Official: U.S. intelligence found Iran nuke document was forged

WASHINGTON,
Dec 28 (IPS) - U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document
published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes
an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a
"neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according
to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Philip Giraldi,
who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS
that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do
with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The
sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.

The
Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of
the document. But it quoted "an Asian intelligence source" - a term
some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials - as
confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron
initiator as recently as 2007.

The story of the purported Iranian
document prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and European
support for tougher sanctions against Iran and reminders of Israel's
threats to attack Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails.

U.S.
news media reporting has left the impression that U.S. intelligence
analysts have not made up their mind about the document's authenticity,
although it has been widely reported that they have now had a full year
to assess the issue

Giraldi's intelligence sources did not reveal all the reasons that
led analysts to conclude that the purported Iran document had been
fabricated by a foreign intelligence agency. But their suspicions of
fraud were prompted in part by the source of the story, according to
Giraldi.

"The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to
publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the
British government," Giraldi said.

The Times is part of a Murdoch
publishing empire that includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the New
York Post. All Murdoch-owned news media report on Iran with an
aggressively pro-Israeli slant.

The document itself also had a number of red flags suggesting possible or likely fraud.

The
subject of the two-page document which the Times published in English
translation would be highly classified under any state's security
system. Yet there is no confidentiality marking on the document, as can
be seen from the photograph of the Farsi-language original published by
the Times.

The absence of security markings has been cited by the
Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali
Asghar Soltanieh, as evidence that the "alleged studies" documents,
which were supposedly purloined from an alleged Iranian nuclear
weapons-related programme early in this decade, are forgeries.

The
document also lacks any information identifying either the issuing
office or the intended recipients. The document refers cryptically to
"the Centre", "the Institute", "the Committee", and the "neutron group".

The
document's extreme vagueness about the institutions does not appear to
match the concreteness of the plans, which call for hiring eight
individuals for different tasks for very specific numbers of hours for
a four-year time frame.

Including security markings and such
identifying information in a document increases the likelihood of
errors that would give the fraud away.

The absence of any date on
the document also conflicts with the specificity of much of the
information. The Times reported that unidentified "foreign intelligence
agencies" had dated the document to early 2007, but gave no reason for
that judgment.

An obvious motive for suggesting the early 2007
date is that it would discredit the U.S. intelligence community's
November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran
had discontinued unidentified work on nuclear weapons and had not
resumed it as of the time of the estimate.

Discrediting the NIE
has been a major objective of the Israeli government for the past two
years, and the British and French governments have supported the
Israeli effort.

The biggest reason for suspecting that the
document is a fraud is its obvious effort to suggest past Iranian
experiments related to a neutron initiator. After proposing experiments
on detecting pulsed neutrons, the document refers to "locations where
such experiments used to be conducted".

That reference plays to
the widespread assumption, which has been embraced by the International
Atomic Energy Agency, that Iran had carried out experiments with
Polonium-210 in the late 1980s, indicating an interest in neutron
initiators. The IAEA referred in reports from 2004 through 2007 to its
belief that the experiment with Polonium-210 had potential relevance to
making "a neutron initiator in some designs of nuclear weapons".

The
National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political arm of the
terrorist organisation Mujahedeen-e Khalq, claimed in February 2005
that Iran's research with Polonium-210 was continuing and that it was
now close to producing a neutron initiator for a nuclear weapon.

Sanger
and Broad were so convinced that the Polonium-210 experiments proved
Iran's interest in a neutron initiator that they referred in their
story on the leaked document to both the IAEA reports on the
experiments in the late 1980s and the claim by NCRI of continuing
Iranian work on such a nuclear trigger.

What Sanger and Broad
failed to report, however, is that the IAEA has acknowledged that it
was mistaken in its earlier assessment that the Polonium-210
experiments were related to a neutron initiator.

After seeing the
complete documentation on the original project, including complete
copies of the reactor logbook for the entire period, the IAEA concluded
in its Feb. 22, 2008 report that Iran's explanations that the
Polonium-210 project was fundamental research with the eventual aim of
possible application to radio isotope batteries was "consistent with
the Agency's findings and with other information available to it".

The
IAEA report said the issue of Polonium-210 – and thus the earlier
suspicion of an Iranian interest in using it as a neutron initiator for
a nuclear weapon - was now considered "no longer outstanding".

New
York Times reporters David Sanger and William J. Broad reported U.S.
intelligence officials as saying the intelligence analysts "have yet to
authenticate the document". Sanger and Broad explained the failure to
do so, however, as a result of excessive caution left over from the
CIA's having failed to brand as a fabrication the document purporting
to show an Iraqi effort to buy uranium in Niger.

The Washington
Post's Joby Warrick dismissed the possibility that the document might
be found to be fraudulent. "There is no way to establish the
authenticity or original source of the document...," wrote Warrick.

But
the line that the intelligence community had authenticated it evidently
reflected the Barack Obama administration's desire to avoid
undercutting a story that supports its efforts to get Russian and
Chinese support for tougher sanctions against Iran.

This is not
the first time that Giraldi has been tipped off by his intelligence
sources on forged documents. Giraldi identified the individual or
office responsible for creating the two most notorious forged documents
in recent U.S. intelligence history.

In 2005, Giraldi identified
Michael Ledeen, the extreme right-wing former consultant to the
National Security Council and the Pentagon, as an author of the
fabricated letter purporting to show Iraqi interest in purchasing
uranium from Niger. That letter was used by the George W. Bush
administration to bolster its false case that Saddam Hussein had an
active nuclear weapons programme.

Giraldi also identified
officials in the "Office of Special Plans" who worked under
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith as having forged a
letter purportedly written by Hussein's intelligence director, Tahir
Jalail Habbush al-Tikriti, to Hussein himself referring to an Iraqi
intelligence operation to arrange for an unidentified shipment from
Niger.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and
journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback
edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

(This article was originally published by IPS)