about its nuclear program. If Iran fails to fully comply, the IAEA appears likely to refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council for action as early as November.
The mullahs have objected vehemently. But they know the consequence is unlikely to be serious in the short term.
Iraq demonstrated that the council is largely a debating society that will spend years issuing resolutions before acting in a resolute way. And by that time, Iran can make further progress to advance its nuclear ambitions. Still, Iran can use all the time it can get. Accordingly, we should not be surprised to see Tehran act in the "spirit of cooperation" to provide the IAEA with most of the documentation it requests. Indeed, the Iranians already have become more "forthcoming" by providing a list of imported parts.
Should Iran and the IAEA come to an understanding by the end of the month, Tehran will be able to pursue a legitimate program that will bring the country up to the nuclear weapons threshold. At this point -- still a few years from now -- it will be able to legally disavow the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty through its withdrawal provision.
But before all this happens, there will be another nuclear milestone in Iran's nuclear endeavors, namely the commencement of operations at its nuclear power plant near the Persian Gulf city of Bushehr. Built with Russian assistance, the plant is scheduled to go into operation in 2004 or 2005.
Washington speculates that Tehran can extract from the reactor's spent fuel weapons-grade plutonium. As a result, for years the United States pressed Moscow to halt assistance. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin remained unbending in his recent Camp David visit with President Bush. But Moscow has agreed to repatriate the plant's spent fuel. While this would eliminate the risk of plutonium diversion in the near future -- assuming Iran complied -- in years ahead the matter may become academic as Iran develops the potential to generate its own nuclear fuel.
Watching these events with enormous anxiety is Israel, which has told the Bush administration that it will not permit Iran to go forward with a program that can produce nuclear weapons. Israel, of course, is the only nation to have successfully bombed a nuclear plant to halt proliferation when it destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981. Then, as now, time was of the essence.
To avoid the release of radiation, Israel chose to hit the plant before operations began. The Iranian plant -- larger than Chernobyl -- poses a far greater radiological hazard.
Bennett Ramberg served in the State Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the first Bush administration.
http://www.southbendtribune.com/stories/thisday/opinion.20031015-sbt-MICH-A7-Iran_s_intransigence.stoIran-Contra figure re-emerges as middleman for Iraq information to U.S. government
PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer Wednesday, October 15, 2003 (10-15) 11:54 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --
A central figure in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s has passed allegations to the Bush administration that $150 million in enriched uranium was smuggled from Iraq into Iran five years ago and some may remain hidden in Iraq.
The information was relayed to the administration through a conservative author, Michael Ledeen. And Ledeen is now accusing the CIA of failing to aggressively check the allegation because of a long-held distrust of Manucher Ghorbanifar, a middleman in the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra swap of arms for hostages.
The CIA agrees it is dubious of information from Ghorbanifar, saying he has "proven to be a fabricator." But the intelligence agency did meet in Baghdad in recent days with Ghorbanifar's source of the uranium allegation, according to interviews.
President Bush was hurt earlier this year by bad intelligence about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa that was included in his State of the Union address to justify the war. The CIA acknowledges that information turned out to be false and says it had raised concerns about the information with a White House official months before the speech.
The new allegation is worthy of a cloak-and-dagger novel. And its delivery to the CIA illustrates the influence some prominent outside conservatives continue to have inside the Pentagon -- and the difficulty the CIA faces in sorting through allegations emanating from the Middle East.
The source of the current allegation is an Iraqi Shiite who began supplying the Pentagon with information about Iran nearly two years ago in meetings arranged by Ledeen, who has a number of friends in the Pentagon's civilian leadership. The Iraqi was brought to Ledeen's attention by Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile.
Ledeen, Ghorbanifar and the Iraqi source all favor the overthrow of Iran's current government.
Ledeen said that two months ago Ghorbanifar called him with the uranium allegation, and Ledeen pressed the former Iran-Contra figure to check its accuracy. "He called me back and said, `As far as I can tell it's true.' On the basis of that I went to the Pentagon," Ledeen said.
"The question I have is why doesn't the CIA go look?" Ledeen asked.
CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said, "We aggressively pursue all legitimate leads on weapons of mass destruction issues."
"It is true that we have no interest in meeting with Mr. Ghorbanifar since he long ago was proven to be a fabricator and someone who sought to peddle false information for financial gain," Harlow added.
Ghorbanifar flunked two lie detector tests for the CIA, and the White House aides and covert operators involved in the arms-for-hostages deals with Iran didn't trust him, according to testimony from various investigations of that 1980s affair. Yet they continued to deal with him because of his contacts inside Iran and the hope that hostages would be released.
Ledeen, who once advised the Reagan White House on national security matters, presented the uranium story first to Pentagon official Tom O'Connell, to whom Ledeen dedicated the latest of his 17 books, entitled "The War Against the Terrormasters."
Ledeen said he was hoping the Pentagon would go to Iraq and check out the account, but was told that was the CIA's job.
O'Connell, an assistant defense secretary, said in an interview he considers Ledeen "an expert on a whole range of affairs, including terrorism.
"Anything he said would warrant the attention of the U.S. government. I am not in the intelligence business and I would have referred anything" that Ledeen provided "to the proper authorities."
In an acrimonious meeting two weeks ago, in a sport utility vehicle with dark-tinted windows being driven through Baghdad streets, the CIA told the Iraqi source that it did not believe the allegation and suspected the people he was working with only wanted money. The agency demanded a sample of the uranium, the Iraqi source said in an interview arranged by Ledeen.
The Iraqi source, who would talk only on condition his name not be used for fear of his safety, said he told the agency it could meet with three people involved in the purported shipment. Those people, including a man formerly in the Iraqi military, are said to be suffering from radiation sickness. They can take the Americans to a laboratory in Iraq where unspecified "material" is stored, the source said. If the evidence proved valuable, a reward ranging from thousands to millions of dollars would be paid, he said.
Theodore Rockwell, a retired nuclear engineer who was the technical director for Adm. Hyman Rickover's nuclear Navy program, casts doubt on the allegation.
"The idea that these people would still show symptoms of radiation sickness five years later is an indication that if they're sick, it's from something else other than radiation," Rockwell said.
Nearly two years ago, Ledeen says he arranged meetings in Rome between the Iraqi source and two Pentagon Middle East experts after Ghorbanifar brought the source to Ledeen's attention. Ledeen said the contacts provided information to the United States that later saved American lives in Afghanistan. The contacts were broken off amid complaints from some administration officials about Ghorbanifar's involvement.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/10/15/national1454EDT0689.DTL