mebb.de
Iran-Krise

William J. Broad und David Sanger schreiben heute in der NYT, die Ankündigung von Präsident Ahmadinejad am vergangenen Donnerstag, der Iran werde seine Entwicklung von Anreicherungsanlagen mit P2-Zentrifugen wieder aufnehmen, habe für einige Aufregung bei der IAEA gesorgt.

Of all the claims that Iran made last week about its nuclear program, a one-sentence assertion by its president has provoked such surprise and concern among international nuclear inspectors they are planning to confront Tehran about it this week.

Eine iranische Delegation werde am morgigen Dienstag in Wien eintreffen und die IAEA hätte gern Antworten auf eine Reihe von Fragen zu diesem Thema.

The new claim focuses renewed attention on Iran’s rocky relationship with Mr. Khan, who provided it with much of the enrichment technology it is exploiting today. If Mr. Ahmadinejad’s claim is correct, it probably indicates that relationship went on longer and far deeper than previously acknowledged. Mr. Khan and his nuclear black market supplied Iran with blueprints for both the more elementary machine, known as P-1, and the more advanced P-2.

Der Iran hat eingeräumt, bereits Versuche mit P2-Anlagen durchgeführt, behauptet aber, sie aber wieder aufgegeben zu haben. Warum die neue Ankündigung nun ein Hinweis darauf sein soll, dass die Beziehung zwischen dem iranischen Regime und dem Khan-Netzwerk länger bestanden haben soll, als bislang angenommen, verstehe ich nicht. Nach iranischen Angaben sollen diese Beziehungen 1995 abgebrochen worden sein. Bislang hat Ahmadinejad nicht mehr gesagt, als dass man die Arbeiten wieder aufnimmt. Es ist nichts darüber bekannt, wie weit man mit der Entwicklung dieser Anlagen bereits vorangeschritten ist.

Das ändert freilich nichts daran, dass die ganze P2-Geschichte sehr fragwürdig ist.

The P-2 mystery began years ago when Iran told international inspectors that it had received plans for the advanced centrifuges around 1994 but had done nothing with them until 2002, when it hired an Iranian contractor to try to make the complex machines.

The P-2, a second-generation Pakistani model, was the most advanced centrifuge sold by Dr. Khan’s network. With superstrong rotors, it could spin faster and enrich uranium faster.

Iran repeatedly denied receiving any P-2 centrifuges from Dr. Khan, which would greatly ease the making of duplicates. Moreover, it said it did no research on the production of the advanced centrifuges between 1995 and 2002 because of management changes in its nuclear program and a lack of skilled personnel.

In report after report, the I.A.E.A. has questioned that explanation. For instance, last September it said the Iranian contractor, who allegedly first saw the P-2 plans in 2002, made considerable research progress “within a short period,” which seemed to undermine Iran’s claim of doing no past research.

Iran said that the research failed to produce operating machines and that it ended the experimental P-2 work in 2003 and instead focused on the easier P-1 design.

B. S. A. Tahir, der mit dem Iran für das Khan-Netzwerk die Geschäfte abgewickelt hat und nun in Malaysia im Gefängnis sitzt, hat ausgesagt, es sei weit mehr P2-Technologie geliefert worden als Teheran eingestanden hat und die Geschäftsbeziehungen hätten auch nach 1995 weiter bestanden.

Broad/Sanger wissen dazu noch ein interessantes Detail zu berichten:

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan disclosed recently that he fired Dr. Khan, a national hero credited with developing Pakistan’s bomb, in 2001 after discovering that he was trying to arrange a secret flight to the Iranian city of Zahedan, known as a center of smuggling.

Dr. Khan refused to discuss the flight, saying it was important and very secret. “I said, ‘What the hell do you mean? You want to keep a secret from me?’ ” Mr. Musharraf recalled in an interview with The New York Times for a Discovery Times television documentary, “Nuclear Jihad.”

Sollte sich herausstellen, dass es tatsächlich solche Lieferungen nach 1995 gab, dann wäre das zwar immer noch nicht die „smoking gun” für ein Atomwaffenprogramm, weil es bislang immer nur um Anreicherung geht. Aber der Beweis wäre erbracht, dass der Iran weiterhin militärisch relevante Programme betreibt, die er vor dem Rest der Welt zu verbergen versucht.

William Langewiesch setzt in der Januar/Februar-Ausgabe der Atlantic seine Recherchen zu Dr. Abdul Quadeer Khan, dem Kopf eines Netzwerks, das illegal nukleares Material und Pläne an interessierte Staaten verkaufte, fort.

Langewiesch erzählt seine Geschichte um Mark Gibbs herum. Gibbs, der in Bonn wohnt, arbeitet für Nucleonics Week und für Nuclear Fuel, zwei Branchenblätter mit geringer Auflage, aber einer sehr aufmerksamen Leserschaft.

Hibbs hat in seinen Artikel schon sehr früh Einzelteile eines Puzzle zusammengetragen, das später dann zur Aufdeckung des Khan Netzwerkes führte.

Offensichtlich wussten europäische und die amerikanischen Dienste nicht erst seit Libyen im Dezember 2003 seine Einkäufe bei Khan offengelegt hat, dass „Pakistans Vater der Atombombe” auch Geschäfte mit dem Iran betrieben hat.

In May of 1991 Mark Hibbs reported in Nucleonics Week on the possibility that Iran had launched a secret uranium-enrichment program in pursuit of nuclear weapons and that over the previous three years A. Q. Khan had made several visits there. Soon after the article was published, Hibbs received a phone call from an American diplomat named Richard Kennedy, who at the time was the U.S. ambassador for non-proliferation, and the chief American representative to the IAEA.

According to Hibbs, Kennedy said, “I’ve read your last article.”

Hibbs said, “Yeah?”

Kennedy said, “You know that thing about A. Q. Khan-that maybe he went to Iran? Can you tell me who told you that?”

Hibbs answered, “No.”

“Can I assume it’s a European intelligence source?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me which government it is?”

“No,” Hibbs said. “Does it strike your interest?”

Kennedy admitted that it did.

Diese Unterhaltung ist kein Beleg dafür, dass Mr. Kennedy die genauen Einzelheiten der Transaktionen zwischen Khan und dem Iran kannte, aber spätestens mit diesem Anruf sollte der Verdacht geweckt sein.

Langewiesch hat noch mehr.

In 1991, however, Pakistan’s army chief, General Aslam Beg, returned from a trip to Tehran openly advocating the export of nuclear-weapons technology to Iran, and pointing to the several billion dollars’ worth of state revenue that might be in the offing. … Beg is an anti-American with sympathies for Iran, and he says that he is the target of a Jewish conspiracy of lies. Be that as it may, he was told to keep quiet in the early 1990s, presumably because the transfer of blueprints and centrifuges was already under way.

Hibbs was onto it fast. In November of 1991, having previously written about the unconfirmed visits of A. Q. Khan, he described an unnamed Western government’s suspicion that Iran had possibly obtained uranium-enrichment technology from Pakistan, and that this technology appeared to be that of URENCO, the consortium from which Khan had stolen designs. The official reaction in Europe and the United States was “no comment.” …

Unbeknownst to him, the CIA had concluded that the Pakistan-Iran connection had cooled, in part because the centrifuges that Pakistan had sold were castoffs, prone to vibration and inefficient compared with more modern designs. As a result U.S. interest in Khan diminished, and to some extent the trail was allowed to go cold.

Im Jahr 2002 (also immer noch ein gutes Jahr bevor Lybien seine Geschäfte mit Khan offen legte) erhielt Hibbs einen Hinweis von einer Vertrauensperson bei der IAEA, dass der Iran im Begriff sei, eine Anreicherungsanlage zu bauen. Die IAEA Quelle glaubte allerdings, dass die dafür notwendigen Anlagen und Teile von den Iranern selbst gefertigt wurden. Hibbs hatte daran Zweifel.

He went back to his notes of a decade before, and read all his old files, and finally concluded that it had to be a URENCO design, and was probably from A. Q. Khan. But Hibbs needed some sort of confirmation. With the evidence in hand he went to see another confidential source at a U.S. agency in Washington. … He said, “Does the U.S. government know where the technology came from?”

His source did not answer right away. … The man paused for a long while. Finally he said,

“Yeah.”

Hibbs said, “Where did Iran get it from?”

Again the man paused. “Well, it’s the same .” He stopped himself. Earlier that year the United States had leaked word that North Korea had received centrifuge designs and possibly prototypes from Pakistan in return for missile technology, in a state-to-state swap. The leak was directed not against Pakistan but against North Korea, which soon restarted its plutonium-reprocessing facilities and expelled IAEA inspectors. In any case, Hibbs’s contact decided to go ahead. He said, “There’s only one country that’s exporting centrifuge technology.”

“Do you mean Pakistan?”

“Yeah.”

Aber laut Hibbs, weitererzählt von Langewiesch, wusste auch die IAEA weit mehr als sie öffentlich zugab.

Hibbs veröffentlichte im Januar 2003 einen Artikel für Nuclear Fuel unter der Überschrift “Pakistan Believed Design Data Source For Centrifuges To Be Built By Iran.”

Hibbs via Langewiesch:

“There was no comment from the IAEA. I continued to interact with the sources of that story. Throughout 2003 they kept telling me, ‘You’re not only warm and hot but the IAEA is very angry that you are not letting them control the flow of information. They’re onto Pakistan. They know that individuals in Pakistan were deeply implicated in this program. But they can’t use the “P” word. No one will say “Pakistan.” It’s all being discreetly negotiated between the IAEA, the United States, and other countries .’” The problem for the United States was that Pakistan was again now a trusted ally, this time in the effort to destroy al-Qaeda.

I said, “So they wanted you to pipe down.”

Hibbs said, “Anyway, we kept working on Pakistan, and more and more bits of the story got confirmed. I kept fingering Pakistan, fingering Pakistan, and pissing off the IAEA and the U.S. government, because at that time they were saying, ‘We want to make a deal with these people. We want to make sure it doesn’t get out of control.’”

I said, “The story or the activity?”

“The story. They wanted to control it.”