For Pacifica Radio, March 30th, 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 LA.
Our guest again today is Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist primarily for Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net, and has also done award-winning work over at Truthout.org, and he's the author of this absolutely most important book of the year, indispensable new book, Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
And I've been interviewing Gareth on this show and on my other radio show over the past couple weeks off and on, trying to cover every aspect of this book that we can get to.
So this will be, actually, interview part nine, regarding chapter eight, back to Parchin, and if you want to listen to any of the other interviews, or all of the other interviews, they're all there at scotthorton.org, slash interviews.
Alright welcome to the show, Gareth, how are you doing?
Welcome back.
Glad to be back on your show, thank you.
Great, great.
Very happy to have you here, and again, I congratulate you on this most important piece of work that you put together here, Manufactured Crisis, again is the title.
Chapter nine, back to Parchin.
So Parchin is a military base in Iran, and so give us the context here of the Israeli intelligence that sent the Americans, is that right, back to Parchin?
They'd already been there, and then supposedly found out, again, that they had missed something and had to go back?
Well, the Israelis obviously took advantage of the fact that the Parchin issue had already been raised by Bolton.
It was a suspicion that, of course, Bolton and the Israelis had worked on together.
And they took advantage of the fact that it was already, there were already stories out because of the Bolton episode.
And they used the Parchin base as the venue for a whole new allegation, which was based on the idea that the Iranians had tried to test nuclear weapons there starting in 2000.
And so, yeah, they were saying that the Americans had missed this somehow.
And here's where the story really gets very interesting, because the reason that the Israelis were suddenly turning over so many reports and documents to the IAEA is that the National Intelligence Estimate had come out in November 2007 saying, well, we think the Iranians had a nuclear weapons program from 2001 to 2003, but we now have evidence that they called it off.
They halted it.
And of course, that was anathema to the Israelis.
They wanted a narrative that said Iran was still working on nuclear weapons.
So of course, they had to come up with more evidence showing that that was the case.
And the key story in this entire series was that Iran had set up an explosives containment vessel at Parchin, which the intelligence report, there was no document that went with it, just an intelligence report, claimed that this was set up in 2000 at Parchin, someplace in Parchin, and it was to be used to test nuclear weapons.
So that has become the single best known story about alleged Iranian secret nuclear weapons activities that the Iranians are supposed to be hiding from the IAEA ever since.
And indeed, if you pick up the paper and there's a story about the IAEA and Iran, there's bound to be a mention of Parchin in there, and this is why.
Well, and now people might remember back the way I remember the end of 2007, beginning in 2008, when the CIA and the National Intelligence Estimate had come out, as flawed as it was, as we've talked about in previous interviews, that even on TV news, they kind of had to stop saying nuclear weapons program and just start calling it nuclear program, at least there for a little while.
Is it right that this is what changed that, that this was in the media, that this is what finally buried that, and they could get right back to their accusations again, that they could just say, you know, here's something to indicate that that NIE didn't really have it all together?
I would say it's probably the biggest single factor, but not the only one.
I mean, I think it's the combination of this Parchin story, primarily, and the November 2011 IAEA report, in which the Parchin story was the primary story, the one that got the most ink and time on television.
But there were other allegations, of course, in that 2011 report as well.
And then the second thing is, again, going back to that 2007 national intelligence estimate, I think the idea that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program was certainly given enormous credibility by that.
But you know, since that was supposed to have stopped in 2003, I think it's true that the main factor here of sort of making the idea that Iran was still a nuclear threat was certainly the 2011 report and the primary focus on the Parchin bomb cylinder or the bomb test cylinder.
And now, Mayor Dagan, you write in the book here, the head of Israeli intelligence at the time, that his claim to the Americans was just that he had an informant that said so.
He wasn't even claiming to have any other proof than that.
Is that correct?
That's right.
I mean, you know, there was no claim of actual documentation.
The IAEA never cited a document of any kind.
It's simply that they had, quote, information, unquote, from Israel.
And the funny thing is that no other evidence, no citing, no visual evidence, no human intelligence evidence has ever come to light that supports that claim.
It's something that I find really interesting and, of course, very revealing that the evidence is completely lacking for this most important of all claims that has turned into a kind of media narrative of really great, great significance, great power politically.
But really what it is, is it's just a propaganda exercise by Israeli intelligence then that, well, here's a thing, and we can point everybody at it, and we can just call it something else.
Look, everyone, an explosives testing chamber, and then, well, geez, I guess that does sound pretty suspicious if you're telling me it's suspicious, but there's actually something going on there.
It's just not what they claim.
Is that about right?
I explain in the book, of course, I detail in the book the reasons why this claim simply does not hold up.
I mean, there's multiple reasons, multiple dimensions for showing that or which show that this claim is simply a fabrication.
It does not represent anything real.
But I think it's been given, again, great credibility, enormous credibility by the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency embraced it and basically staked the organization's reputation on that story, along with other lesser known stories that were published in that report.
And I think the reason is that somehow or other, they have been trading on the fact that Mohamed ElBaradei had established a reputation for himself and for the IEA as being independent of the United States, and therefore a credible organization.
And he did that, of course, by standing up and opposing the use of tainted intelligence, fabricated intelligence by the Bush administration for war in Iraq, when he went to the United Nations and testified that the Niger Gate document, the supposed document showing that Iraq had gone to Niger to seek uranium supplies, that that was a fake.
That was quite a courageous thing to do, because it did not sit well with the Bush administration, to say the least.
But I mean, the fact is that the IAEA, after Mohamed ElBaradei, became simply a tool of the Bush administration.
I mean, we know, of course, from the WikiLeaks documents, the cables that were released by WikiLeaks, that Yukiya Amano, who actually replaced Mohamed ElBaradei as director general of the IAEA, was fortunate enough to get the support of the United States.
That's how he got in.
And he had assured the United States, according to one of these cables, that he would be in the American court.
He was in the American court on Iran, on the handling of the Iran file.
And it's on that basis, of course, that the United States supported him.
So basically, I think that there's been a misunderstanding, a fundamental misunderstanding, of the role of the IAEA as somehow being apolitical and objective, whereas, in fact, it was quite the opposite, particularly during the period from 2009, late 2009, to the present.
All right.
When it comes to the explosives chamber, which is the core of these accusations here, and why you don't believe in it, I think maybe start with the experts who don't believe in it, like Robert Kelly, who told the Christian Science Monitor that, what?
No, come on.
Well, Robert Kelly is an extremely important source on this subject, and indeed on everything having to do with the 2011 IAEA report.
And Kelly is important because he was not just the senior IAEA inspector in Iraq, not just once, but twice, but even more important, I think, is the fact that he had twice been the director of U.S. federal government programs that had to do with intelligence on foreign weapons of mass destruction programs, or specifically nuclear weapons programs.
So he is, in fact, not just a specialist on nuclear weapons, but indeed knows as much as anyone in the world about issues that relate to intelligence and interpretation of intelligence on the nuclear weapons programs of other countries.
And Robert Kelly has, on numerous occasions, criticized this November 2011 report in general, on a number of points, but specifically on this claim about the Parchin bomb test cylinder, the cylinder, high explosive cylinder, that is the centerpiece of this entire claim about nuclear weapons program, covert nuclear weapons program by Iran.
And what he has said is that, a number of points, but I think the key point is that the alleged cylinder, the cylinder that's been alleged, would not have been big enough, would not have contained enough high explosives to be able to accomplish what the IAEA claimed in its report it was supposed to accomplish.
In other words, what the purpose of it was, which was to carry out hydrodynamic testing of a nuclear weapons design, meaning that there would be a test without fissile material, without the use of uranium that had been enriched, and using another material instead so that there would not be fallout from the test, obviously.
But he's saying that regardless of what would be used for such a test, you could not do it in such a small container.
And he had other problems with this as well.
And I would add that I think the single, I mean, I would say it's not more important, but equally important, is the fact that the test, I mean, the chamber that they're alleging is supposed to have been the dimensions of the chamber.
Let me start again.
The dimensions of the chamber that the IAEA reported, they're saying that they learned the dimensions of the chamber from a professional publication by the foreign expert, quote-unquote, who is alleged to have helped the Iranians to build this chamber.
And that is sort of a central claim of the IAEA about this whole story.
Well, it turns out that, I mean, that professional paper by Yakoslav Donilenko, the foreign expert in question, is available, and you can look at it, and it has a drawing of the chamber in question.
And it's not a bomb chamber, it's not a bomb test chamber, it's a chamber for the production of nanodiamonds.
And the difference between the two is fundamental, because a nanodiamond explosive production chamber has characteristics that are necessary for nanodiamonds, but that would be inappropriate and would be impossible to use for, make it impossible to use for testing a nuclear weapon, including the ability to fill the chamber with water, both before and after the explosions that produce the nanodiamonds.
So it's really quite clear that that is simply an untruth, and one that is so brazen, it's quite astonishing that the IAEA could feel that they could get away with using it.
Right.
Well, the way you describe it in the book, it's real easy to see the case, not for the idea that this guy really is a former nuclear weapon scientist who was helping the Iranians with a bomb test chamber or anything, but why a IAEA member state's intelligence service might try to frame him up that way and might try to create a story out of this, right?
Here you got a base, you got an explosives chamber, you got a guy who used to work for the Soviet Union at a place where they did nuclear weapons research, after all, and whatever.
And this sounds like just enough kernels of truth, too good for talk radio, really, right?
You can make a story out of this.
No, you're right, Scott.
I mean, it's a really interesting case study of how an intelligence agency that wants to make up a story to frame another state, as they did in this case, can take facts that can be documented and weave a storyline around it that is superficially plausible or quite credible.
But if you really stop and look at it and sort of unpack it, carefully analyze it, you see that it's just not really very plausible because it would have required that they found this information, this intelligence information.
They don't, you know, it's never explained how they knew about this alleged bomb test chamber, but they got this intelligence just at the right moment and then discovered that there was a guy who had actually been there, who had the expertise to help them because he had also, you know, because he had designed a chamber like it allegedly, and because he had also studied how to measure the intervals between explosions and had published something on that.
And then they just happened to have discovered another document which showed exactly what he had been studying that fit precisely into this story about the bomb test chamber.
So the whole thing is just this incredible series of implausible coincidences, unless you understand that what really happened, and I show that this is the far more plausible case, is that they discovered, first of all, that this guy, Danilenko, had been in Iran because they're constantly checking on every possible lead as far as any foreign specialist who had worked in Iran over this period.
And so they clearly, they could have easily come up with his name, there's no mystery about that.
And the first thing they would have done is check a publications record, and of course, Danilenko does have these publications.
So they have the idea that he was in Iran, they have his publications, and it's very easy to see how they wove an entire story, storyline that would fit their purposes around those verifiable facts.
And funny little parentheses here, even though Israel is a nuclear weapons state and is not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and does not have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA in any way, and they have this whole pretended nuclear ambiguity and all of this, they are members of the IAEA because the IAEA actually predates the Non-Proliferation Treaty and already had its own separate purpose before it became the sheriff implementing the Non-Proliferation Treaty guidelines.
And so the Israelis can always funnel documents to the IAEA, and George John and the Associated Press can always write it up that these documents came from an IAEA member state, which makes it sound like it means not Israel, when in fact, that's exactly what it means.
Yeah, I mean, you've just identified a couple of the strange circumstances that have surrounded this whole story about Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, as it has been given out to the public through IAEA reports.
One of which, of course, as you say, is that the Israelis can hand over these intelligence reports and documents to the IAEA, and the IAEA never reveals that they come from Israel, which is really strange and, you know, unjustified.
Absolutely.
I mean, there's no reason why they should not identify the source of this information and allow observers outside the IAEA to judge for themselves how credible they are, given the implications of the fact that they would be coming from a country, from the country that has the most clear-cut vested interest in blackening Iran, as far as this nuclear program is concerned.
So I think that is certainly one of the circumstances that raises very serious questions about the way the IAEA operates.
And you're also right that it is extremely strange that Israel is even a member of the IAEA.
I mean, why should they be allowed to be a member of the IAEA when it's known that they have nuclear weapons but will not admit it?
I mean, this is very difficult to explain, to say the least.
All right.
Now, tell us a little bit about Mohamed ElBaradei's last fight inside the IAEA, before he was thrown out.
I mean, people might think of him now as just an attempted sock puppet dictator of Egypt for a little while there, but before that he was the heroic war-stopping guy at the IAEA, and they fought really hard to get him to include the laptop evidence and this bogus Parchin so-called evidence in his reports, but he wouldn't budge, is that right?
That's exactly right.
I mean, this is what happened in mid-2009, and, of course, Israel, to no one's surprise if they've been listening to this up to now, was behind the entire effort to try to force Mohamed ElBaradei to publish all of the intelligence that had been turned over by Israel as a so-called annex to a regular IAEA report on Iran.
And, of course, that was precisely what happened ultimately.
That was the strategy that the Israelis had in mind, that is to say that they would have this report which would give complete credibility to all of their intelligence claims without even identifying, as we've just talked about, without identifying Israel as the source.
So what more perfect propaganda coup could you ask than that?
But of course, ElBaradei was not going to play along with that.
He recognized all along that the Israelis were pulling some, were trying to pull a fast run over the world community, and he had always questioned the documents that had been falsified by Israel, as I've pointed out in a previous conversation with you.
He was always very skeptical about the laptop documents, the alleged studies documents that surfaced in 2004, and had always said that these have not been verified, they've not been authenticated, and that we cannot act as though they have been authenticated.
So you know, he was always in a position of trying to restrain the United States and Israel on this issue.
But what happened in mid-2009, and this was a few months before ElBaradei was to leave the IAEA, having served a second term as director general, the Israelis organized a cabal of friendly states, including the United States, Germany, France, and the UK, of course, who began to put diplomatic pressure on ElBaradei to publish this annex that he'd been resisting.
And they actually issued a warning shot at one point, I mean, I'm sure the Israelis were behind it, an interview with George John, which suggested that there would be more details to come.
It was a clear hint that they would leak all of the details of the dossier, the alleged studies dossier, to the press, and would then blame ElBaradei for having withheld all this information.
And what they were doing was leaking, they didn't leak just to John, they leaked to the New York Times and others some of the information that was in this set of documents and intelligence reports, and ElBaradei still refused.
So then they did, in fact, leak the details of the intelligence dossier to George John, and it was published as a story highlighting, of course, Parchin, but also talking about the other, some of the other documents as well.
So this was a very far-reaching sort of dirty tricks effort led by the Israelis.
And by the way, the Israeli press essentially gave away the game, saying that the head of the Israeli atomic energy organization was really the one who was behind this effort to put pressure on ElBaradei.
So it's astonishing how far the Israelis go in sort of revealing their hand.
Right.
Yeah, as always, I mean, their idea of laundering this stuff is funneling it through the Mujahedini cult, communist terrorist cult.
I mean, how sophisticated is that?
And there are other cases as well, where there are leaks to the Israeli media sort of bragging about how they have been able to manipulate the IAEA and the United States as well, which I cite in my book.
Right.
All right.
Now, geez, I guess to wrap up here, just in the last minute, can you talk real quick about the role of the Sunday Times in being a funnel for Israeli information here?
Right.
Yeah, this is one of the other documents in this dossier that was turned over, this set of documents that was turned over to the IAEA in 2008 and 2009.
And it's important because this is the one document that has been cited as suggesting very strongly that Iran was continuing to work on nuclear weapons as late as 2007.
That's based on some sort of estimate that is implicit in some of the language in the document, apparently.
And which is a conclusion that was picked up by the rest of the headlines spouting news, the top of the hour AM radio shows and the cable news TV, oh no, 2007, that became their new thing.
And the CIA sure did get it wrong that they're not making nukes over there.
Exactly.
And that was precisely the purpose of this document, which was supposedly about studies of neutron sources with language, which very clearly suggested that Iran was working on a project that would be used to produce a way of detonating a nuclear weapon, a neutron trigger, as they called it in the story.
And it was then leaked two weeks almost to the day after Mohammed al-Baradai left the IAEA.
It was leaked to The Times in London, which of course is a Murdoch newspaper, very, very pro-Israeli traditionally, and ready to take a handout from Mossad any day of the week.
And there's even a clear indication in the story itself that they got the information from Israel.
And as I have written about it, IPS, and again, in the book, the CIA was extremely skeptical about this document, regarded it as a fabrication when they actually had a chance to look at it.
All right.
And now I'm sorry.
We'll just have to stop there because we're fresh out of time.
But thank you very much, Gareth, again, for coming on the show.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is the great Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He writes at IPSnews.net.
That's interpresservice at IPSnews.net and at truthout.org.
And the book is Manufactured Crisis, the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
Gareth's let me interview him about each and every chapter of this book, and I'm keeping all the archives there for you at scotthorton.org.
And we'll be back here next week from 830 to 9 for Anti-War Radio here on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Thanks very much for listening.
