Dissident group says Iran has secret nuclear facility
The Washington Post, September 9, 2010
Alireza Jafarzadeh, Foreign Affairs Analyst and Iran Expert
By Greg Miller
An Iranian dissident group said on Thursday that it has
identified a previously undisclosed nuclear facility under
construction northwest of Tehran, claiming to have evidence
that shows the Islamic nation is deceiving inspectors and
moving forward in its pursuit of a bomb.
Details about the facility were scant, and experts said the
allegation that construction at the site is nuclear-related
could not be confirmed.
The information was presented by the People's Mujaheddin
Organization of Iran, a group that has been on the mark in
the past in exposing Iranian nuclear activities, including
the identification in 2002 of a large centrifuge
installation at Natanz.
Satellite image of site alleged to be a previously undisclosed nuclear facility in Iran. (Courtesy DigitalGlobe and Globalsecurity.org).
But U.S. officials have greeted some of the organization's
other claims with skepticism, and note that it has for years
been on a State Department list of designated terrorist
organizations.
"This facility has been under construction for years, and
we've known about it for years. While there's still some
ambiguity about its ultimate purpose - not unusual for
something that's still taking shape - there's no reason at
this point to think it's nuclear," a U.S. official said,
speaking on condition of anonymity. "The Iranians put
military stuff in tunnels, too. People should be cautious
about reaching conclusions here."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed late last year
that Tehran would build 10 new sites to enrich uranium. No
evidence has surfaced yet to indicated that any of those
facilities have been built.
The People's Mujaheddin Organization said the new site is
located just north of a major highway connecting Tehran with
the Iranian city of Qazvin. Satellite images presented by
the organization showed significant excavation amid
otherwise mountainous and barren terrain.
The group said that Iran has been engaged in major
excavation work at the site for at least five years,
building a network of underground tunnels designed to hold
centrifuges that could be used to enrich uranium to
weapons-grade purification levels.
A spokeswoman for the Iranian group, Soona Samsami, said the
new compound was 85 percent complete and could prove to be
"far more important than the Qom site," a facility that Iran
worked on in secret for years before it was exposed by the
Obama administration in 2009.
The dissident group's information came from an "internal
network of sources" inside the country, Samsami said, adding
that details had been shared with U.S. government agencies,
as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency, which
carries out United Nations-mandated inspections of Iran's
nuclear sites.
The facility is referred to within Iran as site "3-1-1," and
has been portrayed internally as an annex to an existing
military garrison nearby, an explanation that the group said
is inconsistent with the scale of the tunneling work
underway.
Noting that Iran had told the IAEA last year that there were
no other nuclear facilities under construction, another
group spokesman, Alireza Jafarzadeh, said, "Iranian
officials were lying through their teeth."
Still, experts expressed skepticism about the new
allegations.
"We saw nothing in the images that suggests a centrifuge
plant," said David Albright, president of the Institute for
Science and International Security. "There are many
underground facilities in Iran."
The Mujaheddin group aims to overthrow of the government in
Tehran, and has lobbied to have the State Department
terrorist label removed.
Iran insists that its nuclear program is strictly for
peaceful purposes, including energy and medical research. An
IAEA report released this week said that Iran has notified
the agency that it is planning to build new nuclear
facilities, but has rebuffed agency requests for details.
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.
