Strange Scoop

Greg Miller for The Los Angeles Times has a seemingly important scoop about a "previously undisclosed program" run by the CIA and called "Brain Drain" that was "designed to degrade Iran's nuclear weapons program by persuading key officials to defect." Naturally, the CIA doesn't want to talk about it:

A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the effort to cultivate defectors, saying "the agency does not comment on these kinds of allegations as a matter of course."

Some sources were, however, willing to speak off the record about the awesomeness of this program:

The defector program was put in place under CIA Director Porter J. Goss, who has since left. The agency compiled a list of dozens of people to target as potential defectors based on a single criterion, according to a former official involved in the operation: "Who, if removed from the program, would have the biggest impact on slowing or stopping their progress?"

"Did they have replacements for these people? Any country would have," the former official involved in the operation said. "But we did slow the program."

But as Isaac Chotiner points out, the lede is that "The CIA launched a secret program in 2005 designed to degrade Iran's nuclear weapons program" and the National Intelligence Estimate's new conclusion is that Iran's nuclear weapons program was mothballed in 2003. How could the CIA's activities have slowed an Iranian program that had already been put on hold?

Comments

The American Media appear to be strangely slow on the uptake.

If Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, for strategic reasons, it is unlikely that Iranian leaders thought it in their strategic interest to keep this event completely secret. To make their strategic choice, strategically effective, they would have had to convince the U.S. intelligence services of what had happened.

Just as Saddam Hussein, before the Iraq invasion, was so desperate to inform U.S. intelligence, that he allowed his Foreign Minister to become a CIA informant !!!!, the Iranians must have moved heaven and earth to get undeniably credible information into the hands of all 16 intelligence agencies.

This is "spying" as a Monty Python routine. The organization you are spying on is actively trying to give you good information, but you cannot believe it, because they must be trying to deceive you, because why would you be secretly spying on them, if they did not have stuff to hide, so the subjects of your spying have to work at helping you distinguish their information from the disinformation you, as a paranoid, expect.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | December 9, 2007 11:35 AM

There are nuclear programs and nuclear weapons programs. The nuclear weapons program was mothballed in 2003. To create any kind of high tech program requires exceptionally smart people. Take those away and the effort languishes. Iran doesn't have an influx of brainiac immigrants to keep its high tech sector popping in the face of a native population not up to the task for one reason or another.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | December 9, 2007 11:44 AM

" . . . a native population not up to the task for one reason or another."

And you know this . . . how?

Posted by Joel | December 9, 2007 12:12 PM

The CIA seems to be running in reverse the operation the Soviet Union ran against the Manhattan Project.

Posted by Davis X. Machina | December 9, 2007 12:15 PM

It seems like there's a pretty logical answer that leaves out Monty Python. CIA was targeting the researchers who were working on refining uranium for what we now think is the civilian nuclear program.

Iran has always (I think) claimed that all its nuclear research activities were directed towards the production of civilian nuclear power. Until just recently, the US asserted that this civilian nuclear program was little more than a beard for nuclear weapons research (given that acquiring the technology to refine large quantities of uranium is a common requirement of both buiding nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons). But now we're saying that it wasn't a beard and they were actually going for the power plants.

But that doesn't mean there weren't plenty of guys trying to refine uranium . . . and that's probably who we went after.

Posted by southpaw | December 9, 2007 12:20 PM

Jeez. I thought if you could enrich uranium enough to use it to fuel power plants, you could use the same equipment to enrich it some more and use it to build warheads. And I thought the brains to do this enriching were hard to come by and if they disappeared, that would set the program back.

Guess I'm just a dumb Bushie and none of this is true.

Posted by Highlymisinformed | December 9, 2007 12:55 PM

"And I thought the brains to do this enriching were hard to come by and if they disappeared, that would set the program back."

Nope. The brains to do uranium enrichment are not that scarce, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. More brains are being trained all the time. The information needed by these brains is freely available.

What is needed is money, energy and experience. Iran has the money and the energy, and it is getting the experience, which accumulates even if good people leave.

"Guess I'm just a dumb Bushie and none of this is true."

It's nice that you're so graceful about it.

Posted by Joel | December 9, 2007 1:16 PM

A few questions:

a) Wouldn't the scientists "Who, if removed from the program, would have the biggest impact on slowing or stopping their progress" be the ones most closely monitored by the Iranian Secret Services? In other words, wouldn't the Iranians be likely to use such scientists as bait to identify and nullify any intelligence assets the US had is Iran?

b) If they're claiming that the operation instituted in 2005 was a success, and they really did lure enough Iranian scientists to defect to "slow the program", wouldn't that mean that the information these defectors provided fed into the assessment of the NIE? In other words, since the most recent Presidentially-approved NIE says that Iran hasn't even been trying to build a nuclear weapons capability sice at least 2003, this operation is part of the reason the 2007 NIE disagrees so firmly with the 2005 NIE?

c) On the same point, if they were getting hard evidence from Iranian defectors from 2005 onwards saying that, so far as they knew, there hadn't been an Iranian nuclear weapons program since at least 2003, why did the current Administration continue to claim that the evidence they had left no doubt that Iran was pushing ahead with a nuclear weapons program? In other words, the claimed success of this operation would also serve as an acknowledgement that the White House has been systematically lying about this issue in order to magic up a threat where they knew there was none. Wouldn't it?

That's enough questions for now.

Posted by Tony J | December 9, 2007 2:00 PM

That should be "any intelligence assets the US had in Iran"

Sorry

Posted by Tony J | December 9, 2007 2:03 PM

Tony J.,

a) Sure.

b) Could be.

c) The program started up in 2005; that doesn't mean it was immediately generating defectors and intelligence. Plus, any intelligence they got from the program would only form on facet of the overall analysis, and there would be potential questions about its credibility. Presumably Iranian secrets are held in a compartmentalized system, like US secrets, and very few people will be able to present a full picture.

Posted by southpaw | December 9, 2007 2:08 PM

Fair enough.

However the release of an NIE that categorically says that Iran hasn't even been trying to create a nuclear weapons capability since 2003, coupled with the claim from the CIA that their post-2005 operation was a success (in gathering defectors, if not in retarding a non-existant program), can surely only mean that all of the first-person evidence they were getting from Iranian scientists between 2005 and 2007 was saying that there was no program. Any scientist saying the opposite would have been an immediate standout and would have been mentioned in the Presidentially-approved NIE.

But it's only really been since 2005, and especially in the last year or so, that the White House has been beating the war drums against Iran on the grounds that Iran is trying very hard to create a nuclear weapons capability.

Those two things don't add up. Just when the evidence is showing that Iran isn't a threat requiring military force, the White House is loudly claiming the opposite, and making this the centrepiece of its Middle Eastern policy.

I call that lying. And not for the first time. It's just that here the professionals who rolled over in 2002 to give the White House what it wanted said no, and were willing to go to jail - or at least to court - to stop the White House from lying the US into another disaster.

Plaudits to them. And I'd also add that the fact that the White House shied away from any of this getting to court shows that the assessment of the NIE is basically irrefutable and far, far away from a partisan hitjob.

Posted by Tony J | December 9, 2007 2:36 PM

I don't know. I think we're talking about nuclear physicists here. In the US more than half of physics graduate students have scored over 700 on the GRE. That's aleady a fairly select group. Then there's the lure of higher-paid jobs for the 700+ crowd. Then there's the three or four years of graduate school just to get the elements down. Then there's the great majority of physicists not knowing nuclear physics.

Then there's the knowhow that comes from experience with the nitty-gritty engineering problems common to all programs, and the pecularities of the Iranian program.

Seems to me these guys would be not all that easy to replace. But I don't know.

Our intelligence operatives certainly have a mixed record. Whether their efforts are this time misdirected I don't know. But I think maybe they could do a lot worse.

Posted by Highlymisinformed | December 9, 2007 2:40 PM

Should have added:
Isn't it true that the biggest obstacle to becoming a nuclear power is acquiring the necesssary plutonium or highly-refined uranium? So this enrichment program has important military implications?

Posted by Highlymisinformed | December 9, 2007 2:46 PM

Highlymisinformed,

There are other countries that train physicists besides the US. Germany, France, UK, Russia, China, India, Canada, just to name a few. Furthermore, it is not only newly trained physicists who understand bomb-making nuclear theory. This technology and the physics behind it have been around for over sixty years, and physics grads don't just die or forget their training if they are not immediately hired to make a bomb.

The "knowhow" is something I noted above. It doesn't disappear when the scientist who acquires it leaves. Scientist leave notes.

"Isn't it true that the biggest obstacle to becoming a nuclear power is acquiring the necesssary plutonium or highly-refined uranium?"

33% correct. Also required is the technology to machine plutonium/uranium and to engineer and program the precise detonation sequence to achieve critical mass fast enough to avoid a nuclear fizzle. The final requirement is a delivery system that can reliably target warheads worldwide. This ain't trivial pursuit.

"So this enrichment program has important military implications?"

Potential implications, yes. The ability to mine uranium ore has important military implications, too. So does a sophisticated computational capability.

Posted by Joel | December 9, 2007 4:53 PM

I don't know. I think we're talking about nuclear physicists here.

No, you're talking about engineers. The physics (and even the engineering) is pretty straightforward, and not really that hard. It's just a matter of buying (or making) equipment and time, really.

Any nation-state (or sufficiently motivated/wealthy corporation) could make a bomb, given the raw materials. It would likely be crude, but it would work.

Posted by justinb | December 9, 2007 5:33 PM

"Also required is the technology to machine plutonium/uranium and to engineer and program the precise detonation sequence to achieve critical mass fast enough to avoid a nuclear fizzle. The final requirement is a delivery system that can reliably target warheads worldwide."

So the NIE says that the technology is what Iran stopped working on in 2002--machining uranium and the detonation sequence?

But Iran continues to acquire missiles that could deliver a warhead if they built it? Two of three?

Why are there so few nuclear powers? Sounds as if even say Qatar could be one if it chose. And a good many other countries. It takes money and the permission, if they're big enough, of one's neighbors. The controlling factor must be in many instances just an absence of desire--based on strategic/security considerations. Question: did the cessation of the bomb-design program coupled with continuance of the enrichment program provide assurance that Iran no longer desires a nuclear weapon?

I had thought that being put in the crosshairs as one of states located on the axis of evil motivated Iran to want nuclear weapons in the worst way. Does the cessation of the bomb-design program prove otherwise? Or does it just show they're sequencing--putting first things, getting a supply of fissile material--first?

Know-how isn't the sort of thing you get from notes. Every organization has an "institutional memory" located in the brains of a few experienced workers. Now more often engineers
than scientists?

If you were listing the obstacles to building an atomic bomb, all the equipment can be bought at a price. And the personnel, too--it's argued by some that they can be had on the cheap. So isn't the fissile material what's hardest to come by? The highest priority to a state desiring to acquire nuclear weapons?

Posted by Highlymisinformed | December 9, 2007 7:03 PM

"But Iran continues to acquire missiles that could deliver a warhead if they built it? Two of three?"

I'm unaware of any evidence that Iran is acquiring ICBM capablility. That's what it would take to deliver warheads around the world.

"Why are there so few nuclear powers?"

Because it is extremely expensive, politically and financially.
For most nations, conventional military power sufficies.

"Question: did the cessation of the bomb-design program coupled with continuance of the enrichment program provide assurance that Iran no longer desires a nuclear weapon?"

Since neither I nor anyone else possesses a crystal ball, I'd have to answer this in the negative.

"I had thought that being put in the crosshairs as one of states located on the axis of evil motivated Iran to want nuclear weapons in the worst way."

Unlikely. More likely, being next door to Saddam's Iraq, which already prosecuted a war against Iran, provided good and sufficient motive.

"Does the cessation of the bomb-design program prove otherwise? Or does it just show they're sequencing--putting first things, getting a supply of fissile material--first?"

The simplest hypothesis is that, since they've announce that they intend to generate energy by nuclear power, and since a precondition for generating nuclear power is enriching uranium, they're enriching uranium so they can generate nuclear power.

"Know-how isn't the sort of thing you get from notes. Every organization has an "institutional memory" located in the brains of a few experienced workers. Now more often engineers
than scientists?"

Uh, no. I've been a professional scientist for 25 years. Most of the information I use to design experiments is from the notes of others, either published or in lab notebooks.

"If you were listing the obstacles to building an atomic bomb, all the equipment can be bought at a price. And the personnel, too--it's argued by some that they can be had on the cheap. So isn't the fissile material what's hardest to come by? The highest priority to a state desiring to acquire nuclear weapons?"

Fissile material has to be created by enrichment of ore. It is expensive, but the technology is well-established and published. Similarly, the basic principles of machining the enriched material into a form capable of being exploded, and engineering the explosive device have been worked out. The basic physics of rocketry have also been worked out. The engineering of all three is challenging. None is "harder" than the other, and all are essential if one is to become a nuclear power.

Posted by Joel | December 9, 2007 8:21 PM

Joel - "But Iran continues to acquire missiles that could deliver a warhead if they built it? Two of three?"
I'm unaware of any evidence that Iran is acquiring ICBM capablility. That's what it would take to deliver warheads around the world.

Joel is incorrect, because he is America-centric. ICMBs are only a problem to those countries far away from a threat. Closer in, as Europe, Israel, Turkey, KSA are, a MRBM capable of dropping nukes in - is the maximum threat. Also to US regional bases. Iran is going full-bore developing and deploying ballistic missiles. Ballistic missiles, vs. tactical rocket artillery, are good for delivering one type of "cargo" in the 2-ton warhead a 30 million dollar missile can drop with a 3-km radius of probable strike - WMD.

That they chose to put on those missiles on parade in 2005 the slogans "Death to America", "Death to Israel under Allah's sun", "Wipe the West and Zionism off the map" might be troubling to some and speak to Iran's long-term ill-intentions.

Joel - The simplest hypothesis is that, since they've announce that they intend to generate energy by nuclear power, and since a precondition for generating nuclear power is enriching uranium, they're enriching uranium so they can generate nuclear power.

Incorrect. If you wish a situation where you have nuclear power plants, you do not spend almost all your money on fuel enrichment when you can buy the stuff cheaply under IAEA supervision from 6-7 global consortiums taking advantage of tens of billions sunk into enrichment for weapons production (France, Russia, UK, USA) or for enrichment being a good use for abundent but remote from consumer electric users, hydropower facilities (Canada, Brazil). Iran is putting their money into enrichment, not any into fuel fab, nuke power plant operator training, new nuke plant construction.
Its like if the Vietnamese wanted a modern civil aviation program, but one that only focused their money on designing their own medium range planes that could conveniently double as bombers, while building no airports and training no pilots.

Joel - Fissile material has to be created by enrichment of ore. It is expensive, but the technology is well-established and published. Similarly, the basic principles of machining the enriched material into a form capable of being exploded, and engineering the explosive device have been worked out. The basic physics of rocketry have also been worked out. The engineering of all three is challenging. None is "harder" than the other, and all are essential if one is to become a nuclear power.
Posted by Joel

Joel is again incorrect, on many counts.

*Creating weapons grade uranium is not a matter of enriching ore. But elemental isotopic enrichment of the element itself using a dangerous gaseous compound containing the element.

*That weapons grade enrichment technology is NOT common knowledge with all the "how-to's" published. Much of it is highly classified, not-published.

*Joel is incorrect about basic SRBM and MRBM missile tech being harder than the enrichment of naturally occuring uranium to bombgrade stuff. And wrong that the machining and design and engineering of HEU gun-type nuclear bombs is challanging at all. It's 100-year old artillery equipment manufacture difficult. No more. The challenging stuff is plutonium implosion and thermonuclear design, neither of which Iran now seeks.

Misinformed - I don't know. I think we're talking about nuclear physicists here. In the US more than half of physics graduate students have scored over 700 on the GRE. That's aleady a fairly select group.

You are correct, and Iran is fairly thin in manpower in other high tech fields needed to get bomb-grade uranium. Chem engineering, high-accuracy voltage and electric frequency control for centrifuge cascades, vibration-free electric motors and mounting design, frictionless bearing science, centrifuge, stress cracking detection and analysis, harmonic vibration testing and troubleshooting, advanced metallurgical alloying. Loss of just a few people here and there can cause big organizational problems...Especially after the snakes of the AQ Kahn Network that provided much of that technical asssistance and procurement from willing Euro & China whore vendors to AQ Kahn, were burned by Libya after our Iraq invasion, and rolled up.

And Joel is incorrect that Iran can just go to Germany, France, UK, Russia, China, India, Canada, just to name a few, and replace the AQ Kahn Network or defector top Iranians with others. That is a good way to get arrested or "disappear" courtesy of Mossad, French DST, Putin's thugs, Pak ISI....spreading nuke weapons knowledge or nuke technology without IAEA and national Gov't permission is worse than getting caught running a child porn ring.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 9, 2007 11:22 PM

Chris for once is not entirely incorrect. Iran is indeed acquiring ICBM - or at least MRBM - technology. Most of which is intended to drop conventional warheads on Israel - or more likely, US bases in the region - if absolutely necessary.

And of course, a lot of it is probably driven by the same economics the US military program is - i.e., somebody gets paid for this stuff.

"Iran is putting their money into enrichment, not any into fuel fab, nuke power plant operator training, new nuke plant construction."

Bullshit.

"when you can buy the stuff cheaply under IAEA supervision from 6-7 global consortiums taking advantage of tens of billions sunk into enrichment for weapons production (France, Russia, UK, USA)"

Yeah, from the US. Right. From France, which wanks to bomb Iran. From the UK, who wants to bomb Iran.

Fucking moron. Iran can't trust any of these countries to supply them with fuel. Even Russia delayed the fuel delivery - although that appears to be on track at this time. Few countries will trust anyone else to supply fuel if they can afford to master the fuel cycle themselves. Japan has the full fuel cycle - do they trust the US?

The CIA program is pointless, if it exists. There are a certain number of people who will be working in the necessary fields no matter what. And the more you drain that field, the more likely that field is to look valuable to up and coming physics students and engineers. The best you can do is delay a program by a year or two if some critical position can't be filled.

Not to mention that how many US citizens would defect to Iran if Iranian spies offered them tons of money? Not that many. There may be more Iranians willing to go the other way, but it's unlikely to be terribly successful.

What appears to be have happened is that a couple Iranians may have defected - or been kidnapped, the CIA wouldn't admit that if it happened - and some intelligence might have been retrieved. There was at least one IRGC general that appears to have disappeared, for example, with some controversy from the Iranian government and his family over whether he defected or was kidnapped. This is probably their program.

By the way, if one considers it possible that Iran had a weapons program up until 2003, and that Valerie Plame's operations were primarily targeted at the A. Q. Khan network and Iran as a beneficiary of it - which they almost certainly were - then it becomes interesting that Cheney decided to out her at that point.

There is some evidence that the weapons smuggling and nuclear black market operations that Plame targeted were the same operations that reportedly got FBI translator Sibel Edmonds fired. And Edmonds is now willing to testify to any major MSM - provided the testimony is unedited - that "senior elected US officials" were involved with those black market operators. (Such as, for example, Marc Rich, who was pardoned by Clinton in exchange for money, and who was Scooter Libby's client at one point, and who is reputedly neck deep in financing these sorts of operations.)

So what are the odds that Plame's operation was closing in on certain individuals whose exposure might have led to exposure of these "senior elected US officials"?

The "nepotism" accusation as the method to discredit Joe Wilson never made any sense.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 10, 2007 12:17 AM

Wow, Chris. You basically don't know anything about atomic bomb technology, do you? But thanks for discrediting yourself instead of making me have to do it!

Posted by Joel | December 10, 2007 6:36 AM

" . . . a native population not up to the task for one reason or another."

And you know this . . . how?

That was the premise of MY's post: the CIA tried to get significant Iranians to defect because they didn't have a long bench of scientists.

And a dig at American needs vs. American training.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | December 10, 2007 8:53 AM

Joel, a know it all "scientist" of dubious provenence who talks so convincingly of "enriching uranium ore" and the "technical and engineering barriers" to making a gun-type U-235 assembly?

Ah, yes, THAT Joel! Who "discredited" me!

Posted by Chris Ford | December 10, 2007 9:12 AM