For Pacifica Radio March 23rd 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is anti-war radio All right, y'all welcome the show it is anti-war radio, thanks very much for listening I'm Scott Horton here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA My own website is Scott Horton org you find my full interview archive There are more than 3,000 of them now going back to 2003 and you can follow me on Twitter if you want at Scott Horton show And so today will be part 7 of the interview series begun on the show last week and continuing All through the week on my other radio show with the great independent journalist.
Dr. Gareth Porter author of Manufactured crisis the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
Welcome back to the show Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine Thanks very much.
Scott.
Thanks for having me back Very good to have you here.
And if anybody wants to catch up on this series They're all there already in mp3 format for you there in the archive at Scott Horton org all right, so This is part 7 of our interview series about manufactured crisis on chapter 8 The mystery of the laptop documents and so again the book is manufactured crisis the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare and We've covered a lot of the IAEA investigations into what all the Iranians are doing and it looked like right at the end of 2007 they got pretty much a clean bill of health, but then then again The alleged studies documents were brought up Purporting to show Iranian progress on a nuclear weapons program a secret nuclear weapons program they're known as the alleged studies documents the smoking laptop the possible military dimensions and even the laptop of death and it's about a thousand pages of documents that were handed over to the CIA in the fall of 2004 and Well Gareth, where do these laptop documents come from?
Well, of course the myth, but first of all, let's let's just talk about what the myth of their origins is and was and that is that the documents were supposedly coming from within this covert Iranian nuclear weapons program from 2001 to 2003 and There was a whole set of stories that were spun around that idea one of which was told by Somebody who had been in the Bush administration and or who had been in the intelligence community and was supposedly retired who told David Sanger that the documents had been on the laptop of This engineer Who had been participating say engineer but a participant in this covert nuclear weapons research project in Iran?and that the The person who had these documents on on his computer was apparently somehow other out of sympathy with the policy and was intending to turn these over to people outside the country and he he was afraid at one point that he'd been discovered or that he was suspected of Doing some sort of spying and he managed to get the the documents out through his wife Out of the country and so with that was one of the stories and then you know, and then he died Mysteriously or was supposedly by the regime that the part of that are related to that is this Notion that the the US government was never clear on whether this person was still alive or not and indeed al-baradei Mohammed al-baradei the the director-general of the IAEA During this period when the documents materialized says in his memoirs that that he was told by the Americans that They were not sure if this person was still alive or it died So so that was that was clearly part of this this what I call a cover story About the document there are others other cover stories as well, which I won't get into but well And the other cover stories are completely contradictory to that one, right?
Well, I mean, they're not They're different from but they're along the same lines that you know One of them was that the guy was a spy for the Germans that the German intelligence agency The BNP had recruited a spy and Iranian who was a businessman and that's how they got the document Which is a lot different and different Yes still much different than it was a scientist and we don't know what happened to him But his wife got it out for us.
That's that's a pretty specific story that either holds or it doesn't right?that's a very specific story and and you know, the It's not really very credible for a whole bunch of reasons mostly that you know if he was Believing that he was under surveillance The idea that his wife would waltz out of the country with it with a Laptop full of these documents is it just doesn't pass the laugh test at all Clearly and the chapter right that early on in the story The CIA had admitted that they didn't really know where the documents came from and that they even suspected That they had come from the Mujahideen e-call, is that correct?
Well, that's that's what I wrote and indeed that that was what the Washington Post reported later on and What this underlines just very, you know, very quickly to take care of that point Is that there were some people analysts within the CIA and and elsewhere in the US intelligence?community who were not part of the Deal, I mean they weren't insiders In the Bush administration and so they were not Apprised of what the official line was supposed to be or or you know that there was a line here That was being protected and those are the people I'm sure who are being quoted there by the by the Washington Post but you know the people who were the insiders the the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and I and I I assumed that when Porter Goss became CIA director He was CIA director when these documents were acquired by by the CIA he was clearly part of the What I think it's fair to say is a a plot to keep the truth from not just the American people but from other people in the administration including Colin Powell secretary of state at that point because Powell didn't really know It wasn't really told the truth of what happened.
He was he was given the idea that that I've just told you the official line So so that that is the official line, but but I'm able to pretty much Document without any question that what really happened the way those documents really came into the possession of Western intelligence is that they were handed over by a Member of the Mujahideen ecalc.
All right now stop right there because I want to hear all that evidence best You can assemble it for us here.
Yeah, but first you got to tell us what's a Mujahideen ecalc?
Yes, Mujahideen ecalc is the terrorist organization, which had started as a kind of blend of Muslim and Marxist revolutionaries against the Shah initially as soon as the Shah was overthrown they were Supporting the new government, but they quickly came to very sharp conflict into sharp conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran and Very soon by the early 1980s.
They were carrying out terrorist bombings against the government government organized organized meetings and indeed Ali Khamenei apparently suffered the the loss of the use of one of his arms because of a terrorist bomb Set by the MEK and one of those one of those meetings.
That is the supreme leader of Iran the present supreme leader So there's no question about their terrorism in Iran.
But before that they they carried out assassinations of US military and civilians in in Iran before the Shah was overthrown before the Shah was overthrown and of course they were then They moved to Iraq from from Iran when they came to blows with the regime In Tehran and and then they became the tools of Saddam Hussein's Iraq and they were used by Saddam for various kinds of operations against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and then George Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 Yeah, Bush Bush invaded Iraq the Neoconservatives who wanted them to come to a kind of peace agreement with the MEK so that they could be useful for the future to try to destabilize Iran Colin Powell and other people in the State Department weren't buying that and The policy was never officially adopted.
So that was kind of There was a there was a face-off within the Bush administration about what to do about the MEK Well as we talked about in one of these previous interviews When we spoke about cooperation between the Iranians and the Americans after September 11th, it was part of an ongoing negotiation was also part of their golden offer of 2003 that they would just love to turn over some captured al-qaeda guys in exchange for Mujahideen e-calk and the Americans preferred to let the Iranians hold on to the al-qaeda guys so that they could keep the MEK and use Them for their own purpose but what what you really mean is that the Neoconservatives are pushing very hard to make no deal whatsoever with Iran and that meant that they did not want any Cooperation on al-qaeda or anything else including, you know, of course exchanging intelligence about al-qaeda And so they very deliberately turned down an opportunity to get some very valuable intelligence Simply because it was in conflict with their regime change objective All right, and then so now tell us what all we know for a fact about the MEK's Involvement with the Israeli Mossad.
Well Yeah, I mean the MEK had already had developed a close working relationship with Mossad in the 1990s This has been documented in the New Yorker piece by Connie Bruck Who actually?
Amazingly got a an Israeli diplomat in Washington on the not not on the record.
It wouldn't be quoted but off the record Saying that yes, we we did in fact support the MEK.
We gave them various kinds of aid for example supporting their broadcasting capabilities Building up broadcasting capabilities for the MEK and he said we found them very useful, but he wouldn't comment further than that All right, well, but you know more about them than that, right well, I mean, of course there there was a very important Relationship or usefulness of MEK that that is Important in the storyline and that is that in 2002 the MEK went public in a press conference in Washington DC Revealing the existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility Two points about that though, which not generally understood not generally known Well, let me add one thing here about the MEK for people that they might remember from current reference Is that two years ago the administration put a story in NBC News?spring of 2012 Saying that the Israelis were using the MEK to assassinate Iranian scientists and that it was messing up American diplomacy And they didn't appreciate it.
That was a pretty big deal and especially because it was very clear that it came from the very top It was not, you know, some kind of mid-level whistleblower or something This was a very official leak to NBC.
It was a big story and you know It certainly is credible that the MEK could have could have been used for that purpose So so that is indeed a another part of this Relationship at least as far as the the evidence that has been put out by the Obama administration Which is a pretty important source, right?
Now, I'm sorry to interrupt but I just thought that would help with the context here about who is this group of of Mujahideen?
You know basically hired guns who keep going from master to master around the Middle East Right and and the point that I wanted to make is that the the MEK of course claims that they have all these inside people in the In the defense and nuclear institutions in Iran who feed them information.
They're they're they're sympathizers or or people who who really believe in the same thing as the MEK who are feeding the information and in this case, it's clear that they didn't have any such inside information at all because they got the Function of this facility wrong.
They called it a fuel fabrication plant fuel fabrication a Facility you're talking about when they identified the Natanz facility.
Pardon?
You're talking about when they identified Natanz in 2000 They called it a fuel fabrication facility instead of a uranium enrichment facility and and that is a fundamental mistake That you could only make if you were, you know an outsider just guessing which is what was really going on and of course, they gave the dimensions and the the map coordinates of Natanz And they didn't have the capability themselves to get that information.
They had to get that from the Israelis and And it's been reported both by Cyrus quoting an IAEA and then named IEA official and by another source that the That the Israelis did indeed pass that information on to to the MEK so so we know that in fact the MEK has served the purpose of Passing on excuse me passing on intelligence Information or purported intelligence information that the Iraq that the Israelis Did not want to have associated with them because it would have been less credible and so that's that's what the key point I think that I want to make about the MEK and its role in the nuclear issue.
Okay Yeah, so now I mean the fact that something came from the Israelis doesn't necessarily mean that it's inaccurate Although I think we need to get back to that because you need to explain how it was that, you know writing pretty well confirmed understating it that this collection of alleged studies documents did in fact come into Western Intelligence streams by way of the MEK.
Yes, and and the reason we know that is that of a senior foreign office former foreign office official named Karsten Voigt who had been the the spokesperson in foreign policy for the SPA day the socialist Democratic Social Democratic Party of Germany Before he was named to the foreign office position Had been the coordinator for German North American relations for several years by 2004 And remained in that position by the way until he retired in 2010 and I had an interview with him On the record a year ago now.
It was March of 2013 in which he told really the full story behind the Acquisition of the so-called laptop documents by German intelligence, and he said it happened because a member of the MEK brought them in and gave them to the the BND the German Foreign Intelligence Agency and This MEK member had been an occasional source for BND in the past The the problem was that they did not regard this source as Very credible.
They did not think that they could trust this source to bring them accurate information They the term that that Karsten Voigt used in the interview with me was that they considered the source doubtful and of course this this suggests that they were doubtful about the The use of these documents to make policy and indeed Voigt makes it clear made it clear to me that That the body language and everything about the conversation they had with senior members of the BND the German Foreign Intelligence Agency Was that they wanted him to warn the Americans don't use these documents to make policy and the context here very important context is that Colin Powell had just made a public statement in mid-november 2004 when this Conversation just before this conversation had taken place in which he had talked about information that the United States intelligence had obtained that had that showed that Iran was working very hard to combine their ballistic missile with a Weapon and by that he understood everybody understood.
He meant a nuclear weapon so the German intelligence officials were very concerned because it looked to them like The United States was trying to make a case that Iran was indeed Working on nuclear weapons that that it was that it had a nuclear weapons program And and of course the background of this is all about curveball because curveball the Iraqi Source who had told these tales about bioweapons labs in Saddam's Iraq Had been a source for the BND.
He had told his his tales to BND officials And they had passed it on of course to the CIA, but they ultimately Realized after they talked to him enough that the guy couldn't be telling the truth.
They just didn't believe in it and So in December 2002 the head of the BND August Hanning warned of the the then head of the CIA George Tenet not to rely on these documents Don't don't rely on these documents without further corroboration.
He said in a personal note to Tenet But of course we know that Tenet paid no attention to him then Colin Powell used the same information From curveball to make the case for war with Iraq at the United Nations, so here's Colin Powell again Using a source that they found doubtful to make a case that sounded suspiciously like it was the beginning of yet another Case for war against another Middle Eastern country And then you also have a second German source corroborating the origin of the documents here is that well that that's what's interesting I mean Carson.
I mean I knew to get in touch with Carson Boyd because There had been two previous instances where he and another German source had said something to the effect that that these documents did in fact come from from the MEK and The first time was when Boyd himself made a public Statement through the Wall Street Journal a few days after the conversation that he described to me with BND and in that Interview with Wall Street Journal.
He said almost word-for-word the United States and Europe should not make policy on the basis of single-source headlines And he said the information that Powell had referred to in his remarks to the press came from a Dissident Iranian group that was the term he used And then you know a few years later in late 2007 I had the opportunity to speak with a second German source who was close to the Foreign Minister of Germany Who said to me I can assure you that these documents came from the Iranian Resistance organization meaning the MEK there's only one resistance.
You know armed resistance organization, and that's the MEK All right now.
We've got less than 10 minutes, but I think we can do it We've got to cover the red flags in these documents.
Yes, and then Your reasons that you conclude it's a circumstantial case But I think a powerful one Gareth that the Israeli Mossad forged these documents Yeah, and then funnel them through the MEK into the American intelligence stream Well, it's it's really interesting that that there are so many things about these documents that raised red flags For people who were intelligence analysts who had a chance to to look at them of course I've never seen the documents They've never they've never been released There's never even been anything more than like brief paragraphs written about them by the IAEA and their reports, but The interesting thing is how?
David Albright Who we now know as a very strong?
Supporter of the line that that Iran cannot be trusted because it it has a record of Prove a proven record of having had a covert nuclear weapons program in 2008 when I interviewed him about the documents He was very forthright in saying that there were the people that he talked to who'd read them Of Couldn't couldn't really figure out make sense of them because there were so many things that didn't add up They just didn't make sense one of them was that There was there was nothing in the papers about Design of nuclear weapons.
How can there be a covert nuclear weapons research program without some?
Element of it that is devoted to designing nuclear weapons, but there was nothing there and of course I mean you know you'd expect to see various things about testing of various kinds I mean you know that they would they would have to have You know be working on on you know the mechanisms the technology that would be needed for testing the parts and the whole And there's no sign of that either The main thing the main problem that he brought up was that it just didn't hang together It didn't seem like this this sounded like a reasonable profile of a nuclear weapons Program or a nuclear weapons research project then the the second thing that he Highlighted was that the work that had been done on the the one part of this alleged program That was the most spectacular most sensational in terms of news coverage of that that was the Supposed program to or effort to redesign the reentry vehicle of the Shahab three ballistic missile so that it could take a It could integrate what appeared to be a nuclear weapon And he said you know I can't figure out and he said he had asked the New York Times Why they didn't?
Write anything about this the the work that was done on on those drawings on the computer simulations Or the computer modeling.
I should say was so poor.
He called it primitive.
He said why is it so primitive and Apparently this had been something that the People who had read the documents were puzzled by that so it was so poorly done all right now I'm sorry.
I got to interrupt and fast-forward through here there are also major technical flaws you say in the uranium flowchart documents and And then as you're mentioning there in the in the warhead design Yeah and there's then the question of the mine and whether it was a Military operation or not and and that is part of your answer to the last question here is About the evidence that these are actual forgeries.
They couldn't possibly be real They must be forgeries, and they must have come from Israel to wrap it up So so I mean the first point that I think find to be a dead giveaway that these documents were fabricated by the Israelis is that the The re-entry vehicle that is shown in the drawings That again were the ones that were the most given the most play by the United States Were it was the wrong re-enter vehicle it was a re-entry vehicle of the Shahab 3 the original version Which I show in the book was abandoned by the Iranians The Iranian Defense Ministry as early as 2000 they started redesigning that having an entirely new Version of the ballistic missile that would have greater range and be more It would it would pass the flight test which the Shahab 3 did not do in three flight tests.
It was not successful So they had a completely different re-entry vehicle that Didn't resemble the one on the Shahab 3 at all and that was that's a fundamental giveaway I mean, there's no way that they would have done the this kind of computer Modeling of a of a missile that they'd already given up on so this this was a giveaway that the people who did the documents simply were not aware of the shift the changeover and That was the first giveaway.
The second one was that there was a how to put this in the in the briefest way possible that there was a a project 5 which was supposed to be Uranium conversion mining conversion and enrichment and one of the sub projects Was supposed to be project 5.15 and it turns out the project 1.15 was actually started by the Iranian civilian atomic energy organization two years before the beginning of this alleged national secret nuclear weapons project of Iran So so that was the second giveaway and and Ali Heinemann who I confronted about this Admitted ultimately that he didn't have any answer for the contradiction that I'd pointed out I'm being the former head of the Safeguards Department of the IAEA who really pushed these documents to the full when he was there Sorry.
Yeah, and then you also say here that based on these documents the IAEA Tried to expand their inspections to all of Iran's missile facilities as they had to acquit themselves burden of proof on them to show that these bogus documents weren't right and that was where they balked and then that became And and set me straight on the date here that became the brand new excuse to pretend that the Iranians weren't cooperating Oh, look, they don't want to open up all their missile facilities for yeah There was what I call a trap that Ali Heinemann set for the Iranians He wanted to goad them into taking the position that they would refuse to cooperate With the IAEA's investigation of these papers.
So what he did was he went further than what you suggested Scott.
He actually Did not just want the right to visit various facilities working on Defense things he actually Demanded that the Iranians turn over the blueprints in effect of the Shahab three One of the certainly one of the top military secrets of of Iran and was saying that that unless they did that They weren't going to be regarded as cooperating with with the investigation.
And of course the Iranians said no We're not going to do that and they actually cut off their conversations with the IAEA over that issue in September of August I guess it was of 2008 Okay, and I'm sorry, but we are all out of time.
We got to go.
That is the great Gareth Porter everybody The book is manufactured crisis the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare and I'm Scott Horton This has been anti-war radio for this morning We're back here every Sunday from 830 to 9 here on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA You find my all of my interviews including this whole series with Gareth Porter at Scott Horton dot-org.
Thanks very much.
See you next week
