IAEA Blasts U.S. House Report on Iran

In an unusually public moment, senior U.N. nuclear inspectors have harshly objected to the findings of a U.S. House committee report on Iran’s nuclear program, the Washington Post reported today.  They called the parts of the document “outrageous and dishonest” and directly rebutted several claims (see GSN, Aug. 24).

The House Intelligence Committee released the report last month accusing U.S. intelligence agencies of understating Iran’s nuclear capabilities and plans.  It charged that intelligence analysts were shying away from making assertive accusations about Iran’s nuclear weapon ambitions because they were trying too hard to avoid mistakes similar to those made in assessing Iraq’s WMD capabilities prior to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

In a letter to committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), International Atomic Energy Agency officials said the report contained “erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements.”

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The letter was signed by Vilmos Cserveny, director of the agency’s office of external relations and policy coordination.

A copy of the letter was also given to the U.S. ambassador to the agency, Gregory Schulte, in Vienna, where the IAEA Board of Governors is meeting this week (see GSN, Sept. 13).

The letter identified five major errors in the report, including an assertion that Iran has produced weapon-grade uranium at its enrichment facility in Natanz.  The letter said that charge was “incorrect,” and that Iran has enriched uranium only to 3.5-percent levels, when weapon-grade is considered to be 90 percent or greater.

The report also asserted that the agency had transferred a senior inspector from the Iran case after he raised “concerns about Iranian deception regarding its nuclear program.”  The officials’ letter said the inspector has not been transferred.

The committee report was primarily authored by a one staffer, a former aide to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and it was publicly released without full committee approval, the Post reported.  The staffer, Frederick Fleitz, is now preparing a report on the North Korean nuclear crisis, according to the Post.

It was “clearly not prepared in a manner that we can rely on,” said committee member Rush Holt (D-N.J.).

Several U.S. intelligence officials told the Post that the report had at a least a dozen mistaken or unprovable assertions.

“This is like prewar Iraq all over again,” said Institute for Science and International Security President David Albright.  “You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that’s cherry-picked and a report that trashes inspectors” (Dafna Linzer, Washington Post I, Sept. 14).

Meanwhile, senior European Union and Iranian officials yesterday postponed planned diplomatic discussions on the nuclear crisis, the Associated Press reported.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and top Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani had planned for the Paris session today to be their third meeting in recent days.  The meeting was expected to proceed, but with lower-level officials, according to AP (George Jahn, Associated Press/Washington Post, Sept. 14).

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