Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcast: 31/08/2006
Reporter: Tony Jones
Tony Jones speaks to the author of a report detailing the nuclear ambitions of Iran.
Transcript
TONY JONES: Just how close, though, is Iran to building a nuclear bomb? And what's the real timetable for stopping it? Our next guest has just completed a detailed report for the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. It's called 'Assessing Iran's Nuclear Program' and it sets out the known evidence. Most surprising is the detailed account of the Iranian defector who in 2004 walked into a US embassy in the Middle East with a laptop full of what appeared to be secret documents on the Iranian nuclear program.
Designs for rebuilding Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missile, evidently to carry a spherical nuclear warhead, designs for high-explosive detonators and for a 400 metre shaft with a control team 10 kilometres away and evidently designed for an underground nuclear test.
So, was this mysterious defector the genuine article? Or could he be as flawed as the Iraqi defector the CIA called 'Curveball'? Joining us now in London is the report's author, Mark Fitzgerald. He's spent 26 years in the US Foreign Service, including as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Non-Proliferation.
Mark Fitzgerald, thanks for being there.
MARK FITZPATRICK, FORMER US OFFICIAL AND NUCLEAR EXPERT: Sure. Fitzpatrick.
TONY JONES: Fitzpatrick. I beg your pardon.
Can you start by telling us what is known of this mysterious Iranian defector? Either he's the most important defector that we know of, or he's a fraudulent defector?
MARK FITZPATRICK: Well, not too much is known in open sources about the person who turned over the laptop. The person who turned it over was not necessarily the owner of the laptop. The person who turned it over was subjected to lie detector tests, was quizzed heavily. There were no indications that he was planted or, you know, that this was the work of somebody like a 'Curveball' or somebody working for some other intelligence agency. But this is still a single source of evidence, so it would be imprudent to base decisions on this single source, no matter how valuable and deep it is. I mean, there is an incredible wealth of information that was on the laptop.
TONY JONES: Yes, can we talk a little bit about some of that information, or what it actually contained? We mentioned some of the things, but there were thousands of documents evidently in it?
MARK FITZPATRICK: I think you've ticked off some of the major things. The plans to put a spherical device on the Shahab-3 ballistic missile which would bring a nuclear weapons delivery capability to the foothills of Europe. The plans for a test shaft, the plans for detonators that very much had all the characteristics of an implosion device. Additional, there was information regarding an infrastructure of a front company by, with an Iranian military official who was involved in various aspects of the nuclear program, not just these bomb-making aspects, but some of the other aspects - uranium mining, uranium conversion. So you see throughout the Iranian nuclear program indicators of military involvement.
TONY JONES: I think this was called Project 111. All these things have names like that, I suppose, but this one was called 111.
MARK FITZPATRICK: Yes.
TONY JONES: What exactly do the documents - apart from the front company - tell us about Iranian military involvement in this?
MARK FITZPATRICK: Well again, most of this documentation is classified and not available to the general public, or to me as an independent researcher. But from what I have been able to gather from open sources is that this was a front company that was set up for the explicit purpose of providing, in the first instance, a source of uranium for the Iranian military and then this front company was then involved with one aspect of converting this uranium into the material that can then be enriched. Now it wasn't involved in every aspect and so we don't know whether there's more information to be found, or whether they just stopped it there.
Also, this information all stops in 2003 and that happens to be the time when the spotlight of international attention turned on Iran with all the inspections by the IAEA. So the question is: did they stop the military involvement then or did they just go deeper underground? I don't see any signs of a strategic change in Iran that would have made them stop the military involvement. I think they are just lying low for the time being, or maybe they've tightened their security and we just haven't been able to find anything more out about it.
TONY JONES: Do you get a sense for just how seriously the American intelligence authorities and indeed, as I believe this information has been passed onto other members of the UN Security Council or at least elements of it, how seriously they are taking it? Whether they believe the documents are genuine and the defector is genuine?
MARK FITZPATRICK: They believe the documents are genuine and the defector is genuine but they always are also are subjecting it to a counterfactual analysis that maybe, just maybe, it's not. So they are looking at it from all angles, making sure that there's not another intelligence failure. When I say 'they' I think you've correctly indicated this is not just the United States intelligence agencies - this is the British, the French, the Germans, the other members of the Security Council. Russia has seen much of the evidence - Russia looks at it with more scepticism. They apparently were not given the full range of the documentation. But given that Russia is wary to go down any road that could eventually lead to conflict at its doorstep, they are looking a bit more sceptically than the other intelligence agencies are.
TONY JONES: I understand from your report that the Iranians themselves are describing this as falsified information. It's obviously been put to them presumably by the Atomic Energy Agency?
MARK FITZPATRICK: Yes. The International Atomic Energy Agency has been trying to pursue many of the leads that were given to them by means of this evidence. And some of which was corroborated by other evidence that the IAEA has picked up on its own. For example, one of the key individuals involved in this project 111, a gentleman named Fakhrizadeh, had been someone known to the IEA for his involvement in procurement activities for the Iranian nuclear program. To all of these inquiries Iran just says it's falsified, we're not going to answer these questions. They've closed the door on the IEA investigations. But the IEA is pretty dogged in its pursuit and I think it is finding other ways to try and get at the truth here.
TONY JONES: Let's look a little closer at some of the detail, because if it indeed is true that designs were there to convert the Shahab-3 missile that would be extremely worrying. The question is: did these designs get off the drawing board? Does anyone have any idea?
MARK FITZPATRICK: That's one of the unknowns. As I said, this trail of evidence goes cold at the end of 2003 before it is known whether these plans ever got off the drawing board and I think that's very important to stress that whether actual work is taking place operationally in any factories is just unknown. It is also unknown whether Iran's missiles, the Shahab-3, could even carry a nuclear weapon. We don't know anything about Iran's nuclear weapons designs. We can presume that perhaps they got the same weapons design that Libya got from the AQ Khan black market network, but that design would not fit on what is known about the Shahab-3 missile, so Iran would have to do some work to miniaturise the warhead or to otherwise modify the missile and they have been doing some missile modification but, as far as I know, it is not known whether the nuclear weapon would fit aboard the modified Shahab-3.
TONY JONES: OK. What about this 400m test shaft, because obviously the whole situation would change, the Security Council's position, the United States's position, the possibility of attacks on Iran if indeed they were ever to test a nuclear weapon?
MARK FITZPATRICK: Oh, indeed. That would be - well, there's your smoking gun. I mean, a couple of things: one, they are still several years away from being able to actually produce a nuclear weapon. They don't have the fissile material, the 25 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon. So, that day is about four years off at the earliest. And secondly, this test shaft, there's not too much known about that. This apparently was something that was found in forensic investigation of the laptop. It wasn't one of the documents on the laptop, but when you go in and find out what was erased earlier at some point apparently this is what was on there and it does seem to have been a test shaft. As I say, not much is known about it.
TONY JONES: What happens if you actually put this information from the laptop together with the information that the IEAE already knew about and that is the nuclear black market material at a they acquired from AQ Khan and his network in Pakistan?
MARK FITZPATRICK: Where you have putting all this information together is a series of places where there is a military connection with the Iranian nuclear program and I counted up 10 different areas here, from the missile to the implosion device to the test shaft to the military involvement in mining and milling, military involvement in uranium conversion, military involvement in production of components for centrifuge, the black market plans that Iran received for reconversion and casting of uranium metal in hemispheres that can only be the - the purpose can only be for a nuclear weapon. So there obviously was a systematic and coordinated military involvement in the nuclear program. Now, don't know whether much of this materialised, don't know whether it has stopped. We just know that there was a coordinated effort.
TONY JONES: Let's just go back for a moment to this extraordinary defector and the Middle East embassy that he walked into with all this information. I imagine - no-one knows who he is, and I imagine beyond that he must be being kept in a very secure place - but he'd be precisely the sort of person you might bring out in public at some point if you wanted to make a public case for bombing Iranian facilities?
MARK FITZPATRICK: I think it's unlikely that the defector would be brought out in public. The defector undoubtedly has relatives in Iran. Undoubtedly has legitimate fears for personal safety and of the family involved. I think the most important evidence is the actual documents that were found on the laptop, many of which have been shared with the IAEA which is the proper way of pursuing this investigation.
I don't think there's a need right now to flash documents up on the screen at the UN Security Council the way Adlai Stevenson did back at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.
TONY JONES: Or Colin Powell famously before the invasion of Iran.
MARK FITZPATRICK: Yes, yes. Well for one thing, I think any talk about military action in Iran could not rest on this documentation. There would have to be much more and I think there are many diplomatic steps to be pursued before military action could be considered, and even then I think there are so many downsides to it.
TONY JONES: Yes, we'll come to that in a moment, but one of the interesting things you point out is that policy makers in Washington - some of them, at least, powerful ones presumably - are inclined to listen to Israel's worst-case scenario, which is that Iran could have a nuclear weapon by some time next year?
MARK FITZPATRICK: They are inclined to listen to that. Some of the policy makers in Washington think that their own CIA has been leaning over backwards in the other direction, being too cautious about looking at worst-case scenarios for Iran. But when I've talked with Israeli analysts I can't find how they could ever get to a bomb by the end of next year, unless Iran stole the basic fissile material from some place. So, I think the worst-case analysis that I've seen that really makes sense would be about, well, I guess 2008, that's two years from now. That happens to coincide with the end of the Bush Administration so maybe they would think there's a need to take some action by then.
TONY JONES: The other thing - sorry to interrupt you, Mark Fitzpatrick - the other thing you point out, is that they are getting better, the Iranians. Their technology is improving and particularly the cascades which are used to actually produce enriched uranium?
MARK FITZPATRICK: Exactly. They have been improving their capability. Now, when I wrote this report it looked like Iran was moving pretty fast. That was at the beginning of the summer. Since then, they slowed down. Now, we will be getting another indication today of the status of the program, but it has not made as much progress as Iran had portrayed in the spring. And one important point about this worst-case analysis: Iran has been closing the door to inspections. They still accord the basic legal rights that are demanded of them in the NPT to let the inspectors see what they're doing, but they have been harassing inspectors, only providing single-entry visas, denying some inspectors the right to come there.
So, it's becoming harder and harder for the inspectors to know the status of Iran's program. And this actually works against Iran because if the world doesn't know the status of their program, then it's necessary for policy makers to leap to worst-case assumptions. It would be much better for Iran to let everyone know if, in fact, their program is not so far along, then there would be more time for diplomacy.
TONY JONES: It doesn't look like it's about to happen though, with a statement from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
MARK FITZPATRICK: That's right. Ahmadinejad's statements have been very defiant. In addition to not suspending enrichment, as the UN mandated, Iran hasn't cooperated with the IEA as the UN mandated, nor has it fulfilled and UN mandate to implement what is called the additional protocol, the strengthened safeguard provisions that provide additional access to the IAEA.
TONY JONES: OK, Mark Fitzpatrick - and I'll say that again, sorry to get your name wrong at the beginning - we thank you very much for coming in and joining us tonight and I think we'll stay in touch.
MARK FITZPATRICK: You're welcome.
