Benjamin
Netanyahu’s stage performance about Iran seeking a nuclear weapon
not only was based on old material, but evidence shows it was
fabricated too, says Gareth Porter in this Consortium News exclusive
report.
by
Gareth Porter
Part
3 - Using the MEK
The Bush
administration’s desire to steer press coverage of the supposedly
internal Iranian documents away from the MEK is understandable: the
truth about the MEK role would immediately lead to Israel, because it
was well known, that Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad had used
the MEK to make public information that the Israelis did not want
attributed to itself – including the precise location of Iran’s
Natanz enrichment facility.
As
Israeli journalists Yossi Melman and Meir Javadanfar observed in
their 2007 book on the Iran nuclear program, based on U.S., British
and Israeli officials, “Information is ‘filtered’ to the
IAEA via Iranian opposition groups, especially the National
Resistance Council of Iran.”
Mossad
used the MEK repeatedly in the 1990s and the early 2000’s to get
the IAEA to inspect any site the Israelis suspected might possibly be
nuclear-related, earning their Iranian clients a very poor reputation
at the IAEA. No one familiar with the record of the MEK could have
believed that it was capable of creating the detailed documents that
were passed to the German government. That required an organization
with the expertise in nuclear weapons and experience in fabricating
documents – both of which Israel’s Mossad had in abundance.
Bush
administration officials had highlighted a set of 18 schematic
drawings of the Shahab-3 missile’s reentry vehicle or nosecone of
the missile in each of which there was a round shape representing a
nuclear weapon. Those drawings were described to foreign governments
and the International Atomic Energy Agency as 18 different attempts
to integrate a nuclear weapon into the Shahab-3.
Netanyahu
gave the public its first glimpse of one of those drawings Monday
when he pointed to it triumphantly as visually striking evidence of
Iranian nuclear perfidy. But that schematic drawing had a fundamental
flaw that proved that it and others in the set could not have been
genuine: it showed the “dunce cap” shaped reentry vehicle design
of the original Shahab-3 missile that had been tested from 1998 to
2000. That was the shape that intelligence analysts outside Iran had
assumed in 2002 and 2003 Iran would continue to use in its ballistic
missile.
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