For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio here on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our guest tonight on the show is Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter for The New Yorker magazine and author of The Samson Option, Chain of Command, and other great books.
Welcome to the show, Cy.
How are you doing tonight?
Ah, well, fine, great.
Well, thanks for joining us very much.
The new piece in The New Yorker magazine is entitled Iran and the Bomb.
How real is the nuclear threat?
And it starts out with a little bit of rehashing of the National Intelligence Estimate from 2007, November 2007.
And you say that the new National Intelligence Estimate from this year basically confirms the same conclusion from 2007 that Iran is not currently pursuing nuclear weapons.
Is that right?
Yes, sir.
And now you go into some detail from your sources here talking about the story of how this NIE came to be.
And I guess it's been known for a while that there was quite a bit of infighting going on inside the intelligence community about what this new Iran NIE was to say.
And apparently, as you write in here, the Defense Intelligence Agency and their analysts came out on top in the fight.
Can you rehash a little bit about how that went?
Well, I wouldn't say they came out on top.
But what happened is their assessment was that the thing that's really novel is that the Defense Intelligence Agency, which has apparently gotten much better simply in the last four or five years than it has been.
Everybody's been a little skeptical of defense intelligence.
It's like military music is the music, all that stuff.
And military justice is the justice.
But the critical thing is the analysis of the Defense Department going into the NIE was that, this is the new one, was that yes, Iran had stopped any efforts to weaponize in 2003, as the 07 estimate said.
But the new theory of the Pentagon was that they had stopped.
So the only reason they even looked at the issue of trying to make a bomb was not to deter or defend against the Israelis or America, but their arch enemy, Iraq, with whom they had a horrible eight-year war, 1980 to 1988.
And there was a fear in Iran that if Iraq went ahead and developed the bomb, they had to have an answer.
And that was the reason there was so much infighting.
And actually, that particular notion did not get into the estimate.
But a lot of the other ideas that the Pentagon wanted did get in.
I assume there was horse trading.
I really don't know that many details.
What I know is that that was their position that bollocks everything up for about four or five months.
This NIE was expected late last summer, or maybe even in the fall last year.
It didn't come out until February.
And so you have, you know, look, the problem with saying that Iran may not have a bomb, for most Americans that's like defending incest or the Third Reich.
You know, we've been so knocked up with the idea that they're committed, the Ayatollah and his minions are committed to being nuclear masters.
And I'm only exaggerating a little bit.
There's been a lot of fear talk about Iran.
The reality is that they haven't looked at weaponization since 03, and it's not clear what they were even doing then.
It might have been mostly paper studies.
There's been no evidence that we found the United States.
And, you know, we've had our special forces and our Joint Special Operations Command, I've been writing about this for years, deep inside Iran on missions, looking for evidence of a bomb of a secret facility.
There's just no evidence that they've gone that way.
And what I also did, this is, you know, I have a luxury at the New Yorker.
I can spend months on stories.
I talked to officials in intelligence among our allies in the West, the Germans, even the Swedes, the French, the Brits, and in no place was any, everybody, everybody has a suspicion.
And the fear is that there may be something they're hiding beautifully, but there's no evidence at all that they've done anything to weaponize.
They are enriching.
They are working on missiles.
Yes, but they have not done anything.
You know, the process of turning a gas, you know, enriched uranium to 90%, it comes in a gaseous form, UF6.
The process of turning that into a metal, we're talking about the most toxic stuff in the world, really radioactive, and then putting it into, fabricating it, molding it into a small ball, a core, to go into a warhead, and then surrounding that warhead with little, you know, 10,000 or more or less, that many, little small high explosives so that you, at the same time, you hit a button and there's 10,000 small impressions, the compression of the ball, and that triggers the response.
That's how you get a thermonuclear response or a nuclear response fission.
And the idea, this is such a complicated process, and you have to have special facilities for it.
We haven't found any evidence.
It just could be that what they've said publicly and what their ayatollahs have said in fatwas, that they're not going nuclear.
Now, if I remember correctly, Cy, in your piece called The Next Act in The New Yorker that came out two or three years ago, you had kind of mid-level Mossad sources as well as CIA, not the political types like Mayor Dagan, Nehu, Barak, who you quote in this piece, but also I believe you had kind of mid-level actual Mossad analysts working the case who also came to the same conclusion that you're telling me now all of our allies agree with, that there just is nothing indicating a secret nuclear weapons program here.
I'm embarrassed to tell you, Scott, I hardly remember what I wrote last week.
You know, I'm getting up in age.
But that's consistent.
That's also consistent.
I was in April, in early April, and I did see people there.
Unfortunately, because of a huge defied over ground rules, these are really difficult when it comes to attribution.
I didn't carry much of their stuff.
But I can tell you that that's certainly so today.
And it's also true today that, you know, the...
It is certainly so that the mid-level analysts at Mossad agree with the same conclusion you're saying.
Well, it's certainly so that I can tell you about the defense services.
I don't remember who I talked to before, but I can also tell you that I did see some senior people when I was there, and there's nothing...
Nothing has made me change my opinion.
And plus, it's also so that, you know, you, Barack, said recently on the record, something that was said to me in Israel, too, which is that the idea that if Iran were to decide to get a bomb and eventually did get a bomb, which could be who knows how many years away, they first have to build the elaborate facilities needed.
And we've, of course, been watching that.
We watch Iran all the time.
If they did, the idea that has often been said that the Iranians, when they got a bomb, would immediately go after Tel Aviv is loony because the Israelis do acknowledge that Iran is, you know, it's a 2,000-year Persian Empire.
They know if they did that, it would be instant annihilation because Israel obviously has so many more weapons and all paused, you know, for counter-strike.
And it's also so that the Israelis also understand that is that Iran did stop in 2003, whatever it was doing in terms of weaponization.
And I basically, I, along with other people inside the intelligence community, I'm not sure very much was done, except some drawings and papers and schematic stuff.
Again, there's no evidence of a serious industrial base for making weapons.
But nonetheless, they did look at it.
And the Israelis also believe that it was Iraq that did it.
They have a different explanation, whereas the explanation in the Defense Department was that Iran did look, until 2003, at weaponizing because of Iraq.
But once we invaded Iraq and took it down, that ended their worries.
And so they stopped.
The Israelis agreed the timing is right.
They say that what we did to Baghdad in three weeks with our, you know, shock and awe, our bombing, was more than Iran could do in eight years of warfare to Baghdad.
So they came away, they stopped because they were afraid they would be next.
So they had a different explanation for why they stopped, you know, in fear of us.
But the same point is the same point, that in 2003, everyone agrees, they stopped any efforts to weaponize, whatever they were.
And now, I think you're referring to, when you talk about these paper studies, to the Iran laptop?
Because as best I know, that's the only thing that anybody said indicated they had any sort of nuclear weapons program up until 2003.
Well, the laptop is in much dispute.
And actually, I didn't write about it, but I think I have in previous articles.
It was delivered to us.
It was allegedly a laptop owned by an Iranian nuclear scientist.
And it was delivered to us, I think in 04, maybe early 05, maybe 04 is more likely.
The Germans were involved.
This material was being passed.
And I will tell you, even the senior people in the German intelligence, the BND is the initials for it.
They've told me years ago and repeated it again recently that the drawings there were very amateurish and it's not clear there was a legitimate, not clear it wasn't some propaganda exercise, the famous laptop.
No, I think what the intelligence community is talking about was other signs they had in 03 of some efforts to look at plans and more plans above and beyond the laptop, which is much in dispute in terms of its provenance.
But there was clearly something they were looking at.
I don't think, I think that's perfectly fair.
But they stopped it in 03.
Okay.
And now, again, it's Seymour Hersh.
He's got the new piece in the New Yorker magazine, Iran and the bomb.
How real is the nuclear threat?
And you say in here, Cy, that you talked to a consultant who saw the full classified version of the brand new national intelligence essay on Iran's nuclear program and that he said, not only does it come to the same conclusion as the NIE from 2007, that there is currently no nuclear weapons program in Iran, but that there's much more evidence now added to it to buttress that same conclusion.
Is that right?
And did he describe what any of that intelligence was?
I guess you're going to talk about JSOC and their surveillance capability inside Iran.
Yeah, well, obviously, I don't want to talk too much about because, you know, look, we're talking about pretty highly classified stuff.
And as you may or may not know, the White House got pretty heated about this.
They wouldn't talk to me about it, but as soon as it came out, they were very quick to go after me pretty hard, basically trying to diminish what I wrote and make fun of it and say nobody believes it and we all know that Iran is serious about it.
You know, the problem for us with this information is that believe me, the NIE is taking seriously.
And I obviously know more about it than I'm writing because of the classification of it.
I don't want to get anybody in trouble.
But I will tell you that, you know, if in 07 they said there's no weaponization and in four years later, they still haven't found any evidence of weaponization, you know, the evidence that they're not doing a weapon system at all has to be assumed to be greater.
You've had four more years to look.
And don't forget one of the things about the 07 estimate was that for the first time in the history of NIEs, National Intelligence Estimates, which are sort of the holy grail of the community, the most serious sort of scholarly work on, they range, there's NIEs written every week that we don't know about.
But in 07, they decided, the Bush-Cheney White House decided to make a summary public and thinking it would come out negative, but it did not, that the intelligence community, to its everlasting credit, said what they had to say, no evidence, which got the White House pretty hot.
And you have to say to yourself, okay, if they did an estimate in 07 and they talked publicly about what they saw and couldn't see, you have to say, okay, did that estimate help the Iranians hide what they were doing?
Did it give them any details?
It was just describing a process.
Did it make the Iranians learn more?
So the fact that given that worry went into the new estimate and it still came out the same place, you really understand it's a pretty hard finding.
What does this mean, Scott?
What this means is that at some level in this, the government, and I don't care what they say publicly, they understand that they're pursuing a very aggressive sanctions policy against Iran that's being increased and every couple of weeks they've added more and more companies who are not permitted in the West to do business with the Iranians in shipping and insurance, in weapons, obviously in any dual use stuff.
What this means is this sanctions program is aimed at stopping a weapons program that doesn't exist.
And that's the ultimate, I think ultimately, no matter how much the White House yells and screams and no matter how much I don't want to listen to this and certainly in Congress I'm not flooded with calls by Congressmen saying tell me more.
It is going to have an impact.
Clearly the sanctions policy is aimed at wanting, trying to force Iran to change its foreign policy, not regime change, that's not going to happen.
Bush might have been interested in regime change, Obama is not.
So clearly we've got a policy that's not going to happen.
And as you write in the article it seems like it's pretty clearly backfiring and it's only pushing the Iranians to deepen their relationship with Turkey instead, that kind of thing, where we could be filling that role and doing that trade.
We're increasing their hegemony in the region.
Well certainly there's been a whole new nexus there.
Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and American power has been diminished.
That's absolutely so.
There's just no question.
I'll give you the other thing that's sort of amazing to me.
It's also clear that we're having grave troubles with Saudi Arabia.
They're really unhappy with the fact that the Obama White House, to its credit, didn't intervene to protect Mubarak in Egypt when he went down, and has generally been very skittish about it, and the spring we're having, the Arab Spring, the uprisings.
I think I'm balanced.
For all of his weakness, he's been pretty good on it.
And so here we have the Saudis not increasing the output of oil.
There are 8.5 million barrels a day.
The price of oil and gas is very high in America right now.
Obama's going to be re-elected not because he got Osama bin Laden, but because his gas price is below $4.
And so here's Iran, that's the second largest producer of natural gas and also has a large quantity of oil, although its fields are diminishing.
And they're doing all their trading with India and China and even Pakistan.
Excuse me, dumb and dumber.
What kind of a policy is that if you're trying to increase the amount of oil available to us and to the world so we can lower the prices?
And so I'm not sure there should be some serious rethinking about opening up a talk.
And I do quote Tom Pickering, the former Deputy Secretary of State and a long time very serious diplomat, very scholarly, and sort of a very decent man saying, among others, that he's been in touch with the Iranians in secret talks for years with a small group and now this Track 2, you call it, negotiations, these have been going on since the George Bush years, right?
And so it's authorized by the National Security Council, by the presidency, right?
Well, I don't know if authorized is the right word.
They informed Condoleezza Rice about it and got a sort of an okay.
I see, so it's sort of outside of government, kind of a middleman effort?
Well, it's outside the government and they didn't come to him and ask him to do this for them or something?
No, no, no.
He initiated and they agreed but there were contacts made with senior people in the State Department including this State Department, including this government, Hillary Clinton.
They do meet with her, they've met with her.
So there is a separate track for talks and the whole point of the Track 2 that Pickering and others was involved in, has been to say to the Americans and to the Western European, what we call the P5 plus 1, the negotiating partners on the Iranians, is to say, hey, let's get off the enriched uranium issue.
There's no evidence from the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has diverted any enriched materials.
They're only enriching to about 3.7% the amount needed for running a civilian reactor.
They have a small pilot program for nuclear purposes but it's very small and everything they're doing is under IAEA inspection.
Many of the most serious parts are under camera, IAEA cameras around the clock and so the Pickering et al., the Track 2 group, is saying to the United States and to our allies, let's find other things to talk about and among other things, nothing wrong with treating the Iranians as grown up people, that we do, we and the Israelis do constantly.
Well, and they have this, the offer that Pickering is working on here in your article seems to be along the lines of what Obama was proposing or at least pretending to propose that we just internationalize the program and we'll have your uranium that you want up to 20% for your targets for your medical isotope reactor, we'll do the enriching in Russia and we'll make the fuel rods in France and then we'll give it back to you and we'll do that deal and yet they refuse to take him up on his acceptance of their own offer, best I can tell, Sy.
You know, I don't know the ins and outs, I do know the document you're talking about, the WikiLeaks document and yes, there's no question that Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs, but as you know, there's serious disputes among the right right now, political disputes between Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs that are very interesting.
It's not a dispute between the Green Party, it's a dispute among the right but anyway, that could play a role.
There certainly was a lot of room there to do serious talking about it and it fell apart and then at another point, the Iranians went to Brazil, I think, and some other country, I can't remember which one you're talking about.
The Turks, yeah.
What was the other one?
The Turks, yeah.
Oh yeah, the Turkey, that's right.
You know, there's a problem, I'll tell you, it's interesting.
One of the problems I've been told, is that their materials aren't very good.
I mean, they have a lot of technical problems that they haven't solved and they have some serious contamination in some of their enriched materials and certainly, it's okay for running a peaceful reactor, but when you start enriching to a greater number, the contaminant could destroy centrifuges, the machinery used to enrich that spin at incredible volumes, hundreds of thousands of times a second or something like that.
A centrifuge just, you know, it's just one atom and leaves the rest as residue anyway.
And that really, the Russians and the French weren't always that eager to take, to reprocess some of the Iranian enrichment stuff because they were worried about contamination.
I don't know if that's so or not, but that is something I did know is in the issue.
But the point is, the point you make, Scott, is there's a lot of different ways to approach this without bellicosity and without yelling and without screaming about the consequences Iran could play.
You know, they supported us after 9-11.
They were in the streets demonstrating against Al-Qaeda.
Don't forget Al-Qaeda, Sunni jihadism, Iranians, Shia.
There is, it seems to be, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to approach some common ground.
First, you'd have to, I think if you started to talk about other issues, you'd find that the Iranians would give what we want right now, which is to be monitored by the Non-Proliferation Treaty to which Iran is a signatory.
And Iran also, obviously is monitored by the IAEA and there's no evidence that Iran, nobody's suggesting, even in the United Nations, that there's been no allegation that they violated any UN enrichment procedures.
There's just other allegations that they're not doing what we want.
But I can tell you, it's a little, you know, here I am.
I'm just being the equivalent of an advocate for incest.
And I don't like it.
And I mean, I'm just...
Well, it just sounds to me like you're an advocate for the truth of the matter.
Well, it doesn't seem to matter so much, you know, that everybody seems to...
Well, look, I mean, you're reporting here the official position of the unanimous, because they have to be before the thing is finalized, right?
The unanimous 16 intelligence agencies of the United States.
The major players, this agreement that worked out, the new NIA, which of course is secret, that's the problem.
And by the way, it is also true that the NIA does not say we believe there's no weapon system.
They'll never say that.
They just can't find it.
And there's also, as I said up front in the article, there's also, you know, everybody also, and where that breaks down, though, is if there's, if we, you know, for now we have no evidence that there's any secret nuclear weapons program, that means for them to someday go ahead and go for one means to basically announce to the whole world they're doing so, because they'd have to kick out the IAEA and withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty and it'd be apparent to everyone that they're enriching up to weapons grade right there at Natanz, which is now where they're enriching and one of the things that the Israelis actually believe now, you know, that the former head, Meir Daigon of the Mossad, came out and he said, well, they're four or five years away.
And the way that's explained to me by some people besides some internal politics is that Daigon really means that what he's really saying is they're four or five years away from deciding they would withdraw from the International Atomic Energy Agency and do exactly what you say.
They're going to withdraw and stay with us.
And that's what he believes, that Daigon believed by saying that Iran was four or five years away.
So if that's Mossad's worst case scenario, then that means they would have plenty of time to know for a fact that they're actually now beginning to attempt to make one nuclear bomb.
You know, in that article, I described after a lot of back and forth and talking to people, I described some of the sensitive stuff we had done.
We don't do it anymore because of the Joint Special Operations Command, which I've been critical about many times because of some of the excessive killing that went on.
But they also do very competent intelligence.
And they've done some very good work inside Iran in terms of sort of basically proving the negative, proving that I'm being unable to find any evidence of what everybody thought existed, a secret underground or what you will program.
And so there we are.
It ain't there.
And there's a national intelligence estimate saying that.
And this government knows what they say and continues to talk in terms, as I wrote in the article, as we did before the WMD crisis in Iraq.
We talk as if everybody's sure it's there.
And, you know, there we are.
Right.
Now, one more point to wrap up here real quick is this track two negotiation with Thomas Pickering here.
You say in the article that he hasn't had a chance to meet with Barack Obama.
And I wonder if that's the same thing as saying that Obama has refused to meet with him thus far or what?
Because this seems like the very best hope that we have for peace.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I don't know the answer to that question because my sense of Obama is that in my reporting, I'm doing other things.
I'm writing a book.
So I'm still doing stuff.
I mean, you know, we always talk about presidents having a cult around them.
He's pretty isolated.
It's very hard to break through.
And it's not clear that Obama wouldn't be very engaged and interested in what Pickering had to say.
I do know that Pickering and his colleagues, they include former State Department people, mostly three or four people that were prominent, you know, former ambassadors and former high government officials that are with him on this project.
They met with Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, a couple of times at least, and she's open to talking to them.
It's just not clear that Obama actually knows they want to come.
Well, let's hope they let him read The New Yorker.
I don't think anybody in the White House is interested in reading The New Yorker, at least my part of The New Yorker this week.
That doesn't seem to be the response.
All right.
Well, time is short, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that is the great Seymour Hersh, author of a great many books, including Chain of Command.
And he's written a lot of great articles for The New Yorker magazine on the issue of Iran, specifically the coming wars, the next act, and now Iran and the bomb.
How real is the nuclear threat just out in The New Yorker magazine?
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm KPFK every Friday night from 6.30 to 7 o'clock, and of course streaming live worldwide in whatever time zone you're in at kpfk.org.
Full archives of all of my interviews are available at antiwar.com/radio.
See you next week.
