The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  “I thought when I read that there must be some other tubes that people were talking about,” said Houston Wood, a consultant who had worked on the analysis at Oak Ridge. “I was just flabbergasted that people were still pushing that those might be centrifuges. Science was not pushing this forward. Scientists had made their determination, their evaluation, and now we didn’t know what was happening.”

  Powell’s use of the tubes as part of his case against Iraq also stunned experts at the IAEA. They, too, had read The New York Times story the previous fall and dispatched a team to Iraq to examine the tubes. The unanimous conclusion was that the cylinders were not suitable for a nuclear program. More significantly, the dozens of IAEA inspections inside Iraq over the past decade had turned up no evidence that Saddam had resumed work on a nuclear weapon. Among the skeptics about the American claims was Jacques Baute, the head of the agency’s inspection team for Iraq. Baute’s inspectors had found no sign of a nuclear program in Iraq, and he was confident that they had visited every potential site, since Iraq’s agreement at the end of the Gulf War had given the IAEA unfettered access.

  The tubes were not the only alleged evidence bothering Baute. On January 28, 2003, President Bush had used his State of the Union address to bolster the American case for going to war against Iraq, citing both the aluminum tubes and intelligence claims that the Iraqis had been shopping for uranium in Africa. “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” he said, uttering the words that became infamous. “Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”

  Baute had first heard of the Iraqi uranium shopping in the fall of 2002 when a British dossier on Iraq mentioned that agents for Saddam had tried to buy five tons of yellowcake uranium ore in Niger. Baute had tried in vain since then to get copies of the records cited by the British so he and his inspectors could follow up. On the day of Powell’s speech to the Security Council, an American official finally handed over copies to an IAEA official in New York, and a few days later they wound up on Baute’s desk in Vienna—a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Iraq and Niger, with many of the letters written on Niger government letterhead. As Baute examined the documents, he found blatant inconsistencies that told him they were forgeries, and poor ones at that. Using just the Internet, he discovered that a letter dated October 10, 2000, had been ostensibly signed by a Niger minister of foreign affairs who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, attributed to Niger president Tandja Mamadou, had a signature that was clearly faked and a text filled with inaccuracies. “The forgeries were so obvious that a junior case officer should have spotted them,” said a senior IAEA official involved in evaluating the letters and other communications.

  On March 7, with the United States on the verge of invading Iraq a month after Powell’s speech, Mohamed ElBaradei appeared before the Security Council to plead for more time to complete further inspections. In precise, controlled language, he contradicted key aspects of Powell’s presentation. Three months’ worth of inspections at 141 sites in Iraq, he said, had turned up “no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq.” Some of the same sites listed in ElBaradei’s report as free of any evidence of nuclear activity were locations described by Powell as proof that Saddam had resumed his pursuit of nuclear weapons. Further contradicting the American claims, ElBaradei said inspectors had uncovered blueprints, invoices, and meeting notes that backed up Iraq’s explanation that the aluminum tubes were part of an effort to develop a conventional artillery rocket that would resist corrosion. As for the Niger documents, the IAEA director general said his agency, in consultation with outside experts, had concluded that the material was not authentic.

  Later that day, Powell responded angrily to the IAEA findings, saying: “I also listened to Dr. ElBaradei’s report with great interest. As we all know, in 1991 the International Atomic Energy Agency was just days away from determining that Iraq did not have a nuclear program. We soon found out otherwise.”

  ElBaradei had taught international law at New York University and held the United States in high regard. So he was stung by the personal nature of Powell’s attack, and by the fact that the Bush administration, in a rush to war, was ignoring facts that contradicted its view of Iraq’s nuclear status. ElBaradei had watched Powell’s presentation to the UN on television with key members of his staff, and the room had been filled with shouts of anger over what the IAEA officials viewed as the American official’s misstatements. “ElBaradei was completely shocked and it changed him,” said one of his close aides. “He found his voice, in anger maybe.” ElBaradei realized that it was not enough just to issue a report, so he authorized people at the agency to reach out to the media in an attempt to get the truth out, not just about Iraq but about Iran, too. In the weeks that followed, ElBaradei began to speak out more often in the press and at conferences about disarmament and the atomic bargain that allowed countries like the United States and Russia to retain weapons.

  UNDERSECRETARY of State John Bolton, the Bush administration’s point man on arms control, was ElBaradei’s chief nemesis in Washington even before the IAEA chief had criticized the American case against Iraq. Bolton had a reputation as a pugnacious, blunt-spoken conservative opposed in principle to multilateral organizations like the IAEA and willing to interpret facts to suit his own purposes. Critics accused him of inflating evidence against Iraq and North Korea to support tough stances against both countries. “Very often, the points he makes have some truth to them, but he simply goes beyond where the facts tell intelligent people they should go,” said Carl Ford Jr., a former head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

  A protégé of former senator Jesse Helms, the conservative Republican from North Carolina, Bolton once said that “if the UN secretariat building in New York lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference” and “there’s no such thing as the United Nations.” Soon after joining the Bush administration in 2001, he had attempted to cut American funding for the IAEA, and his anger at what he viewed as ElBaradei’s coddling of Iraq grew in the aftermath of the American invasion, when military and intelligence teams were unable to find any evidence of existing programs to develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

  When it came to Iran, however, Bolton found himself in the uncomfortable position of needing ElBaradei and the IAEA to point the finger at Tehran’s secret nuclear program, since the international community would not believe the United States if it blew the whistle again. Like it or not, the Americans and Bolton had to play ball with the IAEA and ElBaradei.

  Beginning that summer, the administration started sharing sensitive intelligence information about Iran with the IAEA. The initial exchanges went through back channels and took place in the secure room at the American mission, on the thirty-seventh floor of a modern skyscraper overlooking the IAEA complex. There, American diplomats and nuclear experts provided selected officials with the latest intelligence on Iran’s nuclear efforts. Some of the most sensitive information took the form of classified satellite photos showing that trucks and bulldozers had been at work at Kalaye in April and May, weeks before the IAEA inspectors were permitted into the main building. Tons of dirt were dug up around the building and removed. At the same time, truckloads of concrete rubble, presumably from the destruction of old walls and floors, were hauled off. Without its own intelligence arm and with limited access to commercial satellite photography, the IAEA depended on the American information as part of its larger inspection strategy in Iran.

  In the case of Kalaye, the photos confirmed the IAEA’s suspicions that Iran had tried to remove evidence of enrichment activities from the site. Still, the inspectors were confident that, if the building had ever contained nuclear material, they would find its traces—provided they could get inside to take samples. The IAEA could not persuade Iran to
allow the testing until August, a year after the site had first been identified as part of the nuclear program. Even then, the permission was granted only after Heinonen made a special trip to Tehran to tell the Iranian authorities point-blank that it was in their interest to permit the sampling and put the questions to rest. The Iranians acquiesced, apparently confident in the cleanup. Heinonen, on the other hand, fully expected the results to show traces of fissile material, despite those efforts.

  On August 9, a team of inspectors with environmental-sampling kits was allowed into the building where they suspected the enrichment work had taken place. The day was sweltering, and the Iranians had shut down the air-conditioning to make the chore as unpleasant as possible. Dripping with sweat, the inspectors unwrapped the cotton swabs and began going over every available surface, pushing the swipes deep into the corners and along the windowsills. After nearly two hours, the job was done, and the team packed up its equipment, leaving the building with what its members fully expected would be proof that Iran was lying.

  FROM his home in Islamabad, A. Q. Khan was engaged in his own cover-up. After the accusations about Natanz broke in August 2002, Khan realized that he had a potentially dangerous situation. Of course he was already well aware of the work at Natanz and elsewhere. After all, he had provided both the plans and a handful of centrifuges, which enabled the Iranians to manufacture their own machines. Those centrifuges would be used in the pilot plant and the huge enrichment halls at Natanz, though it had been the Iranians’ idea to bury the main installation because of fears of an attack by Israel or the United States. Khan had continued to do some troubleshooting for Iran, but the flow of supplies from the network had dropped to a trickle because the Iranians were producing most of their own equipment. However, if the IAEA applied enough pressure to Tehran, it might force the Iranians to implicate Khan by revealing that he was the source of the prototypes and the blueprints.

  Determined to cover his tracks, Khan had made two telephone calls. First, he talked to Tahir in Dubai, telling him to destroy all records of the transactions with Iran. Second, he telephoned a high-level contact at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and instructed him to destroy any documents describing Iran’s deals with the network. If the IAEA asked to speak to people involved in the early days of the nuclear program, Khan said, the Iranians should say those individuals had died. Khan was anxious, but he was far from panicking. After all, the major customers for his network were countries that had no diplomatic relations with the United States, and he was confident that they would be more than willing to lie to the IAEA.

  In the fall of 2002, Khan’s transactions with North Korea had also slowed after the Americans accused the Koreans of operating a secret uranium-enrichment program using equipment and know-how provided by Pakistan. The North Koreans had responded by expelling the IAEA inspectors who had been monitoring the freeze on its plutonium program and withdrawing from the nonproliferation treaty. But the network was still going gangbusters with Libya, providing Gadhafi’s regime with millions of dollars’ worth of technology and making final preparations to set up the bomb factory outside Tripoli.

  WHILE the Americans and British continued to leave the IAEA in the dark about Khan’s dealings with Iran and Libya, Washington decided it was in its interest to provide more information about Iran’s program. Influential elements of the Bush administration, led by Bolton, still thought that ElBaradei was too soft on the Iranians, and they circulated stories that the director general was going easy on Tehran because he was a Muslim and falsely claiming he was married to an Iranian. Publicly, Bolton and other American officials tried to get rid of ElBaradei by opposing his bid for a third term as director general. In September, Powell argued that ElBaradei should step aside when his term ended the following year, citing an informal policy adopted several years earlier by the countries that were the largest donors to international organizations like the IAEA. Bolton increased the pressure on ElBaradei by threatening again to cut American funding for the agency, but John Wolf, Bolton’s deputy for counterproliferation, opposed his boss, pointing out that withdrawing American money would cripple the agency at a time when the world and the United States needed it most.

  Bolton was so determined to get rid of ElBaradei that the National Security Agency was directed to begin eavesdropping on the IAEA chief’s telephone conversations. While such electronic surveillance would have required court approval in the United States, there was no law prohibiting it outside the country. By the fall of 2003, the NSA was listening in on ElBaradei’s office and home calls, intercepting dozens with Iranian diplomats and scouring them for evidence that he was in bed with them. The intercepted calls produced no evidence of inappropriate conduct by ElBaradei, and when the secret tapping was disclosed by The Washington Post it created a backlash of support for the IAEA chief, though there was little surprise among cynical diplomats and other government officials. “We’ve always assumed that this kind of thing goes on,” IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky explained. “We wish it were otherwise, but we know the reality.” ElBaradei was privately outraged, but he maintained a sanguine public attitude, later telling the German magazine Der Spiegel: “I have nothing to hide professionally. But it becomes unpleasant when you apparently cannot even have a private conversation with your wife or your daughter. There is also a concerted smear campaign against me. For example, they say things like: An Egyptian can’t be impartial toward Islamic states and will tell them all our secrets. I refuse to comment on people at this low level.”

  Hans Blix, ElBaradei’s predecessor at the IAEA, served as the UN’s chief weapons inspector for Iraq from 2000 to 2003. He repeatedly told the UN that inspections at hundreds of suspected weapons sites had turned up no evidence that Saddam had restarted his chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons programs. During that period, Blix said later, he, too, suspected that his telephone conversations had been monitored. “If I was bugged, I wish they had at least listened a bit more carefully to what I said. It is the height of humiliation to be bugged and ignored.”

  At the same time the Americans were passing intelligence tips to the IAEA, the Israeli government began an ambitious campaign to exert diplomatic pressure on Iran by leaking information about its nuclear efforts. Israel’s senior military leaders regarded a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to their country’s very existence, and their intelligence indicated the Iranians were farther down the road than the rest of the world realized. Israeli military and intelligence agencies kept Tehran under close observation through a large network of informants and sophisticated electronic monitoring, sharing information with Washington and creating a circular world in which Israeli intelligence was recycled through American sources and vice versa. Like the Americans, the Israelis faced a difficult time convincing the international community that it should be concerned about a nuclear Iran because it, too, had a credibility problem. Israel’s own arsenal of atomic weapons had been an open secret for years, and its weapons installations were closed to the IAEA. So Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the Mossad came up with a strategy of careful and anonymous leaks, aimed at fueling worries about Iran’s intentions.

  Beginning in the summer of 2003, a special unit of Mossad was tasked with quietly passing on the latest information about Iran to the international press corps. The campaign was extensive and sophisticated: Israeli nuclear-weapons specialists provided secret briefings on the details of the Iranian nuclear efforts, often supported by documents from inside Iran and elsewhere. At one point, the Israelis passed on a confidential report prepared in May 2003 by the French government for the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an ad-hoc organization that tried to restrict sales of nuclear-related technology worldwide. The report summarized developments regarding Iran’s nuclear program and warned that the supposedly civilian program likely concealed military aims: “France’s assessment is now that this country may obtain a sufficient quantity of fissionable materials to manufacture a nuclear weapon within a few years.” Mossad a
gents also shared information about locations where intelligence suggested that the Iranians were concealing nuclear-weapons work, accusations corroborated by satellite photos. Most of the intelligence was generated from Israel’s espionage efforts, but the Israeli pipeline to the press also provided a way for the Americans to publicize their intelligence without leaving fingerprints.

  This is not to suggest that the Americans did not leak, too. Bolton occasionally telephoned reporters covering the Iran file at the IAEA, offering bits of information or sanitized intelligence designed to keep the pot boiling. Diplomats assigned to the IAEA and senior officials who worked there were sometimes angered by what they viewed as misinformation coming from the Americans, so they occasionally responded with their own set of counterleaks in an attempt to set the record straight or reveal information that they felt should be in the public domain.

  The resulting mix of articles in a variety of publications, wire-service reports, and television broadcasts called attention to fears about the Iranian program in general and focused suspicions on some specific locations. In some cases, IAEA officials used the articles to question Iranian authorities about activities and sites; in rare cases, the information was deemed so credible that the agency sought permission to make official visits to locations identified in the press. In that way, the leaks also protected the flow of intelligence from the United States and Israel to the IAEA. The CIA could tell the IAEA about a suspicious location, and the agency could wait to seek access to the site until the same information was published or broadcast.

  The increasing press attention also renewed the focus on Khan and Pakistan. A couple of articles in the American press in the middle 1990s had suggested that Pakistan was assisting Iran with a nuclear program, but the allegations had been dismissed. But as 2003 wore on, more specific information linking Khan to the Iranian effort came out in the press, and it mirrored the suspicions of Olli Heinonen and Trevor Edwards.