Iran Admits Foreign Help on Nuclear Facility
U.N. Agency Implicates Pakistan as the Source
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 27, 2003; Page A17
Iran has admitted for the first time that it received substantial foreign help in building a secret nuclear facility south of Tehran that is now beginning to enrich uranium, turning it into a key ingredient in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, according to U.N. documents and diplomatic sources.
While Iran has not yet identified the source of the foreign help, evidence collected in Iran by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency implicates Pakistani companies as suppliers of critical technology and parts, officials familiar with a U.N. investigation of Iran's program said yesterday. Pakistan is believed by many proliferation experts to have passed important nuclear secrets to both Iran and North Korea. Pakistan has denied providing such assistance.
The latest disclosure about Iran came as the U.N. group, the International Atomic Energy Agency, reported that Iran had only partially complied with demands to open its nuclear program to scrutiny. The IAEA, in a confidential report, said Iran had not fully accounted for activities that have spurred fears that it was secretly developing nuclear weapons.
"Iran has demonstrated an increased degree of cooperation," said the report, portions of which were provided to The Washington Post. "However . . . there remain a number of important outstanding issues, particularly with regard to Iran's enrichment program, that require urgent resolution."
The report also noted that Iran had apparently attempted to sanitize one of its nuclear facilities, known as the Kalaye Electric Co., before granting IAEA inspectors access to the site this summer. "Considerable modifications were observed," the IAEA said of the Kalaye site, which had been identified by an Iranian opposition group as a pilot enrichment facility. IAEA officials were barred from the site during earlier visits.
Over the past 18 months, Iran has begun work on major facilities for processing and enriching uranium, while simultaneously building a separate reactor that can be used in the production of plutonium. The Bush administration contends the facilities are part of an accelerated campaign to build nuclear weapons. Iran's disclosures about its nuclear suppliers were part of an apparent attempt to allay rising international concerns about its nuclear intentions
Iran's claim of a purely peaceful nuclear program suffered a blow last month when IAEA inspectors discovered traces of highly enriched uranium at a newly constructed facility in Natanz, 200 miles south of Tehran. Iran had denied making enriched uranium at Natanz or any other facility prior to June of this year.
In a new attempt to explain the discrepancy, Iran has told U.N. nuclear officials that the uranium came into the country on contaminated equipment purchased from another country -- specifically, on metal machine parts used in gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium.
"In the past, Iran had claimed that the technology was indigenous, and they were quite proud of that," said one European diplomatic official familiar with the IAEA's findings. "Now they're saying they did get a lot of help. This was a major change in the story."
The equipment said to be tainted was from a type of centrifuge acquired by Pakistani scientists in the 1970s and used in Pakistan's domestic nuclear program, two officials familiar with the findings said.
Iran told inspectors it acquired design plans for the centrifuge in 1987, although the transfer of technology appears to have continued over several years, officials said. Iranian officials promised to provide the IAEA with a full account of where it acquired each piece of equipment and how it was used, the officials said
Pakistan has never acknowledged providing uranium-enrichment technology to Iran. One of only a handful of countries that remain outside the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Pakistan technically is not bound by many of the international restrictions on the export of nuclear technology.
The possibility that Pakistan could be implicated in Iran's nuclear program presents a diplomatic challenge to the Bush administration, which has been reluctant to publicly criticize Pakistan because it has provided crucial assistance in the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan.
"The notion that Pakistan wasn't involved is getting less and less tenable," said Henry D. Sokolski, a top nonproliferation official in the Pentagon during the George H.W. Bush administration. "Some might make the claim that this was something that happened in the past. But it wasn't all that long ago."
The Bush administration declined comment on the IAEA's findings, but it continued to express skepticism about the veracity of Iran's nuclear claims.
"They have clearly not been forthcoming in the past with the actual facts and details about their secret nuclear programs, and that's what's been of great concern to us," said the State Department's deputy spokesman, Philip Reeker.
Reeker repeated the White House demand that Iran agree to more intrusive, "snap" inspections of its nuclear sites to ease concerns that it might be building nuclear weapons. . "It's going to be crucial to see whether Iran is willing to follow through with accepting the same protocol that other non-weapons states have accepted."
Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, said yesterday that his government was ready to sign on for more intrusive inspections, but said the U.N. agency would first have to take unspecified steps to ensure "the preservation of [Iran's] sovereignty," according to Iran's official IRNA news agency. Salehi promised to answer the IAEA's remaining questions before a meeting of the agency's 135 member nations scheduled for Sept. 8.
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