The International Atomic Energy Agency has once again lent itself to the
political interests of the United States and Israel, provoking a needless
conflict with Iran
Gareth Porter
The approval by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of a
June 19 resolution calling on Iran to comply fully with agency demands for
cooperation marks a new stage in the long-running Israeli campaign to
isolate Iran over alleged covert nuclear weapons activities.
The IAEA has demanded that Iran provide "clarifications" regarding "possible
undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities," as well as
access to two sites in question.
Those demands are based on alleged Iranian documents that Israeli
intelligence supposedly stole from Iran in 2018. And as The Grayzone has
reported, their authenticity is highly questionable, and their theft may
have never occurred.
The Israeli pressure campaign gains way with US help
The latest phase of the Iran crisis erupted in June 2018, when the Israeli
government informed the IAEA that its intelligence services had discovered a
new "secret atomic warehouse" in the Turquzabad district of Tehran. In his
September 2018 United Nations speech announcing the find, Netanyahu demanded
that IAEA Director General, Yukio Amano "do the right thing. Go inspect this
atomic warehouse, immediately, before the Iranians finish clearing it out."
Amano pushed back publicly against the Israeli pressure in October 2018,
however, asserting his independence from Netanyahu's agenda. Under his
watch, the IAEA also failed to accede to Israeli pressure to publicize
documents from the "archive" they had provided.
When Brian Hook, a neoconservative operative serving as the State
Department's lead official on isolating Iran, visited Israel in November
2018, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's political director told him his
government was furious with the IAEA for failing to take the documents
seriously. Hook assured the Israelis that his administration would apply
pressure on the IAEA to take action. He assigned the new U.S. Ambassador to
the IAEA, a protege of John Bolton named Jackie Walcott, as his point
person.
In January 2019, as an apparent result of the pressure campaign, the IAEA
asked Iran to visit the warehouse that Netanyahu had identified and take
environmental samples. Iran agreed, suggesting that Iranian officials did
not believe the agency would find anything supporting the Israeli
allegations.
Months later, laboratory results showed the presence of what the IAEA called
"natural uranium particles of anthropogenic origin." That meant that the
particles had been subject to a process of uranium conversion but not
enrichment. The most likely explanation for the finding was that that a part
of retired equipment or other material that had been used in Iran's
fully-monitored uranium conversion program had ended up in that warehouse.
The logical next step for the IAEA at that point would have been to have to
request visits to sites where Iran's declared conversion program has
operated so the results could be compared with the those of the samples
found at the warehouse. That was what precisely Iran proposed to the Agency
in January 2020. The IAEA did carry out the sampling, but the laboratory
tests on those samples are not yet available.
While the IAEA stalled on requesting environmental samples from the declared
uranium conversion sites for several months, when it would have made the
most sense to do so, the Israeli government exploited the lab results to
resume its political offensive against Iran. With backing from the US, they
pushed a dubious argument that particles of natural uranium confirmed their
claim that Iran had run an undeclared program to process natural uranium for
use in covert nuclear weapons-related testing.
Israel enhances its position in the IAEA
The Israeli lobbying coincided with the first phase of a transition within
the IAEA that would ultimately advance their position. Amano underwent an
unspecified medical procedure in September 2018, grew steadily weaker with a
serious illness and died on July 2, 2019.
Before his physical decline, Amano had announced plans to step down by March
2020, touching off a competition between senior IAEA officials for election
to the Director General position. US and Israeli influence was immediately
enhanced by the race, because any interested candidate required substantial
U.S. support to for the requisite votes among the agency's board of
directors.
The Israelis had focused IAEA's attention on an alleged Iranian overt
conversion program the very beginning. Drawn from a covert program that
took place from 2000 to 2003, the collection of supposedly purloined
documents included a one-page flow sheet showing a process for converting
uranium ore into a form of uranium that could be enriched.
But in its December 2015 "Final Assessment" of questions of "possible
military dimensions," the IAEA had concluded that the process shown in the
document "was technically flawed and of low quality in comparison to what
was available to Iran as part of its declared nuclear fuel cycle." In other
words, it wasn't taken very seriously.
Netanyahu's new "Iranian Nuclear Archive" included what was purported to be
a May 2003 letter from the "project manager" of the "Health and Safety
Group" for that same alleged covert nuclear weapons program. The letter
described a large covert uranium conversion plant and three plant designs.
But the letter bore no marking that connected it with any Iranian government
entity - only a crudely drawn symbol that could have been drawn by anyone.
What's more, nothing about the facility designs supported the documents'
authenticity, especially considering a senior Israeli intelligence
official's acknowledgment to pro-Israel lobbyist David Albright that no such
plant was ever built. Nevertheless, the Israelis continued to deploy those
dubious documents to hammer home their point.
The IAEA caves to Israel and the US
The documents and photos the Israelis pushed with U.S. support eventually
prompted the IAEA to cave in to their demands. The agency sent three letters
to Iran on July 5, August 9 and August 21, 2019 based entirely on the
Israeli claims about three "undeclared sites." In the missives, the IAEA
claimed to have "detailed information" about what it called "possible
undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities" at each of site.
It demanded "clarifications" in each case.
According to the IAEA, the first letter related to the "possible presence"
between 2002 and 2003 of a natural uranium metal disc which it said "may not
have been included in Iran's declarations." The letter was obviously
referring to Lavisan-Shian in Tehran, when it said the site "underwent
extensive sanitation and leveling in 2003 and 2004." At the time, the Agency
decided there was no point in visiting it.
The U.S. and Israel have always argued that Iran had completely removed the
topsoil at the site in order to avoid detection by environmental sampling of
some kind of nuclear-related work at the site. But that claim was false. In
fact, the buildings belonging to the military contractor of Lavisan-Shian
had been torn down, but topsoil remained.
The IAEA did undertake environmental sampling of the site in June 2004,
acknowledging that the vegetation and soil samples collected at
Lavisan-Shian revealed no evidence of nuclear material. Reuters reported at
the time that an IAEA official had said that "on-site inspections of Lavizan
produced no proof that any soil had been removed at all."
In its July 5 letter, the IAEA demanded to know whether an undeclared
natural uranium metal disc had been present at the site and, if so, where it
was located. That question was clearly based on a slide in the Israeli
collection that Albright's organization has described as summarizing how to
make uranium deuteride, which has been used to create a neutral initiator
for a nuclear explosion, with uranium metal chips and deuterium gas.
The second site, which has not been otherwise identified, "may have been
used for the processing and conversion of uranium ore including fluorination
in 2003," according to the IAEA letter. It said the site "underwent
significant changes in 2004, including the demolition of most buildings," as
though that constituted evidence of wrongdoing.
The claim made little sense given that in April 2003, Iran had formally
declared to the IAEA that it was opening lines at its Esfahan Nuclear
Technology Center for production of natural uranium metal for use in the
production of shielding material.
At the third site, the IAEA stated, "outdoor conventional explosive testing
may have taken place in 2003" on "shielding" for use with "neutron
detectors." As part of the rationale for demanding clarification," the
agency cited supposed efforts beginning in July 2019 to "sanitize part of
the location." This language was designed to imply that evidence of
wrongdoing had been removed from the Iranian site.
We know that the site in question was near Abadeh, because Netanyahu showed
satellite photos of the Abadeh site in June 2019 and again in late July of
this year, when a set of buildings had been removed by the latter date.
Netanyahu bragged that he was revealing "yet another secret nuclear
site.exposed in the archives." However, IAEA wording suggested its letter
was prompted not by any concrete evidence of nuclear activity at the Abadeh
site, but by some evidence of the destruction of those buildings.
The IAEA thus chose the three sites based on nothing more than the fact that
buildings were razed, and thanks to pressure applied by the Israelis and the
the United States. The notion that Iran "may have" used and stored
undeclared nuclear material at undeclared site, moreover, was based solely
on unvetted Israeli documents, contrary to the IAEA claim of "extensive and
rigorous corroboration process."
In provoking a needless crisis over obscure hypotheticals, the IAEA has once
again lent itself to the political interests of the United States and Israel
- just as it did during the Bush and Obama administrations. But this time
the IAEA's highly politicized campaign is serving the Israeli aim of making
it political impossible for the next administration to return to the Iran
nuclear deal.
On June 8, Iran's Permanent Mission the IAEA demanded that any request for
clarification under the Additional Protocol should be based on
"authenticated information" and expressed "concern" over attempts to "reopen
outstanding issues" that had been closed in 2015. Iran views the new IAEA
exercise as yet another salient of the U.S.-Israeli "Maximum Pressure"
strategy. It has therefore insisted the IAEA cease its role as a de facto
prosecutor for the U.S.-Israeli special relationship.
