For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And it's my pleasure to introduce David Albright.
He is the president of the Institute of Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., and has been quoted in every written thing on Earth.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Oh, good to be here.
It's a bit of an exaggeration, but...
Well, I'm not so sure.
I mean, I'm looking at a pretty long list of places you've been published here.
It's very interesting.
Very interesting work going quite a ways back.
The World Inventory of Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1992.
I've heard that praised in very high places.
Oh, thank you.
As a, you know, pretty definitive compendium.
That work started in the early 80s.
I mean, I left graduate school to do this kind of work, and President Reagan had just been elected president and was worried and felt that I wanted to use the physics train I'd had to try to change government policy.
And one of the first projects I started with was trying to understand how much plutonium there is in the world.
And at the time, the Reagan administration wanted to basically harvest all the plutonium from commercial nuclear power reactors and use it in nuclear weapons as part of a very major buildup of nuclear weapons.
And I was involved in a project in a group in Washington to try to stop that through passing legislation that was sponsored by and written by Senator Hart, and it was successful.
And now, well, you've been criticized in the past for going by the title physicist, but according to your bio page, you don't have a Ph.
D., and from physicists I've talked to, you've got to have a Ph.
D. in physics to be a physicist.
Well, thanks for raising that.
I mean, I know your station and people on it have criticized me for that, but I think it's, you know, I do have a master's in physics.
I've been awarded awards by the American Physical Society, which is the national organization of physicists, and I'm also a fellow in the American Physical Society, so I think by any standard I can call myself a physicist.
Well, I do know, sir, I do know to your credit that in the past there are people who have not had Ph.
D.s who have been accepted into that community, but I think it is a point worth bringing up.
Well, I'm happy to answer that.
I mean, you know, I was in physics and also mathematics, and I felt that rather than finish my Ph.
D., I wanted to commit myself to working to use science for social change and also to reduce the chance that nuclear weapons could be used in the world.
And let me put it this way.
I could have finished a Ph.
D. in theoretical physics, or I could have a Ph.
D. in chemical engineering, but I'll tell you that wouldn't have helped me learn what I've had to learn, and I've spent 30 years trying to learn, in a sense, on the job by immersing myself in the real information, not the theoretical information you may get in a university, which, by the way, isn't very relevant to what Iran is pursuing in its gas centrifuge program or what North Korea has been doing with plutonium or what South Africa did or Brazil.
I did a lot of work with the Brazilian Physics Society in the 1980s to try to constrain their nuclear weapons efforts, or they called it a peaceful nuclear explosive, and the idea was to end the worst parts of the program, but get them to renounce nuclear weapons and secret nuclear programs, and I think it was quite a successful effort.
Well, now, I absolutely share your distaste for nuclear weapons.
I wish I could be Superman 4 and just get rid of them all myself, but I kind of get the feeling sometimes that the universality of your criticisms of different nuclear activities around the world seems to end up settling on a few very specific places, like, for example, in Iran, and every time I read something by Broad and Sanger in the New York Times that seems to me to be kind of half-truth or something said in a way that implies that sort of everybody knows that what's going on at Natanz is a nuclear weapons program somehow or something, it seems like you're always in those articles, whether you're the exact quote of the half-truth or not.
I'll give you an example.
I'm sorry, I don't want to be so vague while I'm accusing you.
At the Council on Foreign Relations website, there's a statement that I believe is elaborated further on in the interview, but at the very beginning it says, the Iranians now have enough low-enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb.
When everybody knows you could have a ball of low-enriched uranium as big as the sun, you couldn't make a nuclear bomb out of it.
It would have to further be enriched, but it almost sounds the way it's quoted, it's like you're laying the premise for then John Bolton to go out and say whatever lie he wants to say based on the half-truth that was in the Times or at the CFR website.
You see what I mean?
Yeah, you said a lot, and I think at ISIS we're very worried that information not be misused to promote war or to promote, in this case, military strikes against Iran.
In the past, it's been in many cases Iraq.
We were in the forefront of efforts to challenge the Bush administration's claims about WMD, particularly nuclear.
Nuclear is our expertise.
In September of 2002, we were about the only group out there challenging the Bush administration claims in detail and trying to counter and organize counter-press and efforts to try to say, look, they're hyping this threat.
So we take this very seriously.
Now, on Iran, you've raised a couple of issues.
One is we've worked on every, I can't think of a nuclear program that touches, almost any nuclear program that's major we've worked on over the years or I've worked on in my career, whether it's Israel, Iran, Pakistan, Brazil, South Africa, North Korea.
I could go on and on and on, civil nuclear power programs.
The CIPRI book covers all the nuclear programs.
Well, it's certainly true that Iran's is the one that's in dispute now, so that's why you'd clearly be addressing that now.
So is Pakistan and North Korea.
I'm trying to answer your questions in order.
So is Pakistan and North Korea.
I mean, there's a lot of countries in dispute.
Now, in terms of the website, I don't know what's on that website.
I mean, our position at ISIS has been that and we're plotting technical milestones in Iran's program.
And one technical milestone that we believe has been reached is that Iran has enough low-enriched uranium, that if it chose to do so, decided to do so, it could further enrich that weapon grade or that low-enriched uranium into weapon grade uranium and have enough for a nuclear explosive.
And we're going to chart when they hit the point of having two or three or whatever.
Now, with Broad and Sanger, I don't have as close a relationship as you may think.
I've known Broad for a long time.
I don't know Sanger as well.
I think we sometimes are in agreement with them, sometimes we're opposed.
I mean, I had a tangle with them in 05 over these kind of infamous laptop documents.
And we felt they were overstating what they said.
And we had learned something about them and felt that it wasn't a smoking gun of a nuclear weapons program.
It's certainly a problem for Iran.
But we felt that it could have been indigenous efforts that weren't organized.
And so people shouldn't conclude that here, ha, we got you, there's a nuclear weapons program, and particularly an ongoing one.
So I think we've tried to be very careful.
I am in the media a lot, and I certainly have been quoted by Broad and Sanger.
And I think that some of the people on your station are a little too hard on them.
But I understand what you're saying.
If you think back to the Iraq war, Bush would like to say things like, well, why do we have to attack Iraq?
Because of 9-11.
And then seven beats would go by.
And then he would say, because we learned then that you can't just wait for people to attack you first.
You've got to attack first.
But it sounded like what he just said was Saddam did it, that kind of thing.
And I think that when we deal with foreign policy, there's a lot of disinformation and misinformation and half-truth and spin.
And I really appreciate anyone's efforts to try to really narrow down exactly what it is we're talking about.
And one thing that I found on your site was the idea that once they have this breakout capability, they have enough low-enriched uranium on hand that if they turn that into weapons grade, then they would be able to make a bomb out of it, that they would have to do that transformation either at Natanz, in which case everyone in the world would know about it, because the IAEA is standing right there in their lab coats and their monitors and cameras and everything, or they would have to use some secret facility.
And yet my question is, what secret facility?
I mean, I saw the Chuck Norris movie where there was a secret thing under the mountain or whatever, but there's no real evidence anywhere that there's any sort of separate uranium enrichment anywhere in Iran, is there?
Well, first of all, if they broke out, the IAEA would know whether it was at Natanz, or the enrichment was done at Natanz or at a congestion plant, and they would get an indication.
I mean, they're not there as often as you may think, but either Iran would deny them access to the plant so they couldn't see it was diverted, or they would get in and they would see it's diverted.
But in any case, they would see that the low-enriched uranium has been taken.
The worry is that, and this is just unfortunately, it's a hard reality, and I understand your concern because of the Iraq experience, but there's been many cases where countries have built secret sites, and the world didn't learn about them until later.
And so what we want to see happen is that Iran accepts more transparency, and that they are resistant to that now, and it's caught up into the general conflict.
But I think if Iran would do a few things, it would alleviate many of our concerns that they could be building a secret plant, one of which is Iran refuses to say to the agency anymore, it used to, you know, we're building a new plant, you know, we were going to start construction.
They agreed to do that in 2003, and then they took it back in 2006.
I mean, we'd like Iran to say, okay, we'll tell you.
Then we would, you know, then they'd have to lie.
I mean, right now they could build a secret plant, and they're not violating any agreement.
And, in fact, that's how they built Natanz.
They built Natanz enrichment plant in secret.
They had an enrichment research and development facility at a place called Kalai Electric that they built in secret.
And there they actually violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the verification conditions.
So I think, unfortunately, countries do do this.
And Iraq was doing it in the 80s.
Syria did it with a reactor.
North Korea's done it.
Libya was doing it with the AQ Khan network.
And so countries do these things, and so you have to worry about them.
But at the same time, and this is where I agree with you, they can't be excuses for war.
You can't use this and say, look, you know, we suspect you're up to something, therefore we're going to condemn you for it, and then take a draconian action against you.
Well, and even at the time at Natanz, I mean, I remember in the BBC, they had a picture of a giant empty warehouse.
I mean, what had happened was they had started to build something, but like you said, they were still perfectly within their safeguards agreement.
They don't have to say, they have to say, announce three or six months before they're going to enter nuclear material into the machines.
That's when they have to give notice, right?
That's right.
That's the old deal.
But that's not so bad, right?
Well, no, no, it's an incredibly dangerous loophole.
And the way it was discovered was the Germans had built a research and development facility in Germany for centrifuges and had 500 or so centrifuges spinning with vacuum.
And they had that for years, and the IA didn't know about it.
And the IA, in its kind of post-Iraq, 91 Iraq revelations, decided, look, this is just too big of a loophole, that you can have a whole centrifuge plant operating minus the material.
And so they asked countries to say, look, we'll tell you when we decide to build a facility.
And almost all countries did.
I think Iran was the last of the countries with a major nuclear program that didn't.
And then it did.
And when 2003 agreed to do early notification, then unilaterally in 06 it took that back.
And the IA's position on this is very clear.
They said that Iran cannot unilaterally take back that condition, that it's inconsistent, this is their word, inconsistent with their obligations under the safeguards agreement.
So the IA is not accepting this.
They want the transparency because they know that it reduces a lot of the suspicion about whether there's secret facilities.
So was that separate from the additional protocol then?
It's actually under the traditional safeguards.
It's separate.
The additional protocol goes much further.
And certainly I'd like to see Iran agree to that because it would provide a lot of transparency about their activities, where they make centrifuges.
The IA was abiding by that additional protocol there for a while, even though it ratified, right?
That's right.
They agreed to it from 03 to 06, and then they took it back.
And that would be within the right to do that.
Dave, do you think that they had a point when they said that, listen, we agreed to the additional protocol while we were negotiating in good faith with the British, French, and Germans, but now that it's clear that we're really not negotiating in good faith and that George Bush means to not allow us to have any, you know, we have to give up his every demand and cease all enrichment in order to even have any negotiation whatsoever?
Or, hell, even then, because under the additional protocol, enrichment was frozen.
So I don't know what the demands were then, but because George Bush refused to negotiate with them in good faith, they said, well, forget the additional protocol then, right?
Well, what happened, and again, we were very critical of the Bush administration because the 03, the IA, in fact, we were the first group to reveal satellite images of the Natanz plant and say it was a gas centrifuge plant.
The Iranian opposition group had said it was a nuclear facility.
They called it a fuel fabrication plant.
We identified it as a gas centrifuge plant and released satellite imagery in late 02.
And the IA then went in and was able to show that Iran was actively trying to keep them from finding out things, taking, you know, taking down walls and buildings, trying to mislead the IA in their declarations, and a whole range of things.
But the IA was seeing through it and catching them.
And certainly Iran was worried about the Bush administration.
I mean, before we released our satellite images, we went to the administration to find out their reaction, and their reaction kind of surprised it.
Their reaction was, you know, when we get to Baghdad, we're turning right.
So they weren't even interested in, you know, revealing this information because we thought it would be good pressure to put on Iran to reveal more.
Their attitude was, well, we're going to attack him anyway.
What does it matter?
So I think the Bush administration lost a very important opportunity to settle this thing with Iran in 2003 and 2004.
But instead, after the Europeans got Iran to suspend, agree to additional protocol, really open up, they threw stones at the agreement.
And then eventually they joined it, but it was pretty late in the game.
And Iran has worried about being attacked, and I think quite legitimately worried about being attacked.
But that being said, you know, now it's the Obama administration, and they reached out and would like to settle this issue with Iran.
Now, it's a very dangerous region, and the Obama administration still wants to see a suspension in the enrichment program.
But I think what I hear from the Obama people, and certainly from the Europeans, is that if everything is worked out, people trust each other, then Iran could start to enrich again.
So it's not a – the Europeans, at least, and from what I understand, the Obama administration isn't – well, let me just say, the Europeans aren't seeking a permanent halt to enrichment.
Well, that would certainly be a change from the Bush years there, I guess.
But so, I mean, here's my thing, though.
If my understanding is correct, they're not in violation of their safeguards agreement, and Elbrada has continued to – Well, they are.
I mean, they are.
I mean, when I say inconsistent, I mean, they're not – the IAEA is not happy – they're not saying they're in full compliance with their safeguards agreement.
Well, okay, correct me when I'm wrong in a second here, then.
Because my understanding is that Elbrada has basically continued to – or the Iranians, I guess, have continued to achieve the Rumsfeld standard and even prove a negative, and Elbrada says he's been able to positively verify, continue to verify, the non-diversion of any of their nuclear material.
Now, the way I understand it works, I think, is that there's the safeguards agreement and the IAEA's investigation as pertains to that safeguards agreement, and then there's a separate UN Security Council mandate that directs the IAEA to investigate all these other things, which to my understanding is all based on the laptop.
And that's what they're not satisfied with, is that the Iranians won't answer questions about the laptop, but the IAEA, Elbrada himself already said, that there's no reason that they should have to answer questions about a bunch of documents that they're not even allowed to examine.
There's more problems than that.
I mean, one is the IAEA has asked repeatedly to go visit the Iraq Heavy Rotter Reactor to verify what they call design information, and Iran has refused to allow them to do that.
And so there's some issues that are outstanding, but there's a more fundamental one, and the IAEA says this in every one of its reports that it issues, that it's no longer, without the additional protocol, it cannot provide assurance, and it's their words, of the absence of undeclared nuclear activities or materials or facilities.
And so the IAEA cannot say whether there's secret sites or not.
If you don't have the additional protocol, they can't say.
So what they've said, and what you're referring to, is that in terms of the declared nuclear material, which is enriched uranium, it's not uranium at a mine, for example, but once it's processed, it's under safeguards, and that they say that there's no evidence that any of the declared nuclear material is missing.
But the problem is that the traditional safeguards, and why ElBaradei is very careful in what he says is that they've been tricked before.
Iraq did that in the late 1980s up through 1991, and so the traditional safeguards said no diversion of declared materials, but then there was this huge growing nuclear weapons program with many facilities.
It happened again in Libya.
You know, the declared material was safeguarded, but Libya was building a secret centrifuge plant with the help of AQ Khan.
It appears to have happened in Syria.
And so, or at least there, they were building a reactor.
We don't know about the nuclear material, even if there was any.
So you have to worry about both the declared programs and the undeclared, and Iran right now has decided not to have the additional protocol, and so it's very hard to know or for the IAEA to say anything about the declared or about the undeclared activities, and they can't say they're not there.
In a way, it reminds me of gun control laws here in America, where ultimately you can't really ever prove a negative.
No, no, exactly right.
That's why they use absence.
You develop absence.
You develop confidence in the absence.
It's through a process, and it was developed in the 90s.
You use a whole set of things to develop confidence that there's an absence of undeclared activities.
It was done in South Africa very successfully.
It was done in Iraq.
The inspectors were able to prove that after they went back in at the end of 2002 that there wasn't much there, and if they'd been given more time, they would have then shown there was an absence of undeclared nuclear activities, but they weren't given a chance to finish that task.
But it's a very critical one in the case of Iran, and it's really right at the heart of the issue, and one of our biggest worries is that we don't have a good handle on what Iran is doing, and they have done things in secret in the past.
I mean, their centrifuge program was launched in secret back in the 1980s.
They decided they would do it through kind of black market operations to get equipment and materials for the centrifuge program.
Well, now, do you think that's because they're seeking nuclear weapons or just because Bill Clinton wouldn't let them buy a reactor from China that wanted to sell them one?
No, no.
I mean, I think they've had ambitions.
I think, you know, again, from my perspective, I mean, in the 1980s, I think they worried a lot about Iraq.
They knew Iraq had a nuclear weapons effort underway, and then I think what we saw had been following the Iranian program a long time is I saw kind of a decrease in activity, and then it picked up again, and it's not crazy to say, well, it was picking up somewhat in proportion to what's going on in Iraq, and so they were very worried that they would get nuclear weapons after Iraq, and they'd been subjected to the missile attacks of Iraq in the 1980s, and if you talk to them, they're very clear they want missiles.
I mean, they're not going to, you know, that's one thing they're never going to sacrifice is they were caught unprepared for Iraq's missile attacks, and they're never going to be in that position again.
So I think, but on the nuclear weapons, I think that, yes, I think they have an ambition and a desire, but I don't think they've made a decision to build them yet, and that's really what our challenge here is to make sure they don't, and I'm encouraged that Obama is trying.
I mean, obviously we're all kind of discouraged by recent events, but I hope that the negotiations can happen on nuclear and we can have a settlement where we don't have to worry about Iran building nuclear weapons.
Well, I hope you can insist the next time you talk to Broad that he quotes that part of your statement, that it's your understanding that you agree with Admiral Blair and the guys at the National Intelligence Council when they say that the Iranians have not made a political decision, that what they're doing right now, maybe they want to achieve this so-called breakout capability, but they're not pursuing nuclear weapons as such just because they have a nuclear program.
Well, you know, I say all kinds of things to Bill Broad.
I mean, you know, this is the nature of the game.
I mean, you're in the media yourself.
I mean, there's a selection.
Right, I like to selectively quote the parts of things that people say that would tend to lead us away from war rather than toward it.
And I agree with that completely, so, you know, I'll try.
Which makes me different than Broad, I think.
I'm sorry?
I think that makes me the opposite of William J. Broad.
Well, I think you're, well, I don't think you're being fair to him.
I mean, how many times has he quoted you, David, how many times has he quoted you saying that, look, they're not making nuclear weapons, they just have this program and I'm concerned about it for the following reasons, like you just said to me?
Well, let me put it this way.
I mean, I can't, you know, Bill Broad is an independent person.
I can't be responsible for what he says.
I mean, he knows my position.
I mean, they get our stuff at the New York Times.
But, I mean, the other thing is we've had a pretty rocky relationship with the New York Times over the last 10, 15 years.
And so, I mean, you know, I didn't speak to someone for a year.
I was so mad about what they did with the aluminum tube story.
And so there's, you know, but some I've liked, some I've worked with, some I think are excellent journalists, some I think have distorted things.
So I think it's, you know, we're engaged in a dynamic process and sometimes we're in conflict with New York Times and other parts of the media.
Sometimes, you know, it's a good relationship.
Well, I understand.
You know, and the thing is people sometimes they emphasize different points depending on who they're talking to and obviously depending on what they're asked and all those kinds of things.
But it just seems like, you know, basically you're the go-to guy when it comes to the media needs to talk to a real expert about what's going on with somebody's nuclear something.
And so, I mean, I just have to tell you, I've actually been kind of surprised throughout this interview to hear you say how much you agree with me about so many things that you agree with me about and the difference between this, that, and the other thing that usually get conflated together.
When you're quoted in the media, it doesn't usually read like that.
It usually reads like...
No, many times it does.
I mean, I think our message that, you know, we're against military options, I mean, it's not news to people.
This is with Iran.
But, you know, ISIS seeks to find non-military solutions.
Not necessarily even what ought to be done about it, but even what's going on.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, but also, you know, part of our work is to increase transparency.
I mean, we want, you know, there's a term, I mean, it's like the democratization of monitoring.
And we just, you know, we want to know more because we want to have people need to make decisions.
And so many things in nuclear have been governments making decisions, often in secret.
And we want people.
And so in some of that, we're just charting what's happening.
And what I can see is that sometimes people don't like those results.
But when we look at technical milestones by Iran, we're trying to just understand what they're doing.
And so I understand people didn't like it when we said, look, they had enough LEU to have a breakout capability.
But I tell you, that's what we believe technically.
And people can argue with it, you know, 1,000 or 1,200 or 1,300.
But, you know, at some point you're there.
And we're in the business of saying, look, we're there.
And how people interpret that, at some point when we're just trying to assess what's going on, we want to see the world for what it is.
We know people are going to, in a sense, ISIS can be a double-edged sword.
As I've seen in your own, on the antiwar.com, sometimes you use ISIS's stuff in a very positive way, to make your point.
Of course.
Sometimes it's negative.
But we have to accept that and take the heat on that.
Because in the end, we want to know what's going on.
And we want to chart Iran's progress as accurately as we can.
And we're always trying to improve.
I mean, we're not perfect.
The only reason I'm really nitpicking on this is because it's a very, you know, very detail-oriented kind of problem.
And, like, just now the way you paraphrased it, or paraphrased yourself or whatever there, I think it's perfectly fine that they have enough LEU now that this has achieved a breakout capability, which is defined as such.
And yet, the way it was quoted at the Council on Foreign Relations website was, they have enough low and rich uranium to make a bomb.
And the excluded middle there, the excluded middle there is a problem.
That's all I'm saying.
Well, I'll tell you, when AP misquoted us on that, I immediately wrote something to them and they corrected it.
I mean, I don't see all this.
And to that extent, I appreciate your efforts.
We would do it to correct if the information is used incorrectly.
I mean, if it's technically used incorrectly.
I mean, how people use it politically, we can't control.
Right, right.
But if it's used incorrectly, and there were people, I mean, world leaders that thought that, you know, they thought if you had the LEU in sufficient quantity, then they had, you know, weapon-grade uranium.
I mean, they just conflated it.
So I think it's not a small point and it has to be corrected.
Okay, now, okay, so tell me everything you know about this laptop.
Do you believe that this came from, you know, that all these documents supposedly that are on it came on it or that they were assembled from all different kind of places and put together on this laptop and then made to look like it was a laptop full of documents in the first place?
I don't know.
You know, I don't know.
The documents, there's some, I wouldn't call it a common theme in them, but there's a little bit of a theme that they have to do with initiation of explosives or because even the reentry vehicle work has some part of it where it's looking at initiating something.
But it's not complete by any means.
Now, what we did is we went around and asked governments and people we knew, do they think these are genuine?
And the reaction we get is that we get that they're genuine and not forgeries and that they came out of Iran by someone who was given the things to take out.
I mean, again, it's very hard to peer into this intelligence world, but clearly there was some kind of intelligence operation in Iran that gained access to this information.
Our understanding, it may have been broken up, and this was kind of something passed to people and then they left and went to Turkey and gave it to the U.S., but it was not a U.S. intelligence operation or spy ring.
It was a European country.
And so we tend to see them as not forgeries, and I know people like Gareth Porter have tried to argue that they are.
He asked me to review his work, and I was critical of it, and I don't think he dealt with the criticisms I raised.
But I don't think they're forgeries.
Okay, well, a couple of things there.
Is it the case that the National Council for Resistance in Iran is the source of the laptop, as far as you know?
No, as far as I know, they're not.
But, I mean, they put out a tremendous amount of bad information, and they did some good stuff.
I mean, you know, they got that there were secret nuclear sites in Natanz in Iraq, and sure enough, there were.
And then I think they were able to identify Kali Electric.
And we don't know the source for them.
And then they had a series of incredibly bad, bad things.
I mean, just, you know, and it got so ridiculous.
You know, Pakistan was giving Iran highly enriched uranium.
You know, there were enrichment plants under apartment buildings.
I mean, it was just there's a whole stream of things that came out that we were very critical of.
And so I don't know where they're getting their information.
You know, we don't particularly trust their information.
We always want to check it out.
And we find that most of the time it's wrong.
There may be some grains of truth in it.
Sometimes with Natanz in Iraq and Kali Electric, they were right.
So they seem to have some source in the 2002-2003 period that was giving them the correct location for places.
And we don't know where that source is.
We thought, you know, it could be construction engineers in Iran.
Or it could be a Western intelligence agency.
Well, you know, Scott Ritter in his book Target Iran and Yossi Melman in The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran both either say outright or at least imply, I guess the former says outright, that the NCRI is used as a front for the Israeli Mossad for information.
That's probably how they got their information about the Natanz facility.
And I just don't know.
I mean, it certainly is Israel's very active in trying to work this issue.
But as far as you know, they have nothing to do with the laptop at all?
Not as a forgery.
I mean, again, you know, I can only tell you what we learned.
I mean, it's a very frustrating case.
And it's not the only outstanding question.
I mean, another one involves the Physics Research Center, which was procuring things in Europe in the early 90s that looked like they could be used in a centrifuge program.
And then where they had a building at something called Lavazon, and that site was leveled starting in early 2004, and the ground was scraped.
And we actually released satellite images about that site.
And the IAEA used the images to ask Iran to visit.
But it was really too late to do anything.
And Iran just will not answer the questions.
And so it's still a mystery of whether this Physics Research Center, which is a military organization, was involved somehow in the centrifuge program.
And so that's another outstanding issue.
And the IAEA used the term of military dimensions.
It's the outstanding questions about the military dimensions.
And so they mean Physics Research Center and also the laptop.
Well, I guess I need to look into that Physics Research Center question more.
I don't remember reading about that in any of the – It's on our website.
I mean, this is 2004.
And it's in the reports.
I mean, it's – they've – Yeah, I try to read all the IAEA reports, but a lot of times they delve into new speak and acronym language that I just can't keep up with anymore.
And also I'll tell you one of the reasons – there's been sometimes wonderment, sometimes kind of anger that we release the reports.
But I'll tell you, those reports are essentially public.
And what we found was a member state would release it to a journalist.
The journalist would come to us and say, okay, I'll give you the report, but I want an exclusive.
And then within five minutes we'd get it from six other journalists.
And each of those journalists refused to give it to somebody else.
We would be banned from giving it to somebody else.
And so we felt that even though the reports are hard to understand, that we felt that we should always try to get them out so everybody can look at them.
And so – but they're not secret.
I mean, they're eventually made public, but there's a protocol of giving them to the member states first, and then essentially they're public.
And that's when we release them so that everybody can see them at the same time and there's not the potential to manipulate them because we know – Well, isn't that an important part of the story, though, is who you're getting them from and why they want to let you be the guy to have them?
Well, because we release them to everybody.
That's really – I can't tell you how we do it, although it's not that big of a deal.
But we want to make sure everybody has it because this issue, information is ammunition.
And we want to make sure that everyone can look at it and make their own decisions because, I'll tell you, I'll mention this.
I mean, some reason – sometimes we release satellite imagery.
And there was a case of – it was a military site in Iran called Parchin.
And we had gotten a tip that there could be some high-explosive facilities at that site that could be used in the development of nuclear – making nuclear weapons.
And we got satellite images, looked at it, and it looked capable.
I mean, we thought this could be a place where they would work on high explosives for nuclear weapons.
And we released it and said, look, the IAEA should go there and look at this.
The IAEA, in parallel, we learned, had reached the same conclusion and wanted to go there anyway.
But I'll tell you, the reason we released is because we knew something much worse was coming down the road and was going to be leaked in the media, that it wasn't just that this was a place that could be doing this.
It was a place where it was doing it and that the media reports would have been, you know, they're preparing to do what we call a cold test of a nuclear explosive, which means you're testing the whole device minus the weapon-grade uranium core.
So you put a surrogate material, but that they were getting ready to do that at Parchin.
And so we wanted to preempt that using the satellite imagery to say, look, you know, this is a site that should be inspected.
And I think, you know, the IAEA went to some of the facilities in the end.
It was a very, you know, Ron didn't want to let them in.
They did partial let them in.
And the sites were less capable than they looked from satellite imagery.
Well, wait, so there actually was this attempt to test out the explosives like that?
There was going to be an accusation.
Oh, that was the accusation coming out.
That was the accusation that we wanted to preempt.
I see.
So, again, some of the Yeah, because I thought that was nonsense.
I'm glad I just misunderstood you there.
And so we were, I think, you know, in that sense, you know, we, and again, it was a, I don't want to call it a mistake because we, again, we don't know the full story of Parchin.
And the IAEA didn't do its full investigation.
And so, you know, if they had, then, you know, we accept whatever they find.
But the full investigation wasn't done, and so it's kind of been in limbo.
But I know that some of the buildings that we thought were useful for high explosive tests related to nuclear weapons were not.
We know that from the IAEA visit.
So it's, you know, in that sense, what we did on Parchin was incorrect on those buildings using satellite imagery.
So, you know, so was the IAEA analyst too.
But that's the nature of the beast is you're not, you're going to make mistakes.
But what we feel is that the effort is to improve inspections, not to start a war.
And we felt that there was another group that wanted to start a war, in a sense, by hyping up what was going on at Parchin and making an accusation that's impossible to defeat.
Our accusation can be tested.
I mean, here's buildings.
Can they do it or can they not?
Their accusation was more nearby this one.
There could be a cold test of a nuclear explosive, and Iran was preparing to do that.
And so it's a much more inflammatory accusation that's very hard to prove or disprove.
But we didn't want to see that in the media.
Well, now, when it comes to the laptop, it's been quite a few months, actually, since I read Gareth Porter's story on it.
But the way I remember it, he's basically making the case that these are pretty good educated guesses as to what a forgery ought to look like to make it sort of seem true, but that ultimately it doesn't really wash with what we end up knowing to be the truth from what we found out later on.
And that it, I'm trying to remember the exact context of, well, I know that there was a dispute over whether the handwriting was all over the documents.
The handwriting was all over the documents in the laptop.
But then the Iranians had the documents, and there was no handwriting on them.
And the handwriting could have all simply just been forged later on.
There was nothing saying that it wasn't.
And the Iranians had the original document that was clear, right?
Well, questions about the documents are important.
But what we learned at ISIS was that people who had looked at it that we trust said, we don't think they're forgery.
And that's one of the things that I mentioned to Gareth.
And the handwriting can be explained other ways.
I mean, you see this.
I have a lot of documents, collected a lot of documents in Vienna for assessment.
And some have handwriting on it.
So the sort of the official one that would be in a repository wouldn't have handwriting, but the one that a scientist had would have handwriting.
So there's copies made, and then people can write on things.
So I think it's what I had, the problem I had was the article wasn't, I think it's legitimate to raise these questions.
What we've been told is they're not forgery by people who have detected forgery in the Iraqi case.
But that being said, I think you always have to pursue the question, are they forgery?
And more importantly, what does the information tell you?
But Iran has taken the position that they are forgery, or not all of them.
I think they eventually said some weren't, but they weren't about nuclear weapons.
But if you can't, this is an issue that has to be settled between the IAEA and Iran.
And I think Gareth went too far.
He can't prove what he's trying to prove.
Doesn't mean he shouldn't ask the question, but I just felt he couldn't prove it.
Yeah, well, it still sounds like it's a mystery.
You'll forgive me if I don't hang my hat on sources you trust say so.
Sure, no, that's fine.
I would hope you wouldn't, but we have to do our own work and then report on it.
And I wish we could always say who our sources are, but I'll tell you something.
We had very good sources on the aluminum tube.
I first learned about a problem in the summer of 2001, and we were really nervous.
And those sources were really nervous.
And I'll tell you, the hand of vengeance is long, and there was a story in the New York Times that tried to say our sources were Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
And I don't know if it was a Broad and Sanger story, I forget, but Broad told me that, you know, your friends told me this.
And I said, you know, they're no friends of mine.
But it isn't even true.
Our sources were not at Oak Ridge.
But the CIA wanted to try to – it was like a twofer.
Somebody was trying to get a twofer.
One is say, oh, ISIS can't even do its own work.
They're just told things by people inside government.
And the other is Oak Ridge broke the law by doing this.
And I know that there was an investigation done of a study I wrote in September of 2002, and we revised it in October, and we've been extremely cautious in there because we really didn't understand the implications, full implications of what we were doing.
We were very cautious.
We were more open verbally with journalists that we worked with, particularly Joby Warrick at the Washington Post.
And that study was investigated, and if there had been any classified information in it, Oak Ridge would have been blamed, even though they didn't do it.
And so that was a year after the war was over or so.
I'm sorry, the war is not over, but I mean the fall of Baghdad, many months after that.
And so here you had someone who was still trying to punish people for what had happened on the aluminum tubes when Oak Ridge was certainly right, and we had exposed the aluminum tube issue publicly.
And so I think that we're very nervous about revealing sources, and sometimes you may let your guard down, but in the end you don't know what's going to happen.
So I think we take it, unfortunately we have to take it very seriously not to reveal sources on some of our studies.
I don't know if that made sense.
Maybe I'm speaking too quickly, but we found that it was, you know, even when we thought bygones are bygones, they sure weren't.
Oh yeah, no, well, we were just covering the Larry Franklin story and how he was, they tried to get him to fake his own death so they could murder him easier later or something, I guess.
So nothing surprises me anymore.
Well, let me ask you about some different aluminum tubes, North Korean ones.
Now this guy, A.Q.
Kahn, held a garage sale in Urenco Enterprise.
He was in Jane's Defense Weekly, right?
He'd go to all the arms bazaars and say, here you can buy centrifuge equipment.
And yet, as far as I can tell, from everything I've read about this, and I try real hard, although I don't have my own institute or nothing, it doesn't seem to me like there's an atom of evidence anywhere in the world that the North Koreans, if they did indeed buy a bunch of centrifuge equipment from the Pakistanis, ever used any of it.
And it seems to me, the best I can tell, that the Bush administration simply lied and broke the agreed framework with North Korea because they felt like it.
And so they pretended that the North Koreans admitted to something.
There's still no evidence in the world, one, that they admitted to it, or two, that it's even true that they had an enrichment program.
As we all know, the nukes that they ended up detonating, two so far, were both plutonium bombs.
Harvested from their Russian reactors from back in the day.
It was a busy fall of 2002.
I mean, that's when the charge came up from the CIA that North Korea was building a large centrifuge plant.
And part of the evidence were these aluminum tubes that North Korea was procuring.
And the aluminum tubes that North Korea was procuring look like they're for an outer casing of a centrifuge.
It's big, thick aluminum tubes that are used to contain the spinning rotor.
And they were.
We looked at the documents in the prosecution and the court cases, and they certainly look like they're for a centrifuge.
Now, that being said, we felt that the CIA exaggerated.
I mean, they used bits of information to make a big conclusion and that they couldn't be supported.
Because if you remember, the CIA assessment at the time was that they'd have this big centrifuge plant operating, perhaps, by 2005.
And they'd have enough HEU to make a couple bombs a year.
So, I mean, it was a big plant and moving quickly to completion.
So they had to back away.
But where the debate is, and where North Korea has a harder time, is they had a small centrifuge program.
I mean, that was known during the Clinton administration, and they didn't want to make a big deal out of it because it wasn't seen as that threatening.
And they did buy centrifuges from AQ Khan, about two dozen.
And I think the view at ISIS is that the program never took off.
North Korea has complicated the situation because they just announced that they're going to build an enrichment plant.
So, I mean, and I think they're going to have a long way to go.
Well, and it was funny because the headlines, some of the headlines were, North Korea announces they're going to begin uranium enrichment.
Some of the headlines were, North Korea announces they're to restart their uranium enrichment.
Yeah, and we don't know.
I mean, I think to be accurate, I think they said they were going to do an experimental program.
I mean, I took it as it's small scale.
I mean, I saw those headlines.
And I'll tell you, we got attacked for being completely wrong about attacking this assessment on this so-called big centrifuge plant.
So, I mean, I certainly saw the headlines.
But I think the underlying story is that it's a small effort, but they said they want to pursue it.
Well, what about the so-called admission that it's all true?
Well, that's in dispute.
I mean, some at that meeting say, yeah, they admitted it.
But they never admitted it to me, and I've met them many times, foreign ministry people.
They've never said it's true.
They vehemently deny having such a program.
But, you know, they buy and sell.
I mean, I think for a time people thought maybe they were buying these tubes for others, although I think in the end the view developed, I think we'd share, that they were buying for themselves.
But they just didn't pursue it.
And what you said is true.
They have a plutonium program that once they were accused by the Bush people of this big cheating, they proceeded to start again and then developed or separated the plutonium for nuclear weapons.
So I think the enrichment program would have been much less important to them at that point, if it ever was that important.
I mean, we get reports from IAEA people that back in the 80s they were thinking about it, because there was a time, in 1992 particularly, when North Korea was pretty open about its program.
And I think one of the things they learned was that they had thought about building centrifuges, but they didn't think they could do it.
I'm trying to remember.
Were you allowed to go there and look at their nuclear stuff?
No, I wasn't.
I was in Pyongyang, but they wouldn't let me go to the Yongbyon site.
I met with the head of Yongbyon and was able to interview him for about an hour and a half and ask him questions.
But no, I never went.
I haven't had the occasion to try to go back since.
I went in early 2007, but I haven't gone back since.
Okay, now one more thing here.
What's the story with this recent expansion of a uranium facility in Pakistan?
The New York Times headlined, Blair, that they were expanding their nuclear weapons program.
But if they are expanding their uranium enrichment, is that necessarily the same thing as expanding their nuclear weapons program?
Because I thought their nukes were made out of plutonium, too.
Well, no, they're mostly made out of weapon-grade uranium.
What we published is that they were first to reveal publicly that they were building two new plutonium production reactors, the Khushab reactor.
And we haven't done an analysis of their enrichment program.
I mean, at least we haven't published one.
We saw that they were also expanding a reprocessing facility called New Lab near Rolopindi, and also they were expanding where they convert uranium, which can be used in reactor fuel or can be used in centrifuges.
They were expanding.
So we saw a lot of expansions.
Now, we know they're improving their centrifuges.
I mean, and the way centrifuge plants are often expanded is you take out the old ones and put in a new one that maybe has 50% to double the capacity.
And so you don't necessarily see bigger buildings.
Inside there's better centrifuges.
We think they're saturated on weapon-grade uranium.
I mean, they've got more than enough.
What we see is that they're trying to increase plutonium production because they want to make more sophisticated weapons, because with plutonium you can make a smaller weapon.
You can even try to think about making thermonuclear weapons where the plutonium is used in the primary.
And so we see, and we know Pakistan wants to put a warhead on a cruise missile, which is very provocative to India.
And so we see Pakistan's effort going in that direction, and we'd like to see it stop.
We'd like Pakistan, India, and Israel to agree to a fissile material cutoff treatment, to stop the production of these materials for nuclear weapons.
And we're very grateful that Obama has picked it up again, because the way the Bush administration sabotaged it is it said, well, we don't want verification.
It'll just be a declaration.
But India and Pakistan don't trust each other to make declarations, so they want verification.
So it effectively killed the FMCT work for years, and now Obama wants to bring it back.
And the key states that you want to join are India, Pakistan, and Israel.
And then you can head off this increase in their nuclear capabilities, nuclear weapons capabilities in South Asia.
Well, it seems like if the ultimate goal is global disarmament of nuclear weapons and the nonproliferation regime of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the NPT and the IAEA safeguards agreements and all that stuff, if that's the way to do it, it seems like the Bush policy certainly of basically insisting that Iran go above and beyond their safeguards agreement.
I know you say there are some things.
Well, attack them.
I mean, they threatened to attack them.
I mean, that, you know, they cut all these exceptions for India and Pakistan and Israel and let them get away with bloody murder.
Okay, I'm sorry I interrupted you.
Go ahead.
No, you go ahead.
I'm done.
The Bush administration threatened to attack Iran, and in doing that we lost a golden opportunity to settle that problem back in 2003 and 2004.
Because in the end, if a country hasn't made up its mind about nuclear weapons, they can be convinced not to do it.
But their security has to be first and foremost settled so they don't have to worry about regime change, military strikes.
And the Bush administration wasn't willing to go down that path with them, so there was a golden opportunity lost.
The Bush administration also unfortunately decided that the world isn't one where we want to get rid of nuclear weapons.
It's one where, and I'm simplifying, I'll probably be criticized for this, but the good guys can have them, the bad guys can't.
But you can't work that way.
And so what we now face is, as a result of some of the Bush administration policy, and I'll tell you, North Korea is no, I don't want to in any way say they're a good player.
I mean, they're really horribly irresponsible.
But we now face a North Korea that's testing nuclear weapons.
Iran is reaching a point where it can build them if it wants.
And we don't know how to solve these problems.
And if those two countries can't be solved, how do we stop anybody else?
And then how do we even convince India and Pakistan to stop, or Israel to stop, or ultimately the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China?
Well, it seems like we reward, and this was the part where I was going on there, we reward Pakistan, India, and Israel for not being part of the system.
Well, the Bush administration rewarded India very dramatically with the U.S.
-India nuclear cooperation agreement, and that's a big problem.
And by looking the other way, because in fact what we found was we find this reactor in Pakistan, and we go, my God, this thing's pretty far along.
The U.S. knows about this.
Why hasn't it come out?
In no way, Pakistan doesn't want to reveal it.
It just knows it's going to be hassled about.
But why hasn't the U.S. revealed it?
And it just stunned us that they don't want that.
They didn't want that information out.
Well, Andrew Coburn just had an article in Counterpunch a couple of weeks ago, well, I guess a week ago, about how it's American money that's paying for Pakistan's program.
That I don't know.
I mean, I know they pay for it.
I don't know.
I wouldn't agree with that, but I really don't know.
Well, what about a blind eye turn in the Reagan administration while they were helping the Mujahideen fight the Russians?
No, that's right.
And there was a pretty hefty effort launched in the late 70s to stop Pakistan when the program was learned about.
And it ended because choices were made that I think were the wrong choices.
And now we have to deal with a Pakistan that has a lot of nuclear weapons and not enough security over their nuclear assets, and also we have to wonder who's going to control those weapons in ten years.
So I think it's very important, and Obama's doing this.
I mean, he's recommitted to nuclear disarmament because that's the vision we should have, and he wants to get there.
I mean, he knows it's not going to be in his lifetime, but he also knows that let's deal with the harder problems first that are some of the more dangerous ones.
And so he's willing to look at everybody and say, you know, we should get rid of nuclear weapons.
And that, to me, is a wonderful change.
How it's going to play out, I don't know, but I think it's very important.
And this I would agree with you.
These things aren't settled by military means.
I mean, you can crush a country like we did in Iraq, but I'll tell you, five, ten years from now, if Iran has nuclear weapons, look for Iraq to do something.
So you just can't, you know, it can't be solved that way.
Well, in fact, if you look at the history where Israel attacked Iraq in 1981, that's what drove their safeguarded nuclear program underground.
That's right.
It turned it into a whisper.
Yeah, no, I agree completely.
And a lot of Israelis understand that, too.
So, I mean, you know, the public posture is one thing, but there's some understanding which makes even some Israelis pause about striking Iran's military sites.
Well, now, what about their hundreds of nuclear weapons?
And, you know, there was an Obama aide, I guess a State Department munchkin, I'm not exactly sure, that said, yeah, we need to, like David Albright says, bring the last three nuclear weapons states into the NPT and have them sign up a safeguards agreement, including Israel, I think she said.
And, boy, we didn't hear another thing about that.
Well, you know, obviously right now Israel is pushing back.
I mean, because it's really not about nuclear disarmament right now.
I mean, the initial point, the initial action with Israel is always the FMCT, and they don't like it.
And they certainly, if Iran is moving down a path to nuclear weapons, it's harder to get Israel.
But the argument is, you know, let's cap this thing.
You don't need any more.
Let's get an agreement to ban any further production of plutonium or highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.
And that, you know, so it's just the first step.
But it would change the atmosphere.
And so I think it's very important the Obama administration work on this.
And, you know, we support it.
We tell Israelis that.
People in the Israeli government know our position on this.
We, in the 90s, worked actively on promoting an FMCT diplomatically with the Conference on Disarmament.
And we'd like to see it going again, and Israel should join it.
And I would say, even though they object to Iran, the problem with Iran for Israel isn't an FMCT.
It's nuclear disarmament.
And so you can't expect Israel to disarm unless the problem with Iran is settled.
But we're a long way from there, and so there's a lot of steps that can happen now, independent of Iran, to limit Israel's nuclear capabilities.
And I think those, and I'm hoping the Obama administration will work on them.
But I do know Israel's going to push back very hard on this, because they don't want to do anything.
Well, I hear all different numbers from, I guess, 200 to 400 or 500, I guess.
I don't know.
Our numbers are lower.
I think when it was 200, we were about at 100.
I mean, it's just hard to produce plutonium.
And we looked very carefully at Venunu's information and looked at some other information.
And I think we decided that our estimate, it's in the Sipri book.
We updated the Sipri book in 96 or 97, and I think we, at that time, came out at about 100, a little more than 100.
It's a range, finally.
But thought that the 200s, it was too high.
But think about it, 100, 200, in that part of the world, it's huge.
In any part of the world.
No, in any part.
Yeah, that's right.
You're right.
Thousands.
But, yeah, that's right.
One can destroy a city and kill tens of thousands of people and more if it's a higher yield.
But, anyway.
All right, let me get one more question out of you before I let you go.
One more answer.
I'll ask the question.
Syria, best I can tell, and I know this is how we set up all these questions.
I say best I can tell, and then you say your way is different and usually more concise.
But best I can tell, Israel said, we know that the Syrians are building a nuclear facility here, and that's why we bombed it, because they were introducing all this graphite into it, and that's part of the process.
And yet, then there should have been graphite all over the place, and yet there wasn't.
There was just a little bit somewhere down the road or something, right?
There was graphite found at the site.
The Syrian knew the IAEA was looking for graphite, and so they were more cleaning up.
I mean, it's very complicated, because if the reactor core is bombed, was the graphite actually dispersed?
And you could destroy the reactor, which the core is quite a bit, I forget how many feet, but it's under concrete shielding and other metal, and so the core is protected.
And so did the bombs penetrate that core material and disperse the graphite?
No one knows.
And if it did, did Syria clean it up?
So it's a conflict right now.
But the IAEA also found uranium that they felt was man-processed and was not from anti-armor weapons.
See, I hadn't heard that part of it.
I was still waiting, because the last I heard is that that was the most plausible explanation.
No, no, no.
This was in a previous report and the discussions that happened after that, that they had assessed that it wasn't the right alloy, and so they were moving away that it was an anti-armor weapon.
But it was still a uranium process.
But the problem, and here's actually, here's the real problem.
Countries don't accept the additional protocol, and Syria didn't and hasn't.
It's very hard to get to the bottom of these questions.
And Syria still denies it's a reactor.
The IAEA can't visit the site anymore.
It can't go to other sites it wants to visit, and so we're just stuck.
In the end, the IAEA assessments are based on incomplete information, and we're just waiting.
But the Syrian case is an interesting one, too.
We were the first ones to identify the site of the bombing, and we felt that it was a reactor.
Eventually the U.S. government decided to release a lot of information making their case for a reactor.
And as usual, there's all these differences of opinion.
It's still the Bush administration.
And I think from the Israeli point of view, they never wanted to have any of this come out.
Syria didn't admit it was bombed, and why would they want to admit it was bombed, a reactor bomb?
Israel, from its point of view, dealt with the problem that it was facing.
They know it's not a permanent solution.
Syria may decide to reconstitute at some point.
They may just now decide to get nuclear weapons somehow because it's really mad.
So they understand the limitations of bombing, but if everyone was quiet, that's great.
So why was it made public?
And I think we certainly wanted it made public, and that's why we were getting the satellite imagery.
But why did the U.S. government want it made public?
And what we saw was that it was the hardliners who wanted to use it to try to really put the screws to Syria and North Korea.
And there was actually an effort launched to minimize that damage that people were trying to do.
And so there was a lot of back-and-forth inside the U.S. government between Moderate and Hawks to try to, on the Moderate side, reduce the damage that the hardliners were trying to do.
Well, and there were also all kinds of different stories about what, in fact, was going on there and how believable it was that it was really a nuclear anything at all.
Well, we were convinced it was a nuclear reactor under construction, where we weren't necessarily convinced that operation was imminent, or how they were going to separate the plutonium if they did, or were they going to separate the plutonium?
Because what I would have expected was that Syria would have announced it.
Let's assume it's a reactor.
Let's just agree on that.
They would have announced it when they were finished.
They wouldn't have anticipated keeping it secret once it was operational, but they knew that once it was operational, Israel wouldn't bomb it.
So I think, to us, it was a little bit like batons, that Syria was trying to establish a capability.
We don't know what they were going to try to do with it.
And they knew that if they didn't do it in secret, they would be stopped diplomatically, militarily, whatever.
And that's what I think we're pretty sure that that's the situation.
And where the dispute was is that, do they have a nuclear weapons program?
And I know that the public announcements in the end did not accuse Syria of having a nuclear weapons program.
It was like, well, what else could it be?
But it was really toned down from what some of the internal discussions were saying.
Oh, I wanted to ask, as a favor to a friend, how it was that you started writing your world inventories book?
I guess you said that was back in the 1980s.
Not yet started, yeah.
Well, again, all that information was generally viewed as secret.
But there were efforts to try to have a fiscal material cutoff.
Well, how much does India have?
How much does Pakistan have?
How much does the U.S. have?
When we started, how much does Russia have?
And so the idea was to gather in one place estimates of all these inventories, civil and military.
And then because, again, we felt that people needed to know this information.
The public needed to know this information to make decisions that affect their lives.
It also turned out governments needed it because they couldn't talk to each other about these things.
Because each country viewed its own stock as secret so they could actually use this book to talk to each other.
And, yeah, obviously, we were estimating stocks.
So we're by no means 100% correct.
But it was useful.
And foundations, I mean, we're funded principally by foundations, are also committed to transparency.
And many of us are.
I mean, that's why you have a website, a radio show.
We want more information out there, better discussions, more informed decision-making.
And so there was a lot of support among some of the foundations for us to do this book.
Okay, so here's the thing.
Your harshest critic publicly that I know of is Scott Ritter.
And he has said that by kind of conflating whatever role it was that you had in the debriefing of Iraqi scientists and so forth, as being a real qualified, bona fide weapons inspector, like you could call him or some of his other colleagues, basically helped to put kind of a big red seal of approval on the lies of Qadir Hamza, who said basically all these claims about Iraq's nuclear program.
And Ritter says that because of your seal of approval on this guy, he was then deemed to be a credible witness before the Congress to talk about Iraq's nuclear program, or nuclear weapons program, and the run-up to the war.
I don't care if this is recorded.
I mean, with Qadir Hamza, he tried to use it, definitely.
I mean, and there's two things you've said.
One is I feel quite proud about what I did with the action team.
I wasn't like Scott Ritter.
I mean, I was working with them, with the people in Vienna, assessing documents, and they needed help.
And I actually got involved with them through writing for the Bolton Atomic Scientists and meeting people like the head of it, a guy named Maurizio Zifferero.
But also I was interviewing particularly a person in Germany who had been providing centrifuge technology to the Iraqis, and Zifferero was interested, and so I ended up interviewing him perhaps 20 times.
And he was lying, but he was also telling partial truths, and it was useful.
And so a relationship developed, and I cooperated with him, and I feel very good about it, but I've never tried to oversell it.
I mean, what I did is written on our website.
The action team talks about a lot of what Ritter said is just not true, and I think he had to, in what he wrote in his article, he often had to try.
Well, what he said about Hamza was that Hamza was a liar, and he knew that Ritter knew he was a liar, and Ritter said he was a liar.
Ritter, he said it, but I'll tell you, Scott was one of the most hard-line people.
I mean, in 1998, he said that, you know, I think he testified to this effect in front of Congress.
Some of this I can't remember.
I'd have to check, but he definitely said it.
Iraq had all the components for three nuclear weapons minus the weapon-grade uranium or the fissile material.
I mean, no one thought that at the time.
It was doing nuclear work on Iraq.
Aside from Vienna, of course, there were people here in our CIA or whatever thought that, but no one thought that in Vienna, and so he was one of the hardest-line people on these questions.
Well, certainly in 2002, he said they had no nuclear.
Yeah, he flipped, and there's no doubt about it, he flipped.
I mean, that's part of why I have problems with his credibility is I don't understand the flip, and they're both stated with equal assurance that they're true, and so from my point of view, I have real problems with his credibility.
His explanation for that is that he didn't really flip.
What flipped was the context of what was being spoken.
I can't address, and I've never heard him address what you say about his claim before the Congress about a nuclear thing.
But what he told me, because I asked him the first time I ever interviewed him why the flip, he said what I said then was that if this guy is not controlled by international inspections and so forth, he could reconstitute his chemical weapons ability within six months, and I still say that that's true.
But I'm also saying the same thing I said then, which is we got rid of everything.
He's got maybe 5% of it's unaccounted for, but you could chalk up to paperwork, but all he really wanted was a hardcore inspection regime to not a war.
Yeah, that's fine, but on the nuclear, he said it, and I know the head of the team at that point, we call him a leader, is the top person, a guy named Gary Dillon, who I know well, and he had to sort of refute this.
Again, this is all done internally and shared with governments, but he had to go around and refute this, and so it wasn't a program that had been dismantled, according to Ritter, and it caused a headache and it caused damage to efforts to have inspections, because it was implying that the inspectors couldn't find it, and people just thought it was not true.
And again, you can't prove a negative.
I mean, this is really one of the problems in some of the Iraqi debate is if you oppose what the Bush administration did, you were put in a position to try to prove a negative, and Scott asserted a negative, and that was fine, but in an argument in Congress or among the media, anyone who said it's not there was at a tremendous disadvantage and was usually just dismissed.
That's why, in the end, we went after their evidence.
Okay, tell us what your evidence is, and they wouldn't do it at first, but then, you know, okay, That's pretty crappy evidence.
They hung their stuff to it, but they even had to start backing away by the winter.
I'm sorry.
I don't want to forget Kadir Hamza.
He's another one that they used, but did you want to say something?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I just was chiming in there.
Yeah, it was debunked.
The aluminum tubes were debunked in September.
That's all I'm talking about.
Well, I wish that was the case.
I mean, we were the ones who went forth with the aluminum tubes, the only ones that went forth publicly at that time, and then there was an effort on the Hill in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Biden launched, but it went nowhere, but it took a couple months to really get people convinced, but a lot of people weren't, and I'll tell you, inside the government, the CIA waged a ferocious battle to try to insult the Oak Ridge people and keep them from getting the data so they could prove that the aluminum tubes were not suitable for use in a centrifuge.
So it took, and in fact, Oak Ridge, I don't think they got the data that they needed from the CIA people until after the fall of Baghdad.
I mean, it really was.
Well, maybe debunked is too strong a word.
Certainly a doubt was cast on them in a Washington Post article in September.
Right, and we were behind that Washington Post article.
And the Knight Ridder guys had some stuff on it, too.
No, they were great.
No, no, they were very good.
Landay, no, they were excellent.
There was a Guardian.
Guardian was good, too, but there were a lot that weren't, and we were just really outgunned, and it's also, I think, one of the lessons we learned in that is that you have to be more aggressive about the analysis, and maybe that's some of what people are objecting to somewhat on the Iran stuff.
We have to be more aggressive than we used to be about presenting our analysis, but you also have to really make it clear that you're not for military options, and that we do much more quickly now than we used to because we weren't for military options against Iraq.
Well, I diverted you there from the Hamza story.
Yeah, Hamza came to me.
I mean, when I was working with the action team, Zipero actually gave me quite a bit of access to information as part of the work I did, and one of the things I saw was a debriefing of Hamza by action team people, and I saw his story and what he did and knew pretty clearly what he had done in the program, and after Zipero died, I stopped working with the action team.
It was always a complicated relationship because I was the only person working with the nuclear people and I wasn't in the government or working for Urenko, so it was always a little bit uncomfortable, but I did a lot, but once Zipero died, I wanted to do other kinds of work on Iraq, and one of which was we wanted to go and interview people who had been involved in the program, and there were Germans that we wanted to work with that had provided centrifuge information.
We were interested in Iraqis, and Hamza called me one day just out of the blue, and we hired him part-time for about a year, and he was actually for us a very good source because we had all this information on the EMIS program, the centrifuge program, even a little bit on weaponization, but we didn't know the people, and I spent a week in Iraq and interviewed the leaders of the EMIS program, the centrifuge program, and then Jafar Jafar was just a few other people, Deferrero and the person from Oak Ridge, and so I had a lot of opportunities to ask questions, but really didn't know the people and the politics and how things fit together and motivations, and Hamza provided a lot of information to us about sort of the inner workings of the program, but he didn't have direct knowledge of any reconstitution, and we knew that, and we tried to actually limit his work on that, but in an interview that he did with the New York Times, he said, and it was actually not with Judy Miller, she was one of the co-authors of this interview with Hamza, an editor kind of pushed Hamza against the wall at one point and said, you know, is there a program now or not, nuclear program, and he said yes, and that got into the New York Times piece in 98, and despite our best efforts actually, and for various reasons after, I don't know, sometime in the second year, Hamza moved on from ISIS, so this was back in 99, I think, and we lost touch, and he then moved on to work with Chalabi's group, and became sort of eventually the head of the entire nuclear weapons effort, if you'd see his bio, it would say he headed the nuclear weapons effort from 97 to 2004 when he left, but I had his resume, I knew exactly what he did, and he wrote his resume, so I knew for six months in 97 he'd headed the initial what's called the weaponization program, and earlier he'd had to do with the diffusion program as a theoretician, and been a very senior official, but had never headed their nuclear weapons program, that was Jafar Jafar essentially, and Hamza was using his credentials, false ones, in collusion with Chalabi to try to hype up the thing, and so we started to say he didn't do these things, and so we put his resume up on our website at some point, we would write, I think we issued these things, that he was exaggerating his claims, I mean the White House issued a press, or a fact sheet, and this was in October, maybe this is too much detail, but there was a Cincinnati speech by Bush, where he put out some pictures of supposed nuclear weapons sites that we challenged, but he also in the website, or in the fact sheet, there was a statement that in 1998, they had evidence that the nuclear weapons program had been reconstituted, and when we looked into it, it turned out it was Qadir Hamza's quote in the New York Times piece, which we knew wasn't true, and we knew he could say that, and it's fine, if he thinks it's reconstituted, that's fine, we often thought it was, but it's a thought, it's an assessment, it's not knowledge, direct knowledge, and Qadir tried to say it was direct knowledge, and the White House tried to say it was direct knowledge.
So you're saying that rather than helping bestow legitimacy on this guy, all you ever did was tell people the truth about...
That's how I would say it, yes.
One thing, he was a former employee, so I had to be careful, but I think we tried to say very clearly, but we also benefited from his statements.
I mean, when he was working with us, particularly that first year, we learned a lot about people and how to interpret some of the technical accomplishments and failures that we would see in documents that had been given by the Iraqis or actually seized from the Iraqis in some cases.
But once this thing heated up and we started to see what he was doing, then yes, we were very critical, and particularly if journalists would call and ask, and then we started publishing things that he was misrepresenting his role and that he had worked as head of weaponization for six months.
And then it's also important, I mean, in 1987, he left the program.
He went to the civil side, and he had some knowledge, but he actually left the program, the actual nuclear weapons program.
So we thought that when Chalabi's people hyped him up, that it was quite serious and needed to be refuted.
So I don't know, again, he used it.
I mean, I learned later, for example, he took a study we did which quoted him, and he went and told people, well, my God, ISIS wouldn't have quoted me if they didn't think everything I said was correct.
So, I mean, he tried to use us for sure, and we tried to counter that.
And so I don't think that we were in any way saying anything positive about him in 2002 or in 2003.
I mean, it felt he was actually really quite dangerous and was being used.
I mean, I know him, and I saw him once during that period, and he was trying to survive.
But he was willingly participating and hoping to get a big fat job after the invasion of Baghdad.
How did that work out?
Well, he got a pretty good job.
Working for the Republican Party, or what exactly?
Well, working in Baghdad with the U.S. government.
A bomb went off under his car one morning, and he had to move into the green zone.
And then he was discredited.
And he stayed in the green zone.
I mean, I don't know where he is.
I haven't heard anything about him since.
I think the last time I heard of what he was doing was in 2003.
I don't know if he stayed in Iraq or left.
But, I mean, he expected a lot and was brought into the inner circle of people in the Bush administration to go in after the war.
Well, they thought the war would end quickly, as you know better than I, but would go in and kind of pick up the pieces and take control of the government.
And he expected to have a very senior job in that process.
So anyway, we hire these people.
But it's a program we have that we hire people who have been in these programs to try to understand them better.
And we manage it better since we've hired Hamza.
We learned our lesson in a certain sense that you have to be very careful.
All right.
Well, David Albright, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Sure.
Okay, take care.
Bye.
