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DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

A couple of puzzling occurrences in the West this week touching on the controversy over Iran’s nuclear goals can be traced to a single event in Tehran.
This event was behind the otherwise inexplicable remark by British Prime Minister David Cameron on August 4. In his first British “PM Direct” event in Brighton, he listed reasons for keeping lines open to Turkey, one of which was, “like the fact that Iran has got a nuclear weapon.”
Was this a slip of the tongue by an inexperienced leader – or a giveaway?
The latter, say DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence and Washington sources. Cameron spoke out of knowledge gained from his last intelligence update before his appearance.
That day, too, in Washington, a group of regular White House correspondents were invited to a briefing on the Iranian nuclear issue with President Barack Obama‘s policy team leaders. To their surprise, the president himself walked in. He proceeded to make a strong point of sanctions and international isolation succeeding better than expected in hurting the Iranian economy and making the Tehran regime’s day-to-day life more difficult.
He explained his tactics of diplomatic engagement, which have been depicted as failing, were not intended to lead to dialogue with Iran, but to isolate the Islamic Republic internationally.
In Obama’s view, that tactic was beginning to work.
The reporters took this as a reference to the unilateral sanctions the European Union had imposed on Iran’s energy and banking industries and the widening rift between Moscow and Tehran.
White House mystifications
The President and his advisers belittled Iran’s consent to resume talks with the P5-plus-1 (the US, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany) next month as nothing important or new. Washington saw no cause for making dramatic gestures or concessions to win Iran around, he said.
Just the reverse: The president commented wryly that the Iranians were masters of deception and he had no expectation they would come to terms on their nuclear objectives.
The correspondents present were not let into the reason for Barack Obama’s personal appearance at a fairly routine briefing or what was behind his remarks.
In its editorial two days later, The New York Times highlighted two lines from the presidential briefing:
“It is very important to put before the Iranians a clear set of steps that we would consider sufficient to show that they are not pursuing nuclear weapons” was one. And the other was: “They should know what they can say ‘yes’ to.”
The New York Times them commented: “So we were surprised that Mr. Obama would not provide specifics on what the ‘pathway’ might entail. That’s the kind of detail that Iranian leaders need to know now when they appear to be debating whether to engage Washington. If Mr. Obama didn’t want to share the information publicly with journalists, we hope he is sharing it privately with Tehran.”
DEBKA-Net-Weekly confirms that, while making it clear by half-a-dozen artful formulations that there was no new US diplomatic offensive in the offing, the strategists who stayed behind to answer the journalists’ questions after the president left, left them unsatisfied about the purpose of the odd briefing.
Ahmadinejad drops a virtual N-Bomb
Our Washington sources, however, tie Obama’s remarks to a revealing comment by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s chief of staff Esfandyar Rahim Mashai on July 31, to which the US president felt bound to respond. What Mashai said was this:
“The West raised no objections to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s candid avowal that the Islamic Republic could build a nuclear bomb.”
What avowal?
On February 7, said Mashai, Ahmadinejad made a speech at the National Center for Laser Science and Technology. This talk went unnoticed by US intelligence agencies, he claimed.
“One of the points Dr. Ahmadinejad made during his visit to this center was the possibility of enriching (uranium) to 100 percent, which means building an atom bomb.”
“Interestingly, not a single foreign publication made a hullabaloo or raised an uproar (over this dramatic revelation),” Mashai noted. “This shows,” he concluded, “that they (the US) are not worried about an atom bomb, because essentially, Dr. Ahmadinejad said this to test them (the US) in order to see what degree of worry they have about Iran producing an atom bomb.”
Five days later, President Obama made his worry known to Tehran by means of his otherwise unexplained press briefing.
In the meantime, US intelligence analysts and Iran strategists had been busy trying to figure out why the admission of an Iranian nuclear bomb capability had been allowed to slip off Ahmadinejad’s well-oiled tongue and why he had let his chief of staff Iran go to the trouble of bringing the hitherto strenuously-denied goal of Iran’s nuclear program out in the open.
Obama picks it up and throws it back
Mashai was the most high-ranking, authoritative Iranian official to publicly put into words the goal of Iran’s enrichment program as being to build an “atom bomb.”
Every Iranian official has to date emphasized the purely peaceful nature of their nuclear program.
Yet Mashai deliberately called attention to the little-noticed Iranian president’s remark about “enriching (uranium) to 100 percent which means building an atom bomb.” (In Farsi: ke maani an sakht-e bomb-e atomi ast.)
On August 3, President Obama learned that what the Iranian president had been after was a sort of oral nuclear test designed to take the measure of the Obama administration’s potential response to the real thing.
If Tehran got away with that test, US intelligence agencies reckoned, it would continue to go forward steadily up to the point where Iranian leaders judged the time right and its interests best served by shifting from a spoken test to a nuclear test proper.
In taking over the White House news briefing in person, Obama sought to show Tehran that its challenge would meet a strong response.
A week later, on Wednesday Aug. 11, no less than Iran’s Chief of Staff Gen. Hassan Hassan Firouz-Abadi reproved the president’s senior aide for committing “a crime against national security”, thereby confirming that the presidential challenge had been a test of America’s responsiveness.
The general’s reproof also had an ulterior motive linked to the infighting within the Iranian revolutionary regime, which is exclusively revealed in the next article in this issue.

Column One: Guide to the Perplexed.

Photo by: Associated Press

By CAROLINE B. GLICK
08/13/2010 15:25

Are there any circumstances in which US President Barack Obama will order a military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations?

John Bolton: Russia’s Loading of Nuke Fuel Into Iran Plant Means Aug. 21 Deadline for Israeli Attack.

News that Russia will load nuclear fuel rods into an Iranian reactor has touched off a countdown to a point of no return, a deadline by which Israel would have to launch an attack on Iran’s Bushehr reactor before it becomes effectively “immune” to any assault, says former Bush administration U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton.

Once the fuel rods are loaded, Bolton told Fox News on Friday afternoon, “it makes it essentially immune from attack by Israel. Because once the rods are in the reactor an attack on the reactor risks spreading radiation in the air, and perhaps into the water of the Persian Gulf.”

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared in March that Russia would start the Bushehr reactor this summer. But the announcement from a spokesman for Russia’s state atomic agency to Reuters Friday sent international diplomats scrambling to head off a crisis.

The story immediately became front-page news in Israel, which has laid precise plans to carry out an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities while going along with President Obama’s plans to use international sanctions and diplomatic persuasion to convince Iran’s clerics not to go nuclear.

Bolton made it clear that it is widely assumed that any Israeli attack on the Bushehr reactor must take place before the reactor is loaded with fuel rods.

“If they’re going to do it that’s the window that they have,” Bolton declared. “Otherwise as I said before, once the rods are in the reactor, if you attack the reactor you’re going to open it up and radiation will escape at least into the atmosphere and possibly into the waters of the Persian Gulf.

“So most people think that neither Israel nor the United States, come to that, would attack the reactor after it’s been fueled.”

Bolton cited the 1981 Israeli attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor outside Baghdad and the September 2007 Israeli attack on a North Korean reactor being built in Syria. Both of those strikes came before fuel rods were loaded into those reactors.

“So if it’s going to happen in Bushehr it has to happen before the fuel rods go in,” Bolton said.

The conversation that touched off the de facto deadline for Israeli military action was a telephone conversation with wire services involving Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for Rosatom, the Russian Energy State Nuclear Corp.

Novikov said: “The fuel will be loaded on Aug 21. This is the start of the physical launch” of the reactor.

“From that moment the Bushehr plant will be officially considered a nuclear-energy installation,” Novikov said, adding that the head of Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko, will visit Bushehr Aug. 21 to conduct a ceremony for the event.
According to Bolton, once the reactor is operational, it is only a matter of time before it begins producing plutonium that could be used in a nuclear weapon.

“And in the normal operation of this reactor, in just a fairly short period of time, you could get substantial amounts of plutonium to use as nuclear weapons,” Bolton told Fox.

Russia, which is operating under a $1 billion contract with Iran, has spent more than a decade building the reactor. If Russia moves forward with its plan to fuel the reactor, it could be seen as a major setback to the Obama administration’s strategy of engaging Russian leaders in order to win their cooperation.

“The U.S. urged them not to send the Iranian’s fuel rods,” Bolton said. “They did that. The Obama administration has urged them not to insert the fuel rods in the reactors, but as they’ve just announced that will begin next week. What that does over time is help Iran get another route to nuclear weapons through the plutonium they could reprocess out of the spent fuel rods.”

The developments mean Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon may face a stark choice: Attack the Bushehr reactor in the next 8 days, or allow it to become operational despite the certainty it would greatly enhance Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons.

Russian leaders have said the Bushehr reactor project is being closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog group. According to Iran’s ISNA news agency, IAEA inspectors will be on hand to observe the fuel-rod loading process that is now scheduled to begin Aug. 21.

According to Russian officials, Iran has promised in writing to send all spent fuel rods from Bushehr back to Russia for reprocessing, to ensure they cannot be used for nuclear weapons.

Bolton said the reactor has been “a hole” in American foreign policy for over a decade.

The failure to demand it be shut down began in the Bush years, he said, and continues with the Obama administration “under what I believe is the mistaken theory that Iran is entitled to the peaceful use of nuclear energy.”

“I don’t think Iran is entitled to that, or I don’t think we ought to allow it to happen, because they’re manifestly violating any number of obligations under the non-proliferation treaty not to seek nuclear weapons. But this has been a hole in American policy for some number of years, and Iran and Russia are obviously exploiting it,” Bolton said.

Russia’s move would put Iran “in a much better position overall,” he said, adding, “I think this is a very delicate point, as I say, it closes off to the Israelis one possible target for pre-emptive military action.

U.N. sanctions against Iran, he said, “have not had and will not have any material effect on Iran’s push to have deliverable nuclear weapons.”

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Russian S-300 interceptors now in Abkhazia

US and Israeli military sources told debkafile Thursday, Aug. 12, that a threat from Georgia was not the reason why Russian posted advanced S-300 interceptor batteries Russia in Abkhazia and air defense weapons in South Ossetia on the northern shore of the Black Sea -as Moscow officially maintained, but rather possible moves by the US and/or Israel against Iran and its nuclear facilities.
Georgia’s armed forces do not run to the sophisticated warplanes, missiles or drones that would warrant establishing the high-powered S-300 interceptors for defending the breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia.Ordinary air defense batteries would do for deterrence.

Therefore, US military sources believe Moscow placed the sophisticated batteries on the Black Sea shore more as a counterweight for the US Sixth Fleet warships present in the Mediterranean and Black Seas and the two big American bases close to the latter waterway – the Mikhail Kogalniceanu Air Base near Constanta, Romania, and the Bezmer Air Base used by the US Air Force just 50 kilometers from the southern shore of the Black Sea.
Their location gives the US Air Force the freedom to operate over both the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
Our military sources disclose that attention was drawn in Moscow and Tehran to the exercises the Israeli Air Force has been conducting from the two American bases to simulate strikes against Iran’s concealed nuclear sites.

They noticed in particular the Israeli Yasur CH-53 helicopter which crashed in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania on July 26, killing six Israeli airman and a Romanian flight captain. It was obvious to Russian and Iranian observers from the way the CH-53 crashed and the veil of secrecy clamped down by Israeli authorities that it had been engaged in practicing touch-and-go attacks on nuclear sites which the Iranians have holed up in tunnels burrowed in the sides of lofty mountain precipices.
DEBKfile’s intelligence sources do not doubt that Russian placed the top-of-the line air defense systems in Abkhazia for intercepting flights taking off from the American bases in Bulgaria and Romania and heading east over Georgia and Azerbaijan and on to the Caspian and Black Seas to northern Iran.
Byt deploying the S-300s, Moscow has put paid to any plans Israel may have had for using this northern route for attacking Iran.
The deployment was also a message of reassurance from Moscow to Tehran: Although Russia is withholding the advanced S-300 interceptors from Iran it has its own methods for blocking an American or Israel raid on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities.