Ex-Envoy’s Account Clarifies Iran’s 2003 Nuclear Decision
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WASHINGTON, Jul 30 2013 (IPS) -
Newly published recollections by the former French ambassador to Iran
suggest that Iran was not running a covert nuclear weapons programme
that it then decided to halt in late 2003, as concluded by U.S.
intelligence in 2007.
Ambassador
Francois Nicoullaud recounted conversations with high-ranking Iranian
officials indicating that Tehran’s then nuclear policy chief – and now
president-elect – Hassan Rouhani did not know what research projects
relating to nuclear weapons had been carried out over the years.
“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were
surprised by the extent of the activities." -- former French ambassador
to Iran Francois Nicoullaud
The
conversations described by Nicoullaud in a Jul. 26 New York Times op-ed
also portray Rouhani as having difficulty getting individual
researchers to comply with an order to halt all research related to
nuclear weapons.
The
picture of Iranian nuclear policy in 2003 drawn by Nicoullaud is
different from the one in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which
concluded that Iran had halted “its nuclear weapons program”. That
conclusion implied that Iranian government leadership had organised a
programme of research and development aimed at producing a nuclear
weapon.
Nicoullaud
recalled that a high-ranking Iranian official confided to him in late
October 2003 that Rouhani had just “issued a general circular asking all
Iranian departments and agencies, civilian and military, to report in
detail about their past and ongoing nuclear activities.”
The
conversation came immediately after Rouhani had concluded an agreement
with the foreign ministers of the UK, France and Germany on Oct. 21,
2003, Nicoullaud recalled.
The
same official explained that “the main difficulty Rouhani and his team
were encountering was learning exactly what was happening in a system as
secretive as Iran’s,” wrote Nicoullaud.
A
few weeks after, the French ambassador learned from a second official,
whom he described as “a close friend of Rouhani”, that Rouhani’s nuclear
policy team had issued instructions to halt projects relating to
nuclear weapons.
The
Iranian official said the team was “having a hard time”, because,
“[p]eople resist their instructions,” according to Nicoullaud. The
official remarked that it was difficult to “convince researchers to
abruptly terminate projects they had been conducting for years”.
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In an e-mail to IPS, Nicoullaud said he did not believe the Iranian
government had ever approved a nuclear weapons programme. “The first
challenge for Rouhani when he took hold of the nuclear,” said
Nicoullaud, “must have been to get a clear picture of what was going on
in Iran in the nuclear field.”
Rouhani
had been the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC)
since 1989 and would not only have known about but would have been
involved in any government decision to establish a nuclear weapons
programme.
“I
guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were
surprised by the extent of the activities,” Nicoullaud told IPS.
Nicoullaud’s
recollections are consistent with published evidence that nuclear
weapons-related research projects had begun without any government
authorisation.
Despite
an Iranian policy that ruled out nuclear weapons, many Iranian
officials believed that a nuclear weapons “capability” would confer
benefits on Iran without actually having nuclear weapons.
But
the meaning of such a capability was the subject of ongoing debate.
Nasser Hadian, a well-connected Tehran University political scientist,
wrote in late 2003 about two schools of thought on the option of having a
“nuclear weapons capability” but not the weapons themselves. One
definition of that option was that Iran should have only the capability
to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, Hadian explained, while the other
called for Iran to have “all the necessary elements and capabilities for
producing weapons”.
That
debate had evidently not been officially resolved by a government
decision before Rouhani’s appointment. And in the absence of a clear
statement of policy, figures associated with research centres with
military and defence ministry ties began in the latter of the 1990s to
create their own nuclear weapons-related research projects without the
knowledge of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC).
Such
projects were apparently begun during a period when the Supreme
National Security Council was not exercising tight control over the
Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), the Ministry of Defence or
the military industrial complex controlled by Defence Industries
Organisation related to nuclear weapons.
By
the mid-1990s, AEOI was already taking advantage of the lax supervision
of its operations to take actions that had significant policy
implications without authorisation from the SNSC.
Seyed
Hossein Mousavian, then the spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiating
team, recalls in his memoirs that in January 2004, Rouhani revealed to
him that AEOI had not informed the SNSC about a policy-relevant matter
as important as the purchase of the P2 centrifuge designs from the A. Q.
Khan network in 1995. AEOI officials had misled him, Rohani said, by
claiming that “they had found some information about P2 centrifuges on
the Internet and are studying it!”
When
Rouhani was named to take over as nuclear policy coordinator in early
October 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was
demanding a full accounting by Iran of all of its nuclear activities.
Rouhani’s circular to all civilian and military offices about nuclear
work came soon after he had promised the IAEA that Iran would change its
policy to one of full cooperation with the IAEA.
At
the same time, Rouhani moved to tighten up the policy loophole that had
allowed various entities to start weapons-related nuclear research.
Rouhani
anticipated resistance from the bureaucratic entities that had nuclear
weapons-related research projects from the beginning. He recalled in a
later interview that he had told President Mohammad Khatami that he
expected that there would be problems in carrying out the new nuclear
policy, including “sabotage”.
The
sequence of events surrounding Rouhani’s new nuclear policy indicates
that he used Khamenei’s public posture that nuclear weapons were
forbidden according to Islamic law to ensure compliance with the ban on
such research projects.
Around
the same time that Rouhani ordered the bureaucracy to report on its
nuclear-related activities and to stop any research on military
applications of nuclear power in late October, Khamenei gave a speech in
which he said, “In contrast to the propaganda of our enemies,
fundamentally we are against any production of weapons of mass
destruction in any form.”
Three
days later, Rouhani told students at Shahrud Industrial University that
Khamenei considered nuclear weapons as religiously illegal.
That
same week, in an interview with San Francisco Chronicle correspondent
Robert Collier, Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of the conservative
newspaper Kayhan and an adviser to Khamenei, alluded to tensions between
the Rouhani team and those researchers who were not responding to or
resisting the Rouhani circular.
Khamenei
was forcing those working on such projects to “admit that it is
forbidden under Islam”, Shariatmadari said. He also suggested that the
researchers resisting the ban had been working “clandestinely”.
After
the U.S. intelligence community concluded in November 2007 estimate
that Iran had halted a “nuclear weapons program”, a U.S. intelligence
official said key pieces of evidence were intercepted communications
from at least one senior military officer and others expressing dismay
in 2007 that nuclear weapons-related work had been shut down in 2003.
But
U.S. intelligence officials said nothing about what kind of work was
being shut down, and revealed no further evidence that it was a “nuclear
weapons program” under the control of the government.
Nicoullaud’s
recollections suggest that the 2007 estimate glossed over a crucial
distinction between an Iranian “nuclear weapons program” and research
projects that had not been authorised or coordinated by the Iranian
regime.
Nicoullaud
told IPS he believes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC),
which controls Iran’s ballistic missile programme, was also carrying out
a clandestine nuclear weapons programme. The IRGC’s own ministry had
been merged, however, with the old Ministry of Defence to form a new
ministry in 1989, which implies that any such clandestine programme
would have necessarily involved a wider military conspiracy.
*Gareth
Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S.
national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for
journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan
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