WASHINGTON - Olli Heinonen, the Finnish nuclear engineer who resigned last
Thursday after five years as deputy director for safeguards at the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was the driving force in turning the
United Nations nuclear watchdog into a mechanism to support UN Security Council
sanctions against Iran.
Heinonen was instrumental in making a collection of intelligence documents
showing a purported Iranian nuclear weapons research program the central focus
of the IAEA's work on Iran. The result was to shift much of opinion among
Western publics to the view
that Iran had been pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program.
But his embrace of the intelligence documents provoked a fierce political
struggle within the secretariat of the IAEA, because other officials believed
the documents were fraudulent.
Heinonen took over the safeguards department in July 2005 - the same month the
George W Bush administration first briefed top IAEA officials on the
intelligence collection.
The documents portrayed a purported nuclear weapons research program,
originally called the "Green Salt" project, which included efforts to redesign
the nose cone of the Shahab-3 missile, high explosives apparently for the
purpose of triggering a nuclear weapon and designs for a uranium conversion
facility. Later, the IAEA referred to the purported Iranian activities simply
as the "alleged studies".
The Bush administration was pushing the IAEA to use the documents to accuse
Iran of having had a covert nuclear weapons program. The administration was
determined to ensure that the IAEA governing board would support referring Iran
to the UN Security Council for action on sanctions, as part of a larger
strategy to force Iran to abandon its uranium-enrichment program.
Long-time IAEA director general Mohammed ElBaradei and other officials involved
in investigating and reporting on Iran's nuclear program were immediately
skeptical about the authenticity of the documents. According to two Israeli
authors, Yossi Melman and Meir Javadanfar, several IAEA officials told them in
interviews in 2005 and 2006 that senior officials of the agency believed the
documents had been "fabricated by a Western intelligence organization".
Heinonen, on the other hand, supported the strategy of exploiting the
collection of intelligence documents to put Iran on the defensive. His approach
was not to claim that the documents' authenticity had been proven but to shift
the burden of proof to Iran, demanding that it provide concrete evidence that
it had not carried out the activities portrayed in the documents.
From the beginning, Iran's permanent representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar
Soltanieh, denounced the documents as fabrications. In governing board meetings
and interviews, Soltanieh pointed to several indicators, including the absence
of official stamps showing receipt of the document by a government office and
the absence of any security markings.
The tensions between Heinonen and the senior officials over the intelligence
documents intensified in early 2008, when Iran provided detailed documentation
to the agency disproving a key premise of the intelligence documents.
Kimia Maadan, a private Iranian company, was shown in the intelligence
documents as having designed a uranium conversion facility as part of the
alleged military nuclear weapons research program. Iran proved to the
satisfaction of those investigating the issue, however, that Kimia Maadan had
been created by Iran's civilian atomic energy agency solely to carry out a
uranium ore processing project and had gone out of business before it fulfilled
the contract.
Senior IAEA officials then demanded that Heinonen distance the organization
from the documents by inserting a disclaimer in future agency reports on Iran
that it could not vouch for the authenticity of the documents.
Instead, Heinonen gave a "technical briefing" for IAEA member countries in
February 2008 featuring a diagram on which the ore-processing project and the
uranium-processing project were both carried out by the firm and shared the
same military numbering system.
The IAEA report published just three days earlier established, however, that
the ore-processing project number - 5/15 - had been assigned to it not by the
military but by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. And the date on which
it was assigned was August 1999 - many months before the purported nuclear
weapons program was shown to have been organized.
Heinonen carefully avoided endorsing the documents as authentic. He even
acknowledged that Iran had spotted technical errors in the one-page design for
a small-scale facility for uranium conversion, and that there were indeed
"technical inconsistencies" in the diagram.
He also admitted Iran had provided open-source publications showing spherical
firing systems similar to the one depicted in the intelligence documents on
alleged tests of high explosives.
Heinonen suggested in his presentation that the agency did not yet have
sufficient information to come to any firm conclusions about those documents.
In the May 2008 IAEA report, however, there was no mention of any such caveats
about the documents.
Instead, the report used language that was clearly intended to indicate that
the agency had confidence in the intelligence documents: "The documentation
presented to Iran appears to have been derived from multiple sources over
different periods of time, is detailed in content and appears to be generally
consistent."
That language, on which Heinonen evidently insisted, did not represent a
consensus among senior IAEA officials. One senior official suggested to Inter
Press Service in September 2009 that the idea that documents came from
different sources was not completely honest.
"There are intelligence-sharing networks," said the official. It was possible
that one intelligence organization could have shared the documents with others,
he explained. "That gives us multiple sources consistent over time," said the
official. The same official said of the collection of intelligence documents,
"It's not difficult to cook up."
Nevertheless, Heinonen's position had clearly prevailed. And in the final year
of ElBaradei's leadership of the agency, the Safeguards Department became an
instrument for member states - especially France, Britain, Germany and Israel -
to put pressure on ElBaradei to publish summaries of intelligence reports
portraying Iran as actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
The active pressure of the United States and its allies on behalf of the hard
line toward Iran was the main source of Heinonen's power on the issue. Those
states have been feeding intelligence on alleged covert Iranian nuclear
activities to the Safeguards Division for years, and Heinonen knew that
ElBaradei could not afford to confront the US-led coalition openly over the
issue.
The Bush administration had threatened to replace ElBaradei in 2004 and had
reluctantly accepted his re-election as director general in 2005. ElBaradei was
not strong enough to threaten to fire the main antagonist over the issue of
alleged studies.
ElBaradei's successor Yukio Amano is even less capable of adopting an
independent position on the issues surrounding the documents. The political
dynamics of the IAEA ensure that Heinonen's successor is certain to continue
the same line on the Iran nuclear issue and intelligence documents as
Heinonen's.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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