For Pacifica Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And now, an interview I recorded this morning with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, with more on the war party's lies about Iran's nuclear program.
Introducing Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net and various other places.
We reprint every bit of it at AntiWar.com/Porter.
Alright, welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And people may not know, but on my other radio show, I've interviewed you almost 150 times now, something like that.
And that is because, even though you work really for Jim Loeb and not for me, it seems to me kind of your Clark Kent to my Mr. White out there covering all the stuff I need covered, debunking the war party's lies that I need debunked, and in real time, in amazing time.
Well, let me just say that I appreciate the fact that you and you alone get the correct IPSnews.net URL.
Nobody else has ever done that.
Thanks.
Oh, yeah.
No problem at all.
IPSnews.net.
And, you know, Gareth ain't the only one.
Jim Loeb keeps an incredible stable of reporters at IPSnews.net.
Alright, now, so the big war party lies of the last few weeks, of course, were about Iran.
And I thought this is a job for Gareth Porter.
We talked with Seymour Hersh, as you heard there, about the different people in the intelligence community in the United States that don't believe in this nonsense.
But with you, I wanted to break down to the nitty-gritty, the accusations in this report, and what's not credible about them.
And most especially, the newest accusation is about a former Soviet-era nuclear scientist, supposedly.
A man named Danilenko, Ukrainian, who, according to the IAEA, seems to have been involved in a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
So go ahead and break it down.
Who's this Danilenko guy, and why should or shouldn't I be scared that he's going to nuke me in my jammies in the middle of the night?
Well, Danilenko was, in terms of absolutely, I think, clear-cut evidence, he was not a nuclear weapons scientist.
He was not a nuclear physicist.
He did work at a leading Soviet-era nuclear weapons research facility at Chelyabinsk.
And that alone has been enough for the IAEA and its allies in various governments, including, of course, the United States and Israel, to conclude that he must have been, therefore, a Soviet nuclear weapons scientist.
In fact, it's very clear that from the very beginning, in 1960, at the age of 26, when he joined this research outfit at Chelyabinsk, he was working not on nuclear weapons, but on nanodiamonds.
Now, he was part of a team which was involved in gas research that relates to explosives.
And explosives, obviously, are one element of a nuclear weapons research facility.
But very quickly, what happened was that they discovered, by experimenting with explosives, that this produced, under certain circumstances, nanodiamonds.
These industrial diamonds, very, very tiny, obviously, which are clearly becoming a major commercial object in world trade.
I mean, this has, over the last couple of decades, increasingly become an important product.
And he was part of a team that basically discovered how to do this.
And they actually produced not only important research, but patented inventions for actual production of nanodiamonds through explosives.
So, you know, he is arguably one of the fathers of the entire nanodiamond industry in the world.
So the idea that he was leading a double life, that somehow, you know, at night, after working on nanodiamonds during the day, at night, he would sneak himself into the lab and work on nuclear weapons is simply absurd.
And as I've pointed out elsewhere, we know for a fact from the Nuclear Threat Institute that by 1991, half of the workforce at this Chelyabinsk Institute was working on research that was not weapons related.
They were working on commercial related research.
And this clearly underlines the fact that the simple fact that he was working at a nuclear weapons institute does not show that he had anything to do with nuclear weapons.
Well, but now, is there any credible reason to believe, you know, a reasonable cause to believe that maybe this was just cover, even if the people got it wrong, or is this just a ridiculous lie?
Well, it's a very convenient lie for the simple reason that it allows the IAEA and its government, basically, handlers, I would say, the United States, Israel, and their European allies who really control politically the direction that IAEA takes on such issues.
It allows them to argue that they now have evidence, or as they say, strong indications, quote unquote, that a foreign weapons, nuclear weapons specialist helped Iran to construct a device that was allowing them to test an implosion weapon, you know, basically a test device, a chamber, a test chamber that was used to test a bomb.
And they have this at two different levels.
They suggest that this test chamber was used to actually, you know, do hydrodynamic testing, and that is a test which does not use fissile material, but uses other material to simulate a nuclear explosion and, you know, studies that in order to decide whether they're on the right track or not, whether it would work.
And then at the same time, they also say that the Iranians were using this test chamber to test the initiation system, a multi-point initiation system for a nuclear device.
And, as you've pointed out, Robert Kelly, the former IAEA inspector, he was the chief weapons inspector in Iraq and worked for the IAEA for at least a decade, and before that was a nuclear weapons specialist for the U.S. Department of Energy.
So he knows what he's talking about.
He completely rejects this whole idea as a complete fraud.
He completely rejects it in the Christian Science Monitor to Seymour Hersh, and in an interview that you cite here with the Real News Network, correct?
That's right.
I just want to make sure everybody has their footnotes in order.
He went farther in the Real News Network interviews saying that, look, we've been led by the nose, as he put it, to believe that this test chamber, this thing that was attributed to Danilenko, is important, when in fact it's not important at all, that it has nothing to do with a nuclear program.
Now, I don't want to overstate it.
You're not claiming proof necessarily, but it sounds like the picture you're painting is that it seems much more likely that someone in Israeli or American intelligence identified this guy's work and said, we could build a plausible narrative around this being cover for a nuclear weapons design, and then they tried to build that case.
That's exactly right.
And I have no doubt that this was Israel who passed on to the IAEA that we have reason to believe, we have good reason to believe that this guy was a Soviet nuclear weapons specialist.
Here, look at the evidence.
He worked at Chelyabinsk, which is well known as a nuclear weapons institute.
So, I mean, it's a very, not just plausible, but very highly likely that this was a story that was passed on to the IAEA by Israel.
And it seems that the modus operandi of the IAEA, going back several years, is to take whatever is given to it by Israel as, no, not just plausible, but evidence that something is true.
And that's the way they have operated now.
The IAEA has operated for years on the principle that if they are told something by U.S. intelligence or Israeli intelligence, Mossad, that they will regard it as plausible and therefore likely and therefore to the basis for their report.
Because that is exactly, if you read the report carefully, that's exactly what they've done.
By the way, Scott, I'm not saying that the IAEA did not do any work itself, but what it did was simply to take this as the starting point and then to find more evidence to support it.
And this, as Robert Kelly told me, this is simply what he called the law enforcement approach to investigation, which is to narrow the suspects to a single suspect and to then go ahead and find whatever evidence they could to convict the suspect.
And that's exactly what the IAEA has done year after year in their report.
Well, and this plays right into the hands of the war party in the United States and Israel.
Because as long as the IAEA is asking Iran to prove that they stopped beating their wife, basically, and based on these obviously false accusations, the Iranians always just get mad and say, well, we're not going to keep answering these questions anymore.
And then the war party, especially here in the United States on Fox TV, etc., get on there and say, see, they're just intransigent.
They won't live up to their international obligations.
They won't disprove that they're making nuclear weapons.
Well, it's actually even worse than that, Scott.
I mean, what has happened is not just that the Iranians got pissed off after this.
You're correct that the position of the IAEA has been to say to Iran, you go ahead and prove to us that you're not guilty of what the intelligence agencies are telling us you're guilty of.
And in other words, to prove the negative.
And that is certainly a cause for the Iranians to be quite upset with the IAEA.
But in fact, it was not until the IAEA actually demanded that Iran turn over the blueprints.
I call them blueprints, but the engineering designs for the Shahab-3 missile.
I'm not clear on this.
It seems to me what they're really saying is that don't give us the designs for the original Shahab-3 missile.
We want the one that you actually updated, the updated version of the Shahab-3, which is called something else by the Iranians that was tested in 2004.
And as I pointed out in my writing on this subject, the best proof that we have that the alleged studies are a fraud is that they basically had the wrong missile warhead used for these drawings of the warhead that was supposedly trying to incorporate a nuclear weapon into the redesign of the Shahab-3.
And what the people who did those fake documents, those fake drawings, didn't know was that the Iranians had already moved beyond that missile design and had designed a new version of their missile, which was a very different warhead, a different shape of the warhead, and had other major design changes which allowed it, for the first time, to reach Israel.
Whereas the original design, which was being depicted in these drawings that were part of the alleged studies, the smoking laptop, if you will, was the original Shahab-3, which couldn't even reach Israel.
So I've made the argument that this is really prima facie evidence that these key documents as part of the alleged studies, laptop documents, were fakes and that they came from Israel.
But you were saying that it wasn't until the IAEA, under the UN, not under their safeguards agreement with Iran, but under UN mandate, once they started demanding those designs for the new and improved missile, that's finally when the Iranians balked and said they're no longer going to cooperate with the rest of this stuff.
They cut off their cooperation in September 2008, and it's very precisely dated.
A letter was sent by Iran to the IAEA saying, look, we cannot continue to cooperate if you're going to demand conventional weapons secrets.
Which is not to say that they stopped cooperating with the IAEA on their safeguards agreement.
Correct.
Which is the IAEA's actual business is verifying the non-diversion of nuclear material to any military or other special purpose, which they continue to do.
And they're still sitting there at electricity grade, 3.6%, and you can't make a bomb out of that.
That's the whole point.
And that part, the Iranians are still going along with.
It's all this extraneous extra credit stuff that John Bolton and Connelisa Rice had the UN assign them to do, that they're refusing to cooperate with.
That's right.
And let me just make one more point on this, while we're on this subject, of how the cooperation between the Iranian government and the IAEA on the alleged studies documents broke down.
And in the summer of August of 2008, the Iranian government had actually made a major concession to the IAEA, where they had agreed to allow inspectors to go into workshops, which were depicted in some of these videos that were accompanying the alleged studies, went along with the intelligence collection.
And this was something that the IAEA had demanded, which Iran had previously said they weren't ready to do.
But they did, in fact, invite the head of the safeguards department, Olli Heinonen, to go with them to visit these workshops.
It was all set up.
And then this request, again, for the engineering blueprints of the Shahab-3 missile came, and that's when the deal was off, basically.
Olli Heinonen being a former hawk at the IAEA.
He was the head of the safeguards department, and certainly took them in the direction of continuing to give more and more credibility to these alleged studies documents, to the point where essentially he said, yes, we accept them as authentic.
He didn't use those words, but de facto, they regarded them as authentic.
Well, now, we're going to talk a little bit more about that here in just a second, but I just want to make sure that I understand this IAEA report right, or what you're reporting about it.
It's at IAEA.org for anybody who wants to look at it.
Basically, what you're saying is that if I have this right, the only thing in this IAEA report that's not out of this old batch, very old now batch, of alleged studies documents, whose credibility you've already cast into doubt, is this story about the Ukrainian scientist.
Other than that, that's really all they've got.
What do they call it?
The large cylindrical object that maybe the testing was going on in as part of the same story.
Both parts of that fall apart, and then all we're left with is the alleged studies again.
Is that right?
That's correct, and let me just pinpoint the precise nature of what they're claiming as new information.
It's not really new in this report.
It is new in the sense that it is not part of the alleged studies documents which were turned over by unknown parties to the U.S. government in 2004.
But what happened was that in 2008, a member state, which David Albright identified to me as, quote, turned over a new document to Ali Heineman, which claimed that the Iranians had tested this multipoint explosion system, which was part of an implosion device.
They had tested it, and in the official reports of the IAEA prior to this, it was not stated when it was tested, and it was kind of left to the imagination of the reader that it must have been after 2003.
Now, in fact, they're saying that this test took place in 2003.
In other words, as the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 stated, the Iranians stopped any work on nuclear weapons.
So all of this hyperventilating is about false accusations, about things that happened back when the CIA says, yeah, they were working on it then, but they quit in 2003?
That is correct.
And everything that has to do with the idea of Iran working on nuclear weapons since 2003 is nothing more than inference.
Well, they worked on it then.
They must be working on it now.
I think that is the nature of the play as we now see it.
Even though, as Seymour Hersh described earlier in the show, he's talked to guys at the Joint Special Operations Command who confirmed to him that, no, they have found no evidence of a secret nuclear weapons program in that country anywhere.
Really, this is all just innuendo and smoke like the run-up to the war in Iraq.
Only we didn't have analysis like yours on the Niger uranium forgeries in real time like this.
Well, Sai's reporting, of course, is very important on this.
He's the only one who has had the sources to be able to pull together a report showing that, in fact, there were very strong efforts involving placing the sensors within Iran that could pick up any sign of a nuclear device of any sort having been tested, and they came up without any evidence whatsoever, no evidence that there was anything going on.
And this, of course, reinforces what the IAEA itself found when it was sent to the Parchin military complex, precisely where, supposedly, this test chamber was set up in 2000.
This is what the IAEA is now saying, that this test chamber that they attribute to Danilenko, which clearly has nothing to do with Danilenko whatsoever, in fact, it's very doubtful that there is such a thing, was constructed in 2000, and that this test chamber then must have been used to test this implosion device, such as was suggested to them by this member state, having been tested in 2003.
So it's all, again, it really comes back in the end to the Israeli non-stop effort to feed stuff to the IAEA over the years, including, I'm quite sure, the alleged studies papers themselves, to show that the Iranians were working on nuclear weapons.
Well, one little anecdote here.
I talked to my friend Gordon Prather, who's retired now, but I was a nuclear weapons scientist and was the chief scientist of the army, and then wrote a hell of a lot of great articles at original.antiwar.com/Prather, and I asked him about this implosion testing, and he had already told me in the past, and he just reaffirmed to me that to test an implosion system like this, you need uranium, depleted uranium, 238, non-fissile material, but you need that for the testing itself.
And then you have to do it over and over and over again.
The high explosives must be timed to the absolute millisecond.
You have to film it with ultra-high speed x-ray film, and this is not a project that Iran can carry out without the Americans seeing it from space the whole time or something.
And, again, the IAEA has continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material in Iran, and he said there is no substitute.
You can't do the same test with lead and have it work.
You need uranium to do it, and all their uranium is accounted for, etc.
And also, if you use uranium, it's going to be detected by the IAEA's detectors at Parchin, which is precisely what didn't happen in 2004-2005, when the IAEA went twice to Parchin, was allowed by the IAEA to visit any of five sites of their choice.
And so they did that twice, late 2004 and again in the spring of 2005.
And they came away having chosen the sites that they wanted to visit without any evidence whatsoever that there was any testing of a nuclear device.
So, this is why this whole story completely falls apart.
And the utter failure of the news media to cover this simple fact is really quite fundamental to the political nature of this story at this moment.
In fact, what happens is the Washington Post and the New York Times particularly report this as something in which the IAEA was really prevented from being able to adequately visit and inspect or investigate Parchin Military Complex, whereas in fact they had very free reign to choose the place that they wanted to visit and to do whatever they wanted to do to inspect it or investigate it.
Well, even David Sanger in the New York Times quoted the former hawk Olly Heinonen of the IAEA, now at Harvard, saying, yeah, me and my guys went there and it was fine.
Well, he did say that, but then I distinctly recall that in one of his stories on this, Sanger basically characterized the IAEA's visits as essentially unable to fully investigate because of limitations imposed on them by the IAEA.
I know the Post reported that as well.
They mischaracterized the IAEA's visits to the Parchin Military Complex, and that is absolutely critical to understanding the reality here.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time, but I've got to tell you, I always appreciate your time on the show, Gareth.
Well, thank you so much for having me, Scott.
I appreciate it very much.
Everybody, that is the heroic Dr. Gareth Porter from Interpress Service at IPSnews.net, and we reprint every bit of it at original.antiwar.com/Porter.
The latest is Ex-Inspector Rejects IAEA Iran Bomb Test Chamber Claim.
And that's it for Antiwar Radio this evening.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We're here every Friday, usually from 630 to 7, got a full hour tonight, and we'll be back next Friday at 630.
Full archives are at antiwar.com/radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks very much for listening.
