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March 19, 2004/Adar 26 5764, Vol. 56, No. 26
Israel: Keep pressuring Iran to disarm
LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - When Iran declared late last year that it was suspending development of programs that could produce nuclear weapons, skeptical Israeli officials eyed the move suspiciously.
Now, they say, Teheran's mid-March postponement of international inspection of its nuclear plants confirms the suspicions that the Iranians simply are playing for time.
For Israel, the Iranian enigma is not academic: Israel's cities are within range of Iran's Shihab 3 missile, which is believed to be capable of delivering a nuclear pay-load.
The latest Iranian move, therefore, poses key questions for the Jewish state: What does Israel do if Iran continues developing nuclear weapons under a stop-start facade of cooperation with the inter-national community? How does it go about independently verifying Iranian programs?
Some of those calls will be made by the Mossad intelli-gence agency, which has made coverage of Iran a top priority.
Still, Israeli officials believe that the battle with Iran will be diplomatic, and they are heartened by the fact that the United States and Europe are keeping up pressure on the Islamic republic to disarm.
Iran's suspension of Inter-national Atomic Energy Agency inspections was seen as a warning to the IAEA board to tone down language censuring Iran for hiding evidence of materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons - or risk losing Teheran's future cooperation.
If so, the warning seems to have worked.
U.S. officials wanted wording that could have paved the way for U.N. sanctions on Iran. But the final resolution included amendments that effectively defer any threat of U.N. Security Council action against Iran until the next IAEA board meeting in June.
Much of the current standoff revolves around advanced centrifuges that can be used for enriching uranium to the level used in nuclear weapons. Iran first failed to declare that it had such machines. It then argued that its agreement with the IAEA permitted the country to continue assembl-ing centrifuges at a plant in Natanz as long as they weren't used for uranium enrichment.
The most disturbing development was the recent discovery of traces of weapons-grade uranium on centrifuge components at the Natanz plant.
Israeli experts believe the Iranians might have bought the uranium in Russia or on the Pakistani-based nuclear black market and used the centrifuges to enrich it themselves. Others have a more innocent explanation: that the centrifuges were bought second-hand from Pakistan and came with traces of previously produced uran-ium.
For the Americans, though, the evidence was damning.
"We think it's clear that Iran has not made any decision, any strategic decision, to abandon a nuclear weapons effort," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
That view is shared by the Israeli establishment, which makes a clear distinction between the commitments from Iran and from Libya - which recently pledged to end its own weapons of mass destruction programs.
"Libya and Iran are totally different cases," said Eph-raim Sneh, chairman of a key Knesset subcommittee on defense planning and policy. "Behind Libya's announce-ment there is a genuine strategic decision by" Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi "to bring his country into the new world. The Iranians, as far as we know, are simply playing for time."
Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who recently called the Iranian nuclear program the "gravest existential threat to Israel since the founding of the state," has restructured the agency to focus exclusively on just two issues: global terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Coverage of Iran has been strengthened significantly.
But that doesn't mean the Mossad is succeeding.
Neither the Mossad nor any other Western intelligence service detected the existence of the Pakistani nuclear black market in real time - even though its activities were only semisecret.
This major intelligence failure illustrates how difficult it is to monitor nuclear developments in a closed country as large as Iran.
Would Iran dare to go that far with the Americans on their doorstep in Iraq? Israeli analysts think not. They believe Iran soon will invite the inspectors back and try to string them along while clandestinely proceeding with nuclear programs.
Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.
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