For Pacifica Radio, March 16th, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
My own website is ScottHorton.org, where you can find my full interview archive, more than 3,000 of them now, from this and my other radio shows going back to 2003.
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Today's interview will be with Gareth Porter the Great, independent historian and journalist for InterPress Service.
That's IPSNews.net.
And his brand new book is called Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
And when I tell you that I've done 3,000 interviews before and that they're all at ScottHorton.org, that's no lie.
And more than 150 of them are with Gareth Porter.
He is my all-time favorite, the very best reporter that we have here in American society for debunking the very worst and the very most important lies of the American War Party.
Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
This is what the American people need to know.
And this interview will be the first in a series that I will carry on through the rest of the week to cover every bit of what's in here to the best of my ability.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks so much for having me on again, Scott.
Well, it's great to have you here.
And this is why I do this show is so I can interview you about Iran's nuclear program.
That's the bottom line here.
The rest is just window dressing.
And here it is.
You've done it again.
I got to tell you what.
I mean, it's not like I was expecting anything less, but it's just great.
Manufactured Crisis by Gareth Porter.
And so you say at the beginning, the bottom line here is, as we all know, that there never really was a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
This whole crisis is manufactured, a trumped-up scare, as you call it in the introduction, to build pressure in the United Nations and, I guess, on the National Security Council for some kind of action, one way or the other, either U.N. sanctions or maybe even eventual American war to end, to abolish for all time Iran's nuclear program at all, even though it's been recognized by the American government that they do not have a weapons program.
They never really did have a weapons program.
They refused to allow Iran civilian technology up until this point anyway.
They have refused to allow them nuclear technology or refused to accept the fact that Iran already has civilian nuclear technology.
But why, Gareth?
Well, you've posed, of course, the fundamental question that I think everyone needs to understand.
The motivation and the dynamic of U.S. policy toward the Iranian nuclear program, it is certainly not an easy question to unravel.
And the reason is that there are different elements of this at different times in the history, the development of the U.S. policy toward the Iranian nuclear program.
And in the book, in the very beginning of the book, I go back to the dawn, if you will, of the program under the Islamic Republic of Iran, which, of course, they inherited from the Shah's regime, and show that in the beginning the new government was not at all enthusiastic about a nuclear program.
In fact, they were ready to basically all but eliminate it.
And then after a couple of years where there were some cold winters and energy shortages, the leadership of the new government essentially decided, well, maybe they did need a nuclear program of some sort.
They couldn't afford to simply eliminate the possibility of having nuclear power for electricity.
But what they had in mind was a very, very modest version of what the Shah had originally planned.
And the key point about that new conception of the nuclear program in Iran was that they had no intention of having their own capability to enrich uranium.
They were going to use a French company to do so.
And as I document in the book, what that meant was that they were not going to be in a position to simply act unilaterally to generate the necessary uranium that would be required for a nuclear weapon.
That was simply not at all part of their thinking.
And what actually changed the policy on the part of the Iranian government toward the idea of enriching uranium was that the United States stepped in in the very first years of that program.
It was 1983, in fact, when this first began to develop in terms of U.S. policy.
The Reagan administration stepped in and made it clear that it did not want either the French government or the German government, which was pledged at that point to help Iran rehabilitate its one nuclear power plant and put it online, or the International Atomic Energy Agency to help Iran in any way, shape, or form that would give them any expertise, really, to carry on a nuclear program.
And therefore, the Iranian leadership was essentially confronted with a choice.
Either we bow down to the United States and say, okay, we won't have a nuclear program, or we go out to the black market and sort of defy U.S. policy of getting its allies and the IAEA to sort of forbid it from having the ability to even have nuclear power plant work and get their own capability for enriching uranium.
And, of course, they decided, because Iran is a very proud government and a proud people, they decided that they would have their own national capability.
And they did, in fact, go to the black market, which put them in touch with the AQ Khan network to get the basic technology to enrich uranium, that is, centrifuges.
Right.
So it's just the typical short-term thinking of the American and, for that matter, the Israeli government when it comes to these issues, just like when Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981, they just drove Saddam Hussein's nuclear program underground.
It was an IAEA-inspected and safeguarded reactor back when they blew it up, and then by the time of the first Gulf War, not that he was very far along, but he actually really was trying to make a nuclear weapon in secret.
It's a very good analogy, in fact.
I agree entirely that what this signifies is an entirely impractical, emotional, irrational approach on the part of the United States to the question of an Iranian nuclear program.
I mean, had they sat down with the Iranians, talked it through, communicated with them, but forget about sitting down with them, communicating with them, saying, you know, we simply want to be sure that you have no intention of having a nuclear weapon, and, you know, we'd like to talk about how we can guarantee that, the Iranians, of course, would have been perfectly willing to accommodate the United States in regard to those concerns.
It was already part of the IAEA.
It was in good standing in terms of its safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
It had every intention of remaining so.
But what the United States did was to act like a hegemonic power and try to force the Iranians to come to heel.
And, of course, the Iranians are very bad about coming to heel, and that caused them to do the opposite of what the United States wanted.
And it really did no good whatsoever for the United States.
And it was not based, in fact, as I document in the book, quite explicitly, the State Department admitted that they had absolutely no reason to believe that Iran had any intention of having nuclear weapons at that point.
I mean, there was no evidence of it.
They admitted that.
So this was simply an anti-Iran gesture by the United States at a time when the U.S. was supporting Iraq in its war against Iran, and generally was still waiting for the possibility, for the idea of regime change, to get back to where we were under the Shah.
But they were, quite astonishingly to me, they were quite honest about the fact that they did not have any reason to believe that Iran was going after nuclear weapons at that point.
So they were admitting, quite explicitly, that the U.S. policy was simply based on the idea that we did not want Iran to have any nuclear program.
It was really more of a, you know, trying to quash any sense of, or any source of power on the part of Iran that the Reagan administration was acting.
In fact, you know, I was told by the one official that I was able to talk to about this, that the policy was really geared to the war itself.
It was just, it was almost automatic that the United States would do whatever it could to weaken Iran because we were supporting Iraq.
It was just part of the economic war, the altogether war against Iran.
It was the altogether war, exactly.
Alright, and then, so now, you mentioned A.Q. Khan, he's the Pakistani black marketeer, nuclear technology proliferator there.
And you're saying that when they finally did go to him, because the Americans had convinced the Germans and the French and whoever else to break all their deals and to refuse to cooperate with the building of the Iranian program, that they could have bought all kinds of weapons technology from A.Q. Khan, and yet chose not to.
This is really the key point, Scott, about that whole episode.
I mean, you often read accounts of how the Iranians were dealing with the A.Q. Khan network around 1985, 86, and 87.
And the suspicion is always, or almost always, expressed that this must, in some fashion, reveal the nuclear weapons intent of the Iranians, in terms of, you know, why would they go to the A.Q. Khan network if it weren't for that?
Well, of course, as I've explained, I mean, the source of the motivation was precisely that the United States had taken away the alternative to going to the A.Q. Khan network by basically forbidding other technology states, other states with nuclear technology, from dealing with Iran.
So they basically had no choice but to go to somebody who, in this case, of course, we know he was peddling nuclear weapons technology, if he could find a taker.
But what is important to understand is that they did, in fact, the A.Q. Khan network tried to interest Iran in purchasing technology that they could use as the basis for, essentially, designing a nuclear weapon, technology that would be necessary for building the nuclear weapon.
And the Iranians did not respond.
I mean, the Iranians did not express any interest in basically buying any of that technology, despite the fact that they were being invited to do so.
Now, you know, this, to me, is one of the most revealing moments in the whole history of this entire issue, because no one has ever been able to explain why the Iranians would not have started the process in 1985, 1986, with the A.Q. Khan network, of purchasing the technology that they would need to build a nuclear weapon.
And the fact is, of course, that the reason that they didn't do so is that that's not what was on their mind at all.
And this, of course, contradicts efforts to try to build what is essentially a fictional case, based on fictional evidence, that Iran tipped off or gave tip-offs in a couple of cases that have been published that the nuclear program was really just a cover for nuclear weapons.
And I reveal in both cases how those are just fabricated evidence.
Well, now, hold that thought for just a minute here, because I think we're in danger of it going without saying, and it really should not go without saying here, that Iran, just like the United States and the rest of the members of the U.N. Security Council, in fact, we're all signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, where their inalienable right to peaceful nuclear technology is supposedly protected, and where the nuclear weapon states are sworn to respect those rights.
And so when you're talking about, you know, America going by hook or crook to keep any of our other allies from, you know, like the French or the Germans or anyone else working with the Iranians on their nuclear program, we're literally violating their rights under the international law that our side and their side voluntarily signed up to there.
And in that sense, driving them underground and risking any way that they would go ahead and get weapons technology from the likes of AQ Khan, whereas you're explaining back when they started out just five years before they went to AQ Khan, they wanted to buy all their uranium from the French.
They didn't even have a need or want to master the fuel cycle and enrich uranium on Iranian soil in the first place.
That's right.
I mean, just to make this absolutely clear, they were expecting to essentially use this French-based company to obtain the fuel for their Bushehr nuclear power plant, rather than to manufacture it themselves by basically going through the full range of steps, including the enrichment of the uranium and then turning it into fuel plates or fuel rods, I should say.
So, you know, it's very clear that they did not intend initially to have the capability to have a breakout.
I mean, there was just no intention of having that.
They were not thinking in terms of being a nuclear threshold state, as some people have called it, to have that option.
It was simply not their intention.
You even quote in the book the hawk from the New York Times, David Sanger, even admits that the U.S. gave them really no choice but to go underground for their nuclear program, and that it does not necessarily imply, even to David Sanger, that they were pursuing weapons technology.
Yes, and it's astonishing.
It's an astonishing quote, as far as I'm concerned.
I agree.
It's an amazing quote.
And now, so what about this?
Nuh-uh, Gareth, because they got busted, caught, red-handed.
They had a secret program.
Not just they bought some technology on the black market, but they were developing enrichment technology in violation of their safeguards agreement with the IAEA under the Nonproliferation Treaty for 18 years.
I read it in an article by David Sanger in the New York Times.
Well, this, of course, is the next major phase of the false narrative, what I call the false narrative, surrounding the Iran nuclear issue, which is, as you've stated it, that Iran was indeed enriching uranium, had an enrichment uranium program going for 18 years.
The news media definitely portrayed it in that way.
I have a number of cases that I quote from, articles that suggest directly or indirectly, mostly indirectly, that, in fact, they give the impression that Iran was enriching uranium for years and years, suggesting that they must have amassed some very large quantity of enriched uranium.
And, of course, the fact is that Iran wasn't enriching uranium at all for 18 years, that they never even tested their centrifuges until 1989 for the first time, and then again in 1992.
And, you know, there was no real enrichment, it was just basically using uranium to test the centrifuges to see if they would work.
So, you know, there was really a fundamental misrepresentation in the way the news media covered this, which, to some extent, is based on the fact that the IAEA, in its report in 1993, was not being very accurate or not being very careful in the way they formulated the problem, the situation, I should say, that they were looking at with regard to the Iranian nuclear program.
I mean, they used wording which certainly encouraged the worst tendencies on the part of the U.S. news media, I must say.
So, just to put the fine point on this, you know, I think people need to understand that Iran, in fact, did no enrichment whatsoever for those 18 years.
There was no quantity of uranium that was enriched by this, and that is not the way it was covered by the U.S. and international news media, and I think that is part of the reason that there is such a strong bias in the way the news media and political elites in this country and in Europe as well still view the entire Iran nuclear issue.
But also, by the way, I mean, Scott, I should just make it clear as well that what the news media and, of course, the Bush administration, as well as the IAEA, were charging here, to be explicit about it, was that the problem is Iran didn't report these things that they were doing.
They didn't report the fact that they'd gone to get the enrichment technology, that they'd gotten centrifuges, to the IAEA.
They didn't report the fact that they had, you know, used uranium to test their centrifuges.
Well, of course, they were not actually obliged to report to the IAEA that they were purchasing centrifuges.
That is not part of their obligation under the safeguards agreement or the NPT.
They were obliged to report the use of uranium, and they didn't do that.
And as I explain in the book, the real reason for this, which has never actually, I've never seen anyone else discuss this, but it's very clear if you look precisely at what it is that they were using, where they got the uranium.
They got the uranium from China that they were using for these experiments.
And the Chinese were under very strong pressure from the United States not to do anything at all to help Iran on their nuclear program.
And so the Chinese never owned up to the fact that they sold the uranium to Iran because they were eager to get various benefits from trade and nuclear collaboration with the United States, and the United States simply would have refused to do that had the Chinese been honest about it.
So they could not reveal the experiments that they did to the IAEA without essentially blowing their entire cooperative relationship with China, which was the main source that they had for technology cooperation on their nuclear program.
Right.
But still, you know, otherwise, though, there is no mystery, right?
It's not like that uranium is unaccounted for.
We're talking about bench level experiments just to see if it works.
Well, that's right.
And just to, again, put a fine point on it, the fact is that they did not do anything that would be illegal under the NPT or under their safeguards agreement.
Nothing that they did had anything to do with a nuclear weapons program.
There was no finding by the IAEA at any time that any of those activities were part of a nuclear weapons program or necessary for a nuclear weapons program or anything of the sort.
So it was simply the fact they didn't report it.
And as I say, there was a good reason for that, a reason which is understandable, which I'm trying to say.
Right.
Okay.
Now, another parallel with Iraq here, Gareth, is the story of Hussein Kamel in Iraq, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, who defected to Jordan in the mid 1990s and spilled his whole guts to CNN and the CIA and the IAEA and everybody else about how he had overseen the destruction of all the last of Saddam's chemical weapons, that kind of thing.
Well, apparently the Iranians had a defector along those same lines who left Iran, came to the United States and told the CIA everything he knew.
When was that and what did he know?
Well, this is the person, the Iranian in the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, who was responsible for the whole centrifuge program.
And in other words, when they first went out to the black market, to the AQ Khan group, and it wasn't just AQ Khan, but they ended up finding that the people they were dealing with in these companies were connected in some way with the AQ Khan network.
And so the person who was in charge of the purchasing of technology for the centrifuges was the person who ultimately got into trouble with the Iranian government because of the fact that basically he was built by the AQ Khan network.
The people who sold him the centrifuge parts and designs basically gave him stuff that was inferior and didn't work very well.
And the Iranians had a terrible time getting the centrifuges essentially to work for years and years.
And so he basically lost his job because of the bad deal that he'd gotten with the centrifuges.
And as a result of that, he left Iran and came to the United States, and as you say, spilled his guts to the CIA, as was reported in a book by Douglas France and Catherine Collins.
And so they, in fact, did know pretty much everything by 1992, when apparently he began talking to the CIA.
They knew everything there was to know, at least about the centrifuge program.
There was no mystery about that whatsoever.
And so really they were just pretending to be shocked and knew they were lying basically by emphasizing that supposed 18 years were all of fill-in-the-blank with your imagination had been going on.
Yeah.
I mean, there was a lot of sort of stage-managed shock and making it look like everyone was taken by surprise by the revelation in 2002 and 2003 about the Iranian nuclear program, when the fact is that 90%, 95% of what we were to know later on about the Iranian nuclear program in terms of their centrifuge program was already known by Western intelligence and indeed by the IAEA.
Right.
Well, and you talk about in, I guess it's in Chapter 2, about how all the non-aligned movement and everybody else in the world, when the Iranians said, listen, we had to go to the black market because the Americans were completely banning us from the open market for nuclear technology, everybody else on earth took their word for that, believed them, thought that was a perfectly plausible explanation.
It was only the Americans who were at least, you know, pretending or maybe really refused to believe that that was true.
But I actually was reminded my friend Gordon Prather used to make nuclear weapons for the U.S. government, was the chief scientist of the Army and worked at Sandia and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and all that making H-bombs.
And I remember him laughing.
I actually could hear him laughing in my ear as I was reading your book there about how, of course, it was the American policy that drove him underground.
When the Chinese are trying to sell him a turnkey ready to go light water reactor and we're doing everything we can to twist the Chinese arms and prevent them from doing so.
And now you're surprised that he went to AQ Khan and bought some junk from a Pakistani garage sale.
What else are they supposed to do?
You know, it was obvious to everyone in the world who was watching it back in the 1990s what was going on as it was happening.
Yeah.
And I just wanted to add one more very quick point along the same lines, which is this wonderful quote that I've discovered by Robert M. Gates around 1991, if I remember correctly, testifying before Congress.
He made the statement quite astonishingly to me, quite honestly and in a sense that, well, they were aware that the policy they were following of essentially forcing developing countries to forego nuclear technology was one that would impair their ability to develop in terms of science and technology.
In other words, it was clear to them that what they were doing was interfering with a fundamental development decision on the part of Iran and other countries.
And we'll have to stop there.
This has been part one of our interview with Gareth Porter, the great author of the brand new book Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
And I'll be interviewing Gareth all week this coming week on my other radio show, all about the rest of the book as well.
We're going to continue going on in depth here, but that's it for today.
Thank you, everybody, so much for listening.
Thank you, Gareth, for your time on the show.
Thanks again very much, Scott.
And that's been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
We're back here next Sunday from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
