02/10/17 – Greg Thielmann on why Iran’s missile tests aren’t violating international laws or threatening US national security – The Scott Horton Show

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All right guys, welcome to the show, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at ScottHorton.org and at LibertarianInstitute.org slash ScottHortonShow.
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All right, introducing Greg Thielman.
He was the director of the Non-Proliferation Office at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
That's state's own little CIA they have there.
He also worked as a senior staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Here he is writing for Jim Loeb at LoebBlog.com.
This is called Putting Iran on Notice, Stop Acting Like a Sovereign Country.
Welcome to the show, Greg.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
I'm just fine.
Good, good.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Is it okay if I ask you about some 2002 things here real quick before we get to the Iran missile tests?
Sure.
Okay, great.
So I want to know about the aluminum tubes.
You're the guy, you and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, along with the Department of Energy and I think even some inside the CIA, had debunked the theory that the aluminum tubes that had been intercepted, I believe, in transit from Italy to Iraq could possibly be for nuclear centrifuges.
Those were just for rockets, like you'd shoot out of the back of a truck, that kind of a thing.
And I believe I even read that in September of 2002 in the Washington Post.
It was in the back of the newspaper, but it was one of the top headlines on antiwar.com.
And I don't know if that was you particularly, that was the source of that story, but your agency had debunked this months before the start of the war.
And this was a huge part of the key accusation that Saddam Hussein had reactivated his nuclear weapons program.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
I just wanted to explain that I had actually retired from the department in September.
Most of the credit for this goes to the people who worked for me immediately before I retired.
They were the ones who were very much in touch with the experts on centrifuges at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the line experts at the Department of Energy and so forth.
So they were the ones who basically said that, no, these tubes are not likely intended for centrifuges, but rather for rockets, which is a very critical determination.
And it was very interesting that the Department of Energy was sort of the agency that had the most expertise in the U.S. government on this subject.
And they did not agree with the CIA's conclusion here.
But not only were they overridden on this particular point, but when it came to making a judgment about whether or not Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, the DOE, the Department of Energy, caved, I think, for political reasons and joined the majority assessment and said, yes, they are, even though their own experts had said, no, those tubes were not likely intended for uranium centrifuges.
I'm curious, why did you quit right around then, the fall of 2002?
Well, it's actually a bit of a coincidence.
I had decided a year before for various reasons having to do with a desire to have more time with my family while my daughter was still at home and everything.
I decided to retire from the Foreign Service after a 25-year career, and it just so happened that just as I was retiring, this momentous intelligence assessment was being undertaken on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction activity.
So in a way, it's just kind of a coincidence that I retired then.
I did not resign in protest.
I retired on my own schedule, but then in retirement, tried to carefully make some of the points about how the President's and his administration was misleading the public on what the intelligence showed.
So I'm curious what you could tell us about the role of Powell and Armitage, and for that matter, John Bolton and David Wilms are in the State Department at that time, and how much influence did they have over the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and or how did they try to exercise it?
You know, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR as we called it, had a longstanding tradition of independence, not just within the U.S. government, but specifically in the Department of State.
INR was there to provide the really sensitive intelligence collected throughout the U.S. government by the CIA and Defense Intelligence and National Security Agency, to provide that sensitive material to the senior officials of the State Department.
And in addition to being a flow-through for that intelligence, the experts in INR would also add their own judgment and interpretation, knowing about the particular interests of the senior officials at State.
And so that's really the way the system was set up to be, and I would say even in the Bush administration, that is what continued to be the case.
The only pressure put on INR was from Undersecretary John Bolton, and INR, to its credit, resisted that pressure.
And when, for example, John Bolton said that someone working for me in my office should be fired because Bolton didn't like his analysis on an issue involving Cuba, not only did I resist that, but my bosses in the front office of INR resisted it.
And Bolton had no success trying to spin our objective assessment.
Was that when he was trying to accuse Castro of making germ weapons?
That's right.
It came out later in a congressional hearing that he had tried to fire someone because of this.
And Colin Powell is somewhat of a tragic figure in this episode, because he did not choose John Bolton to work under him in the State Department.
Bolton was sort of forced on him by the White House, and in reality, there was sort of a triangular control mechanism of Bolton was sort of working for Cheney and Rumsfeld elsewhere in the government, and was not faithfully following the instructions of Colin Powell within the State Department.
Well, what can you tell us about David Wormser and his role, too?
Well, Wormser was one of those who had a previous history of working with Douglas Feith, and as I understand it, on contract from the Likud party in Israel, and had been working for quite some time to get a violent resolution to the Iraq problems.
And so Wormser was part of Bolton's staff during that period of time when there was a flow of information, and as far as I know, directions from outside the building in the interest of those who eventually prevailed in the invasion of Iraq.
Interesting, you know, I could be wrong, but I'm about 95% sure that Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, Army Colonel, that he has said, of all the neoconservatives, that David Wormser and Douglas Feith both, he considered, and I think that he was also referencing, this has been a few years now since I spoke with him about this, but I think he was also referencing like, you know, FBI counterintelligence assessments, this kind of thing, that these two men were actual agents of influence for Israel.
Paul Wolfowitz might really like Israel a lot, but Wormser and Feith are actually operating on the foreign state's behalf, not even necessarily on Cheney's behalf or Scooter Libby's behalf, but the foreign power first.
What do you make of that?
Well, I wouldn't rule it out, I would just say that I respect Larry Wilkerson and would take seriously assessments that he is making, and I certainly have less respect for Feith and Wormser, and having seen evidence of some of their judgments and assessments, I did not find them to be either objective or ultimately rendered in the best interest of the United States.
All right, I'm sorry, one more about ancient history before we get to Iran's missile test here.
I never really have gotten my head around the mystery of the other aluminum tubes, and that is the scandal of North Korea in 2002, where supposedly one of their agents, ambassadors of some rank, admitted at a cocktail party that we have a secret uranium enrichment program that we're using centrifuges that we bought from AQ Khan in order to enrich weapons grade uranium.
And then based on that, Bush abrogated the deal, I'm glossing over details here, but basically abrogated the agreed framework and put on new sanctions and created the Security Proliferation Initiative, whatever it was called, the PSI something, security initiative, and basically forced Iran out of the deal, out of the IAEA safeguards agreement, out of the nonproliferation treaty, and to nuclear weapons.
And so, but what I want to know is, is that even really right, that they, one, had a uranium enrichment program back then, and two, that they admitted it to the US State Department and got that whole ball rolling at the time?
I'm less intimately familiar with those details, but yes, in general, the North Koreans did admit to having a uranium program.
And the focus of the US in the agreed framework with North Korea of 1994 was on stemming their plutonium production program, which was what was most worrisome at the time.
And I think it was basically successful, at least for a number of years, in freezing that program and making sure that that source of fissile material would not be realized in the form of weapons.
What I cannot, to this day, understand fully is how the US negotiated that without also shutting off the path, the uranium, enriched uranium path to getting fissile material.
And that is something that, for example, in the Iran nuclear deal that was ultimately concluded in 2015, the US government was very careful to make sure that it shut off all the paths to making a nuclear weapon, both uranium and plutonium.
And I think in the case of North Korea, for whatever reason, insufficient vigilance was taken to ensure that there was both agreement on North Korea's part, that it would not develop a capability to enrich uranium, but also that it was not doing it.
So that was ultimately the problem.
But the other part of the problem was that I would say the Bush administration, in detecting the uranium work, instead of re-engaging the North Koreans and sort of demanding that that be solved and actually doing the hard negotiating, they basically walked away from it all.
And I saw evidence inside the State Department at the time of how there was such a strong desire, a political desire on the part of the US to separate itself from the policies of the Clinton administration, that I think there were opportunities that were overlooked that could have conceivably have gotten that agreement back on track.
Well, yeah, that really changes the context.
If uranium wasn't even in the original deal, then one, that means they weren't really breaking the deal when the Bush administration flipped out on them the way that they did back then.
But two, it also kind of raises the question of what the North Koreans meant then by just admitting it.
They made it seem like it was just an accidental flub at this cocktail party or something.
They said, by the way, we're enriching uranium.
But it sounds like if that's really true, then it wasn't a flub.
Maybe they were trying to get another concession out of the US, and then we'll restrict our uranium enrichment too.
Because after all, at that point, they were still within the Non-Proliferation Treaty, right?
As I recall, they had renounced their obligation under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at that point.
So they were not technically, although there were others who said that they didn't have the right to withdraw.
So whether or not they were in or out of the treaty is something that people argue about.
The point was, they had obligated themselves in the 1994 agreement to, in effect, not develop nuclear weapons.
So I don't have too much sympathy for what North Korea was doing, but I think it is entirely possible that, as you say, that they were trying to continue negotiating or get a better deal or an answer to some of their other demands having to do with the size of US military exercise and other things.
And that they did not necessarily intend to move down the course that was actually taken.
I think that the consequences of the US basically just stiffing them and saying, this is all over, have contributed to where we are today, which is after many years of heightened sanctions, it hasn't worked.
North Korea has both tested nuclear weapons now and is making slow progress toward long range delivery vehicles that could actually deliver those at some point in the future to US shores.
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Well, at least their first two or three tests were thought to have been plutonium implosion bombs and not uranium nukes at all.
There's no indication that they've even made a uranium nuke, even though a uranium gun type nuke would have been the simplest to make and successfully test, right?
Yeah, that's right.
That would have been the simplest.
And I think it is a fair assumption that at least the initial tests did use plutonium.
But the truth is that we didn't really get enough information on the series of tests to know for sure what material was used in the various devices.
Oh, by the way, I thought that they didn't withdraw from the NPT until the spring, like right before the invasion of Iraq.
But I guess I should go back and double check that.
Yeah, I have to double check also because the North Korean agreement to the NPT occurred, but then it got a little flaky, I guess one could say.
And then there was the issue of whether or not, even when there was a withdrawal, a period required of notification of withdrawal, and then withdrawal, and it was never clear whether North Korea was abiding by giving due notice for withdrawal.
It's a complicated issue of them sort of moving out of obligation to the NPT.
And as I said, there are those who argue that this is like the Roche Motel, you can go in, but you can't get out.
Once you agree to the commitment not to develop nuclear weapons, you can't just say, never mind, because there are a whole lot of things that go with that initial agreement, including receiving assistance from the international community in the peaceful exploitation of nuclear power.
And it kind of implies that if you're going to give up your obligation not to develop nuclear weapons, then you also owe the international community a payback on the other assistance that you've received in exchange for your original willingness to comply with the NPT.
So it gets complicated.
The point is...
The treaty does say that you can withdraw, but you got to give us six months worth of notice.
And that's what they did here was they gave notice in the fall, and they quit the treaty in the spring.
Is that right?
I think so.
But I'd have to check on the dates.
I get what you're saying, though, that it can be contradictory.
The treaty might say that you can withdraw with six months notice, but there's a lot of other obstacles as well.
Like you're saying, well, now you owe us.
But although, did the international community actually ever really help North Korea with their peaceful nuclear program at all?
I mean, they were supposed to give them a light water reactor built by Donald Rumsfeld's company, but that never really happened, right?
There was a commitment to develop a light water reactor.
There was also a commitment, of course, to provide heavy fuel oil to meet North Korea's energy needs during that interim period while the peaceful nuclear power was being developed.
But the U.S. reneged on its obligations there, too, because Congress delayed some of the deliveries of fuel oil shipments.
So it's a bit of a complicated tale, but it's not the case that only North Korea displayed bad faith in the agreements made under the 1994 agreed framework.
Well, they got nukes now.
No question about that.
All right.
Now, so thank you for that.
I really appreciate that.
I'm going to have to sit and think hard one day about more questions to ask you about that era and maybe try again.
But now we'll talk about the current news and your current piece.
It's at lowblog.com.
Putting Iran on notice.
Stop acting like a sovereign country.
I think I emphasized all those words correctly there.
So Michael Flynn, National Security Advisor, Sean Spicer, the press secretary, and Trump himself on his Twitter feed already look to be picking a fight with the Iranians.
I guess the more patriotic way to put it, Greg, would be that the Iranians are picking a fight with Trump.
That Ayatollah, boy, has he got some hoots, but he started firing off missiles, two of them now, a second since you wrote this article, testing these medium range ballistic missiles.
And most people think ballistic means nuclear, I guess.
And so, boy, nuclear missile tests.
They're trying to kill all the Israelis.
We've got to stop them.
What do you say?
Yeah, well, one of the things I tried to do in writing this piece was to remind people what the facts are and what the international obligations are and so forth, just to revisit one of the things you said.
There is still only the January 29th medium range ballistic missile test.
The other subsequent test was misreported.
It was not a ballistic missile test, it was a service-to-air missile test.
So what Iran did on January 29th was testing a missile with the range that had been done numerous times in the past.
It was a medium range ballistic missile, a category of weapons that Iran has had for a decade, a weapon which is not a long range ballistic missile that could hit Europe or the United States.
It is a missile that can indeed reach Israel, barely, and some of Iran's other immediate neighbors.
But it is not the only such missile in the region.
In fact, Saudi Arabia has longer range ballistic missiles, Israel has longer range ballistic missiles, Pakistan has longer range ballistic missiles, and two of those three countries has nuclear warheads to put on the missiles, which Iran not only does not have, but Iran has accepted an arrangement that pretty much guarantees they won't have them for 10 to 15 years into the future.
So there is definitely both an overreaction to what Iran had done with this test, and there's a mischaracterization of whether or not it violates agreements.
This test does not violate the Iran nuclear deal, which did not address missiles.
Moreover, the UN Security Council resolution that had called upon nations not to do this kind of thing was very different than the previous UN Security Council resolution, which basically banned countries from doing it.
So there were some definite changes when the current Security Council resolution replaced the old one.
There were some very important changes, and those changes all pointed in the direction of Iran continuing to test ballistic missiles.
There were two changes.
When the Security Council resolution, the latest one, was drafted and debated, it was replacing a more severe resolution that had passed in 2010, at a time when Iran was clearly not abiding by a number of previous Security Council resolutions relating to its nuclear program.
It was not fulfilling its obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the way that it should have.
That Security Council resolution had a lot of fairly draconian language in it, including even a section which said no country in the world can help Iran acquire a series of categories of so-called heavy weapons, just conventional systems, things like large caliber artillery or armored personnel carriers or submarines.
All of that was banned in terms of transfers to Iran.
Once the six countries negotiating with Iran succeeded in getting Iran to agree on meaningful long-term restraints on its potential nuclear weapons development, then the UN Security Council revisited the issue and significantly changed the accompanying resolution.
It was mainly focused on making sure that the Iran nuclear deal was implemented in the right way, but it also, at U.S. insistence, continued to have a reference to Iran's ballistic missile developments.
It no longer was mandatory, it was more, one might say, hortatory.
It was urging Iran to do something.
It was not only urging Iran, but what Iran was urged to do was somewhat weakened, too, in its formulation before Iran was banned from testing nuclear-capable missiles.
The most recent resolution, the one that applies today, has additional language saying not just nuclear-capable missiles, but missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
Now, this sounds like just a lawyer's difference, but clearly the change of that language gave Iran an additional excuse to say none of these missiles are designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
In fact, we've just agreed on additional assurances that we will never have nuclear warheads, and that is our international legal commitment we've had ever since we agreed to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
So when you hear Michael Flynn or members of Congress saying that on January 29th the Iranian missile test violated a UN Security Council resolution, that is not true.
It may be inconsistent with the spirit of the resolution, and it is not a violation of the resolution, as it would have been if the previous UN Security Council resolution was still in force.
So one has to talk precisely about what the nature of the relationship between this test is and UN Security Council resolutions, and one has to recognize that Iran is doing what a whole lot of other countries do, and is generally regarded as within the sovereign rights of any country in the world.
Now that doesn't mean the U.S. likes it.
I mean, we would just as soon have Iran disarm itself completely, I think, to make sure it couldn't do any mischief anywhere else, but there are a lot of things we would like to do, and that's a very far distance from asserting that Iran has no right to conduct a ballistic missile test.
All right, now, I called everybody's good friend Gareth Porter here.
This is hearsay, but it's really good hearsay.
I called him to make sure that I was right about this, that from my memory that these are the same missiles we're talking about here are the ones that David Albright, the quite hawkish interpreter of facts on Iran nuclear issues from ISIS, the organization in D.C., actually even contradicted David Sanger, the very hawkish interpreter of Iranian nuclear issues at the New York Times, when it came to the smoking laptop, and said that, you know, there's a real discrepancy here because the smoking laptop makes a good educated guess about advancements in the kind of missiles that Iran used to have, but they were making, they were designing and implementing and carrying out a project for some brand new missiles at that time, and these are those, and it made no sense that they would be designing this warhead or warhead delivery vehicle for a missile that was then obsolete because there was another one in development.
It was just that whoever had forged the laptop didn't know about the secret new missile they were working on, and so Gareth said that, yeah, he thought I was right about that and that it was a different shaped nose cone, it was more of a dolphin kind of bottle nose rather than a coney cone like the old kind, so it would be harder to fit a nuke in there, and then also he said one more thing, which was that a guy named Mike Elliman from the International Institute for Strategic Studies has written kind of a monograph about this missile and said that you can't fit a nuke in the nose cone, assuming they had one, because it's jam-packed full of electronics for their new and improved guidance systems, and so we're pretty deep in the weeds here, but assuming those details are correct, it seemed like they're relevant to me, what do you think?
There is a controversy about the extent of information that the United States had that suggested previous efforts were advanced in terms of making a missile nose cone that could deliver a nuclear weapon.
To me, the main point here is there are a couple of important things to remember.
One is that there is a general sort of physics formula here about a missile capability that can travel 300 kilometers and over that distance deliver a weapons package of 500 kilograms.
That's a formula which is the basis for a whole missile technology control regime that we try to implement around the world, because that is the basic formula for what a missile has to be capable of in order to be used as a delivery vehicle for a nuclear weapons package.
That's basically a physics description.
It's another issue of whether or not a specific missile actually has been designed and has a nose cone that would deliver a nuclear weapon.
I think what Iran is now saying is that it has no intention to deliver nuclear weapons and its missiles that fall into this physics category are still not designed to be capable of because they're only designed to be capable of delivering conventional weapons.
It is an argument that very much gets into the weeds, but what's indisputable is that the U.S. agreed to language weakening the restrictions on Iran in the latest U.N. Security Council resolution.
The reason we agreed to it was because none of the other parties to this agreement, including our allies, the Germans and the French and the British, would have agreed to retain that strict ban in the previous U.N. Security Council resolution.
So it's quite clear to me that the missiles being worked on right now by Iran are concentrating on guidance improvements.
They want to make them more accurate, and the reason they need to be more accurate is because they don't carry nuclear weapons.
They carry conventional weapons, and they're not nearly as destructive, so they need to be much more accurate if they can actually threaten specific targets.
That's what Iran is working on, and that's not good news for us.
It's not good news for the Israelis, but it's a far cry from them getting ready to perfect a system that can deliver nuclear weapons.
Well, and you know, you provide some context in your article that those of us interested in digging through these weeds all the time kind of know offhand, but maybe most people would be under quite a different impression when you compare the strength of the Iranian military to their neighbors.
You mentioned earlier about, you know, the Pakistanis have long-range missiles and the Israelis have long-range missiles and all that, but here you get into who's got a navy and who's got an air force, and I don't know.
Can you tell us, for example, like some kind of ballpark estimate of the difference of the strength between the Saudi military and the Iranian one?
Well, Saudi Arabia is a much smaller country, but their air force is much more modern than the Iranian air force, and you know, it's hard to say that Iran has a superior air force to Saudi Arabia.
I mean, they're not even close in terms of the capabilities of the individual weapon systems.
The U.S., ever since the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the U.S. has had a very strict ban on sales to Iran, and ironically, since the Iran of the Shah was heavily dependent on the United States for sophisticated weaponry, I mean, most of its air force were U.S.-made planes, so spare parts were very difficult to obtain, and over the years, the Iranian air force has really atrophied, while the Israelis, of course, have been the recipients of the latest U.S. hardware, as have the Saudis.
So, Iran's air force is completely outclassed by that of Saudi Arabia and Israel, both of which are quite hostile to Iran, and so the only thing that Iran has in the way of being able to threaten a retaliatory strike against its better-armed neighbors is to pursue ballistic missiles, which they have done.
I'm sorry for keeping you so long.
Is there any way I could ask you one more?
Sure.
Okay, great.
So, you mentioned in the article, and you've referred to it here, the JCPOA, the nuclear deal that Barack Obama reached.
Now, what we hear from the current president is, it's just a bad deal.
Basically, Obama made a deal to give Iran $150 billion, and that was the deal, and it was a terrible deal, you can see.
I mean, who gives somebody $150 billion for doing nothing?
It's just absolutely outrageous, and nobody on TV knows anything about it to even elaborate at all to explain that, well, you know, the Iranians actually do have things that they have to do in the deal, too, and never even mind it was their money and it wasn't that much and all these things.
But I was wondering if you could just real quickly give the audience a bit of a thumbnail sketch of what it was that Iran is bound to do by this deal, and to what degree they've fulfilled their commitment to the deal.
Yeah, and you've alluded to a couple of things.
The $150 billion was more like $100 billion, and contrary to the implication of Trump's remarks, this is money, this is Iranian money that we've been sitting on, and which we're now slowly giving back to them, but it's their money, it's not like the money of the U.S. taxpayers.
So that's one point to make, but the core issue is what we have succeeded in doing in this agreement, which is basically, as John Kerry has often said, it's blocking off all of the pathways to a weapon.
That means not only does it severely restrict the amount of low-enriched uranium that Iran can maintain, but it basically significantly reduces the centrifuges which Iran can have for the next 10 years that would be necessary to enrich the uranium to a level that could be used for nuclear weapons.
And it has blocked off the pathway to plutonium by essentially pouring concrete into a facility that would have been used for generating plutonium to be used in a weapon.
And it also obligates Iran to accept the most stringent international inspection regime that has ever been proposed.
So instead of being the worst deal ever negotiated, as Trump likes to say, I would say it's one of the best deals that we've ever negotiated in the nonproliferation world, particularly in comparison with where we were at just a couple of years ago in terms of the feared time schedule for an Iranian breakout to nuclear weapons.
It's a tremendous diplomatic achievement, and all the more so because we have our three European allies and Russia and China all on board with the same sort of commitments that Iran has made.
And we now have the International Atomic Energy Agency judging that thus far, more than one year into this agreement, Iran has done what it is committed to do.
And so one hopes that as long as the U.S. doesn't blow it here, that we're on track to continue to see this agreement implemented and for Iran to continue to be quite far away from developing nuclear weapons.
Well, you can see why the hawks think it's the worst deal ever.
I mean, for Trump, we know it's just a campaign talking point.
He never read it, doesn't know anything about it.
Maybe somebody's briefed him by now.
Who knows?
But for the rest of these guys, you can see why they hate it is because it's working so well and because it does accomplish all of these substantive things that you said.
It's rolled back their program so far, expanded inspection so far that now the, quote, threat of Iran's civilian nuclear program, which always was safeguarded anyway, is now so diminished that talking point's gone.
The idea that the terror masters have access to nuclear weapons is sort of shrug off the table.
Obama took it off the table with the help of Putin and the others, as you said.
So that seems to be the problem.
Yeah, I think that's right.
For those who are eager to have an excuse to attack Iran, it's very bad news.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for coming on the show and sharing your time with us today, Greg.
I really appreciate it.
OK, you're welcome, Scott.
All right, so that is Greg Fehlman, formerly at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the Nonproliferation Office there at the State Department.
And here he's got this very important article at Loblog.
That's Jim Loeb's blog, loblog.com, Putting Iran on Notice, Stop Acting Like a Sovereign Country.
And that's The Scott Horton Show.
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Help support this show at the same time.
Just go to scotthorton.org slash donate.
And again, anyone who sends $50 on this way, along with a mailing address, and I will get this book right to you.
Thanks.