By Omri Ceren, TIP
The morning conversation has been split between worries over the stock market meltdown, on the domestic side, and stories on the Legion of Honor awards, on the foreign affairs side. By the afternoon – and certainly after today’s State Department briefing – the foreign policy debate will probably get back where it left off last week: the AP’s confirmation of the secret side deal between the IAEA and Iran on Parchin, in which the Iranians will get to inspect their own military facility for evidence of their own past illicit nuclear activities.
The Iranians used Parchin for tests relevant to the detonation of nuclear warheads. The IAEA needs to know how far they got so the agency can set up a verification regime against future violations, and so the Obama administration had consistently promised lawmakers that Parchin would be resolved before any final deal was inked. The JCPOA was nonetheless announced without that resolution and instead there was a Roadmap that included a reference a secret IAEA-Iran side deal on Parchin. Last week the AP published a copy of that side deal: instead of allowing IAEA inspectors to collect evidence from the Parchin, samples will be collected by the Iranians using Iranian equipment; instead of allowing the IAEA to collect everything it wants,only seven samples will be handed over from mutually agreed upon areas; instead of giving inspectors access to facilities, photos and videos will be taken by the Iranians themselves, again only from mutually agreed upon areas [a].
I sent around an email last week with a policy overview on why the Parchin arrangement suggests the entire verification regime of the JCPOA may have been gutted: it will become a model for sharply limited future inspections and it indicates the IAEA has folded under political pressure to look the other way on Iranian violations in general. That email had quotes from a range of politics and policy voices – Rep. Royce, David Albright, Olli Heinonen, and others – so let me know if you didn’t get it and I’ll resend.
The policy collapse is already having political consequences. Politico and the NYT both published articles late last week on some of the damage, which I’ve pasted below. There are at least two very broad areas worth pointing out:
(1) The Parchin side deal undermines the administration’s claim on not “trusting” Iran – Functionally all polling shows that distrust of Iran is one of the key factors underneath all of the other results – low favorability of Iran, belief that the Iranians will cheat, belief that the Iranians use sanctions relief for terrorism, etc – that drive majority disapproval for the JCPOA. Those figures have existed since Iran talks began [b]. They’re presumably why the White House started declaring early and often that Iran deal is “not built on trust” (and why deal supporters are still awkwardly frontloading that message in their ads, even when the message doesn’t quite fit [c]).
But of course the JCPOA is built on trust: instead of forcing the Iranians to do anything that would physically preclude them from going nuclear – dismantling centrifuges, shuttering facilities, etc. – the deal leaves Iran as a threshold state and installs transparency measures that would at best enable us to watch the Iranians as they raced toward a bomb (no one pretends that sanctions snapback could stop an Iranian nuke because the effects wouldn’t be felt for years). So the only reason the Iranians wouldn’t build a bomb is if they choose not to, which is the definition of trusting them.
The Parchin side now deal locks in a second arrangement that plainly trusts the Iranians: this time they’re being trusted to inspect themselves. They even get to negotiate with the IAEA on what gets sampled, photographed, and videoed. AEI scholar Michael Rubin has described the arrangement on a policy level “a basic problem of chain of custody – heavy on the ‘trust’ and light on the ‘verify'” [d]. Politico last week highlighted how the same message is now coming from Congress on a political level:
“The Obama administration has a lot of explaining to do,” House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement. “Why should Iran be trusted to carry out its own nuclear inspections at a military site it tried to hide from the world?” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham added that “[a]llowing the Iranians to inspect their own nuclear sites, particularly a notorious military site, is like allowing the inmates to run the jail.”
(2) The Parchin side deal spotlights the administration’s broader collapse on PMDs – Since U.S. negotiators gave up on forcing Iran to dismantle its nuclear infrastructure, they were forced to make verification the be-all end-all of their campaign to Congress. And since resolving PMDs is a prerequisite to establishing a verification regime, they had to assure lawmakers and journalists that Iran would have to resolve both Parchin specifically and PMDs in general [e][f][g][h][i].
The WSJ revealed after Vienna that the administration had in fact collapsed on PMDs, based on two of the documents the White House submitted to Congress about the deal [j]. Now the AP has revealed the exact way the Parchin collapse happened. The two are being folded into each other.
Administration officials have responded by asserting that the collapses are not a problem because the U.S. already knows what Iran did, and so can enforce the JCPOA (in closed sessions they cite an intelligence assessment on the question, even though that assessment unrealistically assumes perfect Iranian compliance moving forward [k], and in public Kerry has claimed that the U.S. has “perfect knowledge” of Iran’s program, which is cringe-inducingly false). But even if the claim was substantively defensible it would still be politically challenging to sell, because it’s a 180 degree change from years of promisses. The NYT article from this weekend outlined how the Parchin side deal is refocusing the political debate on the broader PMDs collapse. Among other things it is known that at least one more side deal exists, and the NYT suggests that one may deal with all PMDs:
But some American intelligence officials winced when they heard Mr. Kerry’s “perfect knowledge” line, because they view their information as far less than perfect… What may turn out to be far more important than what the agency learns, or does not learn, at Parchin is what it learns from documents and scientists who were part of Iran’s nuclear program. Another confidential agreement between Iran and the international atomic agency lays out how inspectors will be able to resolve a list of 12 detailed questions about “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s past work, going far beyond Parchin. That agreement calls for resolving those questions by December… Iran has resisted that for the past four years. But Mr. Kerry told Congress that Iran would have to cooperate before sanctions were lifted. And it is not clear what “cooperation” means — whether the scientists simply have to talk to the inspectors, or actually come clean.
Omri.
412-512-7256
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[a] http://bigstory.ap.org/
[b] http://www.people-press.org/
[c] https://www.youtube.com/watch?
[d] http://freebeacon.com/
[e] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/
[f] http://www.shearman.com/~/
[g] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/
[h] http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/
[i] http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/
[j] http://www.wsj.com/articles/
[k] http://www.bloombergview.com/
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Debate over mysterious Iranian base could threaten nuclear deal
Lawmakers accuse international officials of erring by allowing Iran to provide its own environmental samples.
By Michael Crowley
8/21/15 6:23 PM EDT
Updated 8/22/15 7:20 PM EDT
A secretive military facility in the desert near Tehran has become the focus of pitched debate over the Iran nuclear deal as critics work to derail the agreement ahead of next month’s vote in Congress.
President Barack Obama has won the backing of several key lawmakers in recent days, boosting White House hopes that the nuclear deal will survive the vote. But Obama officials are nervous that the latest debate about the military facility at Parchin — which they say is fueled by distortions — could blunt their momentum.
The debate touches on larger questions about the deal, including whether Iran should be forced to grant unrestricted outsider access to any site on its soil. Supporters of the deal say no country not under military occupation would allow such a thing. It also resurrects the long-standing question of whether Iran should be forced to publicly confess its past nuclear weapons research, another demand Obama officials call unrealistic.
This week, critics pounced on a report that the nuclear deal will allow Iran to provide its own environmental samples from Parchin for testing to determine whether the facility was once used to study nuclear weapons designs.
“The Obama administration has a lot of explaining to do,” House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement. “Why should Iran be trusted to carry out its own nuclear inspections at a military site it tried to hide from the world?” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham added that “[a]llowing the Iranians to inspect their own nuclear sites, particularly a notorious military site, is like allowing the inmates to run the jail.”
The nuclear deal with Iran struck on July 14 by the U.S. and five other world powers imposes limits designed to keep Iran at least one year from a potential bomb in return for lifting economic sanctions.
Obama officials insist the debate over Parchin is overblown, arguing that western intelligence has already provided a clear picture of Iran’s past activity at the site. Particularly given that Iran has repeatedly bulldozed and paved over the suspected testing areas over the past decade, they doubt any new sampling will advance their understanding of Iran’s past nuclear activities there.
They also argue that statements like Boehner’s and McCain’s misleadingly blur the issue of Iran’s past research at the single military complex with the much broader challenge of monitoring all of Iran’s possible nuclear sites in the years ahead.
“Let’s be clear — this issue is one of past behavior,” said a senior administration official. “The United States has already made our judgment about the past, and we are focused on going forward.”
Parchin may seem an unlikely source of controversy, given that it contains no nuclear material and that U.S. officials believe that nuclear-related work stopped there more than a decade ago.
The sprawling complex, composed of hundreds of buildings and test sites 20 miles southeast of Tehran, researches and develops explosives and rockets for Iran’s military. It houses none of the uranium-enriching centrifuges that became famous during the nuclear negotiations.
But intelligence officials believe that Parchin has played an important past role in Iran’s nuclear program — and could do so again. Western intelligence has found that Iran conducted explosive tests there in 2000 as part of a since-discontinued effort to master warhead construction. Specifically, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says that Iran constructed a containment vessel at Parchin which it used to test explosive compression, a technique for triggering an uncontrolled chain reaction in fissile material like highly enriched uranium.
For Iran, scrutiny of Parchin is an extremely touchy matter. Tehran insists its nuclear program has always been peaceful, and Iran’s Supreme Leader has issued a religious fatwa saying that Islam forbids production of nuclear weapons. As a result, sources who worked on the Iran nuclear deal say, there was little chance Iran would ever come clean about its weapons research at the site.
The question of outsider access to Parchin is equally fraught within Iran. Conservatives in Iran, especially in the country’s military establishment, are hostile to IAEA inspectors, whom they have accused of of passing intelligence to the U.S. and Israel to facilitate sabotage and assassinations.
Their fears may have been stoked by a massive October 2014 explosion at Parchin, whose cause was never clearly explained.
In June, Secretary of State John Kerry seemed to downplay the importance of confirming that past research. “We’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another,” Kerry said. “We know what they did. We have no doubt. We have absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities they were engaged in.”
Even so, the nuclear deal required Iran to strike a parallel agreement with the IAEA to resolve the United Nations atomic watchdog agency’s outstanding questions about the Parchin site. The deal did not specify exactly how that would happen, however, and the IAEA says its agreements are confidential. That has drawn attacks from Republicans who complain about what they call “secret side deals” between Tehran and the agency.
The Associated Press said its report was based on the partial text of Iran’s agreement with the IAEA, which it said allowed Iran to take environmental samples from Parchin, according to text the AP posted, “using Iran’s authenticated equipment, consistent with technical specifications provided by the Agency, and the Agency’s containers and seals.”
In a Thursday statement, the IAEA’s director general, Yukiya Amano, did not deny the specifics of the report, but said he was “disturbed by statements suggesting that the IAEA has given responsibility for nuclear inspections to Iran.”
Amano’s language hinted at the difference between the one-time inspection — to address his agency’s questions about past work at Parchin — and the IAEA’s mandate to monitor and inspect any known or suspected Iranian nuclear facilities over the next 15 years.
The AP report suggested that IAEA inspectors would not be allowed to physically enter the base, though the Iranians will provide photos and video of their samples. The IAEA typically analyzes such samples to check for the presence of radioactive materials and other telltale substances associated with nuclear research.
Intelligence officials and commercial satellite imagery show extensive bulldozing, repaving and other suspicious activity at Parchin in recent years. Critics of the nuclear deal were inflamed just two weeks ago after the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank with expertise on Iran’s nuclear program, said satellite images showed that Iran was likely continuing its efforts to hide traces of its past work even after the nuclear deal was signed.
Sources said that the IAEA’s arrangement with Iran came as no surprise to Obama officials, who considered it carefully during the nuclear negotiations in Switzerland, and consulted with intelligence officials and U.S. nuclear scientists. Opponents of the deal counter that the Obama administration was foolhardy not to demand more access and information about Parchin, insisting that containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions requires perfect knowledge about its past activity — and that allowing Iran to pretend it never conducted nuclear weapons research sets a dangerous precedent for future nonproliferation efforts.
Still unclear is whether Iran has made any specific agreement regarding possible IAEA requests to inspect Parchin in the future, should it believe that Iran has resumed its weapons research there. The nuclear deal requires Iran to give inspectors prompt access to any suspicious sites on request, with disputes referred to an arbitration panel in a process that can take up to 24 days to resolve.
Congress is expected to vote on the deal in mid-September and a vote of disapproval could restrict Obama from lifting sanctions on Iran. With Republicans unified against the deal, it faces majority opposition in both chambers. But Obama is expected to veto the measure, and administration officials believe they can fend off any effort to override that veto.
In recent days the deal’s supporters have grown hopeful about averting even an initial vote of disapproval through a Senate filibuster. That prospect looked likelier after Thursday’s declaration of support for the deal by the centrist Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri. On the House side, Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York announced his support for the deal, a significant move given that he represents a heavily Jewish area. Israel’s government is strongly opposed to the nuclear deal.
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Prospect of Self-Inspections by Iran Feeds Opposition to Nuclear Deal
David E. Sanger
August 21, 2015
To the most strident opponents of President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the suspicious behavior at a military base about 12 miles southeast of Tehran has become a rallying call to defeat the accord, especially as it now appears that Iranian officials may be allowed to take their own environmental samples at the site and turn them over to inspectors.
It did not take long for the speaker of the House, John A. Boehner, to question whether “anyone at the White House has seen the final documents” establishing rules for inspections.
Though the International Atomic Energy Agency says it will monitor the collection, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce, declared that, “International inspections should be done by international inspectors. Period.”
But as in most debates about the Iran deal, the sound bites — on both sides — do not entirely align with reality, or the complexity of the agreement. And the reality about the Parchin military site is that for all its potency as a political issue as Congress prepares to vote on the accord, it is probably not a place where anyone can learn very much about what progress Iran made toward building an atomic weapon.
From all the evidence that has been made public — and much about the inspection architecture remains classified — Parchin likely was a significant site for nuclear weapons research and experimentation a decade ago. It is suspected of carrying out experiments on high explosives — the kind required to detonate a nuclear weapon.
The suspicions about what once happened at Parchin are so old that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors asked to enter the base in 2004 and actually got inside — once — in November 2005.
They found nothing. But soon after, they concluded they were probably in the wrong buildings, and the Iranians turned down subsequent requests for access.
In the years since, the Parchin site has been bulldozed and rebuilt to the point that evidence of past work likely has vanished.
But it has taken on a new, political importance in recent weeks, as a symbol of whether the I.A.E.A., a United Nations institution, is interested in conducting a real inspection or just checking the box to show that it asked questions, took samples and has taken the issue off the books.
The administration’s inability to describe what it knows about the inspection regime planned for Parchin — which is detailed in a confidential agreement between the agency and Tehran — has created the impression, at least among opponents of the deal, that the White House is hiding exactly how the agreement would be monitored.
That led to a sharp exchange last month between Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho, over Mr. Kerry’s refusal to describe the inspection methodology in public. Mr. Kerry said the administration does not have a copy of the agreement, but was aware of its details.
“Even the N.F.L. wouldn’t go along with this,” Mr. Risch said, his voice dripping with sarcasm — perhaps an allusion to letting professional athletes prepare their own samples to prove they are not taking performance-enhancing drugs. After that, the administration provided more classified briefings and even had the director general of the I.A.E.A., Yukiya Amano, visit Capitol Hill to answer questions.
According to people familiar with that briefing, Mr. Amano, a former Japanese diplomat, suggested his agency would be monitoring the Iranians as they collected samples. It was not clear what form international oversight would take, but administration officials, including Mr. Kerry, insist that American technical experts are satisfied.
The issue flared anew when The Associated Press reported it had seen a document that described how Iran would collect the samples at Parchin. It published the text of that document, which was described as an early draft of the agreement, although a former I.A.E.A. official, Tariq Rauf, published an annotated version of the document that called into question the authenticity of the A.P. text.
Mr. Amano, for his part, issued a statement saying: “I am disturbed by statements suggesting that the I.A.E.A. has given responsibility for nuclear inspections to Iran.” He said those statements “misrepresent the way in which we will undertake this important verification work.”
But he never described how that work would be conducted, an omission that is bound to keep the discussion alive.
At the core of the dispute is a bargain Mr. Kerry made to get the Iran deal: He gave Tehran a pass on admitting its past work on nuclear weapons designs in return for a far stricter regime going forward.
Mr. Kerry insisted at one point that the United States had “perfect knowledge” of Iran’s past activities, based on the intelligence work of the United States and allies, and did not need the I.A.E.A.’s confirmation. His negotiating team said it was clear that Iran would never confess to everything it may have done, particularly if that contradicted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s insistence that Iran never worked on nuclear weapons.
Mr. Kerry emphasizes that the inspections for current and future facilities operate under rules enumerated in the nuclear accord, and he argues they are among “the most stringent in history.” In other words, he has said there is one set of inspection regimes for past activity, and a far more critical one for the future.
But some American intelligence officials winced when they heard Mr. Kerry’s “perfect knowledge” line, because they view their information as far less than perfect — and thus so is their knowledge about how close Iran came to design for a weapon. What may turn out to be far more important than what the agency learns, or does not learn, at Parchin is what it learns from documents and scientists who were part of Iran’s nuclear program.
Another confidential agreement between Iran and the international atomic agency lays out how inspectors will be able to resolve a list of 12 detailed questions about “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s past work, going far beyond Parchin. That agreement calls for resolving those questions by December, a herculean task since a serious investigation would require scores of interviews and reviewing complex documentation.
Iran has resisted that for the past four years. But Mr. Kerry told Congress that Iran would have to cooperate before sanctions were lifted. And it is not clear what “cooperation” means — whether the scientists simply have to talk to the inspectors, or actually come clean.
Olli Heinonen, the former chief inspector at the I.A.E.A., who led the agency’s team to Parchin in 2005, said last year: “You don’t need to see every nut and bolt, but you are taking a heck of a risk if you don’t establish a baseline of how far they went.”
Several veterans of the Bush administration argue that it is no time to let Iran off the hook “For inspections to be meaningful, Iran would have to completely and correctly declare all its relevant nuclear activities and procurement, past and present,” Will Tobey, the former deputy administrator of the Energy Department’s Nuclear Security Administration, wrote last month in The Wall Street Journal.
That would be a long process, of which Parchin would be a tiny footnote. It is also unlikely to happen, American and European officials say.
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