It seems some of the background in this case has been left out - namely, that the CIA had previously (and unwittingly) provided other states with detailed blueprints for nuclear weapons - specifically, information key to constructing the high-explosive lens and positioning them around the plutonium sphere that sits at the center of nuclear weapons.
There are allegations that some designs were previously provided as part of a CIA sting operation, and that certain key components were mis-drawn on the blueprints - but this latter fact was apparently known to the recipients - see NYT Reporter James Risen in "State of War." Excerpted here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk...
However, Iran has no capacity to construct plutonium cores - that tends to require a dedicated reactor - technically:
"Weapon-grade plutonium (WGPu)-plutonium that typically contains 6 percent or less of the isotopes Pu-240 and Pu-242, isotopes that makes design of nuclear weapons increasingly more difficult. WGPU is created when U-238 is irradiated in a nuclear reactor for only a short period of time."
In order to make a powerful nuclear weapon that can fit on a missile, it is generally thought necessary to use tritium as a booster - technically:
"To fission more of a given amount of fissile material, a small amount of material that can undergo fusion, deuterium and tritium (D-T) gas, can be placed inside the core of a fission device. Here, just as the fission chain reaction gets underway, the D-T gas undergoes fusion, releasing an intense burst of high-energy neutrons (along with a small amount of fusion energy as well) that fissions the surrounding material more completely. This approach, called boosting, is used in most modem nuclear weapons to maintain their yields while greatly decreasing their overall size and weight."
(Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction, December 1993, OTA-BP-ISC-115)
The key point here is that Iran has neither Pu-239 nor tritium generating capabilities (unlike perhaps the other nuclear powers - Israel, Pakistan, and India) - and hence is no more of a "nuclear threat" than Iraq was, despite the hype.
Why does this matter? It means that the U.S. claims about the need to protect Europe from assault with ballistic missiles from Iran "tipped with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons" is just as implausible as similar claims about Iraqi WMD potential. The only reasons such claims are being floated is to justify the grotesque expense of a useless "missile defense shield" - something neocons have been pushing ever since the 1980s, but now with Obama's support. Insane.
This also raises another question regarding the current Swiss case: who ultimately provided these designs? Consider the following Risen excerpt:
"Operation Merlin has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Clinton and Bush administrations. It's not clear who originally came up with the idea, but the plan was first approved by Clinton. After the Russian scientist's fateful trip to Vienna, however, the Merlin operation was endorsed by the Bush administration, possibly with an eye toward repeating it against North Korea or other dangerous states."
Did they perhaps try this scheme a second time, with the same results?
More to the point, Switzerland is in a rather strange position with regards to nuclear energy, being something of a large investor in nuclear power concerns. See this from the Swiss ambassador (Aug 2008)
"On India’s nuclear deal with the US, Mr Dreyer said that his government recognised the importance of nuclear energy for India’s economic growth, but his country had not decided whether it would support the deal in the nuclear suppliers group (NSG) meeting later this month. “Government of Switzerland is very much in favour of India developing nuclear energy but it is also concerned about problem of non-proliferation,” he said talking to the media on Friday."
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com...
The actual nature of the deal with India is that it violates the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.S. Congress tried to sidestep this issue by saying the deal only applies to India's "civilian reactors", not to its military reactors (the ones engaged in irradiating U238 to create P239 for use in weapons production). Note also that India and Pakistan refuse to sign the NPT, and the U.S. won't pressure them to.
The terms of this deal are strange indeed:
"In a major success for India’s nuclear ambitions, the 46-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on September 6, 2008 granted it a crucial waiver enabling India to carry out nuclear commerce and ending 34 years of isolation which started after the 1974 Pokharan nuclear tests. The decision to grant India a waiver is unprecedented in the history of the NSG since India has neither signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)."
Now, Iran - which has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty - is again being portrayed as a nuclear weapons threat. This is a ridiculous assertion, not backed by any reliable evidence - much like the false claims about Iraqi WMDs. They have no means of producing plutonium - something the U.S. won't discuss. Also, under the NPT terms, Iran has a right to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group and sell enriched uranium to countries with nuclear power stations.
As far as Assange and Wikileaks, that looks more and more like some kind of covert propaganda campaign - for example, the 'leaked' diplomatic cables from Arab states urging military action against Iran?
"The fact of the leaks is not necessarily a bad thing," said Laipson. "It is part of the way Iran gets the message that within the region that they will look to the United States and outside to protect them. Iran does not want us to have such a robust presence in the region."
That would be Ellen Laipson, Member, President’s Intelligence Advisory Board - supporting the Wikileaks agenda? Strange days indeed.
The real goals, as usual, probably have more to do with the U.S. desire to control fossil fuel production and sales in the Middle East and Central Asia, and keep Iran from delivering natural gas to India via a trans-Pakistan pipeline - much as the real goals in Iraq were all about the control of Iraqi oil output.
Given this state of affairs, it's no wonder the U.S. State Department or the CIA doesn't want to see the Swiss bring up Operation Merlin or anything related to it.
There are allegations that some designs were previously provided as part of a CIA sting operation, and that certain key components were mis-drawn on the blueprints - but this latter fact was apparently known to the recipients - see NYT Reporter James Risen in "State of War." Excerpted here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk...
However, Iran has no capacity to construct plutonium cores - that tends to require a dedicated reactor - technically:
"Weapon-grade plutonium (WGPu)-plutonium that typically contains 6 percent or less of the isotopes Pu-240 and Pu-242, isotopes that makes design of nuclear weapons increasingly more difficult. WGPU is created when U-238 is irradiated in a nuclear reactor for only a short period of time."
In order to make a powerful nuclear weapon that can fit on a missile, it is generally thought necessary to use tritium as a booster - technically:
"To fission more of a given amount of fissile material, a small amount of material that can undergo fusion, deuterium and tritium (D-T) gas, can be placed inside the core of a fission device. Here, just as the fission chain reaction gets underway, the D-T gas undergoes fusion, releasing an intense burst of high-energy neutrons (along with a small amount of fusion energy as well) that fissions the surrounding material more completely. This approach, called boosting, is used in most modem nuclear weapons to maintain their yields while greatly decreasing their overall size and weight."
(Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction, December 1993, OTA-BP-ISC-115)
The key point here is that Iran has neither Pu-239 nor tritium generating capabilities (unlike perhaps the other nuclear powers - Israel, Pakistan, and India) - and hence is no more of a "nuclear threat" than Iraq was, despite the hype.
Why does this matter? It means that the U.S. claims about the need to protect Europe from assault with ballistic missiles from Iran "tipped with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons" is just as implausible as similar claims about Iraqi WMD potential. The only reasons such claims are being floated is to justify the grotesque expense of a useless "missile defense shield" - something neocons have been pushing ever since the 1980s, but now with Obama's support. Insane.
This also raises another question regarding the current Swiss case: who ultimately provided these designs? Consider the following Risen excerpt:
"Operation Merlin has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Clinton and Bush administrations. It's not clear who originally came up with the idea, but the plan was first approved by Clinton. After the Russian scientist's fateful trip to Vienna, however, the Merlin operation was endorsed by the Bush administration, possibly with an eye toward repeating it against North Korea or other dangerous states."
Did they perhaps try this scheme a second time, with the same results?
More to the point, Switzerland is in a rather strange position with regards to nuclear energy, being something of a large investor in nuclear power concerns. See this from the Swiss ambassador (Aug 2008)
"On India’s nuclear deal with the US, Mr Dreyer said that his government recognised the importance of nuclear energy for India’s economic growth, but his country had not decided whether it would support the deal in the nuclear suppliers group (NSG) meeting later this month. “Government of Switzerland is very much in favour of India developing nuclear energy but it is also concerned about problem of non-proliferation,” he said talking to the media on Friday."
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com...
The actual nature of the deal with India is that it violates the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.S. Congress tried to sidestep this issue by saying the deal only applies to India's "civilian reactors", not to its military reactors (the ones engaged in irradiating U238 to create P239 for use in weapons production). Note also that India and Pakistan refuse to sign the NPT, and the U.S. won't pressure them to.
The terms of this deal are strange indeed:
"In a major success for India’s nuclear ambitions, the 46-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on September 6, 2008 granted it a crucial waiver enabling India to carry out nuclear commerce and ending 34 years of isolation which started after the 1974 Pokharan nuclear tests. The decision to grant India a waiver is unprecedented in the history of the NSG since India has neither signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)."
Now, Iran - which has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty - is again being portrayed as a nuclear weapons threat. This is a ridiculous assertion, not backed by any reliable evidence - much like the false claims about Iraqi WMDs. They have no means of producing plutonium - something the U.S. won't discuss. Also, under the NPT terms, Iran has a right to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group and sell enriched uranium to countries with nuclear power stations.
As far as Assange and Wikileaks, that looks more and more like some kind of covert propaganda campaign - for example, the 'leaked' diplomatic cables from Arab states urging military action against Iran?
"The fact of the leaks is not necessarily a bad thing," said Laipson. "It is part of the way Iran gets the message that within the region that they will look to the United States and outside to protect them. Iran does not want us to have such a robust presence in the region."
That would be Ellen Laipson, Member, President’s Intelligence Advisory Board - supporting the Wikileaks agenda? Strange days indeed.
The real goals, as usual, probably have more to do with the U.S. desire to control fossil fuel production and sales in the Middle East and Central Asia, and keep Iran from delivering natural gas to India via a trans-Pakistan pipeline - much as the real goals in Iraq were all about the control of Iraqi oil output.
Given this state of affairs, it's no wonder the U.S. State Department or the CIA doesn't want to see the Swiss bring up Operation Merlin or anything related to it.
8 comments:
George Bush insists that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. So why, six years ago, did the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb?
In an extract from his explosive new book, New York Times reporter James Risen reveals the bungles and miscalculations that led to a spectacular intelligence fiasco
She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency's spies in Iran probably didn't think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA's spy network. Just as she had done so many times before.
But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran.
Mistake piled on mistake. As the CIA later learned, the Iranian who received the download was a double agent. The agent quickly turned the data over to Iranian security officials, and it enabled them to "roll up" the CIA's network throughout Iran. CIA sources say that several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fates of some of the others is still unknown.
This espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US - whether Tehran was about to go nuclear.
In fact, just as President Bush and his aides were making the case in 2004 and 2005 that Iran was moving rapidly to develop nuclear weapons, the American intelligence community found itself unable to provide the evidence to back up the administration's public arguments. On the heels of the CIA's failure to provide accurate pre-war intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the agency was once again clueless in the Middle East. In the spring of 2005, in the wake of the CIA's Iranian disaster, Porter Goss, its new director, told President Bush in a White House briefing that the CIA really didn't know how close Iran was to becoming a nuclear power.
But it's worse than that. Deep in the bowels of the CIA, someone must be nervously, but very privately, wondering: "Whatever happened to those nuclear blueprints we gave to the Iranians?"
The story dates back to the Clinton administration and February 2000, when one frightened Russian scientist walked Vienna's winter streets. The Russian had good reason to be afraid. He was walking around Vienna with blueprints for a nuclear bomb.
To be precise, he was carrying technical designs for a TBA 480 high-voltage block, otherwise known as a "firing set", for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon. He held in his hands the knowledge needed to create a perfect implosion that could trigger a nuclear chain reaction inside a small spherical core. It was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.
The Russian was a nuclear engineer in the pay of the CIA, which had arranged for him to become an American citizen and funded him to the tune of $5,000 a month. It seemed like easy money, with few strings attached.
Until now. The CIA was placing him on the front line of a plan that seemed to be completely at odds with the interests of the US, and it had taken a lot of persuading by his CIA case officer to convince him to go through with what appeared to be a rogue operation.
The case officer worked hard to convince him - even though he had doubts about the plan as well. As he was sweet-talking the Russian into flying to Vienna, the case officer wondered whether he was involved in an illegal covert action. Should he expect to be hauled before a congressional committee and grilled because he was the officer who helped give nuclear blueprints to Iran? The code name for this operation was Merlin; to the officer, that seemed like a wry tip-off that nothing about this programme was what it appeared to be. He did his best to hide his concerns from his Russian agent.
The Russian's assignment from the CIA was to pose as an unemployed and greedy scientist who was willing to sell his soul - and the secrets of the atomic bomb - to the highest bidder. By hook or by crook, the CIA told him, he was to get the nuclear blueprints to the Iranians. They would quickly recognise their value and rush them back to their superiors in Tehran.
The plan had been laid out for the defector during a CIA-financed trip to San Francisco, where he had meetings with CIA officers and nuclear experts mixed in with leisurely wine-tasting trips to Sonoma County. In a luxurious San Francisco hotel room, a senior CIA official involved in the operation talked the Russian through the details of the plan. He brought in experts from one of the national laboratories to go over the blueprints that he was supposed to give the Iranians.
The senior CIA officer could see that the Russian was nervous, and so he tried to downplay the significance of what they were asking him to do. He said the CIA was mounting the operation simply to find out where the Iranians were with their nuclear programme. This was just an intelligence-gathering effort, the CIA officer said, not an illegal attempt to give Iran the bomb. He suggested that the Iranians already had the technology he was going to hand over to them. It was all a game. Nothing too serious.
On paper, Merlin was supposed to stunt the development of Tehran's nuclear programme by sending Iran's weapons experts down the wrong technical path. The CIA believed that once the Iranians had the blueprints and studied them, they would believe the designs were usable and so would start to build an atom bomb based on the flawed designs. But Tehran would get a big surprise when its scientists tried to explode their new bomb. Instead of a mushroom cloud, the Iranian scientists would witness a disappointing fizzle. The Iranian nuclear programme would suffer a humiliating setback, and Tehran's goal of becoming a nuclear power would have been delayed by several years. In the meantime, the CIA, by watching Iran's reaction to the blueprints, would have gained a wealth of information about the status of Iran's weapons programme, which has been shrouded in secrecy.
The Russian studied the blueprints the CIA had given him. Within minutes of being handed the designs, he had identified a flaw. "This isn't right," he told the CIA officers gathered around the hotel room. "There is something wrong." His comments prompted stony looks, but no straight answers from the CIA men. No one in the meeting seemed surprised by the Russian's assertion that the blueprints didn't look quite right, but no one wanted to enlighten him further on the matter, either.
In fact, the CIA case officer who was the Russian's personal handler had been stunned by his statement. During a break, he took the senior CIA officer aside. "He wasn't supposed to know that," the CIA case officer told his superior. "He wasn't supposed to find a flaw."
"Don't worry," the senior CIA officer calmly replied. "It doesn't matter."
The CIA case officer couldn't believe the senior CIA officer's answer, but he managed to keep his fears from the Russian, and continued to train him for his mission.
After their trip to San Francisco, the case officer handed the Russian a sealed envelope with the nuclear blueprints inside. He was told not to open the envelope under any circumstances. He was to follow the CIA's instructions to find the Iranians and give them the envelope with the documents inside. Keep it simple, and get out of Vienna safe and alive, the Russian was told. But the defector had his own ideas about how he might play that game.
The CIA had discovered that a high-ranking Iranian official would be travelling to Vienna and visiting the Iranian mission to the IAEA, and so the agency decided to send the Russian to Vienna at the same time. It was hoped that he could make contact with either the Iranian representative to the IAEA or the visitor from Tehran.
In Vienna, however, the Russian unsealed the envelope with the nuclear blueprints and included a personal letter of his own to the Iranians. No matter what the CIA told him, he was going to hedge his bets. There was obviously something wrong with the blueprints - so he decided to mention that fact to the Iranians in his letter. They would certainly find flaws for themselves, and if he didn't tell them first, they would never want to deal with him again.
The Russian was thus warning the Iranians as carefully as he could that there was a flaw somewhere in the nuclear blueprints, and he could help them find it. At the same time, he was still going through with the CIA's operation in the only way he thought would work.
The Russian soon found 19 Heinstrasse, a five-storey office and apartment building with a flat, pale green and beige facade in a quiet, slightly down-at-heel neighbourhood in Vienna's north end. Amid the list of Austrian tenants, there was one simple line: "PM/Iran." The Iranians clearly didn't want publicity. An Austrian postman helped him. As the Russian stood by, the postman opened the building door and dropped off the mail. The Russian followed suit; he realised that he could leave his package without actually having to talk to anyone. He slipped through the front door, and hurriedly shoved his envelope through the inner-door slot at the Iranian office.
The Russian fled the mission without being seen. He was deeply relieved that he had made the hand-off without having to come face to face with a real live Iranian. He flew back to the US without being detected by either Austrian security or, more importantly, Iranian intelligence.
Just days after the Russian dropped off his package at the Iranian mission, the National Security Agency reported that an Iranian official in Vienna abruptly changed his schedule, making airline reservations to fly home to Iran. The odds were that the nuclear blueprints were now in Tehran.
The Russian scientist's fears about the operation seemed well founded. He was the front man for what may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA, one that may have helped put nuclear weapons in the hands of a charter member of what President George W Bush has called the "axis of evil".
Operation Merlin has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Clinton and Bush administrations. It's not clear who originally came up with the idea, but the plan was first approved by Clinton. After the Russian scientist's fateful trip to Vienna, however, the Merlin operation was endorsed by the Bush administration, possibly with an eye toward repeating it against North Korea or other dangerous states.
Several former CIA officials say that the theory behind Merlin - handing over tainted weapon designs to confound one of America's adversaries - is a trick that has been used many times in past operations, stretching back to the cold war. But in previous cases, such Trojan horse operations involved conventional weapons; none of the former officials had ever heard of the CIA attempting to conduct this kind of high-risk operation with designs for a nuclear bomb. The former officials also said these kind of programmes must be closely monitored by senior CIA managers in order to control the flow of information to the adversary. If mishandled, they could easily help an enemy accelerate its weapons development. That may be what happened with Merlin.
Iran has spent nearly 20 years trying to develop nuclear weapons, and in the process has created a strong base of sophisticated scientists knowledgeable enough to spot flaws in nuclear blueprints. Tehran also obtained nuclear blueprints from the network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, and so already had workable blueprints against which to compare the designs obtained from the CIA. Nuclear experts say that they would thus be able to extract valuable information from the blueprints while ignoring the flaws.
"If [the flaw] is bad enough," warned a nuclear weapons expert with the IAEA, "they will find it quite quickly. That would be my fear"
State of War by James Risen Sucks!
State of War by James Risen Rocks!
1) Pakistan remains by far the most dangerous, duplicitous, and untrustworthy nation on Earth as an unapologetic nuclear proliferator, as the Islamic/jihadi world epicenter of terrorism, sponsor of cross-border terrorism to Afghanistan, India, and amazingly, was accused of the same this week by Iran, all in a nation that is spent more than half its existence under military rule.
2) The CIA under the Bush administration found and closed the most dangerous nuclear black market in the world, Pakistan's AQ Khan network. The much reviled and criticized Bush administration with all its mistakes allowed no other attacks on the US after 9/11, got Libya to renounce WMDs without firing a bullet subsequently re-establishing diplomatic ties, displayed in dramatic fashion the price to be paid for killing innocent American lives, focused and fixated on the then much-derided members of the 'axis of evil' North Korea and Iran initiating the on-going tightening of sanctions, and continued to advance ties and counter-terrorist activities with India and many other nations.
3) The all too predictable and sanctimonious hand-wringing towards the CIA here and elsewhere conveniently will forget what potential nightmares have been avoided, not to mention lives saved, by the actions of the CIA, and how thankful we should be of the incessantly criticized military, intelligence agencies, homeland security, justice department, as well as their counterpart state and international agencies.
Anyone familiar with the History of Science would see the flaws in the above comment
1) Pakistan is not the world's greatest proliferator. That honor belongs to the USA which shared its knowledge of nuclear bomb manufacturing with its European NATO allies, prompting the Soviet Union and later China to research and manufacture the bombs. And when South Africa's White Supremacist government was in power and determined to secure its perniciously dangerous status, it used its wealth and Israeli science to develop nuclear weapons. This set off alarms throughout the Third World. The threat of White Supremacists to non-whites and the threat of NATO to the 3rd world and its Communist Allies prompted further nuclear proliferation efforts culminating in Iran and North Korea. The genie of manufacturing nuclear weapons has long ago left the bottle. It is a fool's mission to try to force the genie back into the bottle under the exclusive control of Western Powers.
2.) George W. Bush's administration did not close down the Khan network, only the business in selling nuclear weapons technology that had been operating almost a decade or more. Hundreds of nuclear scientists trained by Dr. Khan still operate as agents of proliferation, and some are working in Iran for the government's military. Western and/or assassins have been killing Iranian nuclear scientists in an attempt to force the genie back into the bottle, but they have been assassinating the wrong scientists. The engineers trained by Dr. Khan have long ago provided their services to Iran and left the country. Nothing further needs be said except that one of them surfaced several years ago in Canada working as a plastics engineer. And is safely back in Iran or Pakistan.
3)The CIA and the FBI make horrendous mistakes as they are only human. Witness the FBI's attempt to destroy Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other black American Civil Rights leaders in the protests over racial oppression of African Americans, and the corresponding CIA effort to protect white South Africa's system of apartheid from Communist inspired violence. The tools of American foreign policy often are our own worst enemies in protecting American lives and securing the world from the evils of proliferation. So long as our government operates on the assumption that no other country has sovereign rights to protect itself from our aggression, we will have countries like North Korea and Iran working to protect themselves through proliferation.
The solution to putting the nuclear genie back into the international control bottle: Either dissolve or expand the Permanent UN Security Council Membership to South Africa, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, India, Pakistan, Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain, Nigeria, Egypt, Venezuela, Australia, Indonesia, and both North and South Koreas. It's clear that excluding countries from international forums to debate nuclear proliferation and their perceptions of military threats from the US or neo-colonial intervention from France, Britain and its former colony Australia are the greatest incentives to proliferation.
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