Dissident: Iran's Top Commanders Are Nuclear Weapons Scientists
Fox News, Tuesday December 11, 2007
Alireza Jafarzadeh
WASHINGTON — Twenty-one
commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps are the
top scientists running Iran's secret nuclear weapons
program, says the man who exposed Iran's nuclear weapons
program in 2002.
On top of that, the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate
published last week saying Tehran shut down its
weaponization program in 2003 failed to mention that the
program restarted in mid-2004, said Alireza Jafarzadeh, an
Iranian dissident and president of Strategic Policy
Consulting.
The scientists working on the alleged civilian nuclear
centrifuge program are IGRC commanders, said Jafarzadeh, who
was providing a list of names to the press on Tuesday. But
their intention is not a nuclear energy source for
civilians.
"It's the IRGC that is basically controlling the whole
thing, dominating the whole thing," Jafarzadeh told
FOXNews.com. "They are running the show. They have a number
of sites controlled by the IRGC that has been off-limits to
the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and
inspectors, including a military university known as Imam
Hossein University. ... That site has not been inspected.
They have perhaps the most advanced nuclear research and
development center in that university."
Jafarzadeh said the 2003 decision to stop the weaponization
program, which was operating in Lavizan-Shian, a posh
northeast district of Tehran, was not Iran's own. The site
had been exposed by the opposition, the National Council of
Resistance on Iran, in April 2003 after revelations of
several other nuclear sites that could be portrayed as dual
purpose facilities. Lavizan-Shian could not, he said.
"The regime knew that this is not the site that they can
invite the IAEA ... this site was heavily involved in
militarization of the program," Jafarzadeh said. "They were
doing all kinds of activities that were not justifiable. So
they decided before the IAEA gets in — and it usually takes
four to six months before they can go through the process
and get in — use the time and try to basically destroy this
whole facility, and that's what they did."
Jafarzadeh said the Iranians razed the buildings, removed
the soil, cut down the trees and allowed the IAEA to inspect
the Lavizan-Shian site, which had been turned into a park by
June 2004. He noted that the regime acted as if it had
succumbed to municipal pressure to open a park with
basketball and tennis courts and that is why the area had
been flattened.
Jafarzadeh said that "in a way it's correct for the NIE to
say that in late 2003 the weaponization of the program was
stopped, and they said it was due to international pressure.
But they failed to say that it restarted in 2004" in a
location called Lavizan 2, he said.
Lavizan 2 "has never been inspected by the IAEA," Jafarzadeh
added.
Jafarzadeh's comments preceded a call by President Bush on
Tuesday for Iran to explain why it had a secretive nuclear
weapons program, and warned that any such efforts must not
be allowed to flourish "for the sake of world peace." The
NIE noted that Iran continues to enrich uranium, which can
be turned toward making a weapon if the country wanted to
pursue that end.
"Iran is dangerous," Bush said after an Oval Office meeting
with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. "We believe Iran
had a secret military weapons program, and Iran must explain
to the world why they had such a program. ... Iran has an
obligation to explain to the IAEA why they hid this program
from them.
"Iran is dangerous, and they'll be even more dangerous if
they learn how to enrich uranium," Bush said. "So I look
forward to working with the president," Bush said, referring
to Napolitano, the Italian leader, "to explain our strategy
and to figure out ways we can work together to prevent this
from happening for the sake of world peace."
Bush's remarks followed a press conference by Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad praising the latest NIE as "a
step forward" for U.S.-Iranian relations, and suggesting an
"entirely different" situation could be created between the
United States and Iran if more steps like the report
followed.
"We consider this measure by the U.S. government a positive
step. It is a step forward," Ahmadinejad said. "If one or
two other steps are taken, the issues we have in front of us
will be entirely different and will lose their complexity,
and the way will be open for the resolution of basic issues
in the region and in dealings between the two sides."
But Jafarzadeh said Iran can't be trusted, and suggested
that the U.S. intelligence community was duped by plants
placed by the Islamic regime to provide disinformation about
its programs.
"There are two extremes" for explaining the NIE's reversal
from 2005, the last report on Iran's weapons program, said
Jafarzadeh. One, career types in the Bush administration
issued the analysis for purely political reasons, like
wanting to hurt the administration, keeping rapprochement
open or removing the military option from the table.
"The other one is it's not political at all, it's just
basically deceit ... by the regime — that they managed to
get so-called 'defectors' to make the Americans and the
intelligence community believe that what happened in late
2003 was actually a decision to totally halt the program.
They sold it that way to the Americans. ... They are like a
fox, the animal is famous in Iran for being tricky. So it's
very possible that it was well-orchestrated by Tehran, and
they succeeded in at least getting that sentence from the
intelligence community in the report."
In August 2002, Jafarzadeh, then-spokesman for the National
Council of Resistance on Iran, revealed the name of the
Natanz nuclear site, which the Iranian government since has
acknowledged and which is subject to IAEA inspections.
Because of its integral relationship to Mujahedin-e Khalq,
or MEK, an Iranian resistance group, NCRI is deemed a
terrorist organization in the United States, despite calls
by several members of Congress to remove its designation
from the State Department list.
NCRI also is on the British and European Union terrorist
list, placed there at the start of the decade by Western
countries trying to improve relations with Tehran. Last week
a British judge ordered NCRI to be removed from the British
list. Pressure also is on the EU to drop MEK.
Nonetheless, NCRI and Jafarzadeh, working independently,
have concluded that Iran did shut down its nuclear weapons
program in 2003 but restarted it a year later, moving and
hiding equipment to a variety of sites.
Mohammad Mohaddessin, NCRI's foreign affairs chief, told The
Wall Street Journal in Tuesday's editions that some of the
equipment was moved to another military compound known as
the Center for Readiness and Advanced Technology, to
Malek-Ashtar University Isfahan and to a defense ministry
hospital in Tehran.
Click here to read The Wall Street Journal report
(subscription required).
The facility was broken into 11 fields of research,
including projects to develop a nuclear trigger and shape
weapons-grade uranium into a warhead, the paper reported.
"They scattered the weaponization program to other locations
and restarted in 2004," Mohaddessin said.
"Their strategy was that if the IAEA found any one piece of
this research program, it would be possible to justify it as
civilian. But so long as it was all together, they wouldn't
be able to."
Alireza Jafarzadeh is a FOX News Channel Foreign Affairs
Analyst and the author of
"The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming
Nuclear Crisis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Jafarzadeh has revealed Iran's terrorist network in Iraq and
its terror training camps since 2003. He first disclosed the
existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the
Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.
Prior to becoming a contributor for FOX, and until August
2003, Jafarzadeh acted for a dozen years as the chief
congressional liaison and media spokesman for the U.S.
representative office of Iran's parliament in exile, the
National Council of Resistance of Iran.
