Iran Nuclear "Alleged Studies" Documents: The Evidence of Fraud

Ror the past few years, a political consensus has formed in the United States that Iran is covertly pursuing a nuclear-weapons program under the cloak of a civilian nuclear-power program. That conclusion has been based largely on a set of supposedly purloined top-secret Iranian military documents describing just such a covert program during 2002-03. The documents have often been referred to as the "laptop documents," but they include documents in both electronic and paper form and were called the "alleged studies" documents by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)."

The documents in this collection, which the United States obtained from sources that still remain a mystery, portray three main activities: a pair of "flow sheets" showing a process for uranium conversion, a set of experiments on "exploding bridgewire" (EBW) technology similar to that used on early designs for the U.S. atomic bomb, and studies on the redesign of the reentry vehicle, or nose cone, of the Shahab-3 missile to accommodate what appears to be a nuclear weapon.

International news media have portrayed the alleged-studies documents as credible evidence of a covert Iranian nuclear-weapons program. Some senior officials of the IAEA believed from the first, however, that the documents were "fabricated by a Western intelligence organization," according to two Israeli authors, Yossi Melman and Meir Javadanfar, based on their interviews with several IAEA officials during 2005 and 2006. David Albright, the executive director of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), worked for the IAEA in the 1990s and was well acquainted with the Safeguards Department director from 2005 until early 2010, Olli Heinonen. Albright confirmed in a 2008 interview that IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei's office "considers the documents as forgeries." Moreover, journalist Mark Hibbs has identified the agency's Department of External Relations and Policy Coordination as another source of skepticism within the agency over the authenticity of the documents.

Heinonen has never asserted publicly that the documents were genuine, and he has confirmed in an interview with me that he does not make that claim. However, he implied that the documents, beginning with the May 2008 IAEA report on Iran, are credible: the information contained in them was "[1] provided to the Agency by several Member states, [2] appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, [3] is detailed in content, and [4] appears to be generally consistent." After ElBaradei left the agency in November 2009, the agency's endorsement of the documents grew even more explicit. In February 2010, the IAEA said the material in the documents "is broadly consistent and credible in terms of the technical detail, the time frame in which the activities were conducted, and the people and organizations involved."

Furthermore, the IAEA has effectively shifted the normal burden of proof in regard to the intelligence documents. Instead of requiring the IAEA and those who provided the documents to give evidence of their authenticity, Heinonen has demanded that the Iranians prove they are fabrications. For example, the IAEA said in its August 2009 report that, because Iran had admitted "working on the Shahab-3 missile," the agency demanded that Iran discuss with it "the engineering and modeling studies associated with the re-design of the payload chamber referred to in the alleged-studies documentation to exclude the possibility that they were for a nuclear payload."

Until 2008, virtually no information was available on the public record about the alleged-studies documents. So it was impossible for anyone outside the IAEA or an intelligence agency close to the United States to undertake an analysis of their authenticity. Over the past two-and-a-half years, however, enough evidence has come to light to make an independent analysis of the issue possible. The analysis of that evidence reviewed in this paper reveals eight major indicators that the laptop documents were fabricated. The analysis concludes that the documents cannot possibly be authentic and that Israel, which had both the motivation and the organization to carry out such an operation, was behind the fraud.