Commentary..
March '12..
Last June, the distinguished American journalist Seymour Hersh published an article in the New Yorker entitled “Iran and the Bomb: How Real Is the Nuclear Threat?” His answer: not very. There exists no “irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” Hersh asserted, relying upon the words of anonymous “intelligence and diplomatic officials.” Hersh concluded with a quote from Mohamed ElBaradei, who had retired as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) two years earlier: “During my time at the agency,” ElBaradei said, “we haven’t seen a shred of evidence that Iran has been weaponizing, in terms of building nuclear-weapons facilities and using enriched materials.”
A week before Hersh’s piece hit newsstands, news came of a letter sent by Yukiya Amano, ElBaradei’s successor, to the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. The IAEA had received “further information related to such possible undisclosed nuclear-related activities.” Amano wished to “reiterate the concern about the existence of possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.” Iran, as it has always done, dismissed the evidence collected by the IAEA as forgeries.
In September, the IAEA revealed it had received information about Iranian “activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.” Two months later, the agency released yet another report confirming what everyone already knew: The regime is pursuing a nuclear-weapons program. Among other information, the agency revealed tests “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device,” “the acquisition of nuclear-weapons development information and documentation from a clandestine nuclear-supply network,” and “work on the development of an indigenous design of a nuclear weapon including the testing of components.” The IAEA cited more than 1,000 document pages of “credible” information related to Iranian weaponization, accumulated by “more than 10 member states.”
The damning IAEA report was a long time coming. In September 2009, at a joint press conference on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the declassification of intelligence that revealed a secret, underground uranium-enrichment plant near the holy city of Qom—a highly inconvenient place to produce fuel rods for medical isotopes. Obama said that he delayed releasing the information for months, as it “is very important in these kind of high-stakes situations to make sure the intelligence is right,” and that the revelation of the plant “represents a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the nonproliferation regime.”
Hersh—the man described by the Financial Times as “the last great American reporter”—was unfazed. There remains “no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program,” he wrote in a November 18 blog post. To account for the IAEA’s increasingly harsh tone toward Tehran, he suggested that the agency’s new head, unlike ElBaradei, was a lackey of Washington, telling a radio interviewer that “Amano has pledged his fealty to America.”
Indeed, the IAEA report was nothing more than “a political document,” Hersh said, before revealing a hint as to why he was so adamant in denying the obvious about Iran’s nuclear intentions:
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