Long a crossroads for Middle-Eastern espionage and intrigue, the island of Cyprus is playing an increasingly prominent role in current investigations into Iran's nuclear program. Suspected Iranian purchasing agents have been using front companies registered on the politically divided Mediterranean island to buy precision Western technology that can be used in designing and building atom bombs, according to reports seen by European intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.
The front companies, some based in Northern Cyprus, a Turkish-run enclave notorious for lax financial regulation, have been ordering equipment and computer software whose capabilities are so unusual and sophisticated that atomic weapons development is among their few known applications. The "dual-use" technology, manufactured by tiny specialized engineering companies in countries such as Germany and Switzerland, does have some potential civilian applications, which is why intelligence officials say that evidence of Iranian efforts to purchase such items doesn't constitute 100 percent proof that Tehran is currently trying to build a bomb.
Nonetheless, says a European counterproliferation official close to the issue (who asked for anonymity when discussing a diplomatically sensitive issue), the latest reports are part of a continuing and extended pattern of Iranian equipment purchases. The pattern began several years ago, when U.S. agencies believed Iran was conducting bomb design and development. The purchases have continued into the present; when individual cases are assembled into a mosaic, the resulting pattern arguably constitutes a strong circumstantial case that the Iranians are trying to assemble the wherewithal to design and build an atomic bomb. "They never stopped [doing this]," the European official said.
Some of the latest reporting indicates that among the high-tech matériel the Iranians are continuing to try to acquire is sensitive measuring equipment that can be used in testing related to nuclear explosions. This is consistent with previously documented Iranian purchasing activities. In a public court case, German authorities have been trying to prosecute an alleged Iranian purchasing agent known as "Mohsen V." for attempting to acquire for Iran ultrahigh- speed cameras and radiation detectors capable of operating under very high temperatures—machines whose specialized applications include monitoring experiments or tests of the kind of explosive detonations that are used in nuclear bombs. During the course of the litigation, German judges made public reference to reports from the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence service, which said that "development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003."
The latest reports about suspicious Iranian technology procurements surface as US intelligence agencies are conducting a review of a controversial 2007 finding, in a formal paper known as a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), that Iran in 2003 had "halted" a program it was pursuing to design, develop and produce an atomic bomb. As NEWSWEEK reported last month, in recent secret updates, intelligence officials indicated to the Obama White House that the two-year old assessment regarding the halt in Iran's work to produce a bomb has not changed.
The U.S. judgment that Iran had stopped work on designing and building a bomb in 2003 put American agencies at odds with allied governments, including Germany, Britain and Israel, all of whose foreign intelligence services appear to believe that Iran never halted bomb development work in 2003 and that such work continues today. The 2007 NIE did say that Iran continued to make progress in building uranium-enrichment capability, which experts say is the most difficult and critical element of a potential nuclear weapons program. A former US counterproliferation official, who also asked for anonymity, said that senior U.S. intelligence officials thoroughly grilled the experts who produced the controversial 2007 assessment about their sources and analytical methods and concluded that the paper's judgments—including the controversial one about Iran having stopped weapons development—held up well under aggressive scrutiny.
U.S. and European counterproliferation officials say it is up in the air whether the latest U.S. review of the 2007 NIE's assessments of Iran's work on an actual atom bomb will produce a dramatically new conclusion.
Some current U.S. officials indicated that one issue which is under consideration as U.S. experts, under the supervision of the national intelligence director's office, review the 2007 NIE is a recent modification in British intelligence's assessment of Iran's nuclear weapons-related activity. U.S. and European officials familiar with the U.K. development said they could not specify whether this involved the receipt of new secret intelligence reports or simply revisions in analytical assessments. However, three European officials familiar with U.K. intelligence assessments and reporting on Iran told NEWSWEEK that British intelligence agencies were always "skeptical" of assertions that Iran had stopped work on nuclear weapons design and production in 2003—meaning that they believed that Iran's weapons development work never stopped, despite the U.S. NIE assessment to the contrary.
US counterproliferation officials said that any proposed revisions in the 2007 US NIE on Iran's nukes would be subjected to rigorous review and testing inside the intelligence community before any report is issued. If a revised or updated NIE is released it is quite possible that no unclassified version will ever be released. A Wall Street Journal report about possible revisions in the 2007 NIE said that the National Security Council and Vice President Joe Biden's office had expressed interest in an updated NIE, but that it could take "months" to produce. Counter-proliferation officials told NEWSWEEK that at a minimum such a report probably would not be ready for at least two months.
