Nowhere would these needs for adjustment be more striking than in dealing with the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
5
IRAN, 2003–2005
The Riddle of Taqqiya
As if two ongoing nuclear verification dramas were not enough, in mid-2002 the IAEA began receiving information about a third. Satellite photos of Natanz, a small town in Isfahan province in central Iran, showed the construction of a large industrial facility with discernable details suggesting that it might be a uranium enrichment plant. In mid-August, the National Council of Resistance of Iran[1] held a press conference in Washington alleging that Iran was building a secret nuclear facility at Natanz.
The Agency began investigating. In September, at the annual IAEA General Conference in Vienna, I looked for Gholamreza Aghazadeh, a small, serious man with two titles: vice president of Iran and the head of AEOI, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. I pulled him aside. “Tell me about this Natanz facility,” I said. “Is this for enrichment, as the satellite photos suggest? Perhaps we should make a visit.”
Aghazadeh smiled. “Of course we will invite you soon,” he replied warmly. “And then we will clarify everything.”
The ambiguity of Aghazadeh’s response was less than reassuring. Still more disturbing was the long list of excuses we began to hear for postponing the promised visit: President Khatami was “traveling”; President Khatami was “sick”; the chosen dates were “inconvenient.” This went on for months.
In the interim, during a meeting in Washington with Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, I told them that their policy on Iran—with its heavy reliance on sanctions and a boycott to prevent weapons development—was not working. I believed that punitive actions, actions that failed to address the underlying reasons for a country’s pursuit of nuclear development, did not constitute a policy—nor, in any pragmatic sense, a strategy—and would at most delay a nuclear weapons program. If a country like Iran wanted to acquire nuclear weapons, the U.S. approach would not be enough to stop it. Powell did not comment, but Armitage agreed, which I took as a hopeful sign.
At the time, I was drawing on the IAEA’s experiences with Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa. Despite years of restrictions on exports to these countries, the first two had acquired the nuclear know-how for the fuel cycle, and the third had actually acquired (and later relinquished) nuclear weapons.[2] From what we had repeatedly observed, a policy of isolation and sanctions only served to stimulate a country’s sense of national pride; in the worst case, it could make the targeted country’s nuclear project a matter of national priority.
When at last the Iranians settled on a visit during the third week of February 2003, the timing was anything but ideal. North Korea had just withdrawn from the NPT. The UN Security Council was sharply divided over the use of force in Iraq, and a military invasion seemed imminent. Our inspection staff was, to say the least, stretched.
But we needed answers about Natanz. I accepted the invitation and asked Pierre Goldschmidt, the Belgian nuclear scientist who served as my deputy director general for safeguards, to accompany me, as well as Olli Heinonen.
At the opening meeting in Tehran, Aghazadeh and his AEOI colleagues admitted immediately that the facility under construction at Natanz was a large uranium enrichment plant. They insisted, however, that they had not meant to hide it from the Agency.[3] Based on their safeguards agreement, they noted, they had no legal obligation to inform the IAEA until 180 days before the introduction of nuclear material. And on this point, they assured us, the record was clean: no nuclear material had been used, and no enrichment had taken place at the facility.
The next day we headed to Natanz, a small mountain town noted for its orchards and nestled among scattered religious shrines. Aghazadeh and his deputy, Mohammad Saeedi, were our escorts, along with a cluster of Iranian engineers and technicians. Our first stop was a nondescript sand-colored building that looked like a warehouse from the outside. Inside was a large hall divided into six concrete blocks. This, Aghazadeh announced, was a pilot enrichment facility. Roughly 20 centrifuges had been assembled. Each block would eventually house a cascade of 164 centrifuges, for a total of slightly fewer than 1,000.
Then we headed underground. Even with some foreknowledge of what to expect, we found the cavernous main hall stunning. It was completely empty but built to house more than fifty thousand centrifuges—a far more ambitious project. Aghazadeh and his colleagues were positively chatty, proud to show us around, agreeably answering the technical questions posed by Pierre and Olli.
Two aspects of that visit stood out. The first was the scale of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which required a sharp reassessment on our part. Up to this point, the hallmark of Iran’s nuclear program had been one power reactor under construction at Bushehr, for which Russia had contracted to supply the enriched uranium fuel.[4] But Natanz, when fully operational, would have the capacity to supply the fuel for two or three one-thousand megawatt reactors. What other facilities was the AEOI planning or constructing?
The second aspect was still more disconcerting. Aghazadeh told us that Iran’s centrifuge development program was entirely indigenous. The Iranians also insisted they had not used any nuclear material in testing at this site or anywhere else. Our experts were skeptical.
This skepticism was only reinforced by my meeting with the president of Iran, Sayyid Mohammad Khatami. Charming and multilingual, Khatami, a cleric and former head of Iran’s National Library, had swept to power in 1997, running on a platform of social reform. Domestically he advocated freedom of expression and supported the empowerment of civil society, and he was known internationally for his advocacy of a “Dialogue Among Civilizations.” While he had not achieved all of the promised reforms, Khatami remained popular among moderates and particularly among the Iranian youth, who came to refer to him as “The Man with the Chocolate Robe,” for the brown clothes he favored.
At our meeting, Khatami was accompanied only by Ali Akbar Salehi,[5] the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, who acted as a translator. Khatami greeted me warmly, with the traditional kiss on both cheeks. As a cleric trained in the Quran, Khatami spoke Arabic, which he did for a few minutes before shifting into Farsi, with Salehi translating. “You shouldn’t worry at all about our program,” Khatami said. “We only used inert gas in running our centrifuge cascade.”
The detail in the statement struck me as odd. President Khatami, a cleric by training, had just referred to a means of cold testing a centrifuge without using nuclear material. His point was that Iran had not violated any nuclear material reporting requirements. But why would Khatami know about testing with inert gas? I wondered.
In the months that followed, the IAEA began to uncover some answers.
1
The NCRI is an Iranian opposition group based in Paris, self-styled as a coalition of democratic Iranian individuals and groups prepared to form a provisional government if the current regime were to be toppled. Both Iran and the United States have classified the NCRI as a terrorist organization, citing its ties to the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a religious leftist affiliate of NCRI with a history of violence. The NCRI has repeatedly made allegations about Iran’s clandestine nuclear program, some of which have been substantiated by subsequent IAEA investigation. Whether the NCRI was used by Western intelligence to disseminate information about Iran’s nuclear activities was a question I often pondered.
2
In each of these three cases, the nuclear program was developed before the country was a party to the NPT.
3
Given the size of the Natanz facility, it is likely that the Iranians were not intending to “hide” it per se. Their aim, I believe, was to delay its reporting as far as legally permissible under their safeguards agreement and to delay IAEA inspection until they had completed their construction and received all the needed knowledge and technology, which were being obtained through clandestine channels due to sanctions. I was later told they were worried that declaring the Natanz facilities would expose their supply network.
4
For a decade, the United States had tried its level best, making demarches around the world, to dissuade the Russians from supplying Iran with the Bushehr reactor. The argument was that if the Iranians were to acquire a power plant, they would have a pretext for also developing fuel cycle capabilities. But the United States was not successful.
5
Salehi would later succeed Aghazadeh as the head of AEOI and vice president of Iran, and was subsequently appointed foreign minister.