All right, y'all welcome to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and Seymour Hersh is the author of the book Chain of Command, for one, about the torture regime in the Bush years.
And he's written a great many articles about Iran and their nuclear program and American war plans for the New Yorker magazine, including the next act and preparing the battlefield.
And this year, Iran and the bomb.
And he's got a follow-up here at the New Yorker from the 18th, Iran and the IAEA.
Welcome back to the show, Sy, how are you doing?
Okay.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for joining us today.
So to get right to the meat of this thing, as far as especially your particular reporting that we can't find out other places, you have sources who have told you the results of CIA and JSOC, I think boots on the ground investigations of Iran's nuclear program inside of Iran, right?
Yeah.
Well, I've been writing for the New Yorker about stories about the joint special operations command operations inside.
I think they started sometime in late 04, probably as good a guess as any, certainly by 05.
And what happened simply is that vice president Dick Cheney in particular, those are the Bush Cheney years, was convinced that Iran was cheating, but even though it was a member of the nonproliferation treaty community and it's all of its declared facilities, the nuclear enrichment facilities were declared to the international atomic energy agency, which is the sort of the UN watchdog group for this, for monitoring a nuclear development.
Anyway, Cheney was convinced there was, they were secretly building the bomb somewhere.
They were doing more than just enriching.
They were actually manufacturing weapons.
And so he had the joint special operations command send teams in and most of the work was done.
We work with locals.
We work with Azeri dissidents, rather people who were against the mullahs, the regime that was dominating the religious regime in Tehran.
Azeris, Kurds, they worked with Iranian Kurds.
They worked with the Jandala, which was a pretty hard line Sunni fundamentalist group that was also very much in opposition to the government.
And the idea was to inspect any place we thought there might be secret weapons manufacturing going on and other facilities.
And also to get tough with certain people if they had to.
I don't know all exactly what was done, but I do know that we targeted certain people, whether this was why certain people got assassinated or not.
As you know, many three or four scientists have, nuclear scientists have been assassinated and it's not clear.
Israel more or less by default seems to suggest they did it, but who knows?
And I don't certainly know.
I just know they were targeted, whether we actually accomplished something or not.
But there you are.
That happened.
And that was going on until the end of the Bush-Cheney years.
What I've done now is not really an article for the magazine, Scott.
I just did a blog item in response to the report a few weeks ago by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
I'm sorry.
Let me hold you right there for a second, because the part I wanted to get to about JSOC on the ground, it wasn't just possible involvement in the assassinations, but what you reported in Iran and the bomb, I think in April, was that they had put sensors everywhere, fake street signs and sensors in the roads.
And they had done this long term investigation and they still were standing by their conclusion that they really couldn't find any evidence of a secret parallel nuclear program, a nuclear weapons program inside Iran.
Is that correct?
Yes, that is not only correct, but also in 07, the American intelligence community, 16 agencies got together and produced what they call a national intelligence estimate, NIE, a highly classified paper, the elements of which are always sort of spread out, leaked a little bit.
And they did a study that said that as far as they could tell, Iran dropped all interest in the weaponization, even considering and looking at weaponization seriously in 03 when we attacked Iraq.
The point being that the Iranians had a war.
And by the way, that that estimate, the NIE was updated in 2011.
And I did a piece last June, this June about it in the New Yorker saying both the the 07 and the 2001 estimates also said nada there.
But here's the critical point.
The estimate, the American estimate was that Iran may well have looked hard at a possibility of building a bomb after its eight year war with Iran.
As some of your audience may know, Iran and Iraq fought a terrible eight year war from 1980 to 1988, in which, by the way, against Iraq.
And we supported, of course, Iraq, Assad Hussein's government then.
And in the years after that war, there was a lot of talk about Iran getting a bomb, Iraq rather getting a bomb, as you know, the WMD issue.
So the Iranians looked at it.
But once we hit Iraq in the March and April of 03 and took down Baghdad, the American estimate was that the Iranians said, OK, no sense worrying about Iraq anymore.
And there's no way with our small arsenal, the most we could make a one or two bombs in the next five years, whatever the estimate was, there was no way that Iran's weapon system, if there was one, if there were to be one, could neutralize or balance the thousand or more weapons we have.
And who knows how many hundreds of weapons warheads the Israelis have.
So the only deterrent reason they even looked at the prospect, according to our NIE, this isn't me, but this is the American intelligence community talking.
The only reason Iran even studied the possibility of making a weapon up to 03 was to balance Iraq as a deterrent against Iraq.
And when that didn't happen, poof, they're out of the business.
That's still the holding of the community.
You wouldn't know it from what you read in the newspapers, but that's still what the American intelligence community says.
Well, and there's nothing in this recent IAEA report that the CIA didn't know about, is there?
Well, there's nothing in the report that the IAEA didn't know about for many years.
My problem with the report is that it's not a scientific document.
This is what I wrote in The New Yorker and in the blog page.
It's not a scientific document.
It's a political document.
What happened, the most important thing that happened at the International Atomic Energy Agency in the last few years was the retirement of Mohamed ElBaradei, who the Egyptian who ran the agency for a dozen years, retired at 091, a Nobel Peace Prize.
We didn't always like him and the Israelis certainly didn't trust him.
By the way, he's now going to might just play a prominent role now in the new government that may form or at least a new coalition that may be set up because of the troubles in Egypt this week.
Anyway, he's still a player there.
And Baradei, when he was there, initially was very angry at Iran for its early work and then worked out a lot of problems.
There were always stuff put in papers, you know, always stuff published in the London Press and even here in America, allegations about cheating that the IAEA would investigate under ElBaradei.
And they would write, they write reports every quarter, four times a year.
And they would say, hey, two things are important.
One, we looked at this allegation.
We can't verify the substance of the claim.
A published report, let's say the London Sunday Times, about they're doing some kind of trigger work.
We don't believe that the evidence, the documents presented are real.
They're fabricated.
We're going on.
And also, what the IAEA did then, all during the last 10 years, and even in the new report, the one that includes sort of a catch-all, what the IAEA said is we've also, our cameras, everything that we know in Iran is under camera inspection and also individual inspection.
We've never detected any evidence of a diversion of uranium.
In other words, if the Iranians are going to build a bomb, they have to build it with enriched uranium.
And none of the uranium that's now being enriched to low levels, by the way, not near the weapons-grade level, has been diverted.
So they're going to have to get the uranium from someplace else, 90%, 95% enriched uranium.
Right now, the Iranians, the most they enrich anything is a small amount of 20% for medical purposes.
But most of the stuff they're enriching is around 3.8% to run a power plant.
Meanwhile, the critical issue is in 2009, he retires ElBaradei.
The new Director General is a Japanese politician named Amano.
I'm sure he's an honorable guy, but the first thing he did, and we have WikiLeaks documents to support this, is he told the American embassy in Vienna that the one that monitors the IAEA, he told the ambassador there in a cable forwarded by the ambassador to Washington that was made public by WikiLeaks, Julian Assange's group, he told them, look, thank you for helping me get elected.
He was six rounds of votes before he got in with our help.
And I want you to know, I share your strategic values.
I share your views on Iran.
He's much more of a player in our sphere.
He's one of our guys.
So you have a change in leadership that results in a much tougher tone on Iran.
And it results in the case in the last two weeks, taking a lot of old allegations, recycling them, and being very careful to caveat what he said.
The report was called possible military uses.
And the language of the report is maybe, perhaps, we believe this information is quote, unquote, overall credible, all these caveats.
But it ended up, and this isn't me talking, I talked to a number of people who worked at the IAEA, one couldn't be named, a senior guy still there, one just retired, an American named Kelly, a very competent guy, 30 years he worked in the American nuclear business, warfare business, before going to the IAEA.
And these guys are quoted in this blog item as saying, there's nothing new, we don't understand what's going on here.
And privately saying, which they don't like to say in public, because they don't want to diminish the IAEA, that they have a lot of grave doubts about Amano and his integrity, not so much his integrity, about his sense that he must do the American bidding, which he probably wants to do.
I'm not suggesting he's corrupting his opinion.
He's just got a different opinion.
He's less objective.
Well, and he's taken all the things that Baradai just refused to include in the report, including the alleged studies documents from the so-called smoking laptop.
And I was wondering, when you talk with your sources about that laptop, do they say that, well, for example, they agree with Gareth Porter's reporting that it was manufactured by the Israelis and funneled into the stream by the Mujahedini caulk?
Or do they still just shrug and say they don't know where it came from?
Do they believe it or not?
Well, I did do some reporting on it, and I think I wrote a piece for you back for The New Yorker.
I did talk to, it was delivered to an allied intelligence agency.
A laptop suddenly appeared.
They passed it off to us.
The allied intelligence agency was very skeptical.
It did include about a thousand pages or something like that, many hundreds of pages of crude drawings, drawings that showed basically fantasy drawings, drawings about putting a warhead on a, making a warhead and then putting on a certain kind of missile that the Iranians would know to play.
We call it a Shabad-3, a middle, mid-range missile, trying to figure out what, how much, what kind of, what stage rockets you would have.
And most of the paperwork that was done was crude, was amateurish, didn't make much sense to the experts in terms of certainly wasn't something done at a sophisticated weapons laboratory.
That doesn't mean somebody at the University of Tehran didn't draw something.
But basically the conclusion of the IAEA was that they really weren't much, they weren't very credible.
And therefore, when Mr.
ElBaradei reported about it, and what you're saying is correct, he would, over the years, he would list a series of, we've had these new allegations that appeared either in the press or they were relayed to us by Western powers, most of which, that means America, which is the main funnel for this kind of information.
And he would dismiss it.
He would look at it.
And what you're getting in the new report was most of these allegations recycled without the notion, unless you happen to read the early reports, that ElBaradei and ElBaradei's name, they had been discredited.
And so this report leans heavily, obviously, on the laptop, which is very much discredited by most people in the community.
I said that most of them at this point, it's just it was a laptop from where?
No providence.
And so there you are.
Well, now, here's the confusing part to me, though.
You know, it seems like what you're reporting here must be, you know, for example, Hillary Clinton's understanding of the situation.
I mean, she may be in disagreement about her, you know, suspicions about where they mean to go from here or something like that.
But I mean, the reality is the reality.
If it's the Americans and the Israelis who are trying to always push the IAEA to come up with this nonsense, they know it's nonsense, too.
So I wonder I know you said in your last article on this subject, Iran and the bomb, you have at least some sources in Israel.
We see two, at least maybe three former heads of Mossad saying don't attack Iran and all this.
And I just wonder whether it's just blatant at this point that this is merely a pretext that all sides in Israel and America understand that there's not really a nuclear weapons program there, that they would have to withdraw from the treaty and kick the inspectors out and announce they're making a bomb basically to get started on one.
And so what is the point of this or are they really afraid of a nuclear electricity program and a light water reactor at Bushehr?
I mean, come on.
Look, I can't get into the minds of Israel.
There's a great division in Israel, which is the former head of the Mossad, Mayer Dagan, who's as tough as they come.
He was the guy that was involved in the attempted assassination in Dubai a year or so ago.
I mean, a really tough character.
He's been saying since he retired a few months ago, four months ago or so, this is crazy.
They're not near a bomb.
He doesn't dispute the fact they may be wanting a bomb and they may be planning to make one.
But he says they're not near a bomb.
And bombing, attacking Iran is devastating, would be insane.
On the other hand, you have both Ehud Barak and his one time bitter enemy, Bibi Yeltsin.
Hey, are the two leaders of Israel in agreement on this?
You know, you have a defense minister and a prime minister both agreeing that this is an existential threat.
I have no idea what they really think.
I have no idea if they're just talking through their head.
My guess is they are.
I'm pretty sure that this administration, despite its tough talk about Iran, does not want to see Israel to attack Iran.
And it is what's scary to me, what is troubling to me, if Israel does do it unilaterally, which would be insane to me.
But, you know, what do I know?
If they did do it, the Middle East would always think we were involved, no matter what we said.
I'm sorry, because I really phrased the question too broadly.
What I should have asked you was, what are the intel guys that you talk to over there think?
They basically agree with the CIA about this, no?
It's complicated for me because I did talk to senior people there and the ground rules are so prohibitive that I couldn't really write what they said.
I wasn't allowed to report.
I can tell you in general that there are smart people in Israel, in intelligence and in the military, who do know that two things, they know that they do believe that the Americans are probably right when they say that Israel's ambition about building a bomb dwindled in 2003.
Iran.
Yeah, I beg your pardon, Iran's ambition dwindled in 2003 when we took down Baghdad.
That clearly whatever efforts they had were aimed at Iraq and not at deterring us or Israel, because how could you with one or two bombs?
And they also agree that they're not near a bomb.
They do think they still might make one.
But the most important thing is, I've had people say to me, in essence, that it's also understood by many in the military and the intelligence community there that Iran, with this 2,000 years of Persian society, they understand that if they got a bomb and they threw it at Tel Aviv, the scarce scenario we always see, they would be incinerated.
That the Israeli response would take out 300 warheads hitting Iran.
So they understand that.
And there are people in Israel who understand that there is a deterrent quality.
You don't use a bomb.
The bomb, and you know what these Iranians have said, Ahmadinejad, crazy as he may seem, and others, Larajani and others, have said the bomb, among other things, there's a fatwa against it, which we always diminish but dismiss.
Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa about, oh, 15 years ago, saying it's an unholy, it's an ungodly, it's against the Koran to build such a weapon.
I'm prepared to believe that there are many people in Iran who take that seriously.
I know in America that doesn't sell, but that's just what they say.
They do take it seriously.
And also the other issue is they're also totally aware that the bomb doesn't buy many security.
I mean, this is all of what, you know, this is.
Does our huge arsenal, does that help us in Iraq?
Did it help us in Vietnam?
Did it help us in Afghanistan?
I mean, come on.
There's, you know, asymmetrical warfare, they call it.
That's what the whole business is about.
But anyway, so I'm just, but I'm a finger, putting a finger in the dike, because the mainstream press has pretty much gone along with the sort of exorbitant language in the report and all the all the doomsday talk.
They've gone along pretty totally.
And so it's a little depressing to me.
But, you know, there is a there is another side to everything.
And maybe common sense will prevail or maybe somebody with some some diplomat or some official with the government and standing will stand up and say, as nobody did before the Iraqi war and nobody may do now, somebody in the inside will say this is crazy.
But so far, it's not happened.
Hmm.
Well, there was one guy that you said you talked to, Kelly, who also spoke to the Christian Science Monitor and the Real News.
So he seems willing to get on TV.
Well, I'll tell you something about Bob Kelly.
It's interesting to me.
He's a former inspector.
He's retired.
I knew him as a tough guy inside.
He was very skeptical of Iran and he still is skeptical of something.
But this new report is a nonstarter and people on the inside know what I quote more than him.
I quote people, others in the American nonproliferation move.
Most of the people who know anything about proliferation basically see the problems with the report that it simply was way overblown.
In any case, I'm off to lunch and coughing away with my cold.
OK, it was good to talk to you.
Yes.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate that.
Seymour Hirsch.
The latest is a blog entry at the New Yorker dot com.
Iran and the IAEA.
Previously, he wrote Iran and the bomb.
That was in June, not April.
Like I said, when I was wrong and you can find the whole thing, just add the letters PDF to your search and you'll find it over Richard Silverstein's blog, Iran and the bomb.
And I interviewed him full scale about that article, which was breaking news at the time.
Back then, too, you can find that at antiwar.com/radio.
