Gareth Porter: Neutron initiator document was forged, Israel is primary suspect

I didn't care about this document when it surfaced because it does not claim Iran conducted experiments that are prohibited by its safeguards agreement or by the NPT. Iran has every right to have completed every step of manufacturing and testing components for a nuclear weapon as long as it has not diverted fissile material to that purpose or built an actual weapon.

But, one former CIA official, Philip Girardi, apparently told Gareth Porter for IPS News that the document is known to the CIA to be a forgery.

U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.

The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted "an Asian intelligence source" - a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials - as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.

Giraldi's report of some of the CIA's reasons for assessing the document to be false match the December 16 reasoning of Mark Gubrud, a commenter at the armscontrolwonk blog. He was suspicious that the document would tie together so many publicly known elements of Iran's program with detailed leading statements while being so specific in its incriminating elements and so vague on other elements.

The latter point is to me very suspicious, since it points to another publicly-known factoid, pre-2003 Iranian implosion experiments. As Mr. Barlow, the “former CIA analyst” said, this is a very good forgery, if it is one. I am tending to think that it is.

The simulations of sanctions and military attacks that are returning results that Iran's nuclear program cannot be stopped practically are much more important than details like these documents, even if they had been true. The US still faces a choice of accepting an Iranian nuclear capability now or later, with later being the more risky course that likely leaves Iran with a more robust program.

With or without this likely forged but maybe not-forged document, it has long been the case that Iran is a threat to Jewish-majority Israel, but not a threat to the United States. Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei believes that absent Israel, the US could have good relations with Iran. He's likely right about that. Instead US companies primarily and Western companies disproportionately bear the cost of US efforts to isolate Iran's economy in order to advance the interest of there existing a secure Jewish-majority Israel in Palestine.

With or without Israeli involvement in any forgery, it is also clear that Israel, in alignment with its interests - probably more than with direct US interests - has been pressing the US to take on the tremendous expense of engaging an actual war with Iran. The prospect of US full war with Iran, by all indications, has been securely vetoed by the US military establishment since 2007 at the latest. I do not expect to see sanctions exactly because sanctions carry an unnecessary risk of unpredictably but uncontrollably leading to war.

The United States is willing to devote a tremendous but not unlimited amount of resources throughout the region directly and indirectly to ensure the security of Jewish-majority Israel in Palestine. The mechanisms by which US policy is shaped to contain this willingness are interesting and I plan to think and write more about them in the future.

The neutron document and documents like it are really a very small part of the story. It could have been fake, it could have been real, it hardly would have mattered either way.