Reuters on Monday leaked a confidential new report from a U.N. Panel of Experts documenting a range of Iranian efforts aimed at circumventing international restrictions on its acquisition of illicit material, with the wire highlighting parts of the report in which experts worried that the Islamic Republic has “learned how to outsmart security and intelligence services in acquiring sensitive components and materials.” Tehran’s tactics were described as including everything from “concealing titanium tubes inside steel pipes to using its petrochemical industry as a cover to obtain items for a heavy-water nuclear reactor.”
The experts recommend that governments exercise greater vigilance over freight-forwarding firms, which often appear as the ordering party on shipments of items destined for Iran. While such practices are not necessarily illegal, the panel says Tehran could use them to conceal final destinations or uses.
The news comes as Obama administration officials have begun floating a possible deal between Iran and the P5+1 global powers under which Tehran would be left within a year or even six months of producing weapons-grade nuclear material – Secretary of State John Kerry explicitly defended the scenario to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month – which has in turn generated concerns that the Islamic Republic would be able to sprint across the nuclear finish line undetected.
“I think it’s public knowledge today that we’re operating with a time period for a so-called breakout of about two months. That’s been in the public domain,” Kerry testified at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
“So six months to 12 months is – I’m not saying that’s what we’d settle for, but even that is significantly more,” Kerry said in response to a question about whether a “breakout” window of up to a year was the negotiators’ goal.
The U.S. intelligence community has in recent years been criticized for miscalling key dynamics in the Middle East and beyond, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the various Arab Spring revolutions. The Washington Free Beacon on Monday published remarks from top Israeli leaders emphasizing that Jerusalem would not take on the existential risk of an Iranian nuclear bomb on the faith that Washington’s intelligence apparatus would this time succeed.
“American intelligence officials have publicly admitted that they cannot guarantee identification in real time of an Iranian breakout move to produce a nuclear weapon,” wrote [former Israeli Gen. Yaakov ] Amidror.
He added that even if Western intelligence could spot an Iranian breakout effort, the Obama administration cannot be relied on to take military action.
In the September 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine, Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, documented the numerous ways Iran has used subterfuge to evade sanctions and ramp up imports of materials that could be used for nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
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