[News] The Iranian Nuke Forgeries

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/
December 29, 2009


CIA Determines Documents Were Fabricated


The Iranian Nuke Forgeries

By GARETH PORTER

U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document 
published recently by the Times of London, which 
purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do 
experiments on what the newspaper described as a 
"neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, is a 
fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism 
official from 1976 to 1992, told me that 
intelligence sources say that the United States 
had nothing to do with forging the document, and 
that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources 
do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.

The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did 
not identify the source of the document. But it 
quoted "an Asian intelligence source" - a term 
some news media have used for Israeli 
intelligence officials - as confirming that his 
government believes Iran was working on a neutron 
initiator as recently as 2007.

The story of the purported Iranian document 
prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and 
European support for tougher sanctions against 
Iran and reminders of Israel's threats to attack 
Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails.

U.S. news media reporting has left the impression 
that U.S. intelligence analysts have not made up 
their mind about the document's authenticity, 
although it has been widely reported that they 
have now had a full year to assess the issue.

Giraldi's intelligence sources did not reveal all 
the reasons that led analysts to conclude that 
the purported Iran document had been fabricated 
by a foreign intelligence agency. But their 
suspicions of fraud were prompted in part by the 
source of the story, according to Giraldi.

"The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used 
extensively to publish false intelligence from 
the Israelis and occasionally from the British government," Giraldi said.

The Times is part of a Murdoch publishing empire 
that includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the 
New York Post. All Murdoch-owned news media 
report on Iran with an aggressively pro-Israeli slant.

The document itself also had a number of red 
flags suggesting possible or likely fraud.

The subject of the two-page document which the 
Times published in English translation would be 
highly classified under any state's security 
system. Yet there is no confidentiality marking 
on the document, as can be seen from the 
photograph of the Farsi-language original published by the Times.

The absence of security markings has been cited 
by the Iranian ambassador to the International 
Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, as 
evidence that the "alleged studies" documents, 
which were supposedly purloined from an alleged 
Iranian nuclear weapons-related programme early in this decade, are forgeries.

The document also lacks any information 
identifying either the issuing office or the 
intended recipients. The document refers 
cryptically to "the Centre", "the Institute", 
"the Committee", and the "neutron group".

The document's extreme vagueness about the 
institutions does not appear to match the 
concreteness of the plans, which call for hiring 
eight individuals for different tasks for very 
specific numbers of hours for a four-year time frame.

Including security markings and such identifying 
information in a document increases the 
likelihood of errors that would give the fraud away.

The absence of any date on the document also 
conflicts with the specificity of much of the 
information. The Times reported that unidentified 
"foreign intelligence agencies" had dated the 
document to early 2007, but gave no reason for that judgment.

An obvious motive for suggesting the early 2007 
date is that it would discredit the U.S. 
intelligence community's November 2007 National 
Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran 
had discontinued unidentified work on nuclear 
weapons and had not resumed it as of the time of the estimate.

Discrediting the NIE has been a major objective 
of the Israeli government for the past two years, 
and the British and French governments have supported the Israeli effort.

The biggest reason for suspecting that the 
document is a fraud is its obvious effort to 
suggest past Iranian experiments related to a 
neutron initiator. After proposing experiments on 
detecting pulsed neutrons, the document refers to 
"locations where such experiments used to be conducted".

That reference plays to the widespread 
assumption, which has been embraced by the 
International Atomic Energy Agency, that Iran had 
carried out experiments with Polonium-210 in the 
late 1980s, indicating an interest in neutron 
initiators. The IAEA referred in reports from 
2004 through 2007 to its belief that the 
experiment with Polonium-210 had potential 
relevance to making "a neutron initiator in some designs of nuclear weapons".

The National Council of Resistance of Iran 
(NCRI), the political arm of the terrorist 
organisation Mujahedeen-e Khalq, claimed in 
February 2005 that Iran's research with 
Polonium-210 was continuing and that it was now 
close to producing a neutron initiator for a nuclear weapon.

Sanger and Broad were so convinced that the 
Polonium-210 experiments proved Iran's interest 
in a neutron initiator that they referred in 
their story on the leaked document to both the 
IAEA reports on the experiments in the late 1980s 
and the claim by NCRI of continuing Iranian work on such a nuclear trigger.

What Sanger and Broad failed to report, however, 
is that the IAEA has acknowledged that it was 
mistaken in its earlier assessment that the 
Polonium-210 experiments were related to a neutron initiator.

After seeing the complete documentation on the 
original project, including complete copies of 
the reactor logbook for the entire period, the 
IAEA concluded in its Feb. 22, 2008 report that 
Iran's explanations that the Polonium-210 project 
was fundamental research with the eventual aim of 
possible application to radio isotope batteries 
was "consistent with the Agency's findings and 
with other information available to it".

The IAEA report said the issue of Polonium-210 – 
and thus the earlier suspicion of an Iranian 
interest in using it as a neutron initiator for a 
nuclear weapon - was now considered "no longer outstanding".

New York Times reporters David Sanger and William 
J. Broad reported U.S. intelligence officials as 
saying the intelligence analysts "have yet to 
authenticate the document". Sanger and Broad 
explained the failure to do so, however, as a 
result of excessive caution left over from the 
CIA's having failed to brand as a fabrication the 
document purporting to show an Iraqi effort to buy uranium in Niger.

The Washington Post's Joby Warrick dismissed the 
possibility that the document might be found to 
be fraudulent. "There is no way to establish the 
authenticity or original source of the document...," wrote Warrick.

But the line that the intelligence community had 
authenticated it evidently reflected the Barack 
Obama administration's desire to avoid 
undercutting a story that supports its efforts to 
get Russian and Chinese support for tougher sanctions against Iran.

This is not the first time that Giraldi has been 
tipped off by his intelligence sources on forged 
documents. Giraldi identified the individual or 
office responsible for creating the two most 
notorious forged documents in recent U.S. intelligence history.

In 2005, Giraldi identified Michael Ledeen, the 
extreme right-wing former consultant to the 
National Security Council and the Pentagon, as an 
author of the fabricated letter purporting to 
show Iraqi interest in purchasing uranium from 
Niger. That letter was used by the George W. Bush 
administration to bolster its false case that 
Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons programme.

Giraldi also identified officials in the "Office 
of Special Plans" who worked under Undersecretary 
of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith as having 
forged a letter purportedly written by Hussein's 
intelligence director, Tahir Jalail Habbush 
al-Tikriti, to Hussein himself referring to an 
Iraqi intelligence operation to arrange for an 
unidentified shipment from Niger.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and 
journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising 
in U.S. national security policy. The paperback 
edition of his latest book, 
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520250044/counterpunchmaga>Perils 
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to 
War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20091229/98c8e6a3/attachment.htm>