02/06/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
I'm on Liberty Express Radio.
And, hey, check it out.
Gareth Porter wrote a thing, so I got to interview him about it.
So I want to.
Hey, Gareth, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks for having me again.
Once again, Scott.
Well, happy to have you on here.
And I see that you've written a thingamajig here.
Going back in history, a little bit of context, and I assume this must be in your book, which I still haven't gotten.
But what an important story.
How it is, I mean, I have to admit, I'm surprised.
I mean, the bottom line of your story, I think, is that you're saying that the Americans have, in a sense, have been accidentally lying about Iran's nuclear program, at least in the window of time between, say, early 1990s, somewhere in there, and 07?
Well, I think I would somewhat modify that by saying, I mean, you're on the right track, but I would say that the statement about the U.S. conclusion that Iran was trying to get nuclear weapons that it had a nuclear weapons program is really about from the early 1990s up to the Bush administration taking office.
Then, I mean, I think the intelligence community still relies on the same basic analysis.
But then you have other, I mean, there are other politics, political interests entering in, even in the Clinton administration, from the White House.
So all I'm talking about here is the intelligence community's finding, as opposed to the policy positions taken by either the Clinton administration or the Bush administration.
Right, as George Bush said to the Israelis, well, you know, the CIA has their opinion and I have mine, but unfortunately I'm bound by theirs.
The findings of the intelligence community has never prevented the administration from being able to do what it really wanted to do, I think I would argue.
So I think you're correct in that general statement.
Yeah.
All right.
So now, so take us back then to the earlier 90s when the Iranians were up to something and the CIA, lo and behold, got it wrong.
How'd they get it wrong?
This is, I think, one of the important stories that I tell in the book.
So you are correct that this is drawn from manufactured crisis.
Oh, wait a minute.
Let me interrupt you for a sec longer here because I got to tell the people that this is still, as of right now, hopefully no other further crises break out today.
This is the top headline today at Antiwar.com.
Errors led analysts to see Iran nuke program.
That's nuke weapon program there.
All right.
Thank you for telling us that.
So this is one of the stories that is told in the book, and it's a very important one, as you've already suggested in your introduction, about the origins of the U.S. intelligence conclusion that Iran was not just sort of interested in nuclear weapons, but was actually taking actions that could only be interpreted, or which they definitely interpreted as being involving an actual program, as they put it later on to, they being the head of the CIA put it, to produce the fissile material for a nuclear weapon.
And so what the story shows is that it all began when Western intelligence agencies began to intercept telexes that were coming from the Sharif University in Tehran to various companies in Europe particularly, but not only in Europe, I think there were some that went to the United States as well, but mainly to European companies seeking various kinds of technologies.
And I have to make it clear, it may not have been as clear as it should have been in the article, that we're talking here about hundreds and hundreds of telexes that were intercepted from Sharif University, but it was only a small handful, a relative handful, that really interested the intelligence analysts, particularly those in the United States, but not limited to those, because what they thought they saw there was that these were technologies that would be used in a nuclear program, that is specifically for uranium conversion and uranium enrichment.
So what the analysts, as opposed to the people who actually gathered the telexes, intercepted the telexes, the people who were analyzing them, looked these over, picked out these telexes that had to do with certain technologies, and these were specifically fluorine, canisters of fluorine, ring magnets, a balancing machine, and high vacuum equipment, what they call high vacuum equipment.
And what the analysts said upon sucking their thumbs and figuring out what they believed this meant is that the Iranians were potentially interested in a nuclear program here, because they were trying to procure a whole series of what is called dual-use items, items that could be used for non-nuclear applications, but can also be used for a nuclear program.
Now, the second thing was the one that really triggered the CIA analysts, the proliferation specialists of the CIA's conclusion that Iran was heading towards a nuclear weapon, and that is that on those telexes from Sharif University, they spotted not all of them, but on many of them there was a telex number that coincided with the number of something called the Physics Research Center, which is often called PHRC or often designated as PHRC in the literature.
And the Physics Research Center was an outfit that was known to have links to the military, and the Defense Ministry of Iran had contracts to carry out activities that related to the Defense Ministry's remit.
So seeing that, they decided that that meant that the Iranian military was actually using Sharif University as a cover for essentially an Iranian military nuclear program.
And that was the theory that underlay a whole series of intelligence judgments from the early 1990s on.
And we have a whole series of indications of this, which I cite in my article, beginning with a statement in 1992, a quote from a George H.W. Bush administration official, unnamed, to the Washington Post that said, well, we've been trying to prevent any nuclear technology of any kind from going to Iran because of, quote, a suspicious procurement pattern.
And that, of course, was clearly a reference to the telexes that they'd intercepted and that they had interpreted in a way that indicated to them, at least, that Iran was interested in nuclear weapons.
So that was one indication.
And then there were leaks to the news media and, in one case, to the producer of a public broadcasting system documentary called Iran and the Bomb.
It was broadcast in April 1993.
And then that producer of the documentary, named Robert Krosny, also published a book in which he characterized these telexes as clear evidence of an Iranian interest in nuclear weapons, and clearly reflecting what he had been told by various intelligence officials, whether it was German or American officials was unclear, because he clearly went to Germany and did some research there.
But in any case, these are indications that this had become an official position of those people in the CIA who were working on proliferation.
You know, the biggest, most important indication, though, was 1996, when the then-director of the CIA, John Deutch, made a public statement in congressional testimony in which he talked about evidence that Iran had tasked both civilian and military organizations to acquire the fissile material for nuclear weapons, for a nuclear weapon.
So, I mean, that was the, at the top of the CIA, a statement indicating that that was their intelligence conclusion, their intelligence analysis.
And then, of course, later on we have, we know that in 2001 the CIA put out the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, the Iranian nuclear program, which specifically had a title that indicated that they believed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
So, I mean, clearly that intelligence estimate, that intelligence assessment, was very much still guiding the position of the CIA and the intelligence community as a whole in regard to Iran's nuclear intentions.
All right, and then you talk about in here how the IAEA went back and revisited all this, and they were satisfied by 2007, is that correct?
Right, and in the meantime, of course, what happened was that in 2004, as I point out in the story, somebody, presumably either U.S. or Israeli intelligence officials, passed on to the IAEA Safeguard Department, Ali Heinemann, he was deputy director of safeguards in 2004, he became director in 2005, passed on these, if not the telexes themselves, then intelligence analysis about the intercepted telexes and what they purportedly told the analysts about Iran's nuclear intentions.
So, the IAEA was tipped off in 2004 that they should investigate the physics research center and demand information from Iran about the role of the PHRC in these requests for procurement.
So, that became really a centerpiece of the IAEA investigation of Iran for the next four years, roughly.
Alright, well, so when we get back, we've got to talk about your perfect 2020 hindsight here, and how bad of a mistake this was, a real rookie blunder, or their good faith best guess, or what, and more.
With the great Gareth Porter, IPSnews.net, top headline today at Antiwar.com, about the CIA being wrong about Iran's nuclear program.
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Alright, y'all.
Welcome back.
I love this song.
I'll never get over how much I love this song.
Alright, that's Dresden 45 for you.
Alright, I'm talking with Gareth Porter.
And, well, if you just tuned in, I hope you didn't hear me wrong on the way out to break.
We're talking about how the CIA used to be wrong about Iran, and thinking that they did have a nuclear weapons program.
Of course, we know that they finally got it right starting in 2007 with their national intelligence estimate, then that they've reaffirmed year by year ever since, in which the Israeli Mossad officially agrees with now that, no, they don't have a nuclear weapons program, and they have not made a political decision to pursue nukes, etc.
So, now we're talking about how they got it all screwed up, and what it was was a procurement pattern, as they put it, of dual-use technologies at an Iranian university, part of which was tied to the Ministry of Defense there.
And so you can see why it would be suspicious.
But I guess it sort of sounds like what you're talking about, maybe a problem of methodology where they went cherry-picking all the things that fit, and ignored all the things maybe counted as subterfuge, all the things that might indicate other uses for these items over these years, something like that.
That, of course, is exactly what happened, Scott.
But behind that mistake, the obvious sort of rookie, as you put it, rookie intelligence error, is a much more fundamental problem that I discuss at some length in my book.
And I don't want to get into detail, but just very briefly, the problem is that the CIA created a new institution in 1991, and sort of reorganized it again in early 1992, that was aimed at raising the profile of the proliferation of WMD.
Oh, that was WINPAC, right?
Pardon?
WINPAC?
WINPAC was a successor organization.
This was the National Center for Counterproliferation.
Because we know that in 2002 and 2003, they were the ones pushing the hardest for the aluminum tube scan on Iraq.
Exactly.
And they are closely related to the original organization.
But the original organization was 1991-92.
And what that did was to focus the attention of the intelligence community far more on the problem of proliferation, which was already identified publicly by officials of the Bush administration, specifically Robert M. Gates, who had just taken over as the director of the CIA in November 1991, on Iran as a major potential, if not actual, proliferator of nuclear weapons, as well as other kinds of WMD.
So what the heads of the intelligence community, and specifically Gates himself, were doing for their own bureaucratic interest in order to have a rationale for maintaining the Cold War levels of spending that had been maintained by the Congress for the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, was they were creating an expectation that the analysts were going to come up with evidence that Iran was a proliferation threat.
And I quote a number of former intelligence officials, some of whom were willing to go on the record, some of whom, one at least, was not willing to be named, but who identified the same problem and talked about how it had been, in his experience, very clearly a problem during the Gulf War, the first Gulf War.
I won't go into detail on that.
But anyway, it's a well-recognized phenomenon that when you raise expectations on the part of the collectors and the analysts that there's a particular problem that we're looking at and we expect to see some results, they're going to come up with evidence that supports that.
And that's exactly what happened in this case.
So I think that it all ties in with the larger pattern, the larger picture, if you will, of a national security bureaucracy, a national security state, that was gearing up to defend its interests, essentially.
They need an enemy.
They needed an excuse to continue containing Iran all through the Clinton years rather than having any kind of rapprochement, even under the reign of the so-called moderates, which means friendly faces for Western TV anyway, whatever it means as far as their domestic politics aside.
Rafsanjani, Khatami, nope, can't even do business with them.
Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.
That's precisely right.
I mean, they needed to have a successor to replace the Soviet threat.
And Iran was the single biggest candidate here for all kinds of reasons.
And so that's exactly what happened.
So then we skipped forward, you know, sort of cut to the ending to this story, which is that after three years in which the relationship between Iran and the IAEA over their investigation kind of broke down for political reasons, both sides were essentially holding out for their own political reasons, waiting for an ultimate agreement under which the two sides would come together and sort of resolve these issues that had been raised about the Iranian nuclear program.
So that was the August 2007 work program.
Well, as soon as that agreement was signed, within a matter of months, Iran had turned over to the IAEA this, I would say, an avalanche of documentation on these procurement issues that they had been asked about.
And what the evidence showed was that in every case, they were able to show that it was, in fact, at the request of faculties of the Sharif University itself, that the procurement requests were made.
And the reason that you had the telex number of the Physics Research Center on the telexes was that the head of the Physics Research Center, this fellow Shamrati Zavari, was actually a professor at Sharif University.
And he had been somebody who had been involved in procurement when he worked in the missile, apparently in the missile program of Iran.
And so they relied heavily on him, on his contacts with various companies and his knowledge of the field of technology acquisition.
And they asked him to help them make these requests.
So he did that.
And so he put the Physics Research Center telex number on the request, and that was where the information went when they got back answers from their requests for the technology.
So that explains this mysterious telex number, not the fact that the Iranian military was trying to carry out a secret military nuclear program.
I think you see in the article at one point they're showing the IAEA around saying, yeah, we need you to come in here, follow me in this room and we'll get the paperwork for that so we can answer your question.
Oh yeah, by the way, there's the thingamajig, whatever piece of technical equipment is still sitting right there on the counter, engaged in the purpose that they claimed in the first place, correct?
The balancing machine that they were so head up about, which they felt was going to be used for the testing of centrifuges, the balancing of centrifuges, was in fact right there in the mechanical engineering department, as I remember now.
So yes, they did find that equipment there.
The magnets, of course, turned out were used by the physics department for what they call lens Faraday experiments, which are apparently just elementary experiments for physics students.
Nothing terribly sinister about that at all.
And so it goes.
All of the information they got was completely credible, irrefutable, showing that these were at the request of the faculties, various faculties of Sharif University, and not having anything to do with the Iranian military.
And in fact, the IAEA made no effort to suggest that there was anything questionable about any of the documentation that they were given, and they said the issue is closed.
The issue of the procurement of requests is closed.
And that was clearly a signal that they had nothing to refute the information they'd gotten from Iran with.
Right.
Wow, and that's something else.
Here I just thought it was as simple as they were lying, but no.
It's got to be the real sort of lesson of this whole story in terms of understanding how this system works.
I mean, it's not new to your listeners, I know, but it's worth mentioning, and that is that the news media didn't even report the fact that the IAEA report of February 2008, which detailed this entire story of the information that they'd been given, which cleared up the issues of the procurement requests, this was an extremely important turning point in the investigation, obviously, for the reasons that we've been discussing.
And the news media simply didn't report it.
Well, you know what?
I mean, the thing of it is there are so few people on the Iran nuclear beat who really know what they're talking about at all, and then subtract away from those, those who have no motivation whatsoever to make clear the kind of point that you're making clear here, bringing to light the truth where there's misunderstanding, where it's most important, the most important kind of journalism, especially on an issue like this, matters of war and peace, etc.
There are very few who are on this beat who understand the issue well enough, who have the motive to do so, and then among those who you could hold in one hand, including yourself, you know, the rest probably just missed it.
You know what I mean?
I wouldn't know unless you told me, like just now.
I think it's clear that the journalists who were covering this beat in 2007-2008 didn't even bother to read the report.
They didn't read it.
Well, now you had a little bit of trouble with the media about this story.
How's that?
Very quickly here.
Yeah, it's true.
I can tell you that since this was published, I've had two communications from journalists covering national security for major American publications that questioned me about why is it that I always take the Iranian side, and every time that I write about an issue that involves Iran, I always act as though that the Iranian claims are fact.
I mean, it was remarkably similar messages that I got within a matter of, you know, overnight.
I mean, between last night and this morning.
Right.
And meanwhile, but it's this huge story explaining, undermining the basis of ten years' worth of bad conclusions.
They don't have anything to say about that, just about.
They don't like how good you are at it.
Anyway, I like how good you are at it.
Thanks, Garrett.
That's Garrett Porter, everybody.
Manufactured Crisis is the book.
Got to go.
See you tomorrow.
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