US Spies: Israel or UK Forged Nukes Report on Iran

Source: PressTV

US intelligence sources have confirmed Iran's assertions that a document published by a British daily about Tehran's nuclear program is a fabrication.

According to a former CIA official, US intelligence agents have found that the document, which was published by the Times of London on December 14, was fabricated by Israel or Britain, the Inter Press Service (IPS) reported on Monday.

The IPS report was penned by renowned investigative journalist Gareth Porter.

Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counter-terrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say the US had nothing to do with forging the document.

He added, however, that US intelligence sources mainly suspect Israel of carrying out the forgery, although, they do not rule out the possibility of the British having played a part in it.

The Times article said that Iran had been secretly experimenting on a key component of a nuclear bomb called the "neutron initiator."

Right after the article was published, Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast dismissed the report as completely "baseless."

The Times article did not identify the source of the document, but rather quoted comments by "an Asian intelligence source," who claimed that his government believes that Tehran has been working on a neutron initiator since 2007.

"An Asian intelligence source" is a term some news media use to refer to Israeli intelligence officials.

The Times story came just before US politicians and their European allies launched a new round of verbal attacks against Iran, threatening it with tougher sanctions and the possibility of an Israeli military attack.

Porter wrote US media reports have left the impression that US intelligence analysts are confident about the document's authenticity. This is while it has been widely reported that they have now had a year to assess the issue.

Although Giraldi's intelligence sources did not reveal all the reasons that led analysts to conclude that the document had been fabricated, they did note that the source of the story itself was suspicious.

"The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the British government," Giraldi said.

Other than The Times, Murdoch's press empire includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the New York Post, all of which are known for the strongly pro-Israeli tone they take in their reports.

Porter added that other than its source, the two-page document itself included a number of giveaways that also indicated fraud.

For example, the image of the Farsi-language original of the document, which was also published by the Times lacked any confidentiality marking, although the subject of the document logically put it into the highly classified category.

Furthermore, the document did not include information about the issuing office or the intended recipients. It vaguely referred to "the Centre," "the Institute," "the Committee," and the "neutron group."

The ambiguity was in stark contrast with the concreteness of the plans, which included detailed instructions about recruiting eight individuals for different tasks for very specific numbers of hours and for a four-year time frame.

The vagueness can be explained by reasoning that security markings and identifying information in a forged document would increase the likelihood of potential errors that could expose the fraud.

The absence of any date on the document also conflicted with the rest of the information, which came in detail. The 2007 timeline was only introduced by the Times' unnamed foreign sources.

A clear motive for suggesting the early 2007 date would be to appease the Israeli government by discrediting the US intelligence community's November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran was not working on a nuclear bomb.

The biggest reason for discarding the document as fraudulent is its attempt to suggest past Iranian experiments on Polonium-210 for use in a neutron initiator, a claim which was ruled out by the UN nuclear watchdog in a February 2008 report.

This is not the first time that Giraldi has been tipped off by his intelligence sources on forged documents. He was the individual who identified those responsible for the two most notorious forged documents in recent US history.

In 2005, Giraldi identified Michael Ledeen, the extreme right-wing former consultant to the Pentagon, as an author of the fabricated letter, which introduced the allegation that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

That letter gave the administration of former US President George W. Bush the opportunity to claim that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program, an allegation that was proven completely false following the invasion of Iraq.

Giraldi also identified officials in the "Office of Special Plans" who worked under Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith as those who forged a letter, allegedly written by a Saddam intelligence aide, about an operation to arrange for an unidentified shipment from Niger.

The Week the IAEA Applied a Double Standard

By: Gareth Porter – Truthout

In 2004, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) revealed that a member state had violated its Safeguards Agreement by carrying out covert uranium conversion and enrichment activities and plutonium experiments for more than two decades. The nature of certain of those enrichment activities, moreover, raised legitimate suspicions of interest in a nuclear weapons program.

The state was found to have lied to the IAEA even when it began investigating these suspicious activities, claiming that its laser enrichment research did not involve any use of nuclear material.

If that sounds like a description of Iran's troubled relationship with the IAEA up to 2004, that's because it bears striking resemblance to it. In fact, however, it is a description of the deception of the IAEA by the government of South Korea.

There was just one major difference between the South Korean and Iranian cases: Iran never enriched uranium at a level that could only represent an interest in nuclear weapons, but South Korea did.

Yet the IAEA treated Iran as a state to be investigated indefinitely, after failing to give South Korea even a slap on the wrist.

Even more remarkable is the fact that the two cases were the subject of IAEA reports issued within the same week in November 2004.

Three months before the report on its nuclear activities was published, South Korea admitted doing everything in violation of its Safeguards Agreement that Iran was found to have done up to 2003.

In the early 1980's, South Korea had carried out uranium conversion in a facility that was kept secret from the IAEA. It had also secretly extracted plutonium from a hot cell, and had carried out at least 10 covert uranium enrichment experiments from 1993 through 2000 using undeclared natural uranium metal.

South Korea had used 3.5 kg of natural uranium metal for its unreported enrichment experiments; Iran had used 8.0 kg of natural uranium for the same kind of experiments.

But by far the most important finding by the IAEA was that, during a series of covert experiments in uranium enrichment using atomic vapor laser isolate separation (AVLIS) in 2000, Korean scientists enriched the uranium to 77 percent. South Korea finally admitted that experiment in its August 2004 declaration to the IAEA.

"Not only did they have an undeclared uranium-enrichment program, but they were actually making something close to bomb-grade, so you have to conclude someone wanted to develop a capability to make nuclear weapons," said David Albright of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security after the Korean violations were revealed.

Despite covert activities that could only be reasonably interpreted as evidence of an intention to develop nuclear weapons, however, Seoul was given what amounted to a free pass. .

After its August 2004 confidential admission to its covert activities, South Korea mounted an aggressive diplomatic offensive, aimed at avoiding any legal consequences.

First, South Korean officials put pressure on IAEA Director General Mohamed El Baradei not even to disclose the enrichment in his report to the Governing Board. The South Koreans threatened to undermine El Baradei's reelection bid, according to a Nov. 25, 2004 Washington Post story.

El Baradei was well aware that South Korea's ally, the George W. Bush administration, was seeking to oust El Baradei, because of his refusal to conform to U.S. policies toward Iraq and Iran.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration had made no secret of the fact it wanted the IAEA Board of Governors to call for Iran to be reported to the U.N. Security Council.

U.S. officials understood that the South Korean covert enrichment and other violations were, if anything, worse than those of Iran. At least some officials were prepared to support a resolution in the IAEA Governing Board to send Korea's case to the Security Council in order to establish a precedent that could then be applied to Iran, according to the Post story.

But the British, French and Germans were negotiating with Iran on an agreement under which Tehran would maintain its suspension of uranium enrichment, and they were threatening to send the Iranian file to the Security Council if Iran did not agree.

Given those negotiations, El Baradei felt no need to write a report that would be the basis of a resolution from the IAEA Board of Governors in late November 2004 to refer the South Korean case to the U.N. Security Council.

El Baradei's Nov. 11, 2004 report on South Korea confirmed that enrichment had gone as high as 77 percent but did not raise the obvious question of whether its covert nuclear activities had been military-related.

It recounted without comment the South Korean authorities' explanation that both the plutonium and uranium enrichment experiments had been "performed without the knowledge or authorization of the Government".

Given the fact that South Korea had admitted that the covert uranium
enrichment had been carried out by no less than 14 government scientists, an IAEA investigation was obviously in order. But the report gave no hint that there was any need to find out who had authorized it and why.

In effect, El Baradei's report on South Korea effectively eliminated the issue from the agency's agenda.

Three days after the report, Iran reached agreement with the Europeans on a
voluntary suspension of enrichment and more negotiations. Since there was no chance of getting the Iranian case referred to the U.N. Security Council,
Secretary of State Colin Powell told the South Koreans at a meeting in Chile
that the United States was now prepared to "accept Seoul's explanation" for
its covert enrichment to bomb-grade levels.

That clearly signaled that the United States had decided against a resolution to send the South Korean case to the Security Council after the European agreement with Iran.

The subject of South Korea's violations of its Safeguards Agreement was
never raised again at an IAEA meeting. In 2007, an IAEA Safeguards report
said the agency was "able to clarify all issues relating to past undeclared
activities".

It offered no explanation for the enrichment to bomb-grade levels and the
obvious official falsehoods surrounding the activities, or for its own
acquiescence in it.

In contrast to El Baradei's lack of curiosity about the obviously suspect
official South Korean explanations for its bomb-grade enrichment, his report
on Iran, issued four days later, concluded that it would "take longer than
in normal circumstances" to "conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear
materials or activities in Iran".

The report suggested the IAEA would continue to pursue what it called "open source reports relating to dual use equipment and materials" in Iran. That meant that any technology, not matter how innocent, would now be treated as evidence of an Iranian covert nuclear weapons program.

The double standard of treatment of the South Korean and Iranian cases implied that the United States had hard intelligence that Iran had exhibited an interest in nuclear weapons, whereas South Korea had not.

However, the closest thing to such evidence in U.S. possession was a set of documents of uncertain provenance and authenticity.
On the other hand, nuclear physicists working in the Korean nuclear program, who had been recruited by the CIA, had reported in the mid-1970's that South Korea was carrying out a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

The stark contrast between the treatment of the Iranian and South Korean cases by the IAEA Secretariat and its Board of Governors is the most dramatic evidence of a politically motivated nuclear double standard practiced by the agency and its Governing Board, dominated by the United States.

And as the episode showed, that double standard essentially reflected the political-military interests of the U.S. government.